Ep 76: Sora Creators Bill Peebles, Rohan Sahai & Thomas Dimson on Their Unexpected Viral Success
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 prioritizes human creativity over passive consumption. They reveal the technical milestones in video generation, their small team size (under 50 people total at launch), navigation of content moderation challenges, early monetization strategy, and their ambitious vision for video models as world simulators that could eventually contribute to scientific breakthroughs by 2028. The conversation captures both the tactical product decisions and strategic philosophy that made Sora a cultural phenomenon. (0:00) Intro(1:35) Unexpected Success of ChatGPT and Sora(3:55) Sora as an Independent App(5:38) Sora Prototypes and Evolution(8:07) User Creativity and Surprising Use Cases(14:46) Celebrity Engagement and Rights Management(17:58) Competition and Future of AI Video Models(25:42) Empowering Creators(31:21) The Evolution of Image Generation(33:36) How Do Models Need to Improve?(42:10) Monetization of Sora(45:54) Global Reach and Cultural Impact(48:38) Moderation and Safety Challenges(50:09) Integration with Other OpenAI Products(52:07) How do Models Learn Physics?(55:16) Quickfire With your co-hosts: @jacobeffron - Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health @patrickachase - Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn @ericabrescia - Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) @jordan_segall - Partner at Redpoint
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AI Round Up: Ari Morcos from Datalogy AI and Rob Toews from Radical VC on Karpathy Reactions, OpenAI’s Dealmaking, & Bubble Reality Check
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 progress will come from massive compute increases or from efficiency gains through better data quality, architectural innovations, and post-training techniques like reinforcement learning. The conversation also tackles which companies truly need frontier models versus those that can succeed with slightly-behind-the-curve alternatives, the surprisingly static landscape of AI application categories (coding, healthcare, and legal remain dominant), and emerging opportunities from brain-computer interfaces to more efficient scaling methods. (0:00) Intro(1:04) Debating the AI Bubble(1:50) Over-Hyping AI: Realities and Misconceptions(3:21) Enterprise AI and Data Center Investments(7:46) Consumer Adoption and Monetization Challenges(8:55) AI in Browsers and the Future of Internet Use(14:37) Deepfakes and Ethical Concerns(26:29) AI's Impact on Job Markets and Training(31:38) Google and Anthropic: Strategic Partnerships(34:51) OpenAI's Strategic Deals and Future Prospects(37:12) The Evolution of Vibe Coding(44:35) AI Outside of San Francisco(48:09) Data Moats in AI Startups(50:38) Comparing AI to the Human Brain(56:07) The Role of Physical Infrastructure in AI(56:55) The Potential of Chinese AI Models(1:03:15) Apple's AI Strategy(1:12:35) The Future of AI Applications With your co-hosts: @jacobeffron - Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health @patrickachase - Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn @ericabrescia - Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) @jordan_segall - Partner at Redpoint
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AI Round Up: Ari Morcos from Datalogy AI and Rob Toews from Radical VC on AI Talent Wars, xAI’s $200B Valuation, & Google’s Comeback
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 sustainability of massive valuations for companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, and the infrastructure ecosystem supporting this rapid evolution. The discussion weaves together technical insights on data quality, synthetic data generation, and RL environments with strategic perspectives on acquisitions, regulatory challenges, and the future intersection of AI with physical robotics and brain-computer interfaces. (0:00) Intro(2:59) Debate on Model Progress(8:03) Challenges in AI Generalization and RL Environments(15:44) Enterprise AI and Custom Models(20:27) Google's AI Ascent and Market Impact(24:30) Valuations and Future of AI Companies(27:55) Evaluating xAI's Position in the AI Landscape(30:31) The Talent War in AI Research(35:45) The Impact of Acquihires on Startups(42:35) The Future of AI Infrastructure(48:28) The Potential of Brain-Computer Interfaces(54:45) The Evolution of AI and Robotics(1:00:50) The Importance of Data in AI Research With your co-hosts: @jacobeffron - Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health @patrickachase - Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn @ericabrescia - Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) @jordan_segall - Partner at Redpoint
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Ep 75: Nano Banana’s Oliver Wang and Nicole Brichtova - Behind the Breakthrough as Gemini Tops the Charts
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 capabilities, and how image and video generation are converging toward unified models. They also share honest perspectives on current limitations, safety approaches, and why the expectation of going from prompt to production-ready content is fundamentally overhyped.(0:00) Intro(1:42) Early Nano Banana Use Cases and Character Consistency(3:05) Popular Features and User Requests(3:54) Future Frontiers in Image Models(5:26) Personalization and Aesthetic Models(7:39) Model Success and User Engagement(10:59) Product Design for Different Users(19:30) Advanced Use Cases and Future Workflows(23:14) Editing Workflows and Chatbots(25:14) Google's Image Model Applications(27:12) Milestones in Image Generation(29:30) MidJourney's Success(30:54) Future of Image Models(33:55) Image Models vs. Video Models(36:35) Quickfire With your co-hosts: @jacobeffron - Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health @patrickachase - Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn @ericabrescia - Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) @jordan_segall - Partner at Redpoint
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Ep 74: Chief Scientist of Together.AI Tri Dao On The End of Nvidia's Dominance, Why Inference Costs Fell & The Next 10X in Speed
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 years, as specialized chips emerge for distinct workload categories: low-latency agentic systems, high-throughput batch processing, and interactive chatbots. Dao shares his surprise at AI models becoming genuinely useful for expert-level work, making him 1.5x more productive at GPU kernel optimization through tools like Claude Code and O1. The conversation explores whether current transformer architectures can reach expert-level AI performance or if approaches like mixture of experts and state space models are necessary to achieve AGI at reasonable costs. Looking ahead, Dao sees another 10x cost reduction coming from continued hardware specialization, improved kernels, and architectural advances like ultra-sparse models, while emphasizing that the biggest challenge remains generating expert-level training data for domains lacking extensive internet coverage. (0:00) Intro(1:58) Nvidia's Dominance and Competitors(4:01) Challenges in Chip Design(6:26) Innovations in AI Hardware(9:21) The Role of AI in Chip Optimization(11:38) Future of AI and Hardware Abstractions(16:46) Inference Optimization Techniques(33:10) Specialization in AI Inference(35:18) Deep Work Preferences and Low Latency Workloads(38:19) Fleet Level Optimization and Batch Inference(39:34) Evolving AI Workloads and Open Source Tooling(41:15) Future of AI: Agentic Workloads and Real-Time Video Generation(44:35) Architectural Innovations and AI Expert Level(50:10) Robotics and Multi-Resolution Processing(52:26) Balancing Academia and Industry in AI Research(57:37) Quickfire With your co-hosts: @jacobeffron - Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health @patrickachase - Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn @ericabrescia - Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) @jordan_segall - Partner at Redpoint
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.
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