EP 79: the state of AI with Naveen Rao of Databricks.


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We wanted to have a deep dive into LLMs and AI as they exist in May 2024 and were lucky to get one of the pre-eminent experts in the space – founder of MosaicML and VP of gen AI at Databricks – Naveen Rao. In this we cover:

  • the state of AI in May 2024
  • reactions to gpt4o and the Google IO Gemini launches
  • Small models vs large models
  • open source models – the state of the art, biz models for open source
  • are transformers the end state of LLM architecture
  • Agentic behavior
  • How do we get more data for training?
  • And much more!

5:32 What do enterprises think of AI
8:00 ChatGPT-4o and Google I/O reactions
9:38 Has generative AI scaling hit a wall? 
16:34 AI pretraining difficulties
22:49 General AI vs. specialized AI
25:55 Biggest opportunities for generative AI startups
29:15 AI hardware landscape
33:23 How open source AI companies can compete with closed models like OpenAI? 38:59 Why Naveen doesn’t use AI in his home 
40:22 Is open-sourcing AI dangerous?
43:46 Advice for founders
47:00 Naveen sold to Intel too early
51:09 The pace of AI innovation