Unsupervised Learning
Read bullet-point summaries of Unsupervised Learning on AI companies, frontier models, product strategy, startups, infrastructure, and agents.
Episodes
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AI Vibe Check: Lab Wars, Why APIs Might Vanish & Future Predictions
Jacob Efron hosts an AI "vibe check" roundup with Ari (co-founder of Datology, former DeepMind and Meta researcher) and Rob (investor at Radical Ventures)
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AI Research Legend’s Honest Assessment of Where We Are
Lukasz Kaiser, co-author of the Transformer paper ("Attention Is All You Need") and former researcher at Google and OpenAI, discusses the current state and
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A Conversation With Demis Hassabis' Biographer
Sebastian Mallaby spent three years writing The Infinity Machine, a biography of Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of DeepMind, conducting over 30 hours of
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Gemini Co-Lead on World Models, RL's Next Domains & Continual Learning
Oriel Vignal, co-lead of Gemini alongside Noam Shazeer and Jeff Dean, sat down the day after Google I/O 2025 to discuss the research behind the announcements
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Yann LeCun on What Comes After LLMs
Yann LeCun, one of the pioneers of deep learning and a Turing Award winner, has launched AMI Labs to pursue a fundamentally different path to human-level AI
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AI investor + engineer discuss the current state of AI
This is a crossover episode between Jacob Effron's Unsupervised Learning and Swyx's Latent Space podcasts. Swyx (Shawn Wang) is an AI engineer, podcaster, and
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OpenAI’s Chief Scientist on Continual Learning Hype, RL Beyond Code, & Future Alignment Directions
Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI's chief scientist, discusses the state of AI progress, research priorities, and alignment challenges in a wide-ranging conversation. He
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Owning the System of Record, Building as Models Improve, & Why ITSM is Vulnerable
Serval is an AI-native employee support platform that automates IT, HR, legal, and other internal help requests end-to-end, and is one of the fastest-growing
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The Most Unexpected Breakout Category in AI
Legora, an AI-powered legal technology platform, just raised a $550M Series D at a $5.5B+ valuation, led by Accel, in what CEO Max Junestrand believes is the
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Ex-OpenAI Researcher On Why He Left, His Honest AGI Timeline, & The Limits of Scaling RL
Jerry Torque, former VP of Research at OpenAI, spent seven years at the lab and was central to some of the most consequential advances in modern AI — including
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AI Vibe Check: The Actual Bottleneck In Research, SSI’s Mystique, & Spicy 2026 Predictions
Ari Morcos and Rob Toews return for a wide-ranging end-of-year conversation fresh from NeurIPS 2025, covering whether AI models are plateauing, the state of the
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Edwin Chen: Why Frontier Labs Are Diverging, RL Environments & Developing Model Taste
Edwin Chen is the founder and CEO of Surge, a company valued at roughly $24 billion that works closely with top frontier AI labs to improve their models through
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OpenAI's Head of Product: How the Best Teams Build, Ship and Scale AI Products
Olivier Godement, Head of Product for Enterprise at OpenAI, discusses the latest model releases, enterprise adoption patterns, the state of AI agents, and where
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China Expert: AI Race, Key Policy Decisions & Unpacking Geopolitical Chip Tension
Jordan Schneider, host of the China Talk podcast and newsletter, joins Jacob Effron for a wide-ranging discussion on the Chinese AI ecosystem, US-China tech
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Anthropic's First PM: Opus 4.5, Rethinking Model Scaffolding & Safety as a Competitive Advantage
Diane, head of product for research at Anthropic, discusses the launch of Opus 4.5, a major model release that delivers significant gains in coding, computer
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Inside OpenAI's Sora: Surge to #1 App, Key Product Decisions & How Video Models Learn Physics
Sora, OpenAI's video generation app, launched in late 2025 and quickly became the 1 app in the App Store, driven by a combination of breakthrough model
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AI Round-up: Karpathy Reactions, OpenAI’s Dealmaking, & Bubble Reality Check
Context: Rob Toews (Radical Ventures) and Ari Morcos (Datology AI) join host Jacob to discuss the latest in AI, including Andrej Karpathy's recent comments on
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AI Talent Wars, xAI’s $200B Valuation, & Google’s Comeback
This episode features a roundtable discussion between Ari Morcos (CEO of Datology AI, former DeepMind and Meta FAIR researcher) and Rob Taves (partner at
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Google's Nano Banana Team: Behind the Breakthrough as Gemini Tops the Charts
Google's Nano Banana (officially Gemini 2.5 Flash Image) has become the breakout AI product of the moment, driving Gemini to the top of the app store for the
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Tri Dao: The End of Nvidia's Dominance, Why Inference Costs Fell & The Next 10X in Speed
Tri Dao is a leading AI researcher whose work has been central to the dramatic drop in AI inference costs over the past few years. He co-authored Flash
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Scale Expert on AI Pricing Tactics, Reactions to GPT-5 & Why Voice is Underrated
Peter Deng, General Partner at Felicis and former product leader at OpenAI, Facebook, and Uber, discusses AI business models, product development, and the
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AI Bio Expert: 99% Faster Drug Discovery, BioTech’s AlphaGo Moment, Building Photoshop for Molecules
Joshua Meier, co-founder of Chai Discovery and former Chief AI Officer at Absci, discusses how AI foundation models are transforming drug discovery, moving from
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The Infrastructure Company Powering the Top AI Apps
Turbopuffer is a high-performance vector database and search engine built on object storage (S3/GCS), powering AI applications at companies like Cursor, Notion
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2 Robotics Pioneers Unpack the Path to Generalist Robots
Physical Intelligence (PI), a leading AI robotics startup co-founded by Karol Hausman (CEO) and researcher Danny Driess, is building generalist foundation
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Databricks Co-Founder: Eval Limitations, Why China is Winning Open Source and Future of AI Infra
Ion Stoica, co-founder of Databricks, Anyscale, and now LMArena, has spent decades shaping modern data and AI infrastructure. In this episode, he explains why
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Mercor CEO: Evals Will Replace Knowledge Work, AI x Hiring Today & the Future of Data Labeling
Brendan Foody, co-founder and CEO of Mercor, discusses how AI is transforming talent evaluation, data labeling, and the future of knowledge work. Mercor builds
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A Masterclass in Building AI Applications From Legora's CEO
Max Junestrand, CEO and co-founder of Legora, discusses how AI is transforming the legal industry—from early experiments with BERT models to deploying agentic
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Claude 4, Next Phase for AI Coding, and the Path to AI Coworkers
Sholto Douglas, a Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic, joined Unsupervised Learning on the day Claude 4 launched to discuss what the new models enable, how
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AI 2027 Co-Authors Map Out AI’s Spread of Outcomes on Humanity
Daniel Katalo and Thomas Larson, co-authors of the AI 2027 report, present a detailed forecast for how artificial superintelligence could emerge before the end
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RFT Launch, How OpenAI Improves Its Models & the State of AI Agents Today
Michelle Pokrass leads the Power Users Research Team at OpenAI, focused on post-training improvements for developers and advanced users. She was instrumental in
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Khan Academy Founder: Predictions About the Future of AI Education
Salman Khan, founder of Khan Academy, discusses how AI is transforming education through Khanmigo, their AI tutoring assistant that has grown from an expected
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Aidan Gomez: Scaling Limits Emerging, AI Use-cases with PMF & Life After Transformers
Aidan Gomez, co-author of the original Transformer paper and CEO of Cohere, discusses enterprise AI adoption, model architecture evolution, and the future of
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4 AI Investors on What Separates Enduring AI Companies from the Hype
The scale of the AI opportunity is staggering, but the investment thesis rests on a massive bet
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What has PMF Today, Google is Cooking & GPT Wrappers are Winning | With Latent Space
This episode is a crossover between two AI podcasts: Unsupervised Learning (hosted by Jordan and Jacob from Redpoint Ventures) and Latent Space (hosted by Swyx
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Inside OpenAI's New Agent Development Tools
Two weeks after OpenAI released a new suite of agent-building tools, Nikunj Handa (Product Lead) and Steve from the OpenAI API platform team joined the
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Noam Shazeer and Jack Rae: Scaling Test-time Compute, Reactions to Ilya & AGI
Jacob interviews Noam Shazeer (co-inventor of the Transformer, now leading Gemini at Google) and Jack Rae (DeepMind researcher, key figure in Gemini and
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Former Meta CTO: The Path to Powering the AI Revolution
Mike Schroepfer, former CTO of Meta (9 years) and founder of Gigascale Capital (a VC firm investing in tech-driven climate solutions), discusses the deep
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Self-Driving Expert Unpacks the Biggest Breakthroughs and Bottlenecks
Vincent Vuk, a distinguished engineer at Waymo and former leader of Google's robotics team, discusses how foundation models are transforming autonomous vehicles
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David Luan: DeepSeek’s Significance, What’s Next for Agents & Lessons from OpenAI
David Luan is a veteran AI leader who was VP of Engineering at OpenAI during its formative breakthroughs, co-founded and led Adept (an AI agent startup that
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Unpacking AI Agent Hype vs. Reality with Arvind Narayanan
Arvind Narayanan, a Princeton computer science professor and co-author of AI Snake Oil, discusses the gap between AI hype and reality, focusing on reasoning
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SemiAnalysis Founder Dylan Patel on New AI Regulations, Chinese AI & xAI's Surge to Hyperscale
Dylan Patel, Chief Analyst at SemiAnalysis, joined Unsupervised Learning to discuss the newly released AI Diffusion Rule, its implications for China and global
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Ex-OpenAI Chief Research Officer: What Comes Next for AI?
Bob McGrew, former Chief Research Officer at OpenAI (served ~6.5 years until November 2024), shares his perspective on where AI is heading, what it takes to
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Why There Won’t be One Model, Will Hyperscalers Win Inference & AI Use-cases with PMF
Lin Qiao, co-founder and CEO of Fireworks.ai and former leader of Meta's PyTorch team, discusses the evolution of AI infrastructure, the rise of compound AI
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OpenAI's Noam Brown Unpacks the Full Release of o1 and the Path to AGI
Noam Brown is a research scientist at OpenAI who was central to the development of o1, a model that scales "test time compute" — letting the model think longer
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A Deep Dive into the Future of Voice in AI
Russ d'Sa, co-founder and CEO of LiveKit, discusses the future of voice AI, how LiveKit powers applications like ChatGPT Voice, and why voice and multimodal
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Databricks AI Head: New Model Architectures are Unlikely, When to Pre-Train/Fine Tune and AI Policy
Jonathan Frankle is the Chief AI Scientist at Databricks, which he joined through the 2023 acquisition of MosaicML, where he was Chief Scientist. Databricks now
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DeepL CEO on Specialized vs. General Models, Beating Google and a Synchronous Translation Future
DeepL is a Language AI platform founded by Jarek Kutylowski that enables businesses to communicate across languages, recently valued at $2 billion and serving
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HeyGen CEO on Navigating Voice-Cloning and the Path to Interactive Avatars
Joshua Xu is co-founder and CEO of HeyGen, an AI video creation and translation platform that recently raised $60 million at a $500 million valuation from
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Stanford AI Researcher on What’s Next in Research, Reaction to o1 and How AI will Change Simulation
Percy Liang is a Stanford professor and co-founder of Together AI, one of the most influential figures in AI research today. In this episode, he shares his
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Expert AI Researcher Reacts to o1 and Shares What's Next in Reasoning and Post-Training
Douwe Kiela is a foundational figure in modern AI: he co-authored the first paper on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), spent five years at Facebook AI
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A Peek Inside Grammarly’s AI
Rahul Roy-Chowdhury, CEO of Grammarly, discusses the future of AI-assisted writing, Grammarly's product evolution, and how AI will reshape human communication
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How Snowflake is Uniquely Positioned to Win in AI
Snowflake sits in a uniquely powerful position in the AI ecosystem: it already hosts vast amounts of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data for
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The AI English Tutor Taking the World by Storm
Connor Zwick, CEO and cofounder of Speak, joins the podcast to discuss building an AI-powered English fluency platform that has grown to over 10 million users
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GitHub's CEO’s Boldest Predictions about the Future of Code
GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke discusses the transformative impact of AI on software development, drawing from his experience leading GitHub and scaling Copilot to
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The GenAI Media Platform That Keeps Getting Better
Cris Valenzuela is co-founder and CEO of Runway, a company building state-of-the-art AI video generation models (most recently Gen-3 Alpha) used by Hollywood
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Fireflies.ai CEO: The Surge to 16M Users
Fireflies.ai is an AI meeting assistant that joins calls, transcribes them, and automatically generates notes, summaries, action items, and follow-ups. Founded
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The Company Leading the AI Music Revolution
Mikey Schulman, CEO of Suno, discusses the AI music platform that has attracted over 10 million users generating songs and recently raised $125 million in
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CTO Unveils Lessons from Building an AI Coding Assistant
Sourcegraph CTO and co-founder Beyang Liu joins the podcast to discuss AI coding tools, how Sourcegraph built Cody (an AI coding assistant), practical lessons
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The AI Startup That Sky Rocketed to $750M
Pinecone is a vector database company that has become a core tool for building AI applications, raising over $130 million and reaching a $750 million valuation.
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The 1-Year Old AI Startup That’s Rivaling OpenAI
Mistral AI, co-founded by CEO Arthur Mensch, has rapidly become one of the most prominent open-source LLM companies, positioning itself as a credible challenger
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Superhuman CEO on Why Email Will Never Die, the Role of AI & Everything That's Wrong With Slack
Rahul Vohra, CEO of Superhuman, discusses the future of email, AI-powered features, and how agents will reshape work. Superhuman is a premium email client
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SalesforceAI CEO on Future of Slack, How Gucci Uses AI and Working with Marc Benioff
Salesforce AI CEO Clara Shih discusses how Salesforce is rapidly integrating generative AI across its product suite, how early adopters like Gucci are
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The AI Developer Platform with an 80,000-Person Waitlist
Harrison Chase, founder and CEO of LangChain, joins the podcast to discuss the state of AI development, LangChain's evolution, and the future of agents
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Lessons from a $4B Company Bringing AI to Healthcare and the Path to AI Doctors
Oscar Health is a $4B public health insurance company serving nearly 1 million members, and CTO/co-founder Mario Schar sits at a unique intersection: Oscar is
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AI Will Create the Next 1 Billion Software Creators
Amjad Masad, co-founder and CEO of Replit, joins the Unsupervised Learning podcast to discuss how AI is reshaping software development, the future of coding
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The Product Playbook of a Billion-Dollar AI Company
Intercom moved from ChatGPT's launch to shipping its AI support bot Fin in roughly four months, treating AI as an existential priority for customer support
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The AI Startup Going After Google Search
Perplexity AI is a next-generation search product that provides concise, cited answers to queries, challenging Google's link-based model. It has gained rapid
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A Full Deep Dive Into Notion AI
Linus Lee, an AI engineer at Notion, discusses how Notion rapidly shipped AI features into production, including AI Writer, AI Autofill, and the newly launched
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Adobe’s 10 Year Vision for AI-Powered Content Creation
Adobe has spent nearly two decades integrating AI across its product suite, and with the launch of Firefly, it is now deploying large-scale generative models to