Gradient Dissent: Conversations on AI
Join Lukas Biewald on Gradient Dissent, an AI-focused podcast brought to you by Weights & Biases. Dive into fascinating conversations with industry giants from NVIDIA, Meta, Google, Lyft, OpenAI, and more. Explore the cutting-edge of AI and learn the intricacies of bringing models into production.
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Why Physical AI Needed a Completely New Data Stack
<p>The future of AI is physical. </p><p>In this episode, Lukas Biewald talks to Nikolaus West, CEO of Rerun, about why the breakthrough required to get AI out of the lab and into the messy real world is blocked by poor data tooling. </p><p>Nikolaus explains how Rerun solved this by adopting an Entity Component System (ECS), a data model built for games, to handle complex, multimodal, time-aware sensor data. This is the technology that makes solving previously impossible tasks, like flexible manipulation, suddenly feel "boring." </p><p>Connect with us here: </p><p>Nikolaus West: https://www...
The Engineering Behind the World’s Most Advanced Video AI
<p>Is video AI a viable path toward AGI? </p><p>Runway ML founder Cristóbal Valenzuela joins Lukas Biewald just after Gen 4.5 reached the #1 position on the Video Arena Leaderboard, according to community voting on Artificial Analysis. </p><p>Lukas examines how a focused research team at Runway outpaced much larger organizations like Google and Meta in one of the most compute-intensive areas of machine learning.</p><p><br></p><p>Cristóbal breaks down the architecture behind Gen 4.5 and explains the role of “taste” in model development. He details the engineering improvements in motion and camera control that solve lo...
The CEO Behind the Fastest-Growing AI Inference Company | Tuhin Srivastava
<p>In this episode of Gradient Dissent, Lukas Biewald talks with Tuhin Srivastava, CEO and founder of Baseten, one of the fastest-growing companies in the AI inference ecosystem. Tuhin shares the real story behind Baseten’s rise and how the market finally aligned with the infrastructure they’d spent years building.</p><p>They get into the core challenges of modern inference, including why dedicated deployments matter, how runtime and infrastructure bottlenecks stack up, and what makes serving large models fundamentally different from smaller ones.</p><p>Tuhin also explains how vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, and SGLang differ in practice, what it take...
The Startup Powering The Data Behind AGI
<p>In this episode of Gradient Dissent, Lukas Biewald talks with the CEO & founder of Surge AI, the billion-dollar company quietly powering the next generation of frontier LLMs. They discuss Surge's origin story, why traditional data labeling is broken, and how their research-focused approach is reshaping how models are trained.</p><p>You’ll hear why inter-annotator agreement fails in high-complexity tasks like poetry and math, why synthetic data is often overrated, and how Surge builds rich RL environments to stress-test agentic reasoning. They also go deep on what kinds of data will be critical to future progress in AI—from...
Arvind Jain on Building Glean and the Future of Enterprise AI
<p>In this episode of Gradient Dissent, Lukas Biewald sits down with Arvind Jain, CEO and founder of Glean. They discuss Glean's evolution from solving enterprise search to building agentic AI tools that understand internal knowledge and workflows. Arvind shares how his early use of transformer models in 2019 laid the foundation for Glean’s success, well before the term "generative AI" was mainstream.</p><p>They explore the technical and organizational challenges behind enterprise LLMs—including security, hallucination suppression—and when it makes sense to fine-tune models. Arvind also reflects on his previous startup Rubrik and explains how Glean’s AI platf...
How DeepL Built a Translation Powerhouse with AI with CEO Jarek Kutylowski
<p>In this episode of Gradient Dissent, Lukas Biewald talks with Jarek Kutylowski, CEO and founder of DeepL, an AI-powered translation company. Jarek shares DeepL’s journey from launching neural machine translation in 2017 to building custom data centers and how small teams can not only take on big players like Google Translate but win.</p><p>They dive into what makes translation so difficult for AI, why high-quality translations still require human context, and how DeepL tailors models for enterprise use cases. They also discuss the evolution of speech translation, compute infrastructure, training on curated multilingual datasets, hallucinations in models, an...
GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke on Copilot and the Future of Software Development
<p>In this episode of Gradient Dissent, Lukas Biewald sits down with Thomas Dohmke, CEO of GitHub, to talk about the future of software engineering in the age of AI. They discuss how GitHub Copilot was built, why agents are reshaping developer workflows, and what it takes to make tools that are not only powerful but also fun.</p><p>Thomas shares his experience leading GitHub through its $7.5B acquisition by Microsoft, the unexpected ways it accelerated innovation, and why developer happiness is crucial to productivity. They explore what still makes human engineers irreplaceable and how the next generation of...
From Pharma to AGI Hype, and Developing AI in Finance: Martin Shkreli’s Journey
<p>In this episode of Gradient Dissent, Lukas Biewald talks with Martin Shkreli — the infamous "pharma bro" turned founder — about his path from hedge fund manager and pharma CEO to convicted felon and now software entrepreneur. Shkreli shares his side of the drug pricing controversy, reflects on his prison experience, and explains how he rebuilt his life and business after being "canceled."</p><p>They dive deep into AI and drug discovery, where Shkreli delivers a strong critique of mainstream approaches. He also talks about his latest venture in finance software, building Godel Terminal “a Vim for traders", and why he thi...
Inside Cursor: The future of AI coding with Co-founder Sualeh Asif
<p>In this episode of Gradient Dissent, host Lukas Biewald talks with Sualeh Asif, the CPO and co-founder of Cursor, one of the fastest-growing and most loved AI-powered coding platforms. Sualeh shares the story behind Cursor’s creation, the technical and design decisions that set it apart, and how AI models are changing the way we build software. They dive deep into infrastructure challenges, the importance of speed and user experience, and how emerging trends in agents and reasoning models are reshaping the developer workflow.</p><p>Sualeh also discusses scaling AI inference to support hundreds of millions of requests pe...
Inside the Dark Web, AI and Cybersecurity with Christopher Ahlberg CEO of Recorded Future
<p>In this episode of Gradient Dissent, host Lukas Biewald talks with Christopher Ahlberg, CEO of Recorded Future, a pioneering cybersecurity company leveraging AI to provide intelligence insights. Christopher shares his fascinating journey from founding data visualization startup Spotfire to building Recorded Future into an industry leader, eventually leading to its acquisition by Mastercard.</p><p>They dive into gripping stories of cyber espionage, including how Recorded Future intercepted a hacker selling access to the U.S. Electoral Assistance Commission. Christopher also explains why the criminal underworld has shifted to platforms like Telegram, how AI is transforming both cyber threats...
