The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica

Ben Lorica sits down with Evangelos Simoudis to unpack why open-weights models are closing the gap with frontier labs and pushing enterprises toward “corporate AI sovereignty.” They then apply an attenuation-funnel lens to AI coding tools — more code, but far less shipped software and usage growth — before turning to “neoconsulting,” the outcomes-based services model reshaping Accenture, Palantir,...

Manos Koukoumidis , CEO of Oumi , returns to the podcast to make the case that most enterprises are wildly inefficient, using bloated generic AI models for tasks that demand specialized ones. He argues that companies should stop renting intelligence from frontier labs and start owning, customizing, and compounding it. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩   https://gradientflow.substack.com...

Andrew Moore , CEO of Lovelace , former head of Google Cloud AI, and former dean of Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science, joins the podcast to discuss YottaGraph , a knowledge graph growing by a billion facts a week that serves as a context engine for enterprise AI agents. He explains why fully automatic knowledge graph construction is the only viable path at scale, why entity resolution r...

Ben Lorica speaks with Helen Gu , CEO of InsightFinder AI and professor at North Carolina State University, about why reliability is becoming a central challenge for enterprise AI. They discuss AI incident response, monitoring agents in production, domain-specific small language models, causal inference for operational data, and why the “last 1%” of accuracy and reliability is often the hardest pa...

Ben Lorica talks with Chang She , co-founder and CEO of LanceDB , about the limitations of traditional analytical data tools like Pandas and Parquet when applied to AI workloads. They discuss the rise of the “multimodal lakehouse,” the unique data storage and retrieval challenges introduced by AI agents, and how LanceDB provides both lightweight embedded memory and massive-scale infrastructure.  S...

Ben Lorica is joined by Evangelos Simoudis for a wide-ranging check-in on how AI is reshaping mobility, enterprise software, and corporate strategy. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩   https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon ·  RSS . Detailed show notes and transcript, can be found on The Data Exchang...

Ben Lorica speaks with Hamza Tahir , co-founder of Kitaru , about what it takes to move AI agents from demos to production. They discuss the difference between workflows and agents, why “harness engineering” is becoming a useful frame for application builders, and why long-running agent workloads require orchestration, durable execution, retries, state management, and human-in-the-loop semantics....

In this episode, host Ben Lorica sits down with Zhou Yu , associate professor of computer science at Columbia University and co-founder of Arklex AI .  Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩   https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon ·  RSS . Detailed show notes and transcript, can be found on The Data Exch...

In this episode, Ben Lorica sits down with Doris Xin and Moustafa Abdelbaky , co-founders of Disarray , to discuss why classical machine learning models remain essential despite the rise of foundation models and LLMs.  Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩   https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon ·  RSS...

Ben Lorica speaks with Terrence Lee-St. John , founder of Enli and lead author of From Garbage to Gold: A Data Architectural Theory of Predictive Robustness .  Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩   https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon ·  RSS . Detailed show notes and transcript, can be found on The D...

In this episode, Ben Lorica talks with Evan Marshall , CTO of Ito AI , about why software testing and QA are becoming the critical bottleneck in the age of coding agents.  Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩   https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon ·  RSS . Detailed show notes and transcript, can be fo...

In this episode, Ben Lorica talks with Richard Garris and Barry Dauber from Databricks , about what enterprises are actually struggling with as they move AI from demo to deployment.  Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩   https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon ·  RSS . Detailed show notes and transcript...

Ben Lorica talks with Nick Vasiloglou , VP of Research at Relational AI , about Nick’s deep dive into NeurIPS 2025 and what people in industry should actually pay attention to.  Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩   https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon ·  RSS . Detailed show notes - with links to man...

Ben Lorica speaks with Changan Chen , co-founder and Chief Research Officer at Rhoda AI , about what it takes to build foundation models for robots that can operate in the real world.  Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩   https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon ·  RSS . Detailed show notes - with links...

In this episode, Ben Lorica and Evangelos Simoudis discuss how enterprises are structuring their internal AI efforts, highlighting the friction between top-down AI governance committees and bottom-up “shadow IT” innovation. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩   https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon · ...

Ben Lorica speaks with Tudor Achim , cofounder of Harmonic , about the fast progress of AI for mathematical reasoning and what it would take to build “mathematical superintelligence.”  Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩   https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon ·  RSS . Detailed show notes - with links...

In this episode, host Ben Lorica sits down with Kay Zhu , Co-founder & CTO of Genspark AI , to explore the rapid evolution of autonomous AI agents and the concept of hiring your first “AI employee.”  Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩   https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon ·  RSS . Detailed show...

In this episode, host Ben Lorica sits down with Arun Kumar (Associate Professor at UC San Diego and Co-founder/CTO of RapidFire AI ) to explore the rapidly evolving discipline of agent engineering.  Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩   https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon ·  RSS . Detailed show note...

In this episode, Ben Lorica is joined by Mikio Braun , Senior Principal Applied Scientist at Zalando , for a wide-ranging conversation about the practical realities of AI-powered coding agents. They explore the unique challenges of using coding agents for data science workflows, the team-level implications of dramatically increased developer velocity, and what skills will matter most in an AI-augm...

In this episode, host Ben Lorica speaks with Jeff Hawke , CTO at Odyssey , about world models — a category of AI that generates continuous, interactive simulations from images or text prompts.  Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩   https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon ·  RSS . Detailed show notes - w...

Chen Goldberg , EVP of Engineering at CoreWeave , joins the podcast to discuss the critical infrastructure shifts required as companies move AI from pilot to production.  Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩   https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon ·  RSS . Detailed show notes - with links to many refer...

In this episode, host Ben Lorica is joined by Evangelos Simoudis to explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping the modern workplace and what knowledge workers must do to adapt.  Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩   https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon ·  RSS . Detailed show notes - with links...

Ben Lorica talks with Sudip Roy (Co-founder & CTO, Adaption Labs ) about why enterprise AI adoption stalls in the “last 5%” of reliability — and why waiting for the next frontier model release is usually the wrong bet. They unpack “adaptation” as something broader than post-training, including gradient-free, inference-time techniques that can sit above models to route, combine, and continuousl...

Jason Martin , Director of Adversarial Research at HiddenLayer , returns to discuss the security implications of OpenClaw, a viral open-source AI personal assistant that was entirely vibe-coded and has exploded to 180,000 GitHub stars.  Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩   https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addic...

In this episode, Umur Cubukcu , co-founder of Ubicloud , explains what an “open cloud” should mean in practice — starting with an open-source control plane and extending to transparency, portability, and freedom from data lock-in.  Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩   https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · A...