The Startup Powering The Data Behind AGI

More from Gradient Dissent: Conversations on AI All episodes →

1. 

   S1 · E135 · 20 Jan 2026 · 1 hr 8 min

   What a $42B Software Co. Really Spends on AI Tools

   “I don't worry about being replaced by AI. I worry about being replaced by someone who's really good at using AI.” Atlassian has 10,000+ engineers currently split-testing the world’s top AI coding tools, from GitHub Copilot and Cursor to Claude Code. In this episode, Co-Founder & CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes joins Lukas Biewald to share what their data reveals about the world's best AI tools today. Hear how 24 years of building a tech giant and a massive internal study on AI productivity have shaped Mike's vision for the future of dev jobs. Connect with us here: Mike Cannon-Brookes:…

2. 

   S1 · E134 · 6 Jan 2026 · 53 min

   Inside the $41B AI Cloud Challenging Big Tech | CoreWeave SVP

   The future of AI training is shaped by one constraint: keeping GPUs fed. In this episode, Lukas Biewald talks with CoreWeave SVP Corey Sanders about why general-purpose clouds start to break down under large-scale AI workloads. According to Corey, the industry is shifting toward a "Neo Cloud" model to handle the unique demands of modern models. They dive into the hardware and software stack required to maximize GPU utilization and achieve high goodput. Corey’s conclusion is clear: AI demands specialization. Connect with us here: Corey Sanders:…

3. 

   S1 · E133 · 16 Dec 2025 · 1 hr 1 min

   Why Physical AI Needed a Completely New Data Stack

   The future of AI is physical. 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. 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." Connect with us here: Nikolaus West: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikolauswest/…

4. 

   S1 · E132 · 1 Dec 2025 · 15 min

   The Engineering Behind the World’s Most Advanced Video AI

   Is video AI a viable path toward AGI? 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 . 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. 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…

5. 

   S1 · E131 · 18 Nov 2025 · 59 min

   The CEO Behind the Fastest-Growing AI Inference Company | Tuhin Srivastava

   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. 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. Tuhin also explains how vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, and…

6. 

   S1 · E129 · 5 Aug 2025 · 44 min

   Arvind Jain on Building Glean and the Future of Enterprise AI

   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. 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…

7. 

   S1 · E128 · 8 Jul 2025 · 43 min

   How DeepL Built a Translation Powerhouse with AI with CEO Jarek Kutylowski

   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. 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…

8. 

   S1 · E127 · 10 Jun 2025 · 1 hr 10 min

   GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke on Copilot and the Future of Software Development

   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. 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…

9. 

   S1 · E126 · 20 May 2025 · 1 hr 30 min

   From Pharma to AGI Hype, and Developing AI in Finance: Martin Shkreli’s Journey

   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." 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…

10. 

    S1 · E125 · 29 Apr 2025 · 50 min

    Inside Cursor: The future of AI coding with Co-founder Sualeh Asif

    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. Sualeh also discusses scaling AI inference to support hundreds of…