In this episode of the Autopilot podcast, James Kaplan, Chief Technology Officer of McKinsey & Company's Technology practice shares his unique career journey from a history major to a tech leader, discussing the evolution of technology from the .com era to modern AI implementations. James also shares the challenges enterprises face in adopting AI, evolving dynamics between startups and incumbents, and provides valuable advice for navigating a successful career in technology.

In this episode of the Autopilot podcast, Surojit Chatterjee, founder of Ema AI, former Chief Product Officer at Coinbase and ex-Google VP, discusses the future of AI employees in enterprise. He explores how Ema's AI employees can boost productivity for any role and any company by automating mundane tasks. Surojit draws parallels to past technological shifts, emphasizing the current phase shift as an opportunity for startups to overtake incumbents, and shares his vision for a more productive and imaginative future.

In this episode of the Autopilot podcast, host Will Summerlin interviews Russell D'Sa, the founder of LiveKit, a company building critical infrastructure for real-time audio and video communication, used by OpenAI to voice ChatGPT. Russ shares his journey from growing up surrounded by technology in Silicon Valley to founding LiveKit, and discusses the complex challenges of delivering reliable, high-quality audio and video at scale. They discuss the future of multimodal interactions and explore how technologies like LiveKit are enabling more natural human-AI interfaces. -

In this episode of the Autopilot Podcast, Will interviews Dr. Thomas Fu, an emergency medicine physician and founder of Enabled Health. Dr. Fu shares how Enabled Health uses AI and computer vision technology to help combat patient deconditioning in hospitals, improving outcomes and efficiency. They discuss the aging population crisis, healthcare staffing shortages, the potential for AI to augment and assist medical professionals, and more.

In this episode, Will sits down with Freda Duan, investor at Altimeter Capital. They explore critical topics such as the energy bottlenecks in AI development, the future of AGI and ways in which we may have already achieved it today, and the future role of AI agents. Freda also discusses the capital expenditure trends among big tech companies and the nuanced competition between open source and closed source models.

In this conversation, Will sits down with Paras Jain, co-founder and CEO of Genmo. They dive into the frontier of AI video generation powered by diffusion models and his unconventional path from self-driving cars to rapidly scaling a lean startup to 1 million global users generating videos from text. Jain shares technical breakthroughs, counterintuitive challenges, the future of personalized AI video content, the implications of deepfakes, and the role of open-sourcing video generation AI. 

In this episode, Will Summerlin is joined by Lin Qiao who shares her journey from leading the PyTorch team at Meta to founding Fireworks, a company focused on specialized, customized AI models for enterprise companies and startups. They explore the challenges of training and inference costs in building AI infrastructure, the potential of multimodal models, and the strategic shift from 'one model fits all' to a diverse set of specialized models. They also cover how to think about efficiency in model deployment, the advantages of open-source vs. closed-source and why her philosophy is opposite to OpenAI's.

In this episode of Autopilot with Will Summerlin, Modern Intelligence CEO John Dulin discusses the vital role of AI for the future of U.S. military defense and intelligence. He dives into challenges like integrating AI with legacy systems, his contrarian vision for building the foundational AI platform for national security, initiatives like JADC2 and scaling human ISR analysts with AI. John also shares his journey from physics to machine learning at GRAIL before starting Modern, compares U.S. and Chinese AI progress, selling software to the DoD, and his priorities if he was President for leading in military AI. A must-watch for anyone interested in AI's impact on national security.

In this episode, Will sits down with Maggie Sin, the CEO and Co-founder of MyCompanions.ai. She shares her journey from being an influencer to leveraging AI to address the pain points in fan engagement and monetization, ethical considerations, how current engagements are being outsourced to the Philippines, mental health and the loneliness pandemic, and more. 

In this episode, Will interviews Jordan Domash, Cofounder and CEO of Responsiv AI. They discuss Responsiv's data advantage, the use of AI in legal 15 years ago to now, document relevancy classification before AI, how Responsiv helps accelerate research for in-house legal teams, and much more.

In this episode, Will sits down with Aaron Slodov, CEO and Cofounder of Atomic, a company using AI to automate tool and die creation in manufacturing. They discuss the challenges of modern manufacturing in the tool and die making field, the current significant waste generated by inefficient processes, and how Aaron seeks to merge AI with automation to expedite product manufacturing. RECOMMENDED PODCAST:  The AI Daily Brief If you're looking for an edge to stay up to date on everything AI, subscribe to Nathaniel Whittemore's AI Daily Brief which delivers tight episodes covering all things AI from legislation to new technologies to the philosophical debates around generalized intelligence.  Spotify:  https://open.spotify.com/show/7gKwwMLFLc6RmjmRpbMtEO Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ai-daily-brief-formerly-the-ai-breakdown/id1680633614 LINKS: Atomic Industries: https://www.atomic.industries/ Atomic in TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/04/atomic-industries-closes-17m-seed-to-exascale-americas-industrial-base/ Autopilot Ventures: https://apv.vc/ X/SOCIAL: @WillSummerlinAI @APhysicist (Aaron) TIMESTAMPS (00:00) Preview (02:02) Aaron Slodov's Background (07:15) The birth and pivot of Remesh: From social platform to market research (18:16) What does the industry look like for tool and die makers? (19:01) Labour dynamics in tool industries (20:01) How does the manufacturing industry use tech today outside of Atomic? (21:48) Timeline for traditional tool and die maker to complete the design process (22:39) Incentives of buyers of tool and die products (25:13) What is a die cast? (25:42) Die casting's 30-50% scrap rate (26:57) Atomic's approach and how it differs from the traditional approach (29:52) How has AI enabled die creation? (35:52) Atomic's physical factory in Michigan (40:39) Reflecting on venture and the catalyst for deep tech investing (45:00) Reflections on the founder journey (48:21) Wrap -- Recommended Podcast: Company Breakdowns Each episode of Company Breakdowns dives into S-1s and series B-and-beyond companies, interviewing founders and investors to break down the companies. First episode is on Rubrik - which just IPO'd. Coming up this season: Databricks, Reddit + more, Spotify Apple

In this episode, Will Summerlin interviews Sergiy Nesterenko, founder of Quilter (backed by Benchmark), a company that designs PCB circuitboards end-to-end using reinforcement learning. They discuss how current PCB boards are designed and how Quilter's tech stack enables faster board design, what better circuit boards enable in the future, their GTM and where they are seeing most market pull right now, and much more.  LINKS: Quilter: https://www.quilter.ai/ Autopilot Ventures: https://www.apv.vc/ X/SOCIAL: @WSummerlinAI (Will) @sergiynest (Sergiy) @quitlerai (Quilter) TIMESTAMPS: (00:00) Sergiy's Background (00:51) What Sergiy learned from SpaceX (02:14) Founding thesis of Quilter and Quilter's journey (03:18) Where would one find circuit boards? (04:31) What is the process of designing a circuit board? (06:00) Design process today with Quilter (12:34) Quilter's thesis and designing more complex circuits (13:19) How much are humans currently paid for board design (14:34) Labour dynamics in board design (15:23) Do most companies have board designers in house? (16:07) Incentive structure (17:37) What does a high performance circuit board look like vs low performance? (21:30) Quilter's technology stack (23:59) How Quilter can grow with scale? (26:45) Where is circuit manufacturing happening (32:40) What other parts of knowledge work can be solved with reinforcement learning (33:58) GTM and who Quilter is selling to (35:43) Pricing (36:59) Where Quilter is seeing the most market pull right now (38:16) What makes Quilter an exciting company to work at or invest (40:33) The effects of closed research in private companies for the industry (40:33) Open source vs closed source (44:26) What Sergiy would advise to himself in his early founder (46:54) What drew Sergiy to working with Benchmark (48:27) Wrap -- Recommended Podcast: Company Breakdowns Each episode of Company Breakdowns dives into S-1s and series B-and-beyond companies, interviewing founders and investors to break down the companies. First episode is on Rubrik - which just IPO'd. Coming up this season: Databricks, Reddit + more, Spotify Apple