No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups

Startups aren't the only companies racing to build the new world of AI. This week, Sarah Guo talks with Brian Halligan, the co-founder, longtime CEO and now executive chairperson of HubSpot, the fastest growing CRM. He talks about category creation, coining the term ‘inbound marketing,’ lessons in scaling from an app to a suite to a platform, staying innovative at scale, and how they're navigating the AI disruption. Brian also describes the life-threatening moment he decided to step back from the CEO role. Plus, what he’s up to at Propeller Ventures and why he’s banking on the ocean to save us from climate change.

Brian coined the term "inbound marketing" and together with Dharmesh Shah built a movement around the concept, which included organizing the industry-leading INBOUND event and co-authoring the book Inbound Marketing. Now, as the founder of Propeller Ventures, Brian directs a $100 million climate tech venture fund, specializing in ocean investments. He also serves on the boards of Navier and Aquatic Labs. Brian developed MIT’s popular Scaling Entrepreneurial Ventures class, which he’s taught for over a decade.

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Show Notes: 

(0:00:00) - HubSpot's Journey from Unlikely Startup to Industry Incumbent

(0:05:32) - The End of Cold Calling (and the Birth of Inbound)

(0:16:40) - Building a Multi-Product Company

(0:22:07) - How to Stay Innovative and Hungry after Going Public

(0:29:12) - AI Workflows in CRM and the Incumbent Data Advantage

(0:36:09) - Creating a Culture Code for HubSpot

(0:40:24) - Propeller Venture Fund, Ours Oceans and Climate Investing

What Does it Take to Improve by 10x or 100x? This week is another host-only episode. Sarah and Elad talk about the path to better model quality, the potential for fine tuning to different use cases, retrieval systems (RAG), feedback systems (RLHF, RLAIF) and Meta’s sponsorship of the open source model ecosystem. Plus Sarah and Elad ask if we’re finally at the beginning of a new set of consumer applications and social networks.

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Show Notes:

0:03:00 - AI Models and Open AI Advances 

0:08:59 - Addressing Hallucinations in AI Models 

0:13:22 - Open Source Models in Consumer Engagement

0:16:23 - New Trends in Social Content Creation

0:21:53 - Balancing Ambition With Realistic Customer Expectations

Ginkgo Bioworks is using DNA as code to digitize the cell programming revolution. Ginkgo is using AI and synthetic biology to keep the next pandemic at bay, and accelerate our production capabilities for medicine, food, and agriculture. Ginkgo’s co-founder and CEO Jason Kelly joins hosts Sarah Guo and Elad Gil to discuss bioengineering protein as a foundational model, specialized data learning from an evolutionary perspective, what we need to prepare for a future pandemic, and more.

Jason has served as a member of our board of directors since Ginkgo’s founding in 2008. He has also served as a director of CM Life Sciences II Inc. (Nasdaq: CMII), a special purpose acquisition company with a focus on the life sciences sector, since its initial public offering in February 2021. Jason holds a Ph.D. in Biological Engineering and a B.S. in Chemical Engineering and Biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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Show Notes: 

(0:00:00) - The Difference Between Software Engineering and Biological Engineering

(0:06:51) - Abstractions and Infrastructure in Synthetic Bio

(0:09:23) - The Role of AI, Foundation Models that Speak Biology

(0:13:17) - AWS for Cell Engineering

(0:17:52) - Where are the AI-discovered Drugs? And Data at Gingko

(0:19:12) - Pandemic Response and Biosecurity in the Age of AI

(0:22:47) - The Likelihood of Existential AI Risk from Lone Actors Harnessing Viruses, and The Need for Defense-in-Depth

(0:31:47) - Will Progress in AI Be Biologically Inspired? And Evolution

Replit’s develop-to-deploy platform and new AI tool, Ghostwriter, are breaking down the barriers to entry for beginner programmers. Replit’s CEO, co-founder, and head engineer Amjad Masad joins hosts Sarah Guo and Elad Gil to discuss how AI can change software engineering, the infrastructure we still need, open source foundation models, and what to expect from AI agents.

Before co-founding Replit, Amjad Masad worked at Facebook as a software engineer, where he worked on infrastructure tooling. He was a founding engineer at CodeAcademy. Throughout his career, Masad has been an advocate for open-source software.

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Show Links: 

Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected]

Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @amasad

Show Notes: 

0:03:55 - Impact of AI on Code Generation 

0:11:09 - Breaking Down Barriers to Entry in Development with Replit

0:14:35 - The Impact of Open Source Models, Meta/Llama

0:20:32 - Bounties, Agents who Make Money

0:24:26 - The Missing Data Spec-to-Code

0:32:29 - Building the Future of AI, Money as a Programmable Primitive

More than 25 million users are using NEAR-powered applications. Co-founder of NEAR protocol and Transformers author Illia Polosukhin joins hosts Sarah Guo and Elad Gil to discuss the intersections of crypto and AI technology, what we should expect from AI agents, decentralized data labeling, why AI’s alignment problem is really a human problem, and more. 

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Show Notes: 

(0:00:00) - Blockchain, AI, and Web3 Intersection

(0:06:39) - How We Might Combine Blockchain and AI for Cancer Research

(0:23:35) - Inference and Decentralized Data Labeling

(0:30:13) - AI SaaS Strategic Challenges

(0:38:18) - The Future of Hardware Accelerators

The GPU supply crunch is causing desperation amongst AI teams large and small. Cerebras Systems has an answer, and it’s a chip the size of a dinner plate. Andrew Feldman, CEO and Co-founder of Cerebras and previously SeaMicro, joins Sarah Guo and Elad Gil this week on No Priors. They discuss why there might be an alternative to Nvidia, localized models and predictions for the accelerator market.

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Show Notes: 

(0:00:00) - Cerebra Systems CEO Discusses AI Supercomputers

(0:07:03) - AI Advancement in Architecture and Training

(0:16:58) - Future of AI Accelerators and Chip Specialization

(0:26:38) - Scaling Open Source Models and Fine-Tuning

Everything digital is increasingly intermediated through web user experiences, and now AI development can be frontend-first, too. Just ask Guillermo Rauch, the founder and CEO of Vercel, the company behind Next.js. In this episode of No Priors, hosts Sarah Guo and Elad Gil speak to Guillermo about their AI SDK and AI templates, and why Vercel is focused on making it easy for every frontend engineer to build with AI. They also discuss what applications Guillermo's most excited about, how to prepare for the world of bots, whether the winds are changing in web architectures, and why he believes in the AI-fueled 100X engineer.

Prior to Vercel, Guillermo co-founded several startups and created the JavaScript library, Socket.io, which allows for real-time bi-directional communication between web clients and servers.

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Show Notes: 

(0:00:00) - Vercel's AI Strategy and Future Plans

(0:10:36) - AI Frameworks, Observability, and Bot Mitigation

(0:17:24) - Crawling the Web and Architecture Changes

(0:27:54) - AI's Impact on Web Personalization

"Biological Software" is the future of medicine. Jakob Uszkoreit, CEO and Co-founder of Inceptive, joins Sarah Guo and Elad Gil this week on No Priors, to discuss how deep learning is expanding the horizons of RNA and mRNA therapeutics.

Jakob co-authored the revolutionary paper Attention is All You Need while at Google, and led early Google Translate and Google Assistant teams. Now at Inceptive, he's applying these same architectures and ideas to biological design, optimizing vaccine production, and magnitude-more efficient drug discovery. We also discuss Jakob's perspective on promising research directions, and his point of view that model architectures will actually get simpler from here, and be driven by hardware.

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Show Notes: 

(0:00:00) - Creating Biological Software

(0:06:54) - The Hardware Drivers of Large-Scale Transformers

(0:14:32) - Challenges in Optimizing Compute Allocation

(0:23:25) - Deep Learning in Biology and RNA

(0:32:49) - The Future of Drug Discovery

(0:41:41) - Collaboration and Innovation at Inceptive

The future of education is right at your children’s fingertips. Sal Khan, CEO and Founder of Khan Academy, joins Sarah Guo and Elad Gil this week on No Priors. For over a decade, Sal Khan has been trying to reform education, beginning with tutoring his cousins in math. 

He's the father of the YouTube "chalk talk" format, and has now served tens of millions of students through Khan Academy. 

He guides us through how Khan Academy is using AI to personalize a student's educational experience, transporting students into immersive learning experiences that allow them to debate historical figures, to assisting teachers with lesson plans that address the learning gaps keeping students from reaching their full potential, to a Khanmigo, a tutor for every child. 

Prior to founding Khan Academy, Sal worked as a hedge fund analyst. He holds an MS in business from Harvard University, as well as an MS in Engineering and a BS in Computer Science from MIT.

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Show Notes: 

[0:00:06] - Sal Khan's Journey

[0:08:41] - Mastery Learning and AI in Education

[0:19:53] - Future of AI Tutors in Education

[0:23:10] - Education's Future With Generative AI

[0:29:35] - Connecting Learning Through Tutoring and Collaboration

[0:33:22] - Implications of GPT 4 on Education

[0:40:42] - Future of Education and Job Skills

[0:46:47] - Importance of Traditional Skills in Education

This week on the podcast, Sarah Guo and Elad Gil answer listener questions on the state of technology and artificial intelligence. Sarah and Elad also talk about the 2024 tech market, what type of companies may reach their highest valuation ever and the (former) unicorns that may go bust. Plus, how do Sarah and Elad define happiness? Hint: it’s a use case for a specialized AI agent. 

Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected]

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Show Links:

Show Notes: 

[0:00:37] - Impact of GPU Bottleneck in the near and long term

[0:10:30] - Timeline for existing incumbent enterprises to use AI in products 

[0:11:50] - Vertical versus broad applications for AI Agents  

[0:19:33] - 2024 tech market predictions & how founders should think about valuations