Unsupervised Learning with Jacob Effron

Ion Stoica helped define the modern data stack. Now he’s coming for AI evaluation. From co-founding Databricks and Anyscale to launching LMArena, Ion has shaped the infrastructure underlying some of the biggest shifts in computing. In this conversation, he unpacks what most people get wrong about model evaluation, the infrastructure challenges ahead for agents and heterogeneous compute, and why he...

Brendan Foody is the co-founder and CEO of Mercor, a company building the infrastructure for AI-native labor markets. Mercor’s platform is already used by top AI labs to label data, evaluate human and AI candidates, and make performance-driven hiring decisions.    They’re operating at the intersection of recruiting, evals, and foundation model development—helping companies shift from intuition to...

Jacob and Logan sit down with Max Junestrand, founder and CEO of Legora - a rapidly growing legal AI platform (and Redpoint portfolio company). After announcing their Series B last week, Max joined the show to discuss why law is uniquely suited for AI, what it takes to scale an enterprise-ready product across global markets, and a few crazy moments from Legora’s journey so far. They dig into produ...

Sholto Douglas, a Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic, joined Unsupervised Learning to break down why coding is the clearest early signal of model progress, how AI agents are already accelerating research, and what it’ll take to unlock real-world breakthroughs in fields like biology and robotics.   (0:00) Intro (0:48) Claude 4 (1:30) Capabilities and Improvements (2:29) Practical Applications a...

The recent AI 2027 report sparked widespread discussion with its stark warnings about the near-term risks of unaligned AI. Authors @Daniel Kokotajlo (former OpenAI researcher now focused full-time on alignment through his nonprofit, @AI Futures, and one of TIME’s 100 most influential people in AI) and @Thomas Larsen joined the show to unpack their findings. We talk through the key takeaways from t...

In this episode, I sit down with Michelle Pokrass, who leads a research team at OpenAI within post-training focused on improving models for power users: developers using OpenAI models in the API and power users in ChatGPT. We unpack how OpenAI prioritized instruction-following and long context, why evals have a 3-month shelf life, what separates successful AI startups, and how the best teams are f...

When Khan Academy launched Khanmigo, Salman Khan thought they might reach 100k users by 2025. Today, they’re at 1.4 million.  🎧 Sal joined us on Unsupervised Learning to talk about AI's role in education— from the vantage point of someone deploying it at scale. As founder of Khan Academy, he’s overseen the rollout of AI tools to over a million teachers and students, giving him a front-row seat to...

Aidan joined this week’s Unsupervised Learning for a wide-ranging conversation on model architectures, enterprise adoption, and what’s breaking in the foundation model stack.  If you’re building or investing in AI infrastructure, Aidan is worth listening to. He co-authored the original Transformer paper, leads one of the most advanced model labs outside of the hyperscalers, and is now building for...

At Redpoint’s annual meeting with investors, Redpoint partners Scott Raney, Alex Bard, Patrick Chase and Jacob Effron shared unfiltered thoughts on some of the most topical questions in AI today, where value will accrue, which industries are best positioned for defensibility at the application layer, and more.   (0:00) Intro (0:39) AI Investment Landscape (1:30) Market Projections (3:25) Strategic...

To unpack some of the most topical questions in AI, I’m joined by two fellow AI podcasters: Swyx and Alessio Fanelli, co-hosts of the Latent Space podcast. We’ve been wanting to do a cross-over episode for a while and finally made it happen. Swyx brings deep experience from his time at AWS, Temporal, and Airbyte, and is now focused on AI agents and dev tools. Alessio is an investor at Decibel, whe...

Two weeks ago, OpenAI released its set of tools to help developers build agentic systems. Today on Unsupervised Learning, Nikunj Handa (Product Lead) and Steve Coffey (Eng Lead) answer some of the biggest questions around how developers should be thinking about building in the agentic paradigm in 2025.   (0:00) Intro (0:53) OpenAI’s Vision for Consumer Interaction (4:51) Building Multi-Agent Syste...

On the latest episode of Unsupervised Learning, Jacob is joined by two of the most influential minds in AI today.  🔹 Noam Shazeer, co-inventor of the Transformer 🔹 Jack Rae, Research Director at DeepMind and one of the leads behind Gemini’s Flash Thinking We got to ask them all of the top-of-mind questions in AI today about where we are, where we’re headed and what it means for businesses and th...

On today’s Unsupervised Learning, Mike Schroepfer (ex-CTO of Meta and founder of Gigascale Capital ) reveals why energy is a key bottleneck holding AI progress back. Mike discusses how we can scale energy production to democratize AI globally and explores AI’s role in climate change. He also reflects on a decade as Meta’s CTO and how AI coding is transforming the CTO role. Finally, he offers predi...

Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company with the mission to be the world's most trusted driver. The company operates a 24/7 public ride-hail service and provides over 150,000 trips each week across San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Austin, making mobility more accessible, sustainable, and safer for everyone. In this week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning, we dive deep into the fr...

David is an OG in AI who has been at the forefront of many of the major breakthroughs of the past decade. His resume: VP of Engineering at OpenAI, a key contributor to Google Brain, co-founder of Adept, and now leading Amazon’s SF AGI Lab. In this episode we focused on how far test-time compute gets us, the real implications of DeepSeek, what agents milestones he’s looking for and more. [0:00] Int...

Arvind Narayanan is one of the leading voices in AI when it comes to cutting through the hype. As a Princeton professor and co-author of AI Snake Oil, he’s one of the most thoughtful voices cautioning against both unfounded fears and overblown promises in AI. In this episode, Arvind dissects the future of AI in education, its parallels to past tech revolutions, and how our jobs are already shiftin...

In this episode of Unsupervised Learning, we sit down with Dylan Patel, Chief Analyst at SemiAnalysis, to break down what these sweeping changes really mean. From how they consolidate power among Big Tech to China's narrowing options for AI dominance, we unpacked the impact of this regulatory shift. Follow SemiAnalysis: https://semianalysis.com/   [0:00] Intro [1:07] Grading the AI Diffusion Rule...

In this cross-over episode with The Logan Bartltett Show, Marc Benioff (CEO, Salesforce) responds to Satya Nadella’s recent predictions and shares his thoughts on the current reality of Agi. He dives into the rise of digital labor, the multi-trillion-dollar potential of agentic technology, and what the future split between software and agentic revenue might look like. Marc also discusses why CEOs...

In our new world of AI, few minds shine as brightly as Bob McGrew's. Until November Bob was the Chief Research Officer at OpenAI, and before that led Palantir’s engineering and product management for the first decade of its existence. He’s seen it all and we were fortunate to get his insights and vision for the future in one of my favorite episodes of Unsupervised Learning to date:   [0:00] Intro...

Lin Qiao, the co-founder of Fireworks.ai, sits down for a deep dive into the future of AI. Lin ran the PyTorch team at Meta, which developed some of the most fundamental open-source AI software in use today. She’s got a riveting perspective on the AI landscape that is a must-listen.   [0:00] Intro [1:06] Fireworks: Revolutionizing AI Inference [2:12] Challenges in AI Model Development [4:05] The F...

Noam Brown, renowned AI researcher and key figure at OpenAI, joins us for a deep dive into the o1 release. Recorded just one day before o1’s full public debut, this episode explores the groundbreaking advancements and challenges behind this innovative test-time compute model. We discuss the technical breakthroughs that set o1 apart, its unique capabilities compared to previous models, and how it d...

For this episode of Unsupervised Learning we spoke with Russ d'Sa, co-founder of LiveKit, a company at the forefront of voice AI technology. Russ thinks of LiveKit as a “nervous system,” powering the sensory interfaces humans use to interact with AI – including the Advanced Voice feature in ChatGPT as well as applications like Character.ai, Spotify and many more.  Russ talked about when voice make...

Jonathan Frankle is the Chief AI Scientist at Databricks ($43B), which he joined through the acquisition of MosaicML in July 2023. Databricks has over 12,000 customers on the cutting edge of AI; Jonathan works to anticipate their needs and offer solutions even as the tech is rapidly evolving.   [0:00] Intro [0:52] Incentives and Team Motivation at Databricks [2:40] The Evolution of AI Models: Tran...

I sat down with DeepL cofounder Jarek Kutylowski. DeepL is a comprehensive Language AI platform that enables organizations to communicate effectively across languages, cultures, and markets. Jarek shared a treasure trove of insights on the past, present, and future of AI translation. Here were some standout moments:   [0:00] Intro [0:38] The Rise of AI and DeepL's Journey [1:41] DeepL's Competitiv...

Joshua Xu is co-founder and CEO of HeyGen -- the fast-growing AI video creation and translation platform. You can upload a video, or create a new one from a script using an AI avatar as your star, and HeyGen will translate it into 175 languages. HeyGen now serves over 40,000 customers and is generating $35+ million in revenue.   [0:00] Intro   [0:37] HeyGen's Viral Moments   [1:23] Creating Magic...