Inside AsembleAI: DeepTech, AI & Science

Mac & Sam
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AsembleAI brings you thought-provoking conversations at the nexus of artificial intelligence, innovation, and leadership. In each episode, hosts Mac and Sam, veterans in data and tech world, sit down with AI researchers, fast‑scaling founders, Fortune 500 executives, and pioneering technologists to reveal how AI is reshaping business strategy, sparking breakthrough product development, and guiding executive decisions. Tune in for actionable insights, compelling case studies, and forward‑looking perspectives on the promises and pitfalls of AI‑driven innovation.RSSVERIFY

  1. 3 hr ago

    EP 65: The AI Bottleneck Nobody's Watching | Troy Liljedahl, Backblaze

    Storage is the least glamorous layer of the AI stack — and often the actual reason GenAI pipelines stall between pilot and production. Sam sits down with Troy, Senior Director of Solutions Engineering at Backblaze, to unpack what's really happening under the hood when AI infrastructure fails to scale. Topics covered: What actually happens when a GPU sits idle — and the opportunity cost most teams don't account forWhy storage bottlenecks are the hidden reason enterprise GenAI adoption stallsBackblaze's role as a capacity and data lake tier for companies building their own modelsInside B2 Overdrive: dedicated bandwidth up to a terabit per second, predictable IOPS, and no egress chargesWhy hyperscalers prioritize large foundational model companies over startups and researchers when resources tightenThe financial case for avoiding egress costs when training on tens to hundreds of petabytes of dataSkills engineers need to survive and prosper in the current AI infrastructure landscape — including agent managementAdvice for new grads entering the storage and infrastructure industryWhy Troy sees parallels between today's AI hype cycle and the dot-com bubble — and why the technology shift is still realWhy human interaction and direct customer conversations remain irreplaceable, even as AI reshapes product developmentGuest Bio: Troy is Senior Director of Solutions Engineering at Backblaze, where he leads the team helping AI customers integrate cloud storage and solve data infrastructure challenges. He has nearly a decade of experience in cloud storage and AI infrastructure at Backblaze. Connect: Find Troy on LinkedIn to learn more about Backblaze's AI storage solutions.

    EP 65: The AI Bottleneck Nobody's Watching | Troy Liljedahl, Backblaze

  2. 1 day ago

    EP 64: Lack of ROI Is Actually Lack of Trust — Fixing Enterprise AI for Finance | Binny Gill, Kognitos

    This episode was recorded live from the Ai4 conference podcast pavilion, where host Mac Goswami sat down with Binny Gill — CEO & co-founder of Kognitos, holder of ~100 patents, who previously helped scale a company from 20 to 6,000 people and a $7B market cap — about Kognitos's newly launched Context Graph for Finance: deterministic, hallucination-free AI for the office of the CFO. What's Covered: A Genius With Amnesia — Binny's framing of the core problem: an LLM is raw intelligence with no memory. Why prompts (instruction) and context windows (short-term memory) aren't enough, and how a context graph gives AI the long-term memory the brain runs on. The Neuro-Symbolic Harness — How Kognitos runs your English SOPs deterministically — AI that is "not allowed to be creative" on every invoice, only tapping the graph when a real exception appears. Same input, same output, 100 times. Extracting Tribal Knowledge — The processes that live only in John's or Vanessa's head. How Kognitos pulls that undocumented know-how directly from employees as they work — and auto-documents it as executable English. Revenue Leakage & 100+ Signals — Why 1–1.5% revenue leakage happens at nearly every company, and how fraud detection, duplicate payments, and data cleanup ride on top of the context graph. "Lack of ROI Is Actually Lack of Trust" — The most important idea in the episode. In POC mode everything works — but nobody ships to production, because if an auditor asks where a number came from and the answer is "the LLM," you're out. Kognitos's answer: full data lineage. Governance in a Regulated Industry — Why a documented, human-approved process is inherently more ethical — and where Binny says you should use Claude, OpenAI, or Gemini instead. Key Quote: "Lack of ROI is actually lack of trust. In POC mode everything works. Nobody trusts it to put in production." Connect with Binny: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/binnygill/ Kognitos: https://www.kognitos.com/ Follow and subscribe to AsembleAI: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Amazon Music | iHeart Radio | YouTube | Substack #Ai4Conference #FinanceAI #ContextGraph #NeurosymbolicAI #Kognitos #AsembleAI

    EP 64: Lack of ROI Is Actually Lack of Trust — Fixing Enterprise AI for Finance | Binny Gill, Kognitos

  3. 2 days ago

    EP 63: From Intel to Mars: The 26-Year Story Behind OpenCV

    OpenCV powers the computer vision behind your phone's camera, autonomous vehicles, hospital screening systems, and even NASA's Mars helicopter — and most people using it have no idea. Sam sits down with Satya Mallick, CEO of the nonprofit OpenCV.org, to trace its 26-year history and where it's headed next. Topics covered: OpenCV's origins at Intel in 2000 under Dr. Gary Bradsky, and why it was open-sourced to democratize computer vision researchWhy OpenCV sees roughly a million downloads a day and remains foundational infrastructureOpenCV5's new DNN inference engine — 40% faster than ONNX Runtime on models like YOLO26Real-world deployments: the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge-winning car and NASA's Mars helicopterWhy classical (non-neural) computer vision still matters for speed- and power-constrained tasksHow OpenCV is integrating with multimodal LLMs and vision-language modelsThe case for open source AI and why closed-source labs risk falling behindA detour on the courage of Geoffrey Hinton and Fei-Fei Li in advancing deep learning and ImageNetPrivacy vs. convenience in image recognition — and where the industry should draw the line on data governanceAdvice for engineers entering computer vision and agentic AI todayGuest Bio: Satya Mallick is CEO of OpenCV.org, the nonprofit that maintains the OpenCV library - downloaded roughly a million times daily and used across image and video analysis applications worldwide. He also runs BigVision LLC, a computer vision and AI consulting company he's led for over 12 years. Connect: Find Satya on LinkedIn to learn more about his work at OpenCV.org and BigVision.

    EP 63: From Intel to Mars: The 26-Year Story Behind OpenCV

  4. 3 days ago

    EP 62: 95% of AI Pilots Fail. Here's Why | Mohamed Battisha, VP of Engineering at WEX

    What actually separates a data platform built for AI agents from the data warehouse most enterprises already have?  Recorded live at Ai4 conference in Vegas, AsembleAI co-host Sam sits down with Mohammed Battisha - who leads the data engineering team at WEX and previously built Saudi Arabia's national AI platform as CTO of SDAIA (Saudi Data and AI Authority), with earlier leadership roles at LinkedIn, Salesforce, and Microsoft - to find out answer to the question.  Topics covered: The shift from "collect, transform, report" data platforms to context-aware, agent-ready platformsWhy the semantic layer is the core of any AI-native architectureGoverned execution: giving AI agents boundaries and full auditabilityLessons from building a sovereign nation's AI platform at SDAIAWhy MIT's research shows 95% of enterprise AI pilots fail — and what disconnects business and technologyWEX's crawl-walk-run framework for AI adoptionClaim AI: how WEX automated a multi-day claims process down to minutesHow WEX measures AI maturity and data maturity across seven dimensionsAdvice for data and AI engineers: why business awareness matters more than technical depth aloneConnect with Mohammed : LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mohamedbattisha/ WEX: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wexinc/

    EP 62: 95% of AI Pilots Fail. Here's Why | Mohamed Battisha, VP of Engineering at WEX

  5. 4 days ago

    EP 61: "Shadow AI" — And No One's Watching | Rafi Khardalian, Actualyze AI

    This episode was recorded live from the Ai4 conference podcast pavilion, where host Mac Goswami sat down with Rafi Khardalian — CEO & co-founder of Actualyze AI, and a former technology leader at Cisco who helped build its container and Kubernetes platforms — about the governance, security, and orchestration layer most enterprises are missing. What's Covered: The Foundation for Enterprise AI — Rafi lays out why a patchwork of point solutions doesn't cut it, and how Actualyze unifies governance and security across every model and provider — at the inference level. The "Shadow AI" Problem — Employees signing up for AI tools on their own, with no governance, no visibility, no controls. Why fragmentation is a company-wide risk, not a per-team one. One Endpoint to Govern Them All — By becoming the sole endpoint for all inference, Actualyze can mask PII, catch secrets and passwords, apply guardrails, and allow or block MCP tool calls — enforcing policy in one place instead of trusting each provider. Why AI ROI Keeps Failing — Rafi's take: the hardest transformation isn't technical, it's cultural. Over-ambitious projects, unbudgeted bills, weak controls — and the trap of building a proprietary LLM you can't scale. Reliable vs. Impressive — What decades of Kubernetes, OpenStack, and large-scale distributed systems taught him about production reliability over demo magic. The Next Five Years — Why the over-rotation on frontier models will give way to small, open-weight, and purpose-built models — and why the real bottleneck is organizational readiness, not technology. Key Quote: "It really comes down to organizational readiness rather than technology readiness. A lot is ready today." Connect with Rafi: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rkhardalian/ Actualyze AI: https://actualyze.ai/ Follow and subscribe to AsembleAI: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Amazon Music | iHeart Radio | YouTube | Substack

    EP 61: "Shadow AI" — And No One's Watching | Rafi Khardalian, Actualyze AI

  6. 4 days ago

    EP 60: Feeding the World with AI: Inside Syngenta's Data Playbook

    Agriculture is the oldest industry in the world — and one of the least represented at AI conferences. In this episode, Sam talks with Jeremy Groeteke, CIO of Syngenta's vegetable division, about how a company operating in 90+ countries with 50,000 employees is building AI infrastructure to help feed the world. Topics covered: Syngenta's approach to merging AI, data science, and physical science in agricultureUsing computer vision for early disease and pest detection in cropsWhy general-purpose LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude give farmers overly generic recommendations — and why domain fine-tuning mattersThe shift from data lakes to data mesh at SyngentaSingle-agent vs. multi-agent AI architectures — and why accuracy often favors single agents right nowThe "metadata problem": why having data isn't enough without context about how it was collectedCropwise AI — Syngenta's tool for turning insight into actionable recommendationsWhy agriculture's long biological cycles make it a poor fit for typical VC/tech timelinesAdvice for technologists looking to break into agtechGuest Bio: Jeremy Groeteke is CIO for Syngenta's vegetable division, overseeing digital strategy for an organization that provides crop protection, biologicals, digital tools, and genetics to growers in over 90 countries. Connect: Find Jeremy on LinkedIn to learn more about Syngenta's work in AI and agriculture.

    EP 60: Feeding the World with AI: Inside Syngenta's Data Playbook

  7. 4 days ago

    EP 59: "The Attackers Have the Advantage" — AI's SATAN Moment in Cybersecurity | Fred Rica, BDO

    This episode was recorded live from the Ai4 conference podcast pavilion, where host Mac Goswami sat down with Fred Rica — cybersecurity leader at BDO USA, former Big Four partner, and a regular voice at RSA and Black Hat — about why AI is cybersecurity's "SATAN moment" and what defenders have to change to survive it. What's Covered: "The Attackers Have the Advantage" — Fred's blunt read on where defenders stand today: back on their heels, facing external attacks and blind spots in their own internal agents at the same time. AI's SATAN Moment — The 1995 parallel. When SATAN — the first real automated scanner — arrived, defenders thought it was the end of the internet. It wasn't, but it changed everything. Fred explains why AI (and Mythos) feels the same, and why the era of large patch windows is over. The Patch Window Is Zero — Why vulnerability management is breaking down and giving way to exposure management and attack-path thinking. Fred's "why is the number going up?" story — printers, missing context, and the CFO on the nightly call — is a masterclass in what's broken. If You're a CISO Today — Fred's three priorities: patch at machine speed ("automated but not automatic," with a human in the loop on critical systems), rewrite the zero-day playbook, and train teams under real pressure. AI Governance Done Right — Anchor to a framework (NIST, ISO, EU AI Act), keep a "big red button," and demand AI cards from every vendor using AI in your ecosystem — the new version of the SOC report. AI Slop & the Agent Problem — On the "10 billion agents" hype, why visibility and a control plane are job one, and where agentic AI genuinely earns its place: continuous monitoring, testing, and SOC tier 1/2 that "don't stand a chance unless they're AI-enabled." Key Quote: "I truly believe that AI is gonna fix AI. I'm a strong believer in the power of AI to transform humanity. However, we have a little bit of work to do at the moment." Connect with Fred: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fredrica/ BDO: https://www.bdo.com/ Follow and subscribe to AsembleAI: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Amazon Music | iHeart Radio | YouTube | Substack

    EP 59: "The Attackers Have the Advantage" — AI's SATAN Moment in Cybersecurity | Fred Rica, BDO

  8. 23 Aug

    EP 58: Every Millisecond Matters: Diffusion LLMs and the Future of Voice AI | Aditya Grover, Inception

    Recorded live at the Ai4 Podcast Pavilion, Sam wraps Day One with Aditya Grover, Co-Founder & CTO of Inception, on why the next generation of LLMs won't look anything like the ones we use today. What's Covered: "Every Millisecond Matters" — Why latency, not intelligence, is the real bottleneck holding back voice agents and multi-step AI agents alike. How Mercury Actually Generates Text — Instead of predicting one token at a time like every autoregressive model, Mercury generates a rough draft of the full response and refines it into coherence — diffusion, applied to language instead of images. Solving Voice AI's Impossible Tradeoff — Fast-but-lower-quality, or high-quality-but-too-slow: Aditya explains how Mercury 2 finally delivers both. A Term Coined Live at This Conference — From Aditya's own Ai4 keynote: "We're moving from token maxing to value maxing." Advice for the Next Generation — Ten-plus years into AI research, Aditya's honest take on why this is still the best time to pursue a PhD, join a startup, or do both. The Next 5-10 Years of Voice AI — A prediction for a future where voice becomes humans' predominant mode of interacting with AI, the same way it is with each other. Key Quote: "Sequential generation is not a law of nature... AI can have a different way of generation, one that's more parallelizable." Connect with Aditya: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aditya-grover/ Inception: https://www.inceptionlabs.ai/ Subscribe: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Amazon Music | iHeart Radio | YouTube | Substack #Ai4Conference #InceptionLabs #DiffusionLLM #VoiceAI #AsembleAI

    EP 58: Every Millisecond Matters: Diffusion LLMs and the Future of Voice AI | Aditya Grover, Inception
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AsembleAI brings you thought-provoking conversations at the nexus of artificial intelligence, innovation, and leadership. In each episode, hosts Mac and Sam, veterans in data and tech world, sit down with AI researchers, fast‑scaling founders, Fortune 500 executives, and pioneering technologists to reveal how AI is reshaping business strategy, sparking breakthrough product development, and guiding executive decisions. Tune in for actionable insights, compelling case studies, and forward‑looking perspectives on the promises and pitfalls of AI‑driven innovation.RSSVERIFY

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