Gradient Dissent: Conversations on AI

Lukas Biewald

Join Lukas Biewald on Gradient Dissent, an AI-focused podcast brought to you by Weights & Biases. Dive into fascinating conversations with industry giants from NVIDIA, Meta, Google, Lyft, OpenAI, and more. Explore the cutting-edge of AI and learn the intricacies of bringing models into production.

  1. Uber, Nissan, and Mercedes Chose This Self-Driving Startup | Alex Kendall, Wayve

    11H AGO

    Uber, Nissan, and Mercedes Chose This Self-Driving Startup | Alex Kendall, Wayve

    "Every vehicle is capable of driverless operation. That's clearly the steady state of where we're going." Wayve started in a rented house in Cambridge with $1.5M, a car in the garage, and an aim to integrate end-to-end AI into driving. A decade later it's driven across 506 cities without a single HD map and is worth over $8.6 billion. In this episode, CEO Alex Kendall joins Lukas Biewald to talk about how he built the AI driver Uber, Nvidia, Mercedes, and Nissan all backed, and why putting self-driving AI into 100 million cars a year is a far bigger bet than 10,000 robotaxis. Waymo and Tesla both come up. He doesn't shy away. Connect with us here: Alex KendallLukas BiewaldWayveWeights and Biases

    46 min
  2. Why Netflix, Uber, and Spotify Never Lag: The Database Nobody Talks About | Aaron Katz

    MAR 31

    Why Netflix, Uber, and Spotify Never Lag: The Database Nobody Talks About | Aaron Katz

    "Companies designing for agents, not humans, are going to get a lot of lift." ClickHouse started as an internal tool at Yandex. Today it's the database Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta and Tesla all run on. In this episode, CEO Aaron Katz joins Lukas Biewald to talk about how he turned an open source project into a $15B company, why he acquired LangFuse knowing it could cost him customers, and what he's actually building for the agent era. Snowflake, Datadog and Databricks all come up. He doesn't shy away. Connect with us here: Aaron Katz: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaron-katz-5762094 ClickHouse: https://www.linkedin.com/company/clickhouseinc/ Lukas Biewald: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lbiewald/ Weights and Biases: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wandb/ 00:00 Trailer 00:57 The Origin Story: From Yandex to ClickHouse Inc. 04:43 Building ClickHouse Cloud & Raising $300M 10:36 Growing Up Around Xerox PARC 12:51 Salesforce, Mark Benioff & the Dot-Com Bust 15:32 Cloud Skeptics vs. AI Skeptics | History Repeating 18:05 Building a Modern Go-To-Market Playbook 21:57 The SaaS Crash, Agents & the Future of Infrastructure 27:09 The Datadog Love-Hate Story 35:21 Hardest Moments: Russia, SVB & Sleepless Nights 43:16 Outro

    44 min
  3. The $64M Bet on an AI That Has to Be Right | Carina Hong, CEO of Axiom

    FEB 5

    The $64M Bet on an AI That Has to Be Right | Carina Hong, CEO of Axiom

    Formal verification already consumes years of human effort. In this episode, Lukas Biewald talks with Carina Hong, Founder & CEO of Axiom, about why verification is becoming the real bottleneck in high stakes AI systems. They discuss how Axiom uses AI to take on the tedious checking that stretches verification cycles across years, starting with formal mathematics and extending to hardware and software. Carina also explains why Axiom’s approach to auto-formalization mirrors spec driven models like Kiro from AWS. Connect with us here: Carina Hong: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carina-hong/ Axiom: https://www.linkedin.com/company/axiommath/ Lukas Biewald: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lbiewald/ Weights & Biases: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wandb/

    51 min
  4. What a $42B Software Co. Really Spends on AI Tools

    JAN 20

    What a $42B Software Co. Really Spends on AI Tools

    “I don't worry about being replaced by AI. I worry about being replaced by someone who's really good at using AI.” Atlassian has 10,000+ engineers currently split-testing the world’s top AI coding tools, from GitHub Copilot and Cursor to Claude Code. In this episode, Co-Founder & CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes joins Lukas Biewald to share what their data reveals about the world's best AI tools today. Hear how 24 years of building a tech giant and a massive internal study on AI productivity have shaped Mike's vision for the future of dev jobs. Connect with us here: Mike Cannon-Brookes: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mcannonbrookes/?originalSubdomain=au Atlassian: https://www.linkedin.com/company/atlassian/?viewAsMember=true Lukas Biewald: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lbiewald/ Weights & Biases: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wandb/ 00:00 Trailer 01:08 Introduction 03:11 Connecting Technology and Business Teams 07:22 The Impact of AI on Business Workflows 13:26 Developer Productivity and AI 21:03 Measuring Developer Efficiency 25:41 Future of AI in Development 34:59 Legacy Technology and Code Changes 39:29 AI's Role in Developer Productivity 47:40 AI and Junior Developers 52:30 Product-Led Growth and Business Strategy 01:00:29 Core Metrics for Sustainable Growth 01:06:56 Staying Creative in the Tech Industry

    1h 8m
  5. Inside the $41B AI Cloud Challenging Big Tech | CoreWeave SVP

    JAN 6

    Inside the $41B AI Cloud Challenging Big Tech | CoreWeave SVP

    The future of AI training is shaped by one constraint: keeping GPUs fed. In this episode, Lukas Biewald talks with CoreWeave SVP Corey Sanders about why general-purpose clouds start to break down under large-scale AI workloads. According to Corey, the industry is shifting toward a "Neo Cloud" model to handle the unique demands of modern models. They dive into the hardware and software stack required to maximize GPU utilization and achieve high goodput. Corey’s conclusion is clear: AI demands specialization. Connect with us here: Corey Sanders: https://www.linkedin.com/in/corey-sanders-842b72/ CoreWeave: https://www.linkedin.com/company/coreweave/ Lukas Biewald: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lbiewald/ Weights & Biases: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wandb/ (00:00) Trailer (00:57) Introduction (02:51) The Evolution of AI Workloads (06:22) Core Weave's Technological Innovations (13:58) Customer Engagement and Future Prospects (28:49) Comparing Cloud Approaches (33:50) Balancing Executive Roles and Hands-On Projects (46:44) Product Development and Customer Feedback

    53 min
  6. Why Physical AI Needed a Completely New Data Stack

    12/16/2025

    Why Physical AI Needed a Completely New Data Stack

    The future of AI is physical.  In this episode, Lukas Biewald talks to Nikolaus West, CEO of Rerun, about why the breakthrough required to get AI out of the lab and into the messy real world is blocked by poor data tooling.  Nikolaus explains how Rerun solved this by adopting an Entity Component System (ECS), a data model built for games, to handle complex, multimodal, time-aware sensor data. This is the technology that makes solving previously impossible tasks, like flexible manipulation, suddenly feel "boring."  Connect with us here:  Nikolaus West: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikolauswest/ Rerun: https://www.linkedin.com/company/rerun-io/ Lukas Biewald: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lbiewald/ Weights & Biases: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wandb/

    1h 1m
  7. The Engineering Behind the World’s Most Advanced Video AI

    12/01/2025

    The Engineering Behind the World’s Most Advanced Video AI

    Is video AI a viable path toward AGI?  Runway ML founder Cristóbal Valenzuela joins Lukas Biewald just after Gen 4.5 reached the #1 position on the Video Arena Leaderboard, according to community voting on Artificial Analysis.  Lukas examines how a focused research team at Runway outpaced much larger organizations like Google and Meta in one of the most compute-intensive areas of machine learning. Cristóbal breaks down the architecture behind Gen 4.5 and explains the role of “taste” in model development. He details the engineering improvements in motion and camera control that solve long-standing issues like the restrictive “tripod look,” and shares why video models are starting to function as simulation engines with applications beyond media generation. Connect with us here: Cristóbal Valenzuela: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cvalenzuelabRunway: https://www.linkedin.com/company/runwayml/Lukas Biewald: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lbiewald/Weights & Biases: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wandb/

    15 min
  8. The CEO Behind the Fastest-Growing AI Inference Company | Tuhin Srivastava

    11/18/2025

    The CEO Behind the Fastest-Growing AI Inference Company | Tuhin Srivastava

    In this episode of Gradient Dissent, Lukas Biewald talks with Tuhin Srivastava, CEO and founder of Baseten, one of the fastest-growing companies in the AI inference ecosystem. Tuhin shares the real story behind Baseten’s rise and how the market finally aligned with the infrastructure they’d spent years building. They get into the core challenges of modern inference, including why dedicated deployments matter, how runtime and infrastructure bottlenecks stack up, and what makes serving large models fundamentally different from smaller ones. Tuhin also explains how vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, and SGLang differ in practice, what it takes to tune workloads for new chips like the B200, and why reliability becomes harder as systems scale.  The conversation dives into company-building, from killing product lines to avoiding premature scaling while navigating a market that shifts every few weeks. Connect with us here:  Tuhin Srivastva: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tuhin-srivastava/  Lukas Biewald: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lbiewald/ Weights & Biases: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wandb/

    59 min
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4.8
out of 5
70 Ratings

About

Join Lukas Biewald on Gradient Dissent, an AI-focused podcast brought to you by Weights & Biases. Dive into fascinating conversations with industry giants from NVIDIA, Meta, Google, Lyft, OpenAI, and more. Explore the cutting-edge of AI and learn the intricacies of bringing models into production.

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