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PODCAST

Unsupervised Learning with Jacob Effron

by Redpoint Ventures

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

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All Episodes

00:48:01

Ep 80: CEO of Surge AI Edwin Chen on Why Frontier...

Unsupervised Learning with Jacob Effron ·

2025/12/15

Edwin 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, providing the high-quality data and evaluation infrastructure that powers their models. Edwin reveals why optimizing for popular benchmarks like LMArena is "basically optimizing for clickbait," how one frontier lab's models regressed for 6-12 months without anyone knowing, and why the industry's approach to measurement is

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00:56:16

Ep 79: OpenAI's Head of Product on How the Best Teams...

Unsupervised Learning with Jacob Effron ·

2025/12/10

This episode features Olivier Godement, Head of Product for Business Products at OpenAI, discussing the current state and future of AI adoption in enterprises, with a particular focus on the recent releases of GPT 5.1 and Codex. The conversation explores how these models are achieving meaningful automation in specific domains like coding, customer support, and life sciences: where companies like Amgen are using AI to accelerate drug development timelines from months to weeks through automated

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01:13:22

Ep 78: Jordan Schneider, Host of China Talk, on AI...

Unsupervised Learning with Jacob Effron ·

2025/12/05

This week on Unsupervised Learning, Jacob Effron is joined by Jordan Schneider, host of China Talk, who challenges widespread assumptions about US-China AI competition. China's AI development is driven by private capital and market competition—not central government planning—with companies like DeepSeek, Alibaba, and ByteDance operating more like Silicon Valley startups than state projects. The critical bottleneck is compute: the West maintains a 10-15x advantage in advanced chips, and US export

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00:42:03

Ep 77: Anthropic’s Dianne Na Penn on Opus 4.5,...

Unsupervised Learning with Jacob Effron ·

2025/12/02

This episode features Dianne Na Penn, a senior product leader at Anthropic, discussing the launch of Claude Opus 4.5 and the evolution of frontier AI models. The conversation explores how Anthropic approaches model development—balancing ambitious capability roadmaps with user feedback, making strategic bets on areas like agentic coding and computer use while deliberately avoiding others like image generation. Dianne shares insights on the shifting nature of AI evaluation (moving beyond saturated

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01:03:23

Ep 76: Sora Creators Bill Peebles, Rohan Sahai &...

Unsupervised Learning with Jacob Effron ·

2025/11/03

This episode features the core team behind Sora, OpenAI's groundbreaking video generation platform that became the #1 app in the App Store. Bill Peebles (research lead), Rohan Sahai (product lead), and Thomas Dimson (engineering/product lead with Instagram background) discuss the unexpected viral success of Sora's launch, the product journey that led to the breakthrough "cameo" feature (putting yourself in AI-generated videos), and their philosophy of building a creator-first social network that

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01:16:53

AI Round Up: Ari Morcos from Datalogy AI and Rob...

Unsupervised Learning with Jacob Effron ·

2025/10/24

This episode features Rob Toews from Radical Ventures and Ari Morcos, Head of Research at Datology AI, reacting to Andrej Karpathy's recent statement that AGI is at least a decade away and that current AI capabilities are "slop." The discussion explores whether we're in an AI bubble, with both guests pushing back on overly bearish narratives while acknowledging legitimate concerns about hype and excessive CapEx spending. They debate the sustainability of AI scaling, examining whether continued

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01:02:54

Ep 76: Ari Morcos from Datalogy AI and Rob Toews from...

Unsupervised Learning with Jacob Effron ·

2025/09/24

This episode features a deep dive into the current state of AI model progress with Ari Morcos (CEO of Datalogy AI and former DeepMind/Meta researcher) and Rob Toews (partner at Radical Ventures). The conversation tackles whether model progress is genuinely slowing down or simply shifting into new paradigms, exploring the role of reinforcement learning in scaling capabilities beyond traditional pre-training. They examine the talent wars reshaping AI labs, Google's resurgence with Gemini, the

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00:41:04

Ep 75: Nano Banana’s Oliver Wang and Nicole Brichtova...

Unsupervised Learning with Jacob Effron ·

2025/09/17

Fill out this short listener survey to help us improve the show: https://forms.gle/bbcRiPTRwKoG2tJx8This week on Unsupervised Learning, Jacob sits down with Nicole Brichtova and Oliver Wang, the Google researchers behind "Nano Banana" - the breakthrough AI image model that achieved unprecedented character consistency and took over social media.The conversation covers how their model fits into creative workflows, why we're still in the early innings of image AI development despite impressive current

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00:58:37

Ep 74: Chief Scientist of Together.AI Tri Dao On The...

Unsupervised Learning with Jacob Effron ·

2025/09/10

Fill out this short listener survey to help us improve the show: https://forms.gle/bbcRiPTRwKoG2tJx8 Tri Dao, Chief Scientist at Together AI and Princeton professor who created Flash Attention and Mamba, discusses how inference optimization has driven costs down 100x since ChatGPT's launch through memory optimization, sparsity advances, and hardware-software co-design. He predicts the AI hardware landscape will shift from Nvidia's current 90% dominance to a more diversified ecosystem within 2-3

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01:04:14

Ep 73: General Partner of Felicis Peter Deng on on AI...

Unsupervised Learning with Jacob Effron ·

2025/08/26

In this episode, Jacob sits down with Peter Deng, General Partner at Felicis and former Product Leader at OpenAI, Facebook, and Uber. Peter shares his insider perspective on building ChatGPT Enterprise in just seven weeks and leading voice mode development at OpenAI. The conversation covers everything from why traditional SaaS pricing models are broken for AI products to how evals became the new product specs, the "AI under your fingernails" test for founding teams, and why current agents are

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00:57:15

Ep 72: Co-Founder of Chai Discovery Joshua Meier on...

Unsupervised Learning with Jacob Effron ·

2025/08/13

In this episode, Jacob sits down with Joshua Meier, co-founder of Chai Discovery and former Chief AI Officer at Absci, to explore the breakthrough moment happening in AI drug discovery. They discuss how the field has evolved through three distinct waves, with the current generation of companies finally achieving success rates that seemed impossible just years ago. The conversation covers everything from moving drug discovery out of the lab and into computers, to why AI models think differently than

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00:51:08

Ep 71: CEO of TurboPuffer Simon Eskildsen on Building...

Unsupervised Learning with Jacob Effron ·

2025/07/22

Fill out this short listener survey to help us improve the show: https://forms.gle/bbcRiPTRwKoG2tJx8In this episode, Simon Eskildsen, co-founder and CEO of TurboPuffer, lays out a compelling vision for how AI-native infrastructure needs to evolve in an era where every application wants to connect massive amounts of context to large language models. He breaks down why traditional databases and even large context windows fall short—especially at scale—and why object-storage-native search is the

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01:09:57

Ep 70: Karol Hausman and Danny Driess (Physical...

Unsupervised Learning with Jacob Effron ·

2025/07/08

In this episode, Jacob sits down with Karol Hausman (Co-Founder) and Danny Driess (Research Scientist) from Physical Intelligence, two of the minds behind some of the most exciting advances in robotics. They unpack the last decade of progress in AI robotics, from early skepticism to the breakthroughs powering today’s generalist robot models. The conversation covers everything from folding laundry with robots to building scalable data pipelines, the limits of simulation, and what it’ll take to bring

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00:54:57

Ep 69: Co-Founder of Databricks & LMArena on Current...

Unsupervised Learning with Jacob Effron ·

2025/06/17

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 believes the U.S. is structurally disadvantaged in open-source AI compared to China. (0:00) Intro(0:49)

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00:44:03

Ep 68: CEO of Mercor Brendan Foody on Evals Replacing...

Unsupervised Learning with Jacob Effron ·

2025/06/04

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 measurable prediction. Brendan and his team recently raised $100M and are working with some of the most

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00:44:09

Ep 67: Max Junestrand (CEO, Legora) on...

Unsupervised Learning with Jacob Effron ·

2025/05/27

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 product strategy, lessons on evolving alongside foundational models, and how AI is reshaping the future of

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00:57:45

Ep 66: Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic Sholto...

Unsupervised Learning with Jacob Effron ·

2025/05/22

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 and Advice(3:04) Future of AI in Coding(4:38) Managing Multiple AI Models(11:20) The Barrier to Agents is

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01:23:27

Ep 65: Co-Authors of AI-2027 Daniel Kokotajlo and...

Unsupervised Learning with Jacob Effron ·

2025/05/14

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 the report, its policy implications, and what they believe it will take to build safer, more aligned

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00:47:12

Ep 64: GPT 4.1 Lead at OpenAI Michelle Pokrass: RFT...

Unsupervised Learning with Jacob Effron ·

2025/05/08

In this episode, I sit down with Michelle Pokrass, who leads post-training at OpenAI and played a key role in the launch of GPT-4.1 and their upcoming RFT offering. 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 fine-tuning to push past the current frontier.If you’ve ever wondered how OpenAI really decides what to build, and how it affects what you should build, this one’s

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00:50:53

Ep 63: Khan Academy Founder/CEO on Salman Khan on...

Unsupervised Learning with Jacob Effron ·

2025/04/29

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 what’s actually working in classrooms. (0:00) Intro(1:17) The Vision for Future Classrooms(4:28) Khan

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