The MAD Podcast: Machine Learning, AI & Data with Matt Turck

What happens when you try to build the “General Electric of AI” with just 14 people? In this episode, Jeremy Howard reveals the radical inside story of Answer AI — a new kind of AI R&D lab that’s not chasing AGI, but instead aims to ship thousands of real-world products, all while staying tiny, open, and mission-driven.

Jeremy shares how open-source models like DeepSeek and Qwen are quietly outpacing closed-source giants, why the best new AI is coming out of China. You’ll hear the surprising truth about the so-called “DeepSeek moment,” why efficiency and cost are the real battlegrounds in AI, and how Answer AI’s “dialogue engineering” approach is already changing lives—sometimes literally.

We go deep on the tools and systems powering Answer AI’s insane product velocity, including Solve It (the platform that’s helped users land jobs and launch startups), Shell Sage (AI in your terminal), and Fast HTML (a new way to build web apps in pure Python). Jeremy also opens up about his unconventional path from philosophy major and computer game enthusiast to world-class AI scientist, and why he believes the future belongs to small, nimble teams who build for societal benefit, not just profit.

Fast.ai

Website - https://www.fast.ai

X/Twitter - https://twitter.com/fastdotai

Answer.ai

Website - https://www.answer.ai/

X/Twitter - https://x.com/answerdotai

Jeremy Howard

LinkedIn - https://linkedin.com/in/howardjeremy

X/Twitter - https://x.com/jeremyphoward

FIRSTMARK

Website - https://firstmark.com

X/Twitter - https://twitter.com/FirstMarkCap

Matt Turck (Managing Director)

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/turck/

X/Twitter - https://twitter.com/mattturck

(00:00) Intro

(01:39) Highlights and takeaways from ICLR Singapore

(02:39) Current state of open-source AI

(03:45) Thoughts on Microsoft Phi and open source moves

(05:41) Responding to OpenAI’s open source announcements

(06:29) The real impact of the Deepseek ‘moment’

(09:02) Progress and promise in test-time compute

(10:53) Where we really stand on AGI and ASI

(15:05) Jeremy’s journey from philosophy to AI

(20:07) Becoming a Kaggle champion and starting Fast.ai

(23:04) Answer.ai mission and unique vision

(28:15) Answer.ai’s business model and early monetization

(29:33) How a small team at Answer.ai ships so fast

(30:25) Why Devin AI agent isn't that great

(33:10) The future of autonomous agents in AI development

(34:43) Dialogue Engineering and Solve It

(43:54) How Answer.ai decides which projects to build

(49:47) Future of Answer.ai: staying small while scaling impact

InfluxDB just dropped its biggest update ever — InfluxDB 3.0 — and in this episode, we go deep with the team behind the world’s most popular open-source time series database.

You’ll hear the inside story of how InfluxDB grew from 3,000 users in 2015 to over 1.3 million today, and why the company decided to rewrite its entire architecture from scratch in Rust, ditching Go and moving to object storage on S3.

We break down the real technical challenges that forced this radical shift: the “cardinality problem” that choked performance, the pain of linking compute and storage, and why their custom query language (Flux) failed to catch on, leading to a humbling embrace of SQL as the industry standard. You’ll learn how InfluxDB is positioning itself in a world dominated by Databricks and Snowflake, and the hard lessons learned about monetization when 1.3 million users only yield 2,600 paying customers.

InfluxData

Website - https://www.influxdata.com

X/Twitter - https://twitter.com/InfluxDB

Evan Kaplan

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaplanevan

X/Twitter - https://x.com/evankaplan

FIRSTMARK

Website - https://firstmark.com

X/Twitter - https://twitter.com/FirstMarkCap

Matt Turck (Managing Director)

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/turck/

X/Twitter - https://twitter.com/mattturck

Foursquare:

Website - https://foursquare.com

X/Twitter - https://x.com/Foursquare

IG - instagram.com/foursquare

(00:00) Intro

(02:22) The InfluxDB origin story and why time series matters

(06:59) The cardinality crisis and why Influx rebuilt in Rust

(09:26) Why SQL won (and Flux lost)

(16:34) Why UnfluxData bets on FDAP

(22:51) IoT, Tesla Powerwalls, and real-time control systems

(27:54) Competing with Databricks, Snowflake, and the “lakehouse” world

(31:50) Open Source lessons, monetization, & what’s next

Sigma Computing recently hit $100M in ARR — planning on doubling revenue again this year— and in this episode, CEO Mike Palmer reveals exactly how they did it by throwing out the old BI playbook. We open with the provocative claim that “the world did not need another BI tool,” and dig into why the last 20 years of business intelligence have been “boring.” He explains how Sigma’s spreadsheet-like interface lets anyone analyze billions of rows in seconds, and lives on top of Snowflake and Databricks, with no SQL required and no data extractions.

Mike shares the inside story of Sigma’s journey: why they shut down their original product to rebuild from scratch, how Sutter Hill Ventures’ unique incubation model shaped the company, what it took to go from $2M to $100M ARR in just three years and raise a $200M round — even as the growth stage VC market dried up. We get into the technical details behind Sigma’s architecture: no caching, no federated queries, and real-time, Google Sheets-style collaboration at massive scale—features that have convinced giants like JP Morgan and ExxonMobil to ditch legacy dashboards for good.

We also tackle the future of BI and the modern data stack: why 99.99% of enterprise data is never touched, what’s about to happen as the stack consolidates, and why Mike thinks “text-to-SQL” AI is a “terrible idea.”

This episode is full of "spicey takes" - Mike shares his thoughts on how Google missed the zeitgeist, the reality behind Microsoft Fabric, when engineering hubris leads to failure, and many more.

Sigma

Website - https://www.sigmacomputing.com

X/Twitter - https://x.com/sigmacomputing

Mike Palmer

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-palmer-51a154

FIRSTMARK

Website - https://firstmark.com

X/Twitter - https://twitter.com/FirstMarkCap

Matt Turck (Managing Director)

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/turck/

X/Twitter - https://twitter.com/mattturck

Foursquare:

Website - https://foursquare.com

X/Twitter - https://x.com/Foursquare

IG - instagram.com/foursquare

(00:00) Intro

(01:46) Why traditional BI is boring

(04:15) What is business intelligence?

(06:03) Classic BI roles and frustrations

(07:09) Sigma’s origin story: Sutter Hill & the Snowflake echo

(09:02) The spreadsheet problem: why nothing changed since 1985

(14:04) Rebooting the product during lockdown

(16:14) Building a spreadsheet UX on top of Snowflake/Databricks

(18:55) No caching, no federation: Sigma’s architectural choices

(20:28) Spreadsheet interface at scale

(21:32) Collaboration and real-time data workflows

(24:15) Semantic layers, data governance & trillion-row performance

(25:57) The modern data stack: fragmentation and consolidation

(28:38) Democratizing data

(29:36) Will hyperscalers own the data stack?

(34:12) AI, natural language, and the limits of text-to-SQL

A week after OpenAI’s o3/o4-mini volleyed with Google’s Gemini 2.5 Flash, I sat down with Arvind Jain— ex-Google search luminary, Rubrik co-founder, and now CEO of Glean —just as his company released its agentic reasoning platform and swirled with rumors of a new round at a $7 billion valuation. We open on that whirlwind: why the model race is accelerating, why enterprises still gravitate to closed models, and when open-source variants finally take over. Arvind argues that LLMs should “fade into the background,” leaving application builders to pick the right engine for each task.

From there, we trace Glean’s three-act arc—enterprise search powered by transformers (2019), retrieval-augmented chat the moment ChatGPT hit, and now agents that have already logged 50 million real actions inside Glean enterprise customers. Arvind lifts the hood on permission-aware ranking, tool-use orchestration, and the routing layer that swaps Gemini for GPT on the fly. Along the way, he answers the hard questions: Do agents really double efficiency? Where’s the moat when every startup promises the same? Why are humans still in the review loop, and for how long?

The conversation crescendos with a vision of work where every employee is flanked by a team of proactive AI coworkers—all drawing from a horizontal knowledge layer that knows the firm’s language better than any newcomer.

If you want to know what’s actually working with AI in the enterprise, how to build agents that deliver ROI, and what the next era of work will look like, this episode is packed with specifics, technical insights, and bold predictions from one of the sharpest minds in the space.

Glean

Website - https://www.glean.com

X/Twitter - https://x.com/gleanai

Arvind Jain

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jain-arvind

X/Twitter - https://x.com/jainarvind

FIRSTMARK

Website - https://firstmark.com

X/Twitter - https://twitter.com/FirstMarkCap

Matt Turck (Managing Director)

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/turck/

X/Twitter - https://twitter.com/mattturck

(00:00) Intro & Glean’s $7B valuation rumor

(02:01) The AI model explosion: open vs. closed in the enterprise

(06:19) Why enterprises choose open source AI (and when)

(10:33) The agent era: what are AI agents and why now?

(12:41) Automating business processes: real-world agent use cases

(16:46) Are we there yet? The reality of AI agents in 2025

(19:24) Glean’s origin story: reinventing enterprise search

(26:38) Glean agents: from apps to agentic platforms

(31:22) Horizontal vs. vertical: Glean’s strategic platform choice

(34:14) How Glean’s enterprise search works

(39:34) Staying LLM-agnostic: integrating new AI models

(42:11) The architecture of Glean agents: tool use and beyond

(43:50) Data flywheels and personalization in Glean

(47:06) Moats, competition, and the future of work with AI agents

In this episode, we sit down with Aaron Levie, CEO and co-founder of Box, for a wide-ranging conversation that’s equal parts insightful, technical, and fun. We kick things off with a candid discussion about what it’s like to be a public company CEO during times of volatility, and then rewind to the early days of Box — from dorm room experiments to cold emailing Mark Cuban and dropping out of college.

From there, we dive deep into how AI is transforming the enterprise. Aaron shares how Box is layering AI agents, RAG systems, and model orchestration on top of decades of enterprise content infrastructure — and why “95% of enterprise data is underutilized.”

We explore what’s actually working with AI in production, what’s still breaking, and how companies can avoid common pitfalls. From building hubs for document-specific RAG to thinking through agent-to-agent interoperability, Aaron unpacks the architecture of Box’s AI platform — and why they’re staying out of the model training wars entirely. We also dig into AI culture inside large organizations, the trade-offs of going public, and why Levie believes every enterprise interface is about to change.

Whether you're a founder, engineer, enterprise buyer, or just trying to figure out how AI agents will reshape knowledge work, this conversation is full of practical insights and candid takes from one of the sharpest minds in tech.

Box

Website - https://www.box.com

X/Twitter - https://twitter.com/Box

Aaron Levie

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/boxaaron

X/Twitter - https://x.com/levie

FIRSTMARK

Website - https://firstmark.com

X/Twitter - https://twitter.com/FirstMarkCap

Matt Turck (Managing Director)

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/turck/

X/Twitter - https://twitter.com/mattturck

(00:00) Intro

(01:51) Navigating uncertainty as a public company CEO

(14:48) The Box origin story: college, cold emails, and Mark Cuban

(23:39) Cloud transformation vs. the AI wave

(30:15) The reality of AI in the enterprise: proof of concept vs. deployment

(34:37) Inside Box’s AI platform: Hubs, agents, and more

(44:15) Why Box won’t build its own model (and the dangers of fine-tuning)

(51:51) What’s working — and what’s not — with AI agents

(1:04:42) Building an AI culture at Box

(1:13:22) The future of enterprise software and Box’s roadmap

In this episode, we sit down with Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO of Snowflake, for an in-depth conversation about the company’s transformation from a cloud analytics platform into a comprehensive AI data cloud. Sridhar shares insights on Snowflake’s shift toward open formats like Apache Iceberg and why monetizing storage was, in his view, a strategic misstep.

We also dive into Snowflake’s growing AI capabilities, including tools like Cortex Analyst and Cortex Search, and discuss how the company scaled AI deployments at an impressive pace. Sridhar reflects on lessons from his previous startup, Neeva, and offers candid thoughts on the search landscape, the future of BI tools, real-time analytics, and why partnering with OpenAI and Anthropic made more sense than building Snowflake’s own foundation models.

Snowflake

Website - https://www.snowflake.com

X/Twitter - https://x.com/snowflakedb

Sridhar Ramaswamy

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/sridhar-ramaswamy

X/Twitter - https://x.com/RamaswmySridhar

FIRSTMARK

Website - https://firstmark.com

X/Twitter - https://twitter.com/FirstMarkCap

Matt Turck (Managing Director)

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/turck/

X/Twitter - https://twitter.com/mattturck

(00:00) Intro and current market tumult

(02:48) The evolution of Snowflake from IPO to Today

(07:22) Why Snowflake’s earliest adopters came from financial services

(15:33) Resistance to change and the philosophical gap between structured data and AI

(17:12) What is the AI Data Cloud?

(23:15) Snowflake’s AI agents: Cortex Search and Cortex Analyst

(25:03) How did Sridhar’s experience at Google and Neeva shape his product vision?

(29:43) Was Neeva simply ahead of its time?

(38:37) The Epiphany mafia

(40:08) The current state of search and Google’s conundrum

(46:45) “There’s no AI strategy without a data strategy”

(56:49) Embracing Open Data Formats with Iceberg

(01:01:45) The Modern Data Stack and the future of BI

(01:08:22) The role of real-time data

(01:11:44) Current state of enterprise AI: from PoCs to production

(01:17:54) Building your own models vs. using foundation models

(01:19:47) Deepseek and open source AI

(01:21:17) Snowflake’s 1M Minds program

(01:21:51) Snowflake AI Hub

In this fascinating episode, we dive deep into the race towards true AI intelligence, AGI benchmarks, test-time adaptation, and program synthesis with star AI researcher (and philosopher) Francois Chollet, creator of Keras and the ARC AGI benchmark, and Mike Knoop, co-founder of Zapier and now co-founder with Francois of both the ARC Prize and the research lab Ndea. With the launch of ARC Prize 2025 and ARC-AGI 2, they explain why existing LLMs fall short on true intelligence tests, how new models like O3 mark a step change in capabilities, and what it will really take to reach AGI.

We cover everything from the technical evolution of ARC 1 to ARC 2, the shift toward test-time reasoning, and the role of program synthesis as a foundation for more general intelligence. The conversation also explores the philosophical underpinnings of intelligence, the structure of the ARC Prize, and the motivation behind launching Ndea — a ew AGI research lab that aims to build a "factory for rapid scientific advancement." Whether you're deep in the AI research trenches or just fascinated by where this is all headed, this episode offers clarity and inspiration.

Ndea

Website - https://ndea.com

X/Twitter - https://x.com/ndea

ARC Prize

Website - https://arcprize.org

X/Twitter - https://x.com/arcprize

François Chollet

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/fchollet

X/Twitter - https://x.com/fchollet

Mike Knoop

X/Twitter - https://x.com/mikeknoop

FIRSTMARK

Website - https://firstmark.com

X/Twitter - https://twitter.com/FirstMarkCap

Matt Turck (Managing Director)

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/turck/

X/Twitter - https://twitter.com/mattturck

(00:00) Intro

(01:05) Introduction to ARC Prize 2025 and ARC-AGI 2

(02:07) What is ARC and how it differs from other AI benchmarks

(02:54) Why current models struggle with fluid intelligence

(03:52) Shift from static LLMs to test-time adaptation

(04:19) What ARC measures vs. traditional benchmarks

(07:52) Limitations of brute-force scaling in LLMs

(13:31) Defining intelligence: adaptation and efficiency

(16:19) How O3 achieved a massive leap in ARC performance

(20:35) Speculation on O3's architecture and test-time search

(22:48) Program synthesis: what it is and why it matters

(28:28) Combining LLMs with search and synthesis techniques

(34:57) The ARC Prize structure: efficiency track, private vs. public

(42:03) Open source as a requirement for progress

(44:59) What's new in ARC-AGI 2 and human benchmark testing

(48:14) Capabilities ARC-AGI 2 is designed to test

(49:21) When will ARC-AGI 2 be saturated? AGI timelines

(52:25) Founding of NDEA and why now

(54:19) Vision beyond AGI: a factory for scientific advancement

(56:40) What NDEA is building and why it's different from LLM labs

(58:32) Hiring and remote-first culture at NDEA

(59:52) Closing thoughts and the future of AI research

In 2022, Lin Qiao decided to leave Meta, where she was managing several hundred engineers, to start Fireworks AI. In this episode, we sit down with Lin for a deep dive on her work, starting with her leadership on PyTorch, now one of the most influential machine learning frameworks in the industry, powering research and production at scale across the AI industry.

Now at the helm of Fireworks AI, Lin is leading a new wave in generative AI infrastructure, simplifying model deployment and optimizing performance to empower all developers building with Gen AI technologies.

We dive into the technical core of Fireworks AI, uncovering their innovative strategies for model optimization, Function Calling in agentic development, and low-level breakthroughs at the GPU and CUDA layers.

Fireworks AI

Website - https://fireworks.ai

X/Twitter - https://twitter.com/FireworksAI_HQ

Lin Qiao

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/lin-qiao-22248b4

X/Twitter - https://twitter.com/lqiao

FIRSTMARK

Website - https://firstmark.com

X/Twitter - https://twitter.com/FirstMarkCap

Matt Turck (Managing Director)

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/turck/

X/Twitter - https://twitter.com/mattturck

(00:00) Intro

(01:20) What is Fireworks AI?

(02:47) What is PyTorch?

(12:50) Traditional ML vs GenAI

(14:54) AI’s enterprise transformation

(16:16) From Meta to Fireworks

(19:39) Simplifying AI infrastructure

(20:41) How Fireworks clients use GenAI

(22:02) How many models are powered by Fireworks

(30:09) LLM partitioning

(34:43) Real-time vs pre-set search

(36:56) Reinforcement learning

(38:56) Function calling

(44:23) Low-level architecture overview

(45:47) Cloud GPUs & hardware support

(47:16) VPC vs on-prem vs local deployment

(49:50) Decreasing inference costs and its business implications

(52:46) Fireworks roadmap

(55:03) AI future predictions

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become a dominant architecture in modern AI deployments, and in this episode, we sit down with Douwe Kiela, who co-authored the original RAG paper in 2020. Douwe is now the founder and CEO of Contextual AI, a startup focusing on helping enterprises deploy RAG as an agentic system.

We start the conversation with Douwe's thoughts on the very latest advancements in Generative AI, including GPT 4.5, DeepSeek and the exciting paradigm shift towards test time compute, as well as the US-China rivalry in AI.

We then dive into RAG: definition, origin story and core architecture. Douwe explains the evolution of RAG into RAG 2.0 and Agentic RAG, emphasizing the importance of self-learning systems over individual models and the role of synthetic data. We close with the challenges and opportunities of deploying AI in real-world enterprise, discussing the balance between accuracy and the inherent inaccuracies of AI systems.

Contextual AI

Website - https://contextual.ai

X/Twitter - https://x.com/ContextualAI

Douwe Kiela

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/douwekiela

X/Twitter - https://x.com/douwekiela

FIRSTMARK

Website - https://firstmark.com

X/Twitter - https://twitter.com/FirstMarkCap

Matt Turck (Managing Director)

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/turck/

X/Twitter - https://twitter.com/mattturck

(00:00) Intro

(01:57) Thoughts on the latest AI models: GPT-4.5, Sonnet 3.7, Grok 3

(04:50) The test time compute paradigm shift

(06:47) Unsupervised learning vs reasoning: a false dichotomy

(07:30) The significance of DeepSeek

(10:29) USA vs. China: is the AI war overblown?

(12:19) Controlling AI hallucinations at the model level

(13:51) RAG: definition and origin story

(18:46) Why the Transformers paper initially felt underwhelming

(20:41) The core architecture of RAG

(26:06) RAG vs. fine-tuning vs. long context windows

(30:53) RAG 2.0: Thinking in systems and not models

(31:28) Data extraction and data curation for RAG

(35:59) Contextual Language Models (CLMs)

(38:04) Finetuning and alignment techniques: GRIT, KTO, LENS

(40:40) Agentic RAG

(41:36) General vs. specialized RAG agents

(44:35) Synthetic data in AI

(45:51) Deploying AI in the enterprise

(48:07) How tolerant are enterprises to AI hallucinations?

(49:35) The future of Contextual AI

In this episode, we dive into how AI is transforming video editing with Gaurav Misra, the CEO of Captions. Launched in New York in 2021, Captions already empowers over 10 million creators worldwide, leveraging AI to make video production as simple as clicking a button.

Discover the strategic framework that led to the inception of Captions, and learn how the founders identified societal changes and technological advancements to build a groundbreaking company. We explore the challenges and opportunities of building an AI product for video editing, including how Captions is outpacing traditional content production workflows.

Gaurav shares insights into the future of video editing, the role of AI in democratizing video production, and the unique approach Captions takes to differentiate itself from industry giants like Adobe and Capcut.

Captions

Website - https://www.captions.ai

X/Twitter - https://x.com/getcaptionsapp

Gaurav Misra

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/gamisra1

X/Twitter - https://x.com/gmharhar

FIRSTMARK

Website - https://firstmark.com

X/Twitter - https://twitter.com/FirstMarkCap

Matt Turck (Managing Director)

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/turck/

X/Twitter - https://twitter.com/mattturck

(00:00) Intro

(01:30) What is Captions?

(03:43) How did Captions start?

(08:25) The strategy behind launching Captions

(12:32) How is Captions different from other editing tools?

(14:13) How does it compare to CapCut?

(18:22) Who is the typical Captions user?

(20:13) Why ‘Captions’?

(23:47) Captions’ product suite for production and editing

(26:37) AI models powering Captions

(36:22) AI lipsync

(38:49) Personalized fine-tuned models for creators?

(39:38) Building models vs. building wrappers

(43:09) Cloud AI vs. Local AI

(45:19) Optimizing for low latency

(48:07) AI/ML stack at Captions

(51:10) “Hallucinations are a feature, not a bug”

(53:19) Prompt engineering

(54:12) Have we passed the uncanny valley for AI avatars?

(01:01:47) The impact of deepfakes

(01:04:33) CapCut ban and its effects

(01:05:05) Evolving from paid to freemium

(01:07:42) Building a company on foundation models

(01:09:01) Running an AI company in New York