Thursday Nights in AI

Michelle Lee, CEO of Medra, discusses the future of AI, robotics, and computer vision in laboratory automation. The podcast explores achieving autonomy in robotics, transitioning from academia to biotech automation, foundation models in robotics applications, challenges of level four autonomy in self-driving cars, and current limitations of language models in robotics.

Snorkel AI CEO Alex Ratner joins the hosts to discuss selling AI to Fortune 500 companies, data-centric versus model-centric AI, flashy demos versus actual production value. Snorkel Flow helps fine-tune generative models with programmatic approaches to enhance results.

The podcast discusses the rise of AI Engineers with guest @swyx, exploring their journey from finance to tech, evolution of AI engineers, long context and multimodal AI capabilities, rapid-fire Q&A, comparing Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman in AI impact, ethical AI considerations, AGI implications, and computing power evolution.

Open-source leaders in AI, Anton Troynikov, Brian Raymond, and Harrison Chase, discuss topics such as chatbot development with Lang Smith, usage of Chroma in AI applications, building open-source and commercial products, limitations of vector search in AI retrieval, favorite AI companies and TV portrayals, and the importance of agility in developing language models.

Season One of Thursday Nights in AI is in the books. Catch our conversation with Jeff Huber and Anton Troynikov, Cofounders of Chroma, on open-source, embedding databases, building developer love, and where their product goes from here. Season two here we come! This fireside chat is part of our 'Thursday Nights in AI" series, co-hosted by Outset Capital and Imbue and sponsored by WndrCo. Join our upcoming events! Full list here: https://www.outsetcapital.com/thursday-nights-in-ai About Outset Capital: Outset Capital is led by Ali Rohde, Kanjun Qiu, and Josh Albrecht — AI practitioners investing in AI, deeptech, and the future of work. We back companies at the outset and love to be the first check in. About Imbue: Imbue is an AI research company aiming to rekindle the dream of the personal computer—by creating practical AI agents that can accomplish larger goals and safely work for us in the real world. They are hiring! https://imbue.com/careers About WndrCo: Founded in 2016 by Sujay Jaswa, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and ChenLi Wang, WndrCo builds & invests in companies whose products are revolutionizing how people live and work. WndrCo's investments include 1Password, Aura, Databricks, Figma, Material Security, and Pilot. About Chroma: Chroma is the AI native open-source embeddings database. Using embeddings, Chroma lets developers add state and memory to their AI-enabled applications. Developers use Chroma to give LLMs pluggable knowledge about their data, facts, tools, and prevent hallucinations. Many developers have said they want "ChatGPT but for my data" - and Chroma provides the "for my data" bridge through embedding-based document retrieval. Learn more about chroma: https://www.trychroma.com/blog/seed Learn more about Anton: https://twitter.com/atroyn Learn more about Jeff: https://twitter.com/jeffreyhuber 00:29 - How Chroma started 04:40 - Chat GPT's impact on Chroma 05:40 - How Chroma works 09:35 - Vector stores - when to use Chroma 14:20 - Serving Developers 20:40 - Programming AI with Data 25:00 - Reasoning models & other new products 28:12 - Specialized Data & Models 29:29 - Metadata filtering & Language Processing 31:15 - System retrieval evolution 34:31 - Consumer applications & devices 35:36 - Hardware 37:31 - Chroma feature requests 38:56 - Custom GPT 39:58 - Fine-tuning embedding models

Outset Capital's Ali Rohde and Josh Albrecht interview Glean CEO Arvind Jain. Special thanks to Volley for welcoming us to their beautiful HQ! This fireside chat is part of our 'Thursday Nights in AI" series, co-hosted by Outset Capital and Imbue and sponsored by WndrCo. Join our upcoming events! Full list here: https://www.outsetcapital.com/thursda... About Outset Capital: Outset Capital is led by Ali Rohde, Kanjun Qiu, and Josh Albrecht — AI practitioners investing in AI, deeptech, and the future of work. We back companies at the outset and love to be the first check in. About Imbue: Imbue is an AI research company aiming to rekindle the dream of the personal computer—by creating practical AI agents that can accomplish larger goals and safely work for us in the real world. They are hiring! https://imbue.com/careers About WndrCo: Founded in 2016 by Sujay Jaswa and Jeffrey Katzenberg, WndrCo builds, buys, and invests in high-growth startups, including Airtable, Aura, 1Password, and Twingate. About Glean: Glean is the world’s most advanced AI platform for the enterprise. They have powerful deep-learning models that understand your company’s information and users’ queries. Your unique enterprise knowledge graph understands people, content, and interactions. Connect to all enterprise knowledge and enforce the existing permissions of your data sources. About Volley: ​About Volley: Volley is the leading developer of voice AI games for smart speaker platforms like Amazon Alexa, smartphones, and connected TVs. Volley’s quickly-growing team occupies a beautiful office in the heart of San Francisco’s Hayes Valley, and a spot on the 2022 YC Top Companies list! Learn more about Glean: https://www.glean.com/product/overview

Dr. Jim Fan, senior research scientist at NVIDIA AI, discusses his career trajectory, the importance of embodied agents in computer vision, challenges in building robust AI products, integration of retrieval and citations into LOMs, the future of gaming with intelligent NPCs, open source tools and reinforcement learning in AI agents, and the significance of research taste and pursuing simple and elegant solutions.

Outset Capital's Ali Rohde interview @imbue_ai co-founders, Kanjun Qiu & Josh Albrecht. This fireside chat is part of our 'Thursday Nights in AI" series, co-hosted by Outset Capital, Imbue, and WndrCo. Join our upcoming events! Full list here: https://www.outsetcapital.com/thursda... About Outset: Outset Capital is led by Ali Rohde, Kanjun Qiu, and Josh Albrecht — AI practitioners investing in AI, deeptech, and the future of work. We back companies at the outset and love to be the first check in. About Imbue: Imbue is an AI research company aiming to rekindle the dream of the personal computer—by creating practical AI agents that can accomplish larger goals and safely work for us in the real world. They are hiring! https://imbue.com/careers About WndrCo: Founded in 2016 by Sujay Jaswa and Jeffrey Katzenberg, WndrCo is a multi-stage technology investment firm that is focused on the Consumerization of Software. We build and partner with companies whose products are revolutionizing how people live and work. We invest where we’ve operated - Future of Work Software, Consumer Technology, and Cybersecurity - so that we can make an impact beyond invested capital. Learn more about Imbue: https://imbue.com Learn more about Kanjun: https://kanjun.me/ Learn more about Josh: https://joshalbrecht.com/ Learn more about the Archive: https://archive.house/ Check out Forbes' article about Imbue's $200M Series B: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonr...

Outset Capital's Ali Rohde and Kanjun Qiu interview @anyscale CEO, Robert Nishihara. This fireside chat is part of our 'Thursday Nights in AI" series, co-hosted by Outset Capital and Imbue. Join our upcoming events! Full list here: https://www.outsetcapital.com/thursda... About Outset: Outset Capital is led by Ali Rohde, Kanjun Qiu, and Josh Albrecht — AI practitioners investing in AI, deeptech, and the future of work. We back companies at the outset and love to be the first check in. About Imbue: Imbue is an AI research company aiming to rekindle the dream of the personal computer—by creating practical AI agents that can accomplish larger goals and safely work for us in the real world. They are hiring! https://imbue.com/careers About Anyscale: First there was Ray, an open source project from the UC Berkeley RISELab. Ray came out of their experience with the scaling challenges around machine learning and AI. From there, they built a fully managed platform for Ray to make the toughest problems in distributed computing easier for developers. That’s Anyscale. Learn more about Anyscale: https://www.anyscale.com/ Learn more about Robert: http://www.robertnishihara.com/ 00:00 Intro 01:18 Robert's founder journey 04:42 Difference between Anyscale and Ray 05:43 On what kinds of open-source projects make good business 08:17 How the AI boom changed Anyscale 10:00 Anyscale's new LLM API 11:05 How enterprise companies use Anyscale 12:50 How startups use Anyscale 13:35 Are big tech companies incorporating AI just to be included in the hype? 15:29 Anyscale and autonomous AI agents 17:20 Anyscale Endpoints and Anyscale Private Endpoints 18:04 Why companies don't want to give their data to OpenAI 19:45 Anyscale is the lowest price point on the market 20:40 Anyscale's new LLM-powered features 22:36 Open-source vs. closed source 23:24 Future of AI 24:24 Did Robert's vision for Anyscale come true? 27:12 "Under-hyped" fields in AI 28:32 How Robert is keeping up with advancements in AI 29:45 Q&A 29:59 Impact of GPU scarcity 31:49 NVIDIA monopoly 34:14 Looking back, will you still open-source Ray? 37:37 Conversion rate from Ray to Anyscale 39:00 Databricks: competitor or partner? 39:43 What layers of stack should an AI product have on Day 1? 40:48 What compute is more needed in the future: training or inference?

Jerry Liu, CEO of LlamaIndex, discusses the growth and applications of LAMA Index, explores expanded use cases and retrieval augmented generation, shares the journey of Loma Index from side project to comprehensive toolkit, talks about improving agent performance and the need for a reliable PDF parser, and announces updates and teases future developments.