Thursday Nights in AI

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. ---------------------------------------- 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 --------------------------------------------------------------- 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

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. ---------------------------------------- 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

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.

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. ---------------- 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. ------------------------------------------------------------ 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.

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

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

​About Jim: Jim Fan is a senior research scientist at NVIDIA AI. His mission is to build generally capable AI agents with applications to game AI, robotics, and software automation. His research spans foundation models, multimodal AI, reinforcement learning, and open-ended learning. Jim obtained his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Stanford University, advised by Prof. Fei-Fei Li. His work "MineDojo" won the Outstanding Paper Award at NeurIPS 2022. Previously, Jim did research internships at OpenAI, Google AI, and MILA-Quebec AI Institute. He was the Valedictorian of the class of 2016 and a recipient of the Illig Medal at Columbia University. ​*** ​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, and we are hiring! ​​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 Notion: Notion is for notes, tasks, wikis, and databases. The app blends everyday work apps into one. It serves as an all-in-one workspace for note-taking, task management, and project management. The app can be accessed via most web browsers.

Outset Capital's Ali Rohde interview @imbue_ai co-founders, Kanjun Qiu & Josh Albrecht. This fireside chat is part of our 'Thursday Nights in AI" series, co-hosted by Outset Capital, Imbue, and WndrCo. Join our upcoming events! Full list here: https://www.outsetcapital.com/thursda... About Outset: 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 is a multi-stage technology investment firm that is focused on the Consumerization of Software. We build and partner with companies whose products are revolutionizing how people live and work. We invest where we’ve operated - Future of Work Software, Consumer Technology, and Cybersecurity - so that we can make an impact beyond invested capital. Learn more about Imbue: https://imbue.com Learn more about Kanjun: https://kanjun.me/ Learn more about Josh: https://joshalbrecht.com/ Learn more about the Archive: https://archive.house/ Check out Forbes' article about Imbue's $200M Series B: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonr...

Outset Capital's Ali Rohde and Kanjun Qiu interview @anyscale CEO, Robert Nishihara. This fireside chat is part of our 'Thursday Nights in AI" series, co-hosted by Outset Capital and Imbue. Join our upcoming events! Full list here: https://www.outsetcapital.com/thursda... About Outset: 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 Anyscale: First there was Ray, an open source project from the UC Berkeley RISELab. Ray came out of their experience with the scaling challenges around machine learning and AI. From there, they built a fully managed platform for Ray to make the toughest problems in distributed computing easier for developers. That’s Anyscale. Learn more about Anyscale: https://www.anyscale.com/ Learn more about Robert: http://www.robertnishihara.com/ 00:00 Intro 01:18 Robert's founder journey 04:42 Difference between Anyscale and Ray 05:43 On what kinds of open-source projects make good business 08:17 How the AI boom changed Anyscale 10:00 Anyscale's new LLM API 11:05 How enterprise companies use Anyscale 12:50 How startups use Anyscale 13:35 Are big tech companies incorporating AI just to be included in the hype? 15:29 Anyscale and autonomous AI agents 17:20 Anyscale Endpoints and Anyscale Private Endpoints 18:04 Why companies don't want to give their data to OpenAI 19:45 Anyscale is the lowest price point on the market 20:40 Anyscale's new LLM-powered features 22:36 Open-source vs. closed source 23:24 Future of AI 24:24 Did Robert's vision for Anyscale come true? 27:12 "Under-hyped" fields in AI 28:32 How Robert is keeping up with advancements in AI 29:45 Q&A 29:59 Impact of GPU scarcity 31:49 NVIDIA monopoly 34:14 Looking back, will you still open-source Ray? 37:37 Conversion rate from Ray to Anyscale 39:00 Databricks: competitor or partner? 39:43 What layers of stack should an AI product have on Day 1? 40:48 What compute is more needed in the future: training or inference?

Outset Capital's Ali Rohde and Josh Albrecht interview LlamaIndex CEO, Jerry Liu. This fireside chat is part of our 'Thursday Nights in AI" series, co-hosted by Outset Capital and Imbue. Join our upcoming events! Full list here: https://www.outsetcapital.com/thursda... About Outset: 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 Learn more about LlamaIndex🦙: https://llamaindex.ai/ Learn more about Jerry: https://twitter.com/jerryjliu0