Episodes

  • How YC fosters AI Innovation with Garry Tan

    How YC fosters AI Innovation with Garry Tan
    May 23 2024
    Garry Tan is a notorious founder-turned-investor who is now running one of the most prestigious accelerators in the world, Y Combinator. As the president and CEO of YC, Garry has been credited with reinvigorating the program. On this week’s episode of No Priors, Sarah, Elad, and Garry discuss the shifting demographics of YC founders and how AI is encouraging younger founders to launch companies, predicting which early stage startups will have longevity, and making YC a beacon for innovation in AI companies. They also discussed the importance of building companies in person and if San Francisco is, in fact, back. Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @garrytan Show Notes: (0:00) Introduction (0:53) Transitioning from founder to investing (5:10) Early social media startups (7:50) Trend predicting at YC (10:03) Selecting YC founders (12:06) AI trends emerging in YC batch (18:34) Motivating culture at YC (20:39) Choosing the startups with longevity (24:01) Shifting YC found demographics (29:24) Building in San Francisco (31:01) Making YC a beacon for creators (33:17) Garry Tan is bringing San Francisco back
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    40 mins
  • The Data Foundry for AI with Alexandr Wang from Scale

    The Data Foundry for AI with Alexandr Wang from Scale
    May 22 2024
    Alexandr Wang was 19 when he realized that gathering data will be crucial as AI becomes more prevalent, so he dropped out of MIT and started Scale AI. This week on No Priors, Alexandr joins Sarah and Elad to discuss how Scale is providing infrastructure and building a robust data foundry that is crucial to the future of AI. While the company started working with autonomous vehicles, they’ve expanded by partnering with research labs and even the U.S. government. In this episode, they get into the importance of data quality in building trust in AI systems and a possible future where we can build better self-improvement loops, AI in the enterprise, and where human and AI intelligence will work together to produce better outcomes. Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @alexandr_wang (0:00) Introduction (3:01) Data infrastructure for autonomous vehicles (5:51) Data abundance and organization (12:06) Data quality and collection (15:34) The role of human expertise (20:18) Building trust in AI systems (23:28) Evaluating AI models (29:59) AI and government contracts (32:21) Multi-modality and scaling challenges
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    39 mins
  • Music consumers are becoming the creators with Suno CEO Mikey Shulman

    Music consumers are becoming the creators with Suno CEO Mikey Shulman
    May 16 2024
    Mikey Shulman, the CEO and co-founder of Suno, can see a future where the Venn diagram of music creators and consumers becomes one big circle. The AI music generation tool trying to democratize music has been making waves in the AI community ever since they came out of stealth mode last year. Suno users can make a song complete with lyrics, just by entering a text prompt, for example, “koto boom bap lofi intricate beats.” You can hear it in action as Mikey, Sarah, and Elad create a song live in this episode. In this episode, Elad, Sarah, And Mikey talk about how the Suno team took their experience making at transcription tool and applied it to music generation, how the Suno team evaluates aesthetics and taste because there is no standardized test you can give an AI model for music, and why Mikey doesn’t think AI-generated music will affect people’s consumption of human made music. Listen to the full songs played and created in this episode: Whispers of Sakura Stone Statistical Paradise Statistical Paradise 2 Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @MikeyShulman Show Notes: (0:00) Mikey’s background (3:48) Bark and music generation (5:33) Architecture for music generation AI (6:57) Assessing music quality (8:20) Mikey’s music background as an asset (10:02) Challenges in generative music AI (11:30) Business model (14:38) Surprising use cases of Suno (18:43) Creating a song on Suno live (21:44) Ratio of creators to consumers (25:00) The digitization of music (27:20) Mikey’s favorite song on Suno (29:35) Suno is hiring
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    30 mins
  • Context windows, computer constraints, and energy consumption with Sarah and Elad

    Context windows, computer constraints, and energy consumption with Sarah and Elad
    May 9 2024
    This week on No Priors hosts, Sarah and Elad are catching up on the latest AI news. They discuss the recent developments in AI like Meta’s new AI assistant and the latest in music generation, and if you’re interested in generative AI music, stay tuned for next week’s interview! Sarah and Elad also get into device-resident models, AI hardware, and ask just how smart smaller models can really get. These hardware constraints were compared to the hurdles AI platforms are continuing to face including computing constraints, energy consumption, context windows, and how to best integrate these products in apps that users are familiar with. Have a question for our next host-only episode or feedback for our team? Reach out to show@no-priors.com Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil Show Notes: (0:00) Intro (1:25) Music AI generation (4:02) Apple’s LLM (11:39) The role of AI-specific hardware (15:25) AI platform updates (18:01) Forward thinking in investing in AI (20:33) Unlimited context (23:03) Energy constraints
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    29 mins
  • Cognition’s Scott Wu on how Devin, the AI software engineer, will work for you

    Cognition’s Scott Wu on how Devin, the AI software engineer, will work for you
    May 2 2024
    Scott Wu loves code. He grew up competing in the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) and is a world class coder, and now he's building an AI agent designed to create more, not fewer, human engineers. This week on No Priors, Sarah and Elad talk to Scott, the co-founder and CEO of Cognition, an AI lab focusing on reasoning. Recently, the Cognition team released a demo of Devin, an AI software engineer that can increasingly handle entire tasks end to end. In this episode, they talk about why the team built Devin with a UI that mimics looking over another engineer’s shoulder as they work and how this transparency makes for a better result. Scott discusses why he thinks Devin will make it possible for there to be more human engineers in the world, and what will be important for software engineers to focus on as these roles evolve. They also get into how Scott thinks about building the Cognition team and that they’re just getting started. Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @ScottWu46 Show Notes: (0:00) Introduction (1:12) IOI training and community (6:39) Cognition’s founding team (8:20) Meet Devin (9:17) The discourse around Devin (12:14) Building Devin’s UI (14:28) Devin’s strengths and weakness (18:44) The evolution of coding agents (22:43) Tips for human engineers (26:48) Hiring at Cognition
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    29 mins
  • OpenAI’s Sora team thinks we’ve only seen the "GPT-1 of video models"

    OpenAI’s Sora team thinks we’ve only seen the "GPT-1 of video models"
    Apr 25 2024
    AI-generated videos are not just leveled-up image generators. But rather, they could be a big step forward on the path to AGI. This week on No Priors, the team from Sora is here to discuss OpenAI’s recently announced generative video model, which can take a text prompt and create realistic, visually coherent, high-definition clips that are up to a minute long. Sora team leads, Aditya Ramesh, Tim Brooks, and Bill Peebles join Elad and Sarah to talk about developing Sora. The generative video model isn’t yet available for public use but the examples of its work are very impressive. However, they believe we’re still in the GPT-1 era of AI video models and are focused on a slow rollout to ensure the model is in the best place possible to offer value to the user and more importantly they’ve applied all the safety measures possible to avoid deep fakes and misinformation. They also discuss what they’re learning from implementing diffusion transformers, why they believe video generation is taking us one step closer to AGI, and why entertainment may not be the main use case for this tool in the future. Show Links: Bling Zoo video Man eating a burger video Tokyo Walk video Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @_tim_brooks l @billpeeb l @model_mechanic Show Notes: (0:00) Sora team Introduction (1:05) Simulating the world with Sora (2:25) Building the most valuable consumer product (5:50) Alternative use cases and simulation capabilities (8:41) Diffusion transformers explanation (10:15) Scaling laws for video (13:08) Applying end-to-end deep learning to video (15:30) Tuning the visual aesthetic of Sora (17:08) The road to “desktop Pixar” for everyone (20:12) Safety for visual models (22:34) Limitations of Sora (25:04) Learning from how Sora is learning (29:32) The biggest misconceptions about video models
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    31 mins
  • The Future of AI Artistry with Suhail Doshi from Playground AI

    The Future of AI Artistry with Suhail Doshi from Playground AI
    Apr 18 2024
    Multimodal models are making it possible to create AI art and augment creativity across artistic mediums. This week on No Priors, Sarah and Elad talk with Suhail Doshi, the founder of Playground AI, an image generator and editor. Playground AI has been open-sourcing foundation diffusion models, most recently releasing Playground V2.5. In this episode, Suhail talks with Sarah and Elad about how the integration of language and vision models enhances the multimodal capabilities, how the Playground team thought about creating a user-friendly interface to make AI-generated content more accessible, and the future of AI-powered image generation and editing. Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @Suhail Show Notes: (0:00) Introduction (0:52) Focusing on image generation (3:01) Differentiating from other AI creative tools (5:58) Training a Stable Diffusion model (8:31) Long term vision for Playground AI (15:00) Evolution of AI architecture (17:21) Capabilities of multimodal models (22:30) Parallels between audio AI tools and image-generation
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    25 mins
  • Hyperscaler strategy in AI, the application landscape heats up, and what we know now about agents with Sarah and Elad

    Hyperscaler strategy in AI, the application landscape heats up, and what we know now about agents with Sarah and Elad
    Apr 11 2024
    This week on a host-only episode of No Priors, Sarah and Elad discuss the AI wave as compared to the internet wave, the current state of AI investing, the foundation model landscape, voice and video AI, advances in agentic systems, prosumer applications, and the Microsoft/Inflection deal. Have a question for our next host-only episode or feedback for our team? Reach out to show@no-priors.com Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil Show Notes: (0:00) Intro (0:32) How to think about scaling in 2024 (3:21) Microsoft/Inflection deal (5:28) Voice cloning (7:02) Investing climate (12:50) Whitespace in AI (16:36) AI video landscape (19:54) Agentic user experiences (22:21) Prosumer as the first wave of application AI
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    26 mins