Sarah Catanzaro — Remembering the Lessons of the Last AI Renaissance

Sarah Catanzaro is a General Partner at Amplify Partners, and one of the leading investors in AI and ML. Her investments include RunwayML, OctoML, and Gantry. Sarah and Lukas discuss lessons learned from the "AI renaissance" of the mid 2010s and compare the general perception of ML back then to now. Sarah also provides insights from her perspective as an investor, from selling into tech-forward companies vs. traditional enterprises, to the current state of MLOps/developer tools, to large language models and hype bubbles. Show notes (transcript and links): http://wandb.me/gd-sarah-catanzaro --- ⏳ Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 1:10 Lessons learned from previous AI hype cycles 11:46 Maintaining technical knowledge as an investor 19:05 Selling into tech-forward companies vs. traditional enterprises 25:09 Building point solutions vs. end-to-end platforms 36:27 LLMS, new tooling, and commoditization 44:39 Failing fast and how startups can compete with large cloud vendors 52:31 The gap between research and industry, and vice versa 1:00:01 Advice for ML practitioners during hype bubbles 1:03:17 Sarah's thoughts on Rust and bottlenecks in deployment 1:11:23 The importance of aligning technology with people 1:15:58 Outro ---