Unsupervised Learning with Jacob Effron
by by Redpoint Ventures
Latest episode
Ep 96: Nebius CTO on Racing the Hyperscalers Before AWS Wakes Up
Ep 96: Nebius CTO on Racing the Hyperscalers Before AWS Wakes Up
About this podcast
We probe the sharpest minds in AI in search for the truth about what’s real today, what will be real in the future and what it all means for businesses and the world. If you’re a builder, researcher or investor navigating the AI world, this podcast will help you deconstruct and understand the most important breakthroughs and see a clearer picture of reality. Follow this show and consider enabling notifications to stay up to date on our latest episodes.
Unsupervised Learning is a podcast by Redpoint Ventures, an early-stage venture capital fund that has invested in companies like Snowflake, Stripe, and Mistral.
Hosted by Redpoint investor Jacob Effron alongside Patrick Chase, Jordan Segall and Erica Brescia.
Episodes
The newest 20 of 105 episodes
- Ep 96: Nebius CTO on Racing the Hyperscalers Before AWS Wakes Up · 1 h 1 min · Episode 96Nebius CTO Danila Shtan joins Jacob Effron to talk about what it takes to run an AI cloud at the frontier, and why he thinks the hyperscalers haven’t won this market yet. Today…
- Ep 95: Modal CEO on the Future of Inference, the Chaos of the GPU Market & Origins of the Sandbox Bet · 59 min · Episode 95Jacob Effron and Pat Chase sit down with Erik Bernhardsson, co-founder and CEO of Modal, for his second appearance on Unsupervised Learning, now with the company past a $1B run…
- Ep 94: Applied Compute CEO on the Limits of RL, the New AI Hyperscaler & Why Post-Training Wins Inference · 58 min · Episode 94Yash Patil, a former OpenAI researcher who worked on Codex and now runs Applied Compute, argues that post-training is the most overlooked part of the AI stack and the key to…
- Ep 93: CEO of Redwood Research Buck Shlegeris on OpenAI/HuggingFace Revelations, Fixing AI Safety & Takeover Odds · 58 min · Episode 93Jacob sits down with Buck Shlegeris, CEO of Redwood Research, one of the organizations that led the independent investigation into OpenAI/Hugging Face's incident. They dig into…
- AI Vibe Check: Chinese Open Models, Distillation & The Hugging Face Breach · 1 h 12 minIn this installment of their recurring roundtable, Jacob, Ari, and Rob dig into the accelerating Chinese open-source model race, debating whether Kimi K3 has actually closed the…
- Ep 92: xAI Co-Founder Unpacks the Future of Model Development · 1 h 4 min · Episode 92Igor Babuschkin, co-founder of River AI and formerly a co-founder of xAI, joins to unpack a career that spans nearly every major AI lab: he led the StarCraft and AlphaCode work…
- Ep 91: Top AI Analyst Unpacks Today's AI Hype Cycle · 1 h 13 min · Episode 91Benedict Evans, one of tech's most widely-read analysts, joins Jacob Effron. The conversation centers on Benedict's core thesis that comparing AI's scale to past platform shifts…
- Ep 90: AI Pioneer Jürgen Schmidhuber on the State of AI Today · 51 min · Episode 90Dr. Jürgen Schmidhuber, a renowned scientist and AI researcher widely regarded as one of the pioneers in the field, originated key ideas behind today's transformers, LSTMs, and…
- AI Vibe Check: Lab Wars, Why APIs Might Vanish & Future Predictions · 1 h 6 minSix months after their last roundup, Jacob sits down with Ari Morcos (Datology AI CEO, former Meta AI researcher) and Rob Toews (Radical Ventures partner, Forbes AI columnist) to…
- Ep 89: AI Research Legend’s Honest Assessment of Where We Are · 1 h 13 min · Episode 89This episode with Lukasz Kaiser, co-author of the seminal "Attention Is All You Need" transformer paper and former researcher at both Google Brain and OpenAI, is a wide-ranging…
- Ep 88: Unpacking DeepMind's Quest for SuperIntelligence with Demis Hassabis' Biographer · 56 min · Episode 88Sebastian Mallaby spent three years and 30+ hours interviewing Demis Hassabis in the back of a British pub to write The Infinity Machine, and the conversation uses that reporting…
- Ep 87: Gemini Co-Lead on World Models, RL's Next Domains & Continual Learning · 60 min · Episode 87Oriol Vinyals, VP of Research at Google DeepMind and co-lead of the Gemini program, joins Jacob the day after Google I/O to unpack the research underpinning Google's latest…
- Ep 86: Yann LeCun on Leaving Meta, Breaking The LLM Paradigm, & Why Hinton is Wrong · 1 h 21 min · Episode 86Yann LeCun, Turing Award winner and former Chief AI Scientist at Meta, joins Jacob Effron. The conversation centers on Yann's contrarian thesis that LLMs are a dead-end on the…
- Ep 85: Has AI Infra Stabilized, FM Vibe Shift, & What's Next for Coding Agents · 55 min · Episode 85This episode is a wide-ranging conversation between Jacob and Swyx (Shawn Wang), an AI engineer, podcaster, and now operator at Cognition, who sits at a uniquely informed…
- Ep 84: OpenAI’s Chief Scientist on Continual Learning Hype, RL Beyond Code, & Future Alignment Directions · 59 min · Episode 84Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI's Chief Scientist, sits down with Jacob to cover the full arc of where AI research stands today and where it's headed. The conversation spans the explosive…
- Ep 83: Owning the System of Record, AI-Native Org Charts, & Why ITSM is The Most Vulnerable Legacy Category · 54 min · Episode 83Serval is one of the fastest-growing AI-native enterprise software companies right now, and this episode is a rare inside look at the deliberate architectural, go-to-market, and…
- Ep 82: Behind Legora's $550M Raise, Model Competition, Doubling Revenue Every Quarter, & US Expansion · 54 min · Episode 82Max Junestrand, CEO of Legora, joins Jacob Effron and Logan Bartlett to discuss the company's $550M Series D and share a candid account of what building an AI-native company at…
- Ep 81: Ex-OpenAI Researcher On Why He Left, His Honest AGI Timeline, & The Limits of Scaling RL · 1 h 2 min · Episode 81This episode features Jerry Tworek, a key architect behind OpenAI's breakthrough reasoning models (o1, o3) and Codex, discussing the current state and future of AI. Jerry…
- AI Vibe Check: The Actual Bottleneck In Research, SSI’s Mystique, & Spicy 2026 Predictions · 1 h 18 minAri Morcos and Rob Toews return for their spiciest conversation yet. Fresh from NeurIPS, they debate whether models are truly plateauing or if we're just myopically focused on…
- Ep 80: CEO of Surge AI Edwin Chen on Why Frontier Labs Are Diverging, RL Environments & Developing Model Taste · 48 min · Episode 80Edwin Chen is the founder and CEO of Surge AI, the data infrastructure company behind nearly every major frontier model. Surge works with OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google…
