No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups Conviction | Pod People

This week on No Priors, Sarah Guo and Elad Gil are joined by Howie Liu, the co-founder and CEO of Airtable. Howie discusses their Cobuilder launch, the evolution of Airtable from a simple productivity tool to an enterprise app platform with integrated AI capabilities. They talk about why the conventional wisdom of “app not platform” can be wrong,  why there’s a future for low-code in the age of AI and code generation, and where enterprises need help adopting AI.

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Show Notes: 
(00:00) Introduction
(00:29) The Origin and Evolution of Airtable
(02:31) Challenges and Successes in Building Airtable
(06:09) Airtable's Transition to Enterprise Solutions
(09:44) Insights on Product Management
(16:23) Integrating AI into Airtable
(21:55) The Future of No Code and AI
(30:30) Workshops and Training for AI Adoption
(36:28) The Role of Code Generation in No Code Platforms

This week on No Priors, we have a host-only episode. Sarah and Elad catch up to discuss how tech history may be repeating itself. Much like in the early days of the internet, every company is clamoring to incorporate AI into their products or operations while some legacy players are skeptical that investment in AI will pay off. They also get into new opportunities and capabilities that AI is opening up, whether or not incubators are actually effective, and what companies are poised to stand the test of time in the changing tech landscape.

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Show Notes: 
(0:00) Introduction
(0:16) Old school operators AI misunderstandings
(5:10) Tech history is repeating itself with slow AI adoption
(6:09) New AI Markets
(8:48) AI-backed buyouts
(13:03) AI incubation
(17:18) Exciting incubating applications
(18:26) AI and the public markets
(22:20) Staffing AI companies 
(25:14) Competition and shrinking head count

Believe or not, we’re almost halfway through 2024. Sarah and Elad have spent the first of this year talking with some of the most innovative minds in the AI industry, so we’re taking a look at some of our favorite No Priors conversations so far featuring Dylan Field (Figma); Emily Glassberg-Sands (Stripe); Brett Adcock (Figure AI); Aditya Ramesh, Tim Brooks and Bill Peebles (OpenAI’s Sora Team); Scott Wu (Cognition); and Alexandr Wang (Scale).
Watch or listen to the full episodes here:

Build AI products at on-AI companies with Emily Glassberg Sands from Stripe

Designing the Future: Dylan Field on AI, Collaboration, and Independence

The argument for humanoid robots with Brett Adcock from Figure

OpenAI’s Sora team thinks we’ve only seen the "GPT-1 of video models"

Cognition’s Scott Wu on how Devin, the AI software engineer, will work for you

The Data Foundry for AI with Alexandr Wang from Scale

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Show Notes: 
(0:00) Introduction
(0:46) Emily Glassberg Sands on the Future of AI and Fintech
(4:23 Dylan Field on AI and Human Creative Potential
(9:03) Brett Adcock on Running Figure AI’s Hardware and Software Processes
(12:43) OpenAI’s Sora Team on Artists’ Creative Experiences with their Model
(17:43) Scott Wu Gives Advice for Human Engineers Co-Working with AI
(21:06) Alexandr Wang on How Quality Data Builds Confidence in AI Systems

This week on No Priors, Sarah Guo and Elad Gil sit down with Karan Goel and Albert Gu from Cartesia. Karan and Albert first met as Stanford AI Lab PhDs, where their lab invented Space Models or SSMs, a fundamental new primitive for training large-scale foundation models. In 2023, they Founded Cartesia to build real-time intelligence for every device. One year later, Cartesia released Sonic which generates high quality and lifelike speech with a model latency of 135ms—the fastest for a model of this class.

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Show Notes: 
(0:00) Introduction
(0:28) Use Cases for Cartesia and Sonic 
(1:32) Karan Goel & Albert Gu’s professional backgrounds
(5:06) State Space Models (SSMs) versus Transformer Based Architectures 
(11:51) Domain Applications for Hybrid Approaches 
(13:10) Text to Speech and Voice
(17:29) Data, Size of Models and Efficiency 
(20:34) Recent Launch of Text to Speech Product
(25:01) Multimodality & Building Blocks
(25:54) What’s Next at Cartesia? 
(28:28) Latency in Text to Speech
(29:30) Choosing Research Problems Based on Aesthetic 
(31:23) Product Demo
(32:48) Cartesia Team & Hiring

 AI video generation models still have a long way to go when it comes to making compelling and complex videos but the HeyGen team are well on their way to streamlining the video creation process by using a combination of language, video, and voice models to create videos featuring personalized avatars, b-roll, and dialogue. This week on No Priors, Joshua Xu the co-founder and CEO of HeyGen,  joins Sarah and Elad to discuss how the HeyGen team broke down the elements of a video and built or found models to use for each one, the commercial applications for these AI videos, and how they’re safeguarding against deep fakes. 

Links from episode:

HeyGen

McDonald’s commercial


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Show Notes: 
(0:00) Introduction
(3:08) Applications of AI content creation
(5:49) Best use cases for Hey Gen
(7:34) Building for quality in AI video generation
(11:17) The models powering HeyGen
(14:49) Research approach
(16:39) Safeguarding against deep fakes
(18:31) How AI video generation will change video creation
(24:02) Challenges in building the model
(26:29) HeyGen team and company

The first step in achieving AGI is nailing down a concise definition and Mike Knoop, the co-founder and Head of AI at Zapier, believes François Chollet got it right when he defined general intelligence as a system that can efficiently acquire new skills. This week on No Priors, Miked joins Elad to discuss ARC Prize which is a multi-million dollar non-profit public challenge that is looking for someone to beat the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC) evaluation.
In this episode, they also get into why Mike thinks LLMs will not get us to AGI, how Zapier is incorporating AI into their products and the power of agents, and why it’s dangerous to regulate AGI before discovering its full potential. 
Show Links:

About the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus

Zapier Central

ARC Prize


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

Show Notes: 
(0:00) Introduction
(1:10) Redefining AGI
(2:16) Introducing ARC Prize
(3:08) Definition of AGI
(5:14) LLMs and AGI
(8:20) Promising techniques to developing AGI
(11:0) Sentience and intelligence
(13:51) Prize model vs investing
(16:28) Zapier AI innovations
(19:08) Economic value of agents
(21:48) Open source to achieve AGI
(24:20) Regulating AI and AGI