Why Netflix, Uber, and Spotify Never Lag: The Database Nobody Talks About | Aaron Katz

More from Gradient Dissent: Conversations on AI All episodes →

1. 

   S1 · E142 · 18 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 34 min

   Elon's Former Battery Chief: AI Data Centers Will Make Electricity Cheaper

   Can today's power grid handle the explosive growth of AI data centers? Tesla Alum Drew Baglino , now founder & CEO of Heron Power , doesn't think so. In this episode, he joins Lukas Biewald to talk about why scaling compute requires a fundamental overhaul of grid-to-chip infrastructure, not just bigger power plants. They cover how Heron Power raised $140M to cut power losses in half, shrink massive oil-filled transformers by 100x, and unlock 35MW of extra compute for every gigawatt data center, and what that means for the future of AI energy efficiency. Connect with us here: Drew Baglino…

2. 

   S1 · E141 · 3 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 19 min

   40 Trillion Tokens a Day (Yes, More Than OpenAI) | Lin Qiao, CEO of Fireworks

   Should American companies be worried about Chinese open-source AI models? Lin Qiao , CEO of Fireworks , doesn't think so. In this episode, she joins Lukas Biewald to talk about why she believes the industry is at a turning point, one that calls for more open intelligence, not less. They cover how Fireworks now processes more tokens a day than OpenAI's API, why she thinks the future belongs to specialized models built on private company data rather than general-purpose ones, and why she believes OpenAI and Anthropic should be open-sourcing their own models too. Connect with us here: Lin Qiao…

3. 

   S1 · E140 · 16 Jun 2026 · 1 hr 15 min

   He's Building an AI That Can't Lie | Dan Klein

   "We are going to switch from the problem in AI being that nothing works to the problem being that everything works." Dan Klein has been studying language models for over two decades and is now a professor of computer science at Berkeley. His new company, Scaled Cognition, is built around one question: how do you build a system that will not lie to you? In this episode, Dan joins Lukas Biewald to talk about why every LLM output is technically a hallucination, how reinforcement learning can quietly teach AI to deceive you, and what it actually takes to build models that check their own work.…

4. 

   S1 · E139 · 26 May 2026 · 1 hr 15 min

   He Raised $70M to Cure Every Disease With AI | Samuel G. Rodriques, Edison Scientific

   Samuel Rodriques left physics because there were no unsolved problems left. Instead, he built an AI scientist named Kosmos to cure every disease, solve aging, and map the human brain. In this episode: The cure his AI proposed for blindness Why he would never touch a peptide Whether we'll need human scientists in 20 years What's stopping America in drug discovery Connect with us here: Samuel Rodriques Edison Scientific Lukas Biewald Weights & Biases

5. 

   S1 · E138 · 15 Apr 2026 · 46 min

   Uber, Nissan, and Mercedes Chose This Self-Driving Startup | Alex Kendall, Wayve

   "Every vehicle is capable of driverless operation. That's clearly the steady state of where we're going." Wayve started in a rented house in Cambridge with $1.5M, a car in the garage, and an aim to integrate end-to-end AI into driving. A decade later it's driven across 506 cities without a single HD map and is worth over $8.6 billion. In this episode, CEO Alex Kendall joins Lukas Biewald to talk about how he built the AI driver Uber, Nvidia, Mercedes, and Nissan all backed, and why putting self-driving AI into 100 million cars a year is a far bigger bet than 10,000 robotaxis. Waymo and Tesla…

6. 

   S1 · E136 · 5 Feb 2026 · 51 min

   The $64M Bet on an AI That Has to Be Right | Carina Hong, CEO of Axiom

   Formal verification already consumes years of human effort. In this episode, Lukas Biewald talks with Carina Hong, Founder & CEO of Axiom, about why verification is becoming the real bottleneck in high stakes AI systems. They discuss how Axiom uses AI to take on the tedious checking that stretches verification cycles across years, starting with formal mathematics and extending to hardware and software. Carina also explains why Axiom’s approach to auto-formalization mirrors spec driven models like Kiro from AWS. Connect with us here: Carina Hong: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carina-hong/…

7. 

   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:…

8. 

   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:…

9. 

   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/…

10. 

    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…