On Unsupervised Learning we probe the sharpest minds in AI in search for the truth about what’s real today, what will be real in the future and what it all mean...
Ep 60: Swyx and Alessio (Latent Space) on What has PMF Today, Google is Cooking & GPT Wrappers are Winning
To unpack some of the most topical questions in AI, I’m joined by two fellow AI podcasters: Swyx and Alessio Fanelli, co-hosts of the Latent Space podcast. We’ve been wanting to do a cross-over episode for a while and finally made it happen.Swyx brings deep experience from his time at AWS, Temporal, and Airbyte, and is now focused on AI agents and dev tools. Alessio is an investor at Decibel, where he’s been backing early technical teams pushing the boundaries of infrastructure and applied AI. Together they run Latent Space, a technical newsletter and podcast by and for AI engineers.To subscribe or learn more about Latent Space, click here: https://www.latent.space/ [0:00] Intro[1:08] Reflecting on AI Surprises of the Past Year[2:24] Open Source Models and Their Adoption[6:48] The Rise of GPT Wrappers[7:49] Challenges in AI Model Training[10:33] Over-hyped and Under-hyped AI Trends[24:00] The Future of AI Product Market Fit[30:27] Google's Momentum and Customer Support Insights[33:16] Emerging AI Applications and Market Trends[35:13] Challenges and Opportunities in AI Development[39:02] Defensibility in AI Applications[42:42] Infrastructure and Security in AI[50:04] Future of AI and Unanswered Questions[55:34] Quickfire With your co-hosts: @jacobeffron - Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health @patrickachase - Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn @ericabrescia - Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) @jordan_segall - Partner at Redpoint
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Ep 59: OpenAI Product & Eng Leads Nikunj Handa and Steve Coffey on OpenAI’s New Agent Development Tools
Two weeks ago, OpenAI released its set of tools to help developers build agentic systems. Today on Unsupervised Learning, Nikunj Handa (Product Lead) and Steve Coffey (Eng Lead) answer some of the biggest questions around how developers should be thinking about building in the agentic paradigm in 2025. [0:00] Intro[0:53] OpenAI’s Vision for Consumer Interaction[4:51] Building Multi-Agent Systems for Business Solutions[6:53] Challenges and Innovations in AI Fine-Tuning[13:20] Exploring Computer Use Cases and Applications[17:20] Advanced Use Cases and Developer Insights[25:29] Challenges with Context Storage and Chat Completions[26:09] Introducing the Responses API and MCP[27:16] AI Infrastructure Companies and Their Role[29:35] Building the Tools Ecosystem[30:17] Exploring Computer Use Models[31:47] The Future of AI and Developer Tools[38:36] Quickfire With your co-hosts: @jacobeffron - Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health @patrickachase - Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn @ericabrescia - Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) @jordan_segall - Partner at Redpoint
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Ep 58: Google Researchers Noam Shazeer and Jack Rae on Scaling Test-time Compute, Reactions to Ilya & AGI
On the latest episode of Unsupervised Learning, Jacob is joined by two of the most influential minds in AI today. 🔹 Noam Shazeer, co-inventor of the Transformer🔹 Jack Rae, Research Director at DeepMind and one of the leads behind Gemini’s Flash ThinkingWe got to ask them all of the top-of-mind questions in AI today about where we are, where we’re headed and what it means for businesses and the world. Some key take-aways: [0:00] Intro[1:30] Exploring Gemini 2.0[4:04] Challenges with Evals and Benchmarks[6:14] Reinforcement Loops and AI Productivity[8:15] Agentic Coding and AI in Development[13:02] Multimodal Capabilities and Applications[15:21] Future of AI: Complexity and Reliability[19:02] Test Time Compute and Data Efficiency[31:20] AI Research Culture and Breakthroughs[38:59] Reflecting on Large Language Models[39:37] The Rise of Vision-Based Models[41:01] Native Image Generation and General Purpose Models[41:35] AI in Healthcare and Specialized Models[43:32] Shifting Timelines and Rapid Adoption[46:48] Open Source Models and Competitive Edge[49:30] AI's Impact on Education and Personal Lives[55:10] AGI Risks and Safety Considerations[57:33] Future of AI Companions[1:02:17] Quickfire With your co-hosts: @jacobeffron - Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health @patrickachase - Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn @ericabrescia - Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) @jordan_segall - Partner at Redpoint
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Ep 57: Former CTO of Meta Mike Schroepfer on the Path to Powering the AI Revolution
On today’s Unsupervised Learning, Mike Schroepfer (ex-CTO of Meta and founder of Gigascale Capital) reveals why energy is a key bottleneck holding AI progress back. Mike discusses how we can scale energy production to democratize AI globally and explores AI’s role in climate change. He also reflects on a decade as Meta’s CTO and how AI coding is transforming the CTO role. Finally, he offers predictions on the future of AI developer tools, VR, and open-source models. [0:00] Intro[0:43] AI's Role in Energy and Climate Change[4:32] Innovative Energy Solutions[14:50] Open Source and AI Development[22:35] Challenges in Chip Design[24:04] Balancing Data Center Capacity[25:55] The Future of VR and AI Integration[29:41] AI's Role in Climate Solutions[31:41] AI in Material Science and Beyond[34:31] Personal AI Assistants and Their Impact[38:47] Reflections on AI and Future Predictions[41:23] Quickfire With your co-hosts: @jacobeffron - Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health @patrickachase - Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn @ericabrescia - Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) @jordan_segall - Partner at Redpoint
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Ep 56: Distinguished Engineer at Waymo Vincent Vanhoucke Unpacks the Breakthroughs and Bottlenecks of Self-Driving
Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company with the mission to be the world's most trusted driver. The company operates a 24/7 public ride-hail service and provides over 150,000 trips each week across San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Austin, making mobility more accessible, sustainable, and safer for everyone.In this week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning, we dive deep into the frontier where AI meets hardware — and there’s no better guide than Vincent Vanhoucke, Distinguished Engineer at Waymo and former Head of Robotics at DeepMind. [0:00] Intro[0:50] Waymo's Technological Evolution[2:40] The Role of LLMs in Autonomous Driving[6:02] Vincent's Journey to Waymo[9:17] Challenges in Autonomous Driving[11:58] Simulation and World Models[27:44] Future Milestones and Expansion[30:10] Broader Robotics and AI[36:12] Future of General Robotics Models[38:14] Hardware vs. Software Approaches in Robotics[40:19] Challenges in Robotic Data Acquisition[40:38] Simulation vs. Real-World Data in Robotics[43:02] Human-Robot Interaction for Data Collection[45:03] Advancements in Multimodal Models[47:08] Unanswered Questions in Robotics[52:02] Reasoning Capabilities in AI[54:57] Future of Robotics and AI[1:00:51] Quickfire With your co-hosts: @jacobeffron - Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health @patrickachase - Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn @ericabrescia - Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) @jordan_segall - Partner at Redpoint
On Unsupervised Learning we probe the sharpest minds in AI in search for the truth about what’s real today, what will be real in the future and what it all means for businesses and the world. If you’re a builder, researcher or investor navigating the AI world, this podcast will help you deconstruct and understand the most important breakthroughs and see a clearer picture of reality. Follow this show and consider enabling notifications to stay up to date on our latest episodes.
Unsupervised Learning is a podcast by Redpoint Ventures, an early-stage venture capital fund that has invested in companies like Snowflake, Stripe, and Mistral.
Cohosted by Redpoint investors Jacob Effron, Patrick Chase, Jordan Segall and Erica Brescia.
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