Ep 62: CEO of Cohere Aidan Gomez on Scaling Limits Emerging, AI Use-cases with PMF & Life After Transformers
Aidan joined this week’s Unsupervised Learning for a wide-ranging conversation on model architectures, enterprise adoption, and what’s breaking in the foundation model stack. If you’re building or investing in AI infrastructure, Aidan is worth listening to. He co-authored the original Transformer paper, leads one of the most advanced model labs outside of the hyperscalers, and is now building for real-world enterprise deployment with Cohere’s agent platform, North. Cohere serves thousands of customers across sectors like finance, telco, and healthcare — and they’ve made a name for themselves by staying model-agnostic, privacy-forward, and deeply international (with major bets in Japan and Korea) (0:00) Intro(0:32) Enterprise AI(3:23) Custom Integrations and Future of AI Agents(4:33) Enterprise Use Cases for Gen AI(7:02) The Importance of Reasoning in AI Models(10:38) Custom Models and Synthetic Data(17:48) Cohere's Approach to AI Applications(23:24) Future Use Cases and Market Fit(27:11) Building a Unified Automation Platform(27:34) Strategic Decisions in the AI Journey(29:19) International Partnerships and Language Models(31:05) Future of Foundation Models(32:27) AI in Specialized Domains(34:40) Challenges in Data Integration(35:06) Emerging Foundation Model Companies(35:31) Technological Frontiers and Architectures(37:29) Scaling Hypothesis and Model Capabilities(42:26) AI Research Culture and Team Building(44:39) Future of AI and Societal Impact(48:31) Addressing AI Risks 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 61: Redpoint’s AI Investors Break Down What Separates Enduring AI Companies from the Hype
At Redpoint’s annual meeting with investors, Redpoint partners Scott Raney, Alex Bard, Patrick Chase and Jacob Effron shared unfiltered thoughts on some of the most topical questions in AI today, where value will accrue, which industries are best positioned for defensibility at the application layer, and more. (0:00) Intro(0:39) AI Investment Landscape(1:30) Market Projections(3:25) Strategic Imperatives in AI(6:04) AI Model Layer Insights(10:06) Infrastructure Layer(11:46) Application Layer(15:04) Vertical AI SaaS Opportunities(21:45) Evaluating Early-Stage Founders(23:39) First Mover Advantage and Competitive Dynamics(25:28) Domain Expertise vs. AI Expertise(26:58) Why AI Startups Fail(29:41) Startups vs. Incumbents(35:15) Navigating High AI Valuations 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 60: Swyx and Alessio (Latent Space) on What has PMF Today, Google is Cooking & GPT Wrappers are Winning
To unpack some of the most topical questions in AI, I’m joined by two fellow AI podcasters: Swyx and Alessio Fanelli, co-hosts of the Latent Space podcast. We’ve been wanting to do a cross-over episode for a while and finally made it happen.Swyx brings deep experience from his time at AWS, Temporal, and Airbyte, and is now focused on AI agents and dev tools. Alessio is an investor at Decibel, where he’s been backing early technical teams pushing the boundaries of infrastructure and applied AI. Together they run Latent Space, a technical newsletter and podcast by and for AI engineers.To subscribe or learn more about Latent Space, click here: https://www.latent.space/ (0:00) Intro(1:08) Reflecting on AI Surprises of the Past Year(2:24) Open Source Models and Their Adoption(6:48) The Rise of GPT Wrappers(7:49) Challenges in AI Model Training(10:33) Over-hyped and Under-hyped AI Trends(24:00) The Future of AI Product Market Fit(30:27) Google's Momentum and Customer Support Insights(33:16) Emerging AI Applications and Market Trends(35:13) Challenges and Opportunities in AI Development(39:02) Defensibility in AI Applications(42:42) Infrastructure and Security in AI(50:04) Future of AI and Unanswered Questions(55:34) 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 59: OpenAI Product & Eng Leads Nikunj Handa and Steve Coffey on OpenAI’s New Agent Development Tools
Two weeks ago, OpenAI released its set of tools to help developers build agentic systems. Today on Unsupervised Learning, Nikunj Handa (Product Lead) and Steve Coffey (Eng Lead) answer some of the biggest questions around how developers should be thinking about building in the agentic paradigm in 2025. (0:00) Intro(0:53) OpenAI’s Vision for Consumer Interaction(4:51) Building Multi-Agent Systems for Business Solutions(6:53) Challenges and Innovations in AI Fine-Tuning(13:20) Exploring Computer Use Cases and Applications(17:20) Advanced Use Cases and Developer Insights(25:29) Challenges with Context Storage and Chat Completions(26:09) Introducing the Responses API and MCP(27:16) AI Infrastructure Companies and Their Role(29:35) Building the Tools Ecosystem(30:17) Exploring Computer Use Models(31:47) The Future of AI and Developer Tools(38:36) 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 58: Google Researchers Noam Shazeer and Jack Rae on Scaling Test-time Compute, Reactions to Ilya & AGI
On the latest episode of Unsupervised Learning, Jacob is joined by two of the most influential minds in AI today. 🔹 Noam Shazeer, co-inventor of the Transformer🔹 Jack Rae, Research Director at DeepMind and one of the leads behind Gemini’s Flash ThinkingWe got to ask them all of the top-of-mind questions in AI today about where we are, where we’re headed and what it means for businesses and the world. Some key take-aways: (0:00) Intro(1:30) Exploring Gemini 2.0(4:04) Challenges with Evals and Benchmarks(6:14) Reinforcement Loops and AI Productivity(8:15) Agentic Coding and AI in Development(13:02) Multimodal Capabilities and Applications(15:21) Future of AI: Complexity and Reliability(19:02) Test Time Compute and Data Efficiency(31:20) AI Research Culture and Breakthroughs(38:59) Reflecting on Large Language Models(39:37) The Rise of Vision-Based Models(41:01) Native Image Generation and General Purpose Models(41:35) AI in Healthcare and Specialized Models(43:32) Shifting Timelines and Rapid Adoption(46:48) Open Source Models and Competitive Edge(49:30) AI's Impact on Education and Personal Lives(55:10) AGI Risks and Safety Considerations(57:33) Future of AI Companions(1:02:17) 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
On Unsupervised Learning 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.
Cohosted by Redpoint investors Jacob Effron, Patrick Chase, Jordan Segall and Erica Brescia.
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