The Private AI Lab

Most enterprise AI projects succeed as pilots. They fail on the way to production. In this episode, Rhys Oxenham, VP and General Manager of AI at SUSE, joins me to break down what SUSE announced at SUSECon 2026: SUSE AI Factory with NVIDIA. We go deep on what it actually is, what problem it solves, and what happens when AI starts managing the infrastructure itself. We cover the assembly line conce...

Johan breaks down NVIDIA’s ComputeEx 2026 announcement of Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B-A 55B, an open-weights mixture-of-experts model with 550B total parameters and 55B active, positioned as an orchestration “agent brain” for multi-step tasks behind the firewall. He reviews NVIDIA’s benchmarks versus GLM 5.1, Kimi K 2.6, and Qwen 3.5, highlighting best-in-class instruction following (82%), long-context...

I've been trying to build my own Jarvis for years. Then I met Alexis Gallagher at GTC — and Sparky is the closest thing I've seen. Alexis is an AI researcher and developer, formerly at Answer AI and Google, now building something most people in AI aren't: a robot designed not just to be useful, but to be *alive*. Sparky lives on his desk in San Francisco. He initiates conversations. He...

In this episode, Johan is joined by long-time colleague Sander Hardewijnen to pull back the curtain on Project Q9 — an ambitious internal project at ITQ that combines a Unitree Go 2 Pro robotic dog, private AI, computer vision, and modern cloud-native development practices. From gesture recognition trained on 30,000 hand images to a Skynet-obsessed dog posting on LinkedIn, this episode is a deep d...

In this episode of The Private AI Lab , Frank Denneman returns as the first recurring guest to go deeper into one of the most misunderstood challenges in AI: 👉 Resource management for GPU workloads Building on our previous conversation, this episode shifts from why it matters to how to actually design it right . We dive into real-world challenges like GPU fragmentation, siloed capacity, and why t...

AI in healthcare didn’t start with ChatGPT. Long before generative AI, hospitals were using machine learning for sepsis detection, imaging diagnostics, and predictive analytics. In this episode of The Private AI Lab , Johan sits down with Vincent Tsugranes , Chief Architect at Red Hat, to explore what’s real, what’s hype, and why platform matters more than ever. They discuss: Why 95% of AI project...

Recorded live at NVIDIA GTC 2026, this episode dives into one of the biggest announcements in open AI: Nemotron Super . Together with Joey Conway, we explore how NVIDIA is pushing open source AI forward — with models that are not only powerful, but also efficient and enterprise-ready. We discuss: The evolution from Llama-based models to Nemotron Why reasoning + agentic capabilities matter How NVID...

Open source is becoming one of the most important forces in AI. In this episode of The Private AI Lab , Johan speaks with Rhys Oxenham and Sanjeet Singh from SUSE about the role of open source in building enterprise AI platforms. They explore: The difference between open source AI infrastructure and open-weight models Why enterprises are moving toward private AI deployments The growing importance...

What should you expect from NVIDIA GTC 2026 ? In this pre-show episode of The Private AI Lab , Johan talks with Dirk Glücker , AI platform engineer and Kubernetes specialist, about the sessions, technologies, and trends worth watching at this year’s conference. They discuss: The unique culture of GTC compared to other tech conferences Key sessions around MLOps, distributed inference, and AI infras...

Is vibe coding the ultimate productivity accelerator — or a fast track to 4AM production outages? In this episode of The Private AI Lab , Johan speaks with Andrew Morgan about the real state of vibe coding in 2026. They unpack the difference between vibe coding and vibe learning , explore the risks of blindly trusting AI-generated code, and debate whether this new wave of AI-native development is...

What if deploying private, enterprise-grade AI didn’t take months—but only as long as it takes your coffee to cool? In this episode of The Private AI Lab , Johan van Amersfoort sits down with Tasha Drew to unpack how Private AI Services on VMware Cloud Foundation are changing the way enterprises build and consume AI. They discuss why AI needs a platform layer, how Broadcom integrates open source r...

In this episode of The Private AI Lab , Johan van Amersfoort speaks with Adam Grzywaczewski , a senior Deep Learning Data Scientist at NVIDIA, about the rapidly evolving world of AI inference . They explore how inference has shifted from simple, single-GPU execution to highly distributed, latency-sensitive systems powering today’s large language models. Adam explains the real bottlenecks teams fac...

In this episode of The Private AI Lab , Johan van Amersfoort talks with Maxime Colomès about the Model Context Protocol (MCP) —one of the most important emerging standards in AI today. MCP is often described as the USB-C of AI : a universal way for AI models to connect to tools, data sources, and real-world systems. Maxime explains what MCP is, how it works, and why its recent donation to the Linu...

In this episode of The Private AI Lab , Johan sits down with Frank Denneman to explore the past, present, and future of VMware’s Private AI portfolio . This conversation goes beyond AI buzzwords and marketing fluff. Together, Johan and Frank dive deep into the real infrastructure and resource management challenges that emerge when AI workloads enter enterprise environments. GPUs, scheduling, isola...

This episode of The Private AI Lab features Robbie Jerrom , Principal Technologist AI at Red Hat, for a deep dive into Private AI, from the DGX Spark to OpenShift AI and the future of agentic systems. Topics we cover: How Robbie uses the DGX Spark for home-lab AI Why developers are moving from cloud GPUs to local devices OpenShift AI as a consistent platform from experiment to production The best...

In this episode of The Private AI Lab , Johan is joined by Andrew Foe , CEO of Iodis and HyperAI, to explore the NVIDIA DGX Spark from a real-world perspective. We cover: Unboxing & first impressions Bring-up and setup tips Everyday usability What customers love The most common misconceptions Why preorder demand exploded in the BeNeLux region A must-listen for anyone exploring Private AI hardw...

In the premiere of The Private AI Lab, Johan van Amersfoort is joined by SUSE AI Specialist Eric Lajoie to talk about sovereign AI, deploying chatbots in under an hour, and the unexpected hazards of robotic dogs. Timestamps: 00:00 – Intro & guest welcome 01:04 – How to pronounce “Lajoie”? 02:00 – What Eric actually does at SUSE 05:14 – Eric’s AI fail: a very personal RAG demo 10:06 – What Priv...

Welcome to The Private AI Lab — the podcast where we experiment, explore, and debate the future of Artificial Intelligence behind the firewall. I’m your host, Johan, and every month I invite a guest into the lab to break down real-world use cases, challenges, and innovations shaping Private AI. Brought to you by Johan.ml Be the first to know when a new episode drops, by subscribing to the podcast!