GroundZero AI Talks

This is Episode 15 on Ground Zero! Ludwig is 31yo programmer with no formal education. He dropped out in 7th grade - started programming around age 10 - began working at 15 - and later worked on distributed systems for a company with hundreds of millions of users. You might know Ludwig for systems programming, ML, intelligence, mathematics, software-engineering culture and his X presence. Ludwig [...

Curtis Northcutt joins us on GroundZero. He is Director of AI Research at Handshake, founder of Cleanlab (acquired by Handshake) and invented confident learning during his PhD at MIT. In this conversation, we dig into why the delta between model generations is almost entirely human data, the four quadrants of the AI market, how expert data labeling is deeply misunderstood, the long tail of human k...

In this episode, Viv joins us on Ground Zero. He leads open source agents and harnesses at LangChain. In this conversation, we go deep into what a harness actually is, Deepagents, Context rot, Why agents should be more opinionated, Harness as a Service, File System, how different frontier models behave in agent workloads, Meta Harness, RL Envs and beyond that. TIMESTAMPS 00:00:00 - Intro 00:03:30...

Francesco Pappone (@tensorqt) is building Paradigma - an infrastructure for autonomous research. Their product Flywheel replaces papers with directed acyclic graphs where every experiment is a node with tracked lineage, and AI agents traverse and extend the graph via MCP. In this conversation, we go through Francesco's path from physics to founding Paradigma, how Flywheel works, building from...

Arcee AI went from post training company to building their own frontier reasoning model from scratch + and open-sourcing all of it. In this episode, Lucas Atkins (Co-Founder & CTO) and Varun Singh (Pre-Training Lead) take us through the full story — the decision to start pre-training, how they built and trained Trinity on a fraction of the budget that frontier labs spend, the data and engineer...

In this episode, Vishnu Patankar (CTO, EigenCloud) joins us for a wide-ranging conversation on AI, infrastructure, and the economy — from chips and compilers to agent harnesses, privacy/security, evals, deterministic inference, RL environments, open source, and where the frontier is headed. TIMESTAMPS 00:00:00 - Intel Monopoly, Chips & Compilers 00:15:10 - OpenClaw, Guardrails & Harnesses...

Vik is the Co-founder of Moondream AI. TIMESTAMPS 00:00:00 - Vik’s Story & Moondream 00:18:50 - The Core Thesis of Small & Scale 00:28:35 - The Data Problem 00:33:35 - Deciding the Training Architecture 00:43:20 - Post-Training & RL Performance 00:46:06 - Post-Training Recipes of Moondream 3 00:47:40 - Open Source & VLM Development Priorities 00:52:05 - AI War: America vs China 00:...

Dhravya Shah is the Founder of Supermemory. TIMESTAMPS 00:00:00 - Teaser 00:01:39 - Introduction 00:02:42 - What is SuperMemory? Explaining the Product 00:04:43 - Coolest Use Cases & Customer Stories 00:07:48 - Early Days: Growing Up in Mumbai & Learning to Code 00:09:24 - First Success: Discord Bot & Twitter Screenshot Tool Acquisition 00:13:11 - The IIT Story: Myth vs Reality 00:14:3...

Pierre-Carl Langlais (aka Alexandar Doria) is Co-founder of Pleias. We'd discussed about pre-training recipes, common corpus, mid-training, agentic systems, good post-training and everything AI. TIMESTAMPS 00:00:00 - TEASER 00:01:12 - INTRO 00:02:03 - Who is Alexander Doria [Pierre-Carl Langlais]? 00:04:10 - Early career: From humanities to AI research 00:07:50 - Meeting influential people in...

Kalomaze is 20 yo Researcher at Prime Intellect TIMESTAMPS 00:00:00 - Teaser 00:01:06 - Intro 00:01:49 - Organic Influence 00:02:46 - “Extremely Silly Jester” 00:04:04 - School Days & Diving into ML Research 00:09:27 - Developing “Research Taste” & The Art of Selection 00:11:45 - Dropping College, Parents’ Reaction & The Plan Ahead 00:18:13 - How a Reddit Post Led to a Job at Shopify 0...

Daniel Han is Co-founder and CEO of Unsloth. ( 00:00:00 ) - TEASER( 00:01:00 ) - INTRO( 00:02:10 ) - Early Career( 00:04:47 ) - Hyperlearn and Sciblox( 00:09:30 ) - Bug Bounty Guy( 00:12:32 ) - Questions for Daniel( 00:30:20 ) - Scaling RL, GRPO and Transformer moment( 00:42:35 ) - Unsloth: GTM, YC aid, next big thing and more( 00:59:10 )- General: learning process, multi-gpu, advices and more

Early July, X users have shared dozens of stories about encounters with Soham Parekh, a software engineer who seems to have been simultaneously working at multiple Silicon Valley startups. We'd discussed his whole journey, experiences and reflections in this episode. Hope you'll find it insightful. ( 00:00:00 ) - TEASER( 00:00:45 ) - INTRO( 00:02:40 ) - Define Soham Parekh, Early Career( 0...

Will Brown is Research Lead at Prime Intellect. TIMESTAMPS( 00:00:00 ) - INTRO( 00:02:00 ) - Career Trajectory, Love for Maths and Algorithms( 00:06:24 ) - Early Motivation and PhD experience( 00:12:22 ) - Teaching, Open Source, GenAI Handbook( 00:17:27 ) - Rubrik Engineering and Approach to Design( 00:23:06 ) - RL over Instruction Tuning( 00:26:07 ) - Journey behind VERIFIERS ( 00:33:30 ) - RL ex...

Tokenbender on Post-Training, RL and Reasoning, Experiments, Post AGI Landscape, Indic AI and Experiments Tokenbender [Guest]: https://x.com/tokenbender ( 00:00:00 ) - INTRO( 00:01:30 ) - Career Trajectory and Motivation( 00:10:00 ) - Non-CS Background and Building Intuitions( 00:14:00 ) - Journey with Codecherrypop and Small Models( 00:21:50 ) - Partner-In-Crime and Roleplay Series( 00:28:45 ) -...