Welcome to Generation AI, where we go deep down the rabbit hole of emerging and burgeoning AI tech. On this podcast, we speak with practitioners, thought leaders, and industry navigators to get to the truth behind the hype of this AI emergence. Our hosts are Sean Anderson and Ofer Mendelevitch and a rotation of special guests.
In this episode of the Generation AI Podcast, hosts Sean Anderson and Ofer Mendelevich sit down with Matt Abrams, a technologist, investor, advisor, speaker, and outdoor adventurer whose mission is to inspire startup founders and executives to think bigger and bolder.
The conversation begins with Matt’s vision for building “a billion for trust,” and quickly expands into the pressing challenges and opportunities that generative AI brings to society. Together, the group explores the balance between innovation and regulation, examining whether government oversight can truly keep pace with AI’s rapid evolution. They discuss the influence of global players such as China’s DeepSeek R1, the shifting dynamics in Washington and Europe, and the role of incentives in shaping big tech’s approach to AI safety.
The conversation also dives into the risks of hallucinations in AI systems, especially in healthcare and financial services. This episode provides a candid and insightful look at how we can build AI that truly serves society.
21 Jun 2025
Generation AI Podcast Episode #12 Alison Cossette
Alison Cossette, a Data Science Strategist, discusses the practical applications of Graph Databases and Graph RAG, exploring their utility for knowledge work and emerging data management architectures in this interview.
16 Dec 2024
Generation AI Podcast Episode #11 Kara Peterson and Rich DiBona
In this episode, we welcome Kara Peterson and Rich DiBona, founders of descrybe.ai, a justice tech startup aimed at democratizing access to the law. Kara is a marketing and business development leader with a strong emerging following in the Legal AI space and is being hosted by the National Law Review as one of the hottest legal tech companies in 2025. Rich is the tech side of descrybe.ai and comes from a software engineering background, where he worked on architecture and scaling with large amounts of data.
Kara and Rich discuss with us the most pressing ideas in the legal AI space, including the trustworthiness of answers and how observability and explainability are so important in legal AI use cases. Our guests also share their vision of how generative AI can enable social change by quickly identifying precedence in cases, which can save operational and administrative costs to people employing these legal services. Will AI create a more equitable future for the legal space? Join the podcast and find out!
7 Nov 2024TRANSCRIPT
Generation AI Podcast Episode #10 Ayush Garg
Ayush Garg, founder of AnswerThis.io, shares his approach to building retrieval systems and reveals his vision for future LLM development.
26 Aug 2024TRANSCRIPT
Generation AI Podcast Episode #9 Tobias Lunt
This month, we sat down with Tobias Lunt, another amazing presenter from this year’s Data Council Lightning Talks. Tobias is using LLMs at Development Data Lab to analyze, expose, and combat gender inequality and understand the impact of societal norms. He has a unique perspective on how academia and the public sector view data science tooling in relation to the commercial landscape.
Tobias puts into perspective the “big” nature of data in his line of work and talks about the meteoric rise in LLM accuracy that we are seeing in the space but also cautions us about the false artifacts that can still be present in RAG systems and with manually defined data sets. We hope you enjoy finding out more about what Tobias and his team are up to.
3 May 2024TRANSCRIPT
Generation AI Podcast Episode #8 Amber Roberts
This month, we chat with Amber Roberts, Senior Technical PMM from Arize AI (https://arize.com/). We met Amber this year at the Data Council conference, where we learned a lot about the concepts around LLM Observability during her great presentation. We wanted to dive a bit deeper on the podcast.
Amber chats with us about the foundational pillars of LLM observability including traces and spans and RAG/fine-tuning, the role of drift in LLMs, and how you can evaluate attributes like fairness and rudeness. Learn more about all the great projects and classes that Amber is leading and hear more about the Data Council conference.
Links:
Arize Community (https://arize.com/community/)
Arize Phoenix HomePage (https://phoenix.arize.com/)
Phoenix Github (https://github.com/Arize-ai/phoenix)
1 Mar 2024TRANSCRIPT
Generation AI Podcast Episode #7 Ofer Mendelevitch
This month, we tried something different and sat down with my co-host, Ofer Mendelevitch, to get his hot takes on topics like vector databases, agents, and fine-tuning.
Ofer has a storied career in Big Data, machine learning, and AI. An in-demand speaker and community champion, Ofer is active in the ecosystem as the Head of Developer Advocacy @ Vectara. Don't miss this chance to get to know Ofer and pay witness to his unique AI forecasts.
22 Jan 2024
Generation AI Podcast Episode #6 Ram Sriharsha
It's a new year, and we are back with more episodes of the Generation AI podcast. This month, we are joined by VP of Engineering Ram Sriharsha of Pinecone.
Ram discusses many aspects of vector databases and LLMs, including Hybrid Search and both sparse and dense retrieval. RAM lays out his mission to make vector search less complex and easier to leverage for every organization and marching towards the science of RAG.
20 Dec 2023
Generation AI Podcast Episode #5 Jordan Volz
For this episode, we sit down with Lolpop creator and head of field operations at Voltron Data, Jordan Volz. Jordan is a known force in data and ML space and has advised countless organizations on how to get more models into production.
With his new open-source project, Jordan aims to bring many of the cemented software development strategies to data science work, ensuring that data science outputs are reliable in production. Jordan chats with us about the rise of LLMs, the areas where traditional machine learning will still likely dominate, and what data scientists should have front of mind.
15 Nov 2023
Generation AI Podcast Episode #4 Bob van Luijt
In this episode, we welcome Bob van Luijt, a technology entrepreneur, technologist, and new media artist from the Netherlands. He is the co-founder and CEO of Weaviate, an open-source vector database, and the chairman of the Creative Software Foundation. Bob is an active force in the AI and Vector Database community and has a front seat to the core shifts in the AI landscape.
Bob skips the tea and goes straight to soup with piping hot takes on Hybrid Search, vector database abundance, and generative feedback loops. This conversation serves as a quintessential primer for understanding vector embeddings and what they are used for.
24 Oct 2023
Generation AI Podcast Episode #3 Tri Dao
Tri Dao is known for his groundbreaking work on Flash Attention at Stanford, enabling a fast and efficient implementation of the Attention mechanism in Transformers, opening up possibilities for much longer sequence length in GPT-4, Claude Anthropic as well as in images, video and audio.
We sat down with Tri Dao to discuss the impact of his pioneering work on software/hardware co-design and some of the new innovation that's coming in the world of transformers and generative AI.
14 Sept 2023
Generation AI Podcast Episode #2 Alfred Chuang
Sean and Ofer sit down with Race Capital's Alfred Chuang, a Silicon Valley luminary and prolific storyteller. Alfred Chuang is a general partner at Race Capital and is also known for being the co-founder and CEO of BEA Systems, Alfred led BEA Systems to its acquisition by Oracle in 2008 for $8.6 billion.
Alfred chats about his excitement around generative AI and offers predictions as to where the market is heading, including how you can better take care of your houseplants. Alfred's experience in transformational moments in tech provides a lively discussion on how AI will transform every aspect of our lives.
10 Aug 2023
Generation AI Podcast Episode #1 Amr Awadallah
Welcome to the Generation AI Podcast. Whether you are a pioneer in this emerging ecosystem of LLMs and generative AI or are struggling to keep up, this is the place for you. On this show, we dive into the practical and theoretical applications of generative AI with a mission to strip out the hype and deliver helpful dialog from those best positioned to guide us through this vast ecosystem shift.
In this episode, we speak with Dr. Amr Awadallah (mailto:amr@vectara.com). Amr is the CEO and cofounder of Vectara which is using the latest advances in Large Language Models, Deep Neural Networks, Natural Language Understanding and Information Retrieval.
Amr previously served as VP of Developer Relations for Google Cloud. Before that, he co-founded Cloudera in 2008 and spent 11 years as global CTO.
He also served as vice president of product intelligence engineering at Yahoo! Amr received his Ph.D. in EE from Stanford University and his Bachelor's and Master's Degrees from Cairo University, Egypt.
17 Jul 2023
Welcome to the Generation AI Podcast
Welcome to the Generation AI podcast, the place where we dive deeper down the rabbit hole around Generative AI and its applications. As you are well aware, since the launch of ChatGPT in November of 2022, Generative AI and LLMs have saturated almost all of our feeds and airways. However, while blogs and infographics on the subject are abundant, the number of organizations that have successfully implemented generative AI for a strategic initiative is still in the minority. With a mission to cut through the noise, we have launched The Generation AI Podcast. In this show, we will talk candidly and directly to individuals who are turning AI hype into hypotheses.
Inside a recent episode
Generation AI Podcast Episode #13 Matt Abrams
Published 25 Sept 2025 · Transcript excerpt
[…] And how does the Guardian, because it goes back to that fundamental optimization, you know, metric for which transformer models are optimizing for? I think there's a, we're never going to get to, you know, fully trusted AI systems from that perspective. We already do have trusted AI systems from a, you know, machine learning techniques, right? From, you know, good old traditional algorithmic techniques. Those are trusted and tried and true. So I want to, I want to differentiate for what we refer to as AI here as well, because everyone just thinks AI again is an LLM. And it isn't. And even out, you know, if you look at things like alpha fold, you know, this kind of thing, like, that's not an LLM, you know, based, you know, structure in this respect. […]
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