Infinite Curiosity Pod with Prateek Joshi

Max Grigorev has been building ML products for a long time. He has worked underwater autonomy and has spent time at Google, Airbnb, and Teralytics. 

In this episode, we cover a range of topics including:
- What is underwater autonomy
- State of play in underwater robotics
- Challenges of underwater operations
- Differences between underwater vs land robotics
- Unexplored opportunities in underwater autonomy
- Regulatory hurdles
- Future of underwater autonomy

Max's favorite books:
- Dune (Author: Frank Herbert)
- Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning (Author: Christopher Bishop)

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Where to find Prateek Joshi:

Newsletter: https://prateekjoshi.substack.com 
Website: https://prateekj.com 
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prateek-joshi-91047b19 
Twitter: https://twitter.com/prateekvjoshi 

Sam Lessin is a GP at Slow Ventures, an early-stage VC firm based out of San Francisco, Boston, and New York. In the last decade, they have invested in the earliest rounds of over 500 companies including Solana, Robinhood, Venmo, Airtable, Slack, Front, Allbirds, Postmates, and more. He's the cofounder of Fin. He was VP of Product Management at Meta. He has a degree from Harvard.

In this episode, we cover a range of topics including:
- AI technology is great, but AI investing is not a good idea. Why?
- Why is AI just an extending innovation as opposed to a platform shift?
- Why can't $100B platform wins be manufactured?
- Do AI startups have moats?
- AI moment vs cloud computing moment
- AI regulation
- Seed equity "killing fields"
- Meaningful AI use cases

Sam's deck: https://docsend.com/view/e6nd457kgbg8zich

Sam's favorite book: The Lessons of History (Authors: Will and Ariel Durant)

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Where to find Prateek Joshi:

Newsletter: https://prateekjoshi.substack.com 
Website: https://prateekj.com 
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prateek-joshi-91047b19 
Twitter: https://twitter.com/prateekvjoshi 

Tristan Zajonc is the cofounder and CEO of Continual, a developer platform for generative AI applications. He previously cofounded Sense, which was a platform for data science and machine learning. It got acquired by Cloudera in 2016. He spent 3 years at Cloudera building ML software. He has a PhD from Harvard.

In this episode, we cover a range of topics including:
- AI as an interface to the world
- Tech stack of the future
- The founding of Continual
- AI product delivery avenues (cloud, on prem, model hubs, packaged solutions)
- Traditional MLOps vs LLMOps
- Open source AI
- AI compute market

Tristan's favorite book: Suburban Nation (Authors: Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Jeff Speck)

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Where to find Prateek Joshi:

Newsletter: https://prateekjoshi.substack.com 
Website: https://prateekj.com 
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prateek-joshi-91047b19 
Twitter: https://twitter.com/prateekvjoshi 

Martice Nicks III is the cofounder and CTO of Danti, a search engine for exploring the extensive collections of Earth observation data available today. He was previously at Orbital Insights, Maxar Technologies, and other companies working on geospatial data.

In this episode, we cover a range of topics including:
- What is Earth observation data
- Where does the data come from
- The founding of Danti
- Use cases of Earth Observation data
- How do you index this data and make it searchable
- gSEARCH challenge
- What AI tools are being built for defense purposes

Martice's favorite books:
- The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Author: Stephen R. Covey)
- Dresden Files (Author: Jim Butcher)

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Where to find Prateek Joshi:

Newsletter: https://prateekjoshi.substack.com 
Website: https://prateekj.com 
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prateek-joshi-91047b19 
Twitter: https://twitter.com/prateekvjoshi 

Nicolas Tilmans is the cofounder and CEO of Anagenex, an AI-powered drug discovery platform. They have raised $37M in funding so far from investors such as Lux Capital, Khosla Ventures, Air Street, Menlo, and Catalio. He was previously the VP of Engineering at Lumiata. He has a PhD in Biochemistry from Stanford.

In this episode, we cover a range of topics including:
- What are small molecule drugs and why are they challenging to develop
- The founding of Anagenex
- Data generation engine
- DNA Encoded Libraries (DELs)
- Affinity Selected Mass Spectrometry
- Identifying the right targets
- What's next for AI-infused drug discovery

Nicolas's favorite books:
- Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (Author: Gabrielle Zevin)
- Letters by Abraham Lincoln (Author: Abraham Lincoln)

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Where to find Prateek Joshi:

Newsletter: https://prateekjoshi.substack.com 
Website: https://prateekj.com 
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prateek-joshi-91047b19 
Twitter: https://twitter.com/prateekvjoshi 

Flo Crivello is the founder and CEO of Lindy, where they are building a personal AI assistant. He was previously the founder and CEO of Teamflow. Prior to that, he was at Uber where he led the development of Uber Works and JUMP Starter.

In this episode, we cover a range of topics including:
- Evolution of intelligence
- The dawn of digital life
- Artificial General Intelligence
- White House's Executive Order on AI
- The founding of Lindy AI
- Large foundation models vs smaller specialist models
- Nvidia's position in the AI ecosystem, its strengths and weaknesses
- Building AI agents

Flo's favorite book: Atlas Shrugged (Author: Ayn Rand)

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Where to find Prateek Joshi:

Newsletter: https://prateekjoshi.substack.com 
Website: https://prateekj.com 
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prateek-joshi-91047b19 
Twitter: https://twitter.com/prateekvjoshi 

Vikram Sreekanti is the cofounder and CEO of RunLLM, a developer platform for the LLM stack. They have raised funding from investors such as Redpoint and Essence. He has a PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley.

In this episode, we cover a range of topics including:
- OpenAI DevDay announcements
- Are long context windows useful?
- Open source AI
- The founding of RunLLM
- Large foundation models vs smaller specialist models
- Why is OpenAI too cheap to beat?
- Nvidia's strengths and potential weaknesses

Vikram's favorite book: Slaughterhouse-Five (Author: Kurt Vonnegut) 

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Where to find Prateek Joshi:

Newsletter: https://prateekjoshi.substack.com 
Website: https://prateekj.com 
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prateek-joshi-91047b19 
Twitter: https://twitter.com/prateekvjoshi 

Douwe Kiela is the cofounder and CEO of Contextual AI, where they are building the next generation of foundation models that provide fully customizable, trustworthy, and privacy-aware AI. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Stanford. He was previously the Head of Research at Hugging Face and a research scientist at Meta. He has a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge.

In this episode, we cover a range of topics including:
- Open source vs closed source AI
- White House's Executive Order on AI
- Enterprise needs when it comes to LLMs
- The founding of Contextual AI
- What does RAG 2.0 look like for LLMs
- Large foundation models vs smaller specialist models
- Do Big tech companies have an unassailable lead in AI?
- Size of the data vs size of the model. What is more important and why?
- How will the AI compute market shape up?

Douwe's favorite books:
- The Lord of the Rings trilogy (Author: J.R.R. Tolkien)
- The Count of Monte Cristo (Author: Alexandre Dumas)
- Amp It Up (Author: Frank Slootman)

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Where to find Prateek Joshi:

Newsletter: https://prateekjoshi.substack.com 
Website: https://prateekj.com 
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prateek-joshi-91047b19 
Twitter: https://twitter.com/prateekvjoshi 

Ville Tuulos is the cofounder and CEO of Outerbounds, a platform to develop and deploy production-grade AI applications. They have raised $24M in funding so far from investors such as Foundation, Amplify, and Greenoaks. He was previously at Netflix and AdRoll. Prior to that, he was the cofounder of Bitdeli.

In this episode, we cover a range of topics including:
- Origin of the open source framework Metaflow
- The founding of Outerbounds
- AI compute clusters
- Large foundation models vs smaller specialist models
- Training compute-optimal LLMs
- Industrial AI
- Multimodal AI
- Building LLMs through experimentation
- How will the AI compute market shape up (chips, cloud services, infrastructure platforms)

Ville's favorite book: Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Author: Richard Feynman)

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Where to find Prateek Joshi:

Newsletter: https://prateekjoshi.substack.com 
Website: https://prateekj.com 
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prateek-joshi-91047b19 
Twitter: https://twitter.com/prateekvjoshi 

In this episode, the host Prateek Joshi talks about Nvidia's new AI agent called Eureka. It can train robots to do all sorts of complex tasks.

Large language models like GPT-4 are really good at making plans and decisions for certain tasks. But when it comes to teaching robots to do complicated physical stuff, like spinning a pen around their fingers, they've been a bit clumsy. That's where Eureka comes in. Eureka takes the best parts of LLMs and uses them to create a reward system for teaching robots.

Blog post: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2023/10/20/eureka-robotics-research/

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.12931

Code: https://github.com/eureka-research/Eureka

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Where to find Prateek Joshi:

Newsletter: https://prateekjoshi.substack.com 
Website: https://prateekj.com 
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prateek-joshi-91047b19 
Twitter: https://twitter.com/prateekvjoshi