Orchestrate all the Things

We live in a world fraught with interfaces designed to work against you. Most people sense it. Few can prove it, and fewer still are trying to fix it.  There is a particular kind of frustration that arrives when you understand a problem perfectly and cannot do a single useful thing about it. Marie Potel-Saville spent years living inside that frustration. First as a competition lawyer cycling throu...

A fully autonomous machine learning engineering agent. A benchmark that matters. And a question that cuts deeper than the hype: when a machine does the work, what happens to the learning part? The race to automate software engineering is expanding to new territory: machine learning.  Neo  is a fully autonomous machine learning engineering agent that handles the entire pipeline from problem stateme...

Everyone's talking about AI. Few people actually understand it, and even fewer are asking the right questions about what it means to live and work alongside it. In this episode, we sit down with Michel Bauwens, founder of the P2P Foundation and one of the sharpest thinkers on civilisation, technology, and collective intelligence. We talk about what AI actually is - and isn't - why the hype creates...

What if the chaos around us isn't collapse, but transformation? Michel Bauwens has spent decades mapping the edges of change. From peer-to-peer networks to the commons, from medieval guilds to distributed autonomous organizations, he's been tracking something most people miss: the seeds of a new civilization, already growing underneath the noise. In this conversation, we explore how the internet d...

Software engineering is being transformed by AI faster than any other domain. Unpacking how this transformation is playing out may offer a glimpse into the future Greg Foster's journey into software engineering began in an unlikely place: a Nevada high school where he couldn't land a job at Starbucks. Instead of serving coffee, he taught himself software development. Foster developed what he calls...

What does it mean to be pragmatic about AI adoption, while staying true to the values and mission driving people and organizations? When Elisa Lindinger decided to talk about AI, her intention was to say what she had to say once, and then move on with her life without having anyone ask about AI ever again. The plan backfired heavily, but somehow, that turned into a good thing. Lindinger is the Co-...

Whether we like it or not, and despite tales of its powers being greatly exaggerated, the AI genie is out of the box. What does that mean, and what can we do about it? In another twist of abysmal  AI politics , OpenAI CEO  Sam Altman just admitted that we are in an AI bubble, and AGI is losing relevance . You may find this baffling or hilarious, or you may be wondering where does that leave the AI...

Can AI work reliably at scale? Will everything be outsourced to AI? Will AI replace CEOs? Why is everyone riding the AI bandwagon, and where is it headed? These are the type of questions you would ask someone with long-standing experience in AI, engineering, business and beyond. Georg Zoeller is that someone: a seasoned software and business engineer experienced in frontier technology in the gamin...

How a rocket scientist turned entrepreneur created the "ChatGPT for Earth data" using transformers and satellite imagery. Bruno Sánchez is a rocket scientist with a somewhat deviant trajectory. An astrophysicist by training, he used the tools of his trade - mathematics and science - at the broadest possible scale: the universe. At some point, however, his focus switched to using those same tools f...

In business, they say it takes ten years to become an overnight success. In technology, they say it takes ten years to build a file system. ScyllaDB is in the technology business, offering a distributed NoSQL database that is monstrously fast and scalable. It turns out that it also takes ten years or more to build a successful database. This is something that Felipe Mendes and Guilherme Nogueira k...

As enterprise systems shift from deterministic software to probabilistic AI, forward-thinking organizations leverage proactive quality assessment to maximize value, minimize risk and ensure regulatory compliance In today's rapidly evolving technological landscape, ensuring the quality of both traditional software and AI systems has become more critical than ever. Organizations are increasingly rel...

Organizations are facing a critical challenge to AI adoption: how to leverage their domain-specific knowledge to use AI in a way that delivers trustworthy results. Knowledge graphs provide the missing "truth layer" that transforms probabilistic AI outputs into real world business acceleration. Knowledge graphs are powering products for the likes of Amazon and Samsung. The Knowledge graph market is...

It’s early 2025, and we may already be witnessing a redefining moment for AI as we’ve come to know it in the last couple of years. Is the canon of “more GPUs is all you need” about to change? Truth is, when we arranged a conversation on AI chips with Chris Kachris, neither the Stargate Project nor DeepSeek R1 had burst onto the AI scene. Even though we did not consciously anticipate these developm...

You.com showcases the state of AI today The story of you.com is multi-faceted and telling in many ways. You.com was founded in 2020 by Richard Socher, one of the leading NLP (Natural Language Processing) researchers in the world, to offer a better search experience to users and compete with Google. With a startup exit and a Chief Data Scientist stint at Salesforce, Socher got the experience, netwo...

"Data Rules" is a book about data, but not just about big data crunching. A book about the relationship of data with economic institutions and society, but also about the interplay with data technologies by which data are being generated and processed. A book that is critical, but not ideological. This is how Jannis Kallinikos describes "Data Rules: Reinventing the Market Economy", a book co-autho...

What is a universal semantic layer, and how is it different from a semantic layer? Are there actual semantics involved? Who uses that, how, and what for? When Cube Co-founder Artyom Keydunov started hacking away a Slack chatbot back in 2017, he probably didn't have answers to those questions. All he wanted to do was find a way to access data using a text interface, and Slack seemed like a good pla...

From better together to full native integration, Neo4j is creating an ecosystem around all major cloud platforms to provide graph-powered features for Generative AI and beyond.  As Neo4j just announced its partneship with Microsoft, we met with Chief Product Officer Sudhir Hasbe to talk about: What this partnership means for users and how it works How graph-powered generative AI aligns with cloud...

If we look at the current status quo in AI as a case of demand and supply, what can we do to close the gap between the exponentially growing demand on the side of AI models and the linearly growing supply on the side of AI hardware? This formulation was the premise on which Yonatan Geifman co-founded Deci in 2019.  Today, with the generative AI explosion in full bloom, demand is growing faster tha...

There’s more to AI chips than NVIDIA: AMD, Intel, chiplets, upstarts, analog AI, optical computing, and AI chips designed by AI. The interest and investment in AI is skyrocketing, and generative AI is fueling it. Over one-third of CxOs have reportedly already embraced GenAI in their operations, with nearly half preparing to invest in it. What’s powering it all - AI chips - used to receive less att...

For many organizations today, data management comes down to handing over their data to one of the "Big 5" data vendors: Amazon, Microsoft Azure and Google, plus Snowflake and Databricks.  But analysts David Vellante and George Gilbert believe that the needs of modern data applications coupled with the evolution of open storage management may lead to the emergence of a "sixth data platform". The si...

What is a skills-based economy and how is LinkedIn moving from vision to implementation? As LinkedIn Director of Engineering Sofus Macskássy shares, there's AI, taxonomy, and ontology involved in building the Skills Graph that powers the transition. We discuss the process of extracting skills from text, building a skills graph, and leveraging it for various product lines within LinkedIn. We cover...

Amazon Neptune, the managed graph database service by AWS, makes analytics faster and more agile while introducing a vision aiming to simplify graph databases. It's not every day that you hear product leads questioning the utility of their own products. Brad Beebe, the general manager of Amazon Neptune, was all serious when he said that most customers don't actually want a graph database. However,...

“Graph database growth is going strong through the Trough of Disillusionment.” And “Graph Analytics go big and real-time.” These were two of the headlines of the Spring 2023 update of the Year of the Graph newsletter. In combination, they seem like an appropriate summary of the reasoning behind a new entry in the graph database market: Aerospike Graph, which Aerospike officially unveiled in June 2...

LinkedIn is a case study in terms of how its newsfeed has evolved over the years. LinkedIn's feed has come a long way since the early days of assembling the machine learning infrastructure that powers it. Recently, a major update to this infrastructure was released. We caught up with the people behind it to discuss how the principle of being people-centric translates to technical terms and impleme...

Would you leave a Google Staff Research Engineer role just because you want your TV to automatically pause when you get up to get a cup of tea? Actually, how is that even relevant, you might ask. Let's see what Pete Warden, former Google Staff Research Engineer and now CEO and Founder of Useful Sensors, has to say about that. Although naturally much of what he did was based off things others were...