16 episodes
Thursday Nights in AI Outset Capital
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- Technology
Every other Thursday night, we interview a founder, researcher, or operator in AI, to hear what's top of mind for them.
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Episode 16: The Future of AI and Robotics with Medra CEO Michelle Lee
At this Thursday Nights in AI, hosts Ali Rohde and Josh Albrecht discussed the future of robotics and computer vision, and the role of AI in the space. Special thanks to Respell for hosting us in their wonderful office!
Michelle is the CEO and founder of Medra. Medra is at the forefront of laboratory automation, leveraging state-of-the-art robotics and computer vision technologies to streamline wet lab tasks. The company is backed by top investors including Nat Friedman, Lux, Neo, and Outset Capital.
Before Medra, Michelle earned her PhD at the Stanford AI Lab, and interned at McKinsey, SpaceX, and NVIDIA.
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About Outset Capital: Outset Capital is led by Ali Rohde, Kanjun Qiu, and Josh Albrecht — AI practitioners investing in AI, deeptech, and the future of work. We back companies at the outset and love to be the first check in.
About Imbue: Imbue is an AI research company aiming to rekindle the dream of the personal computer—by creating practical AI agents that can accomplish larger goals and safely work for us in the real world. They are hiring! https://imbue.com/careers
About WndrCo: Founded in 2016 by Sujay Jaswa, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and ChenLi Wang, WndrCo builds & invests in companies whose products are revolutionizing how people live and work. WndrCo's investments include 1Password, Aura, Databricks, Figma, Material Security, and Pilot. https://bit.ly/tnai-wndrco
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Ali Rohde: https://x.com/RohdeAli
Josh Albrecht: https://x.com/joshalbrecht
Michelle Lee: https://x.com/michellearning
Outset Capital: https://x.com/outsetcap
Imbue: https://x.com/imbue_ai
Wndrco: https://x.com/WndrCoLLC -
Episode 15: Selling AI to the Fortune 500 w/ Snorkel AI CEO Alex Ratner
At this Thursday Nights in AI, hosts Ali Rohde and Kanjun Qiu discussed selling AI to Fortune 500 companies, data-centric versus model-centric AI, flashy demos versus actual production value, and more with Alex Ratner, co-founder and CEO of Snorkel AI.
Snorkel AI believes that AI teams can get better results faster by replacing highly manual data annotation with programmatic approaches that more efficiently capture and apply subject matter expertise. Its data development platform, Snorkel Flow, helps companies fine-tune and align generative models with these programmatic approaches.
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About Outset Capital: Outset Capital is led by Ali Rohde, Kanjun Qiu, and Josh Albrecht — AI practitioners investing in AI, deeptech, and the future of work. We back companies at the outset and love to be the first check in.
About Imbue: Imbue is an AI research company aiming to rekindle the dream of the personal computer—by creating practical AI agents that can accomplish larger goals and safely work for us in the real world. They are hiring! https://imbue.com/careers
About WndrCo: Founded in 2016 by Sujay Jaswa, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and ChenLi Wang, WndrCo builds & invests in companies whose products are revolutionizing how people live and work. WndrCo's investments include 1Password, Aura, Databricks, Figma, Material Security, and Pilot. https://bit.ly/tnai-wndrco -
Episode 14: The rise of the AI Engineer w/ Latent Space host @swyx
We’re talking about the Rise of the AI Engineer with @swyx, host of the Latent Space podcast, and one of the most in-the-weeds commentators on the companies, papers, and trends rising and falling in AI, every single week.
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Episode 13: Open-source panel with Anton Troynikov, Brian Raymond, and Harrison Chase
On this special edition of Thursday Nights in AI, we chatted with three open-source leaders building in AI: Harrison Chase of LangChain, Brian S. Raymond of Unstructured.io, and Anton Troynikov of Chroma.
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About Harrison: Harrison Chase is the co-founder and CEO of LangChain, a company formed around the open-source Python/Typescript packages that aim to make it easy to develop Language Model applications. Prior to starting LangChain, he led the ML team at Robust Intelligence (an MLOps company focused on testing and validation of machine learning models), led the entity linking team at Kensho (a fintech startup), and studied stats and CS at Harvard.
About Brian: Brian S. Raymond is the co-founder and CEO of Unstructured.io, a company building open-source libraries and APIs to build custom preprocessing pipelines for labeling, training, or production machine learning pipelines. He completed his MS in Political Science and Government at UC Davis and his MBA at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.
About Anton: Anton Troynikov co-founded Chroma, an open-source embedding database. Before Chroma, Anton was a robotics engineer, researcher, and founder of an edtech startup. Anton was born in the Soviet Union, did his Computer Engineering degree at the University of Melbourne in Australia, and completed an MS in robotics at the Technical University of Munich in Germany.
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About Outset Capital: Outset Capital is led by Ali Rohde, Kanjun Qiu, and Josh Albrecht — AI practitioners investing in AI, deeptech, and the future of work. We back companies at the outset and love to be the first check in.
About Imbue: Imbue is an AI research company aiming to rekindle the dream of the personal computer—by creating practical AI agents that can accomplish larger goals and safely work for us in the real world. They are hiring! https://imbue.com/careers
About WndrCo: Founded in 2016 by Sujay Jaswa, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and ChenLi Wang, WndrCo builds & invests in companies whose products are revolutionizing how people live and work. WndrCo's investments include 1Password, Aura, Databricks, Figma, Material Security, and Pilot. -
Episode 12: Chroma co-founders Anton Troynikov & Jeff Huber
Season One of Thursday Nights in AI is in the books. Catch our conversation with Jeff Huber and Anton Troynikov, Cofounders of Chroma, on open-source, embedding databases, building developer love, and where their product goes from here. Season two here we come!
This fireside chat is part of our 'Thursday Nights in AI" series, co-hosted by Outset Capital and Imbue and sponsored by WndrCo.
Join our upcoming events! Full list here: https://www.outsetcapital.com/thursday-nights-in-ai
About Outset Capital: Outset Capital is led by Ali Rohde, Kanjun Qiu, and Josh Albrecht — AI practitioners investing in AI, deeptech, and the future of work. We back companies at the outset and love to be the first check in.
About Imbue: Imbue is an AI research company aiming to rekindle the dream of the personal computer—by creating practical AI agents that can accomplish larger goals and safely work for us in the real world. They are hiring! https://imbue.com/careers
About WndrCo: Founded in 2016 by Sujay Jaswa, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and ChenLi Wang, WndrCo builds & invests in companies whose products are revolutionizing how people live and work. WndrCo's investments include 1Password, Aura, Databricks, Figma, Material Security, and Pilot.
About Chroma: Chroma is the AI native open-source embeddings database. Using embeddings, Chroma lets developers add state and memory to their AI-enabled applications.
Developers use Chroma to give LLMs pluggable knowledge about their data, facts, tools, and prevent hallucinations. Many developers have said they want "ChatGPT but for my data" - and Chroma provides the "for my data" bridge through embedding-based document retrieval.
Learn more about chroma: https://www.trychroma.com/blog/seed
Learn more about Anton: https://twitter.com/atroyn
Learn more about Jeff: https://twitter.com/jeffreyhuber
00:29 - How Chroma started
04:40 - Chat GPT's impact on Chroma
05:40 - How Chroma works
09:35 - Vector stores - when to use Chroma
14:20 - Serving Developers
20:40 - Programming AI with Data
25:00 - Reasoning models & other new products
28:12 - Specialized Data & Models
29:29 - Metadata filtering & Language Processing
31:15 - System retrieval evolution
34:31 - Consumer applications & devices
35:36 - Hardware
37:31 - Chroma feature requests
38:56 - Custom GPT
39:58 - Fine-tuning embedding models -
Episode 11: Glean CEO, Arvind Jain
Outset Capital's Ali Rohde and Josh Albrecht interview Glean CEO Arvind Jain. Special thanks to Volley for welcoming us to their beautiful HQ!
This fireside chat is part of our 'Thursday Nights in AI" series, co-hosted by Outset Capital and Imbue and sponsored by WndrCo.
Join our upcoming events! Full list here: https://www.outsetcapital.com/thursda...
About Outset Capital: Outset Capital is led by Ali Rohde, Kanjun Qiu, and Josh Albrecht — AI practitioners investing in AI, deeptech, and the future of work. We back companies at the outset and love to be the first check in.
About Imbue: Imbue is an AI research company aiming to rekindle the dream of the personal computer—by creating practical AI agents that can accomplish larger goals and safely work for us in the real world. They are hiring! https://imbue.com/careers
About WndrCo: Founded in 2016 by Sujay Jaswa and Jeffrey Katzenberg, WndrCo builds, buys, and invests in high-growth startups, including Airtable, Aura, 1Password, and Twingate.
About Glean: Glean is the world’s most advanced AI platform for the enterprise. They have powerful deep-learning models that understand your company’s information and users’ queries.
Your unique enterprise knowledge graph understands people, content, and interactions.
Connect to all enterprise knowledge and enforce the existing permissions of your data sources.
About Volley: About Volley: Volley is the leading developer of voice AI games for smart speaker platforms like Amazon Alexa, smartphones, and connected TVs. Volley’s quickly-growing team occupies a beautiful office in the heart of San Francisco’s Hayes Valley, and a spot on the 2022 YC Top Companies list!
Learn more about Glean: https://www.glean.com/product/overview