Frank Slootman, CEO of Snowflake Computing, joins Sarah Guo and Elad Gil this week on No Priors. Before scaling Snowflake to its blockbuster IPO and beyond, Frank was also the CEO from early to scale for landmark enterprise companies ServiceNow and Data Domain. Frank grew up in the Netherlands and is also the author of three books: Amp It Up, Rise of the Data Cloud, and Tape Sucks. In this episode, our hosts talk with Frank about the opportunity for generative AI in the enterprise, why Snowflake isn't really a data warehousing company, their acquisitions of Neeva and Streamlit, apps within Snowflake, and how AI relates to traditional analytics and BI. He also talks about his personal journey, why it's always a good time to do performance management, and why most leaders struggle to raise the bar for performance.

Fidji Simo, the CEO of Instacart and co-founder of Metrodora Institute, a research institute for neuroimmune axis disorders, shares her personal journey from growing up in France, to serving as head of product for Facebook, to becoming a wartime CEO. Fidji talks about the future of Instacart, their AI strategy, how the current era of AI is different from prior ML waves, and the impact of LLMs in commerce, robotics and healthcare. She also shares how she earns followership from her teams, leading through crisis.

Olivier Pomel, co-founder and CEO of Datadog, the leading observability company, discusses the company’s founding story, early product sequencing, platform strategy, and acquisitions. Olivier also shares his thoughts on their more recent expansion into security, and why he’s bullish on the potential for AI in DevOps.

This week on No Priors, Sarah and Elad do another hangout to answer listener questions. Topics include debunking common misconceptions about AI and its implications on the world, the analogy to nuclear power and nuclear safety, the impact of larger context windows, developer productivity, incumbent announcements of AI products, and some requests for (fat) startups.

Today on No Priors, we discuss defense technology, AI, drones, and autonomous vehicles (think giant submarine drones!) with Brian Schimpf, the co-founder and CEO of Anduril, a next-generation defense technology company. From his early days of coding at age 12 to working on self-driving cars, and finally founding Anduril, Brian's incredible journey led him to create innovative solutions for pressing defense problems. This episode covers the impact of AI, intelligent software, and other technologies to defense. We discuss the challenges of deploying and selling technology in the government spaceBrian shared his perspective on building general-purpose defense technology, the importance of a software-first approach, and how Anduril is working to solve urgent defense problems with speed and efficiency. As we wrapped up our conversation, we touched on the recent shift in the low cost of space launch, which has changed the way the US thinks about defense. We examined the proliferation of satellites, drones, and hypersonic missiles, and how these technologies can be applied, scaled, and built in a way that can fundamentally shift America's approach to defense. Don't miss this fascinating episode with Brian Schimpf as we uncover the cutting edge of defense technology and its implications for the future.

In this episode, Sarah and Elad speak with Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott about his unlikely journey from rural Virginia to becoming the driving force behind Microsoft's AI strategy. Sarah and Elad discuss the partnership that Kevin helped forge between Microsoft and OpenAI and explore the vision both companies have for the future of AI. They also discuss yesterday’s announcement of “copilots” across the Microsoft product suite, Microsoft’s GPU computing budget, the potential impact of open source AI models in the tech industry, the future of AI in relation to jobs, why Kevin is bullish on creative and physical work, and predictions for progress in AI this year.

What if AI could revolutionize healthcare with advanced language learning models? Sarah and Elad welcome Karan Singhal, Staff Software Engineer at Google Research, who specializes in medical AI and the development of MedPaLM2. On this episode, Karan emphasizes the importance of safety in medical AI applications and how language models like MedPaLM2 have the potential to augment scientific workflows and transform the standard of care. Other topics include the best workflows for AI integration, the potential impact of AI on drug discoveries, how AI can serve as a physician's assistant, and how privacy-preserving machine learning and federated learning can protect patient data, while pushing the boundaries of medical innovation.

Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind and now co-founder and CEO of Inflection AI, joins Sarah and Elad to discuss how his interests in counseling, conflict resolution, and intelligence led him to start an AI lab that pioneered deep reinforcement learning, lead applied AI and policy efforts at Google, and more recently found Inflection and launch Pi, a personalized intelligence. Mustafa offers insights on the changing structure of the web, the pressure Google faces in the age of AI personalization, predictions for model architectures, how to measure emotional intelligence in AIs, and the thinking behind Pi: the AI companion that knows you, is aligned to your interests, and provides companionship. Sarah and Elad also discuss Mustafa’s upcoming book, The Coming Wave (expected release September 12, 2023), which examines the political ramifications of AI and digital biology revolutions.

How do you personalize AI models? A popular school of thought in AI is to just dump all the data you need into pre-training or fine tuning. But that may be less efficient and less controllable than alternatives — using AI models as a reasoning engine against external data sources. Kelvin Guu, Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google, joins Sarah and Elad this week to talk about retrieval, memory, training data attribution and model orchestration. At Google, he led some of the first efforts to leverage pre-trained LMs and neural retrievers, with >30 launches across multiple products. He has done some of the earliest work on retrieval-augmented language models (REALM) and training LLMs to follow instructions (FLAN).

So much of the AI conversation today revolves around models and new applications. But this AI revolution would not be possible without one thing – GPUs, Nvidia GPUs. The Nvidia A100 is the workhorse of today’s AI ecosystem. This week on No Priors, Sarah Guo and Elad Gil sit down with Jensen Huang, the founder and CEO of NVIDIA, at their Santa Clara headquarters. Jensen co-founded the company in 1993 with a goal to create chips that accelerated graphics. Over the past thirty years, NVIDIA has gone far behind gaming and become a $674B behemoth. Jensen talks about the meaning of this broader platform shift for developers, making very long term bets in areas such as climate and biopharma, their next-gen Hopper chip, why and how NVIDIA chooses problems that are unsolvable today, and the source of his iconic leather jackets.

Noam Shazeer played a key role in developing key foundations of modern AI - including co-inventing Transformers at Google, as well as pioneering AI chat pre-chatGPT. These are the foundations supporting today’s AI revolution. On this episode of No Priors, Noam discusses his work as an AI researcher, engineer, inventor, and now CEO. Noam Shazeer is currently the CEO and Co-founder of Character AI, a service that allows users to design and interact with their own personal bots that take on the personalities of well-known individuals or archetypes. You could have a socratic conversation with Socrates. You could pretend you’re being interviewed by Oprah. Or you could work through a life decision with a therapist bot. Character recently raised $150M from A16Z, Elad Gil, and others. Noam talks about his early AI adventures at Google, why he started Character, and what he sees on the horizon of AI development.

If you have 30 dollars, a few hours, and one server, then you are ready to create a ChatGPT-like model that can do what’s known as instruction-following. Databricks’ latest launch, Dolly, foreshadows a potential move in the industry toward smaller and more accessible but extremely capable AIs. Plus, Dolly is open source, requires less computing power, and fewer data parameters than its counterparts. Matei Zaharia, Cofounder & Chief Technologist at Databricks, joins Sarah and Elad to talk about how big data sets actually need to be, why manual annotation is becoming less necessary to train some models, and how he went from a Berkeley PhD student with a little project called Spark to the founder of a company that is now critical data infrastructure that’s increasingly moving into AI.

Everyone talks about the future impact of AI, but there’s already an AI product that has revolutionized a profession. Alex Graveley was the principal engineer and Chief Architect behind Github Copilot, a sort of pair-programmer that auto-completes your code as you type. It has rapidly become a product that developers won’t live without, and the most leaned-upon analogy for every new AI startup – Copilot for Finance, Sales, Marketing, Support, Writing, Decision-Making. Alex is a longtime hacker and tinkerer, open source contributor, repeat founder, and creator of products that millions of people use, such as Dropbox Paper. He has a new project in stealth, Minion AI. In this episode, we talk about the uncertain process of shipping Copilot, how code improves chain of thought for LLMs, how they improved product, performance, how people are using it, AI agents that can do work for us, stress testing society's resilience to waves of new technology, and his new startup named Minion.

With advances in machine learning, the way we search for information online will never be the same. This week on the No Priors podcast, we dive into a startup that aims to be the most trustworthy place to search for information online. Perplexity.ai is a search engine that provides answers to questions in a conversational way and hints at what the future of search might look like. Aravind Srinivas is a Co-founder and CEO of Perplexity. He is a former research scientist at Open AI and completed his PhD in computer science at University of California Berkeley. Denis Yarats is a Co-Founder and Perplexity’s CTO. He has a background in machine learning, having worked as a Research Scientist at Facebook AI Research and a machine learning engineer at Quora.

For the first time in decades web search might be at risk for disruption. Bing is allied with OpenAI to integrate LLMs. Google has committed to launching new products. New startups are emerging. Sridhar Ramaswamy co-founded the challenger AI-powered, private search platform Neeva in 2019. He is a former 16-year Google veteran who most recently led the internet’s most profitable business as SVP in charge of Google Ads, Commerce and Privacy. Sridhar, Elad and Sarah talk about the challenge of building search, how LLMs have changed the landscape, and how chatbots and "answer services" will affect web publishers.

When AI research is evolving at warp speed and takes significant capital and compute power, what is the role of academia? Dr. Percy Liang – Stanford computer science professor and director of the Stanford Center for Research on Foundation Models talks about training costs, distributed infrastructure, model evaluation, alignment, and societal impact. Sarah Guo and Elad Gil join Percy at his office to discuss the evolution of research in NLP, why AI developers should aim for superhuman levels of performance, the goals of the Center for Research on Foundation Models, and Together, a decentralized cloud for artificial intelligence.