The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica

Dan Schwarz (CEO & Co-Founder, Futuresearch) explains why his firm finds OpenAI's $125 billion revenue projection highly implausible, citing fierce competition, pressure on ChatGPT/API revenue, and fleeting technical advantages.Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter

Jason Martin is an AI Security Researcher at HiddenLayer. This episode explores “policy puppetry,” a universal attack technique bypassing safety features in all major language models using structured formats like XML or JSON.Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter

Evangelos Simoudis is Managing Director at Synapse Partners, a firm that helps corporations apply AI and invests in startups developing data-driven AI applications. This episode explores the current state of enterprise AI adoption, distinguishing between the steady progress of traditional AI and the experimental phase of generative AI. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter

Lin Qiao, CEO of Fireworks AI, dives into the practical challenges AI developers face, from UX/DX hurdles to complex systems engineering. Discover key trends like the convergence of open-source and proprietary models, the rise of agentic workflows, and strategies for optimizing quality, speed, and cost. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter

Hamel Husain is the founder of Parlance Labs. He discusses how successful AI implementation requires fundamental data science skills often overlooked in current educational resources that focus too heavily on tools and frameworks. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter

Steve Yegge is an evangelist at Sourcegraph, a startups that is industrializing software development with AI agents. This episode explores the paradigm shift in software development with the rise of “vibe coding” and AI agents, moving beyond traditional code completion. It discusses how developers are transitioning from line-by-line coding to orchestrating AI, emphasizing the crucial need for trust, verification, and new skill sets like AI engineering and humanities.Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter

Nestor Maslej is a Research Manager at Stanford's HAI, and editor-in-chief of the 2025 AI Index Report.Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter

Workera founder, Kian Katanforoosh, discusses how skills verification has evolved into a critical market focused on both assessment and professional development. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter

David Hughes, Principal Data & AI Solution Architect at Enterprise Knowledge. Our discussion centers on BAML, a domain-specific language that transforms prompts into structured functions with defined inputs and outputs, enabling developers to create more deterministic and maintainable AI applications. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter

Chi Wang is co-creator of AG2, and a Senior Staff Research Scientist, Google DeepMind.  This episode explores AG2, an open-source “agent OS” that provides infrastructure for developers to build sophisticated multi-agent AI systems.Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter

Ilan Kadar is co-founder and CEO of Plurai. This episode introduces IntellAgent, an open-source platform designed to address these challenges through synthetic data generation, knowledge graph construction, and reinforcement learning for agent optimization.Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter

Travis Addair is Co-Founder & CTO at Predibase. In this episode, the discussion centers on transforming pre-trained foundation models into domain-specific assets through advanced customization techniques.Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter

Hagay Lupesko is the SVP for AI Inference at Cerebras Systems. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter

This is our semi-regular conversation on topics in AI and Technology with Paco Nathan, the founder of Derwen, a boutique consultancy focused on Data and AI. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter:  https://gradientflow.substack.com/Subscribe: Apple • Spotify • Overcast • Pocket Casts • AntennaPod • Podcast Addict • Amazon •  RSS.Detailed show notes - with links to many references - can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

This episode explores the rapidly evolving world of AI agents, covering topics from GUI-based interaction and layered architectures to modular design, safety, and real-world deployment challenges.This episode relies on visuals, to view the visual presentation, go to the Youtube version:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsmBYBqQMIoSubscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter:  https://gradientflow.substack.com/Subscribe: Apple • Spotify • Overcast • Pocket Casts • AntennaPod • Podcast Addict • Amazon •  RSS.Detailed show notes - with links to many references - can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

Tom Smoker is the co-founder of WhyHow.ai, a startup that transforms unstructured data into structured knowledge, including knowledge graphs, enabling enterprises to deploy accurate and explainable AI solutions with its open-source graph tooling.Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter

Andrew Burt is CEO of Luminos AI, a startup that provides AI and legal teams the tools they need to reduce AI liabilities and sign off on AI risks.Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter

Hjalmar Gislason is founder and CEO of Grid, a startup focused on bringing spreadsheets into the AI-first era.Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter:  https://gradientflow.substack.com/Subscribe: Apple • Spotify • Overcast • Pocket Casts • AntennaPod • Podcast Addict • Amazon •  RSS.Detailed show notes - with links to many references - can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

This is our monthly conversation on topics in AI and Technology with Paco Nathan, the founder of Derwen, a boutique consultancy focused on Data and AI.Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter:  https://gradientflow.substack.com/Subscribe: Apple • Spotify • Overcast • Pocket Casts • AntennaPod • Podcast Addict • Amazon •  RSS.Detailed show notes - with links to many references - can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

As AI moves from buzzword status to a core business driver, 2025 will be a turning point for organizations adopting advanced machine learning and generative models. This episode explores pivotal themes—from post-training optimization and agentic AI architectures to emerging regulations and data infrastructure.This episode relies on visuals, to view the visual presentation, go to the Youtube version:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFeUOZJSwFYSubscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter:  https://gradientflow.substack.com/Subscribe: Apple • Spotify • Overcast • Pocket Casts • AntennaPod • Podcast Addict • Amazon •  RSS.Detailed show notes - with links to many references - can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

Generative AI is transforming industries, but its full potential is hampered by a critical bottleneck: data. This episode explores the challenges of processing unstructured data, the shift from SQL-centric to AI-centric systems, and the emerging tools that are bridging the gap between AI models and real-world data.This episode relies on visuals, to view the visual presentation, go to the Youtube version:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnCA8VcCazYSubscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter:  https://gradientflow.substack.com/Subscribe: Apple • Spotify • Overcast • Pocket Casts • AntennaPod • Podcast Addict • Amazon •  RSS.Detailed show notes - with links to many references - can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

Robert Nishihara is co-founder of Anyscale and co-creator of Ray, the open source project that has emerged as the AI Compute Engine.Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter:  https://gradientflow.substack.com/Subscribe: Apple • Spotify • Overcast • Pocket Casts • AntennaPod • Podcast Addict • Amazon •  RSS.Detailed show notes - with links to many references - can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

This is our monthly conversation on topics in AI and Technology with Paco Nathan, the founder of Derwen, a boutique consultancy focused on Data and AI.Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter:  https://gradientflow.substack.com/Subscribe: Apple • Spotify • Overcast • Pocket Casts • AntennaPod • Podcast Addict • Amazon •  RSS.Detailed show notes - with links to many references - can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

Qian Li and Peter Kraft, co-founders at DBOS, Inc., a startup that's building a serverless platform for building highly reliable applications. We dive into DBOS, a system built on Postgres that addresses workflow management and application durability.Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter:  https://gradientflow.substack.com/Subscribe: Apple • Spotify • Overcast • Pocket Casts • AntennaPod • Podcast Addict • Amazon •  RSS.Detailed show notes - with links to many references - can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

Shreya Rajpal serves as CEO and co-founder of Guardrails AI , where she also co-created the popular open-source project Guardrails, a Python framework designed to help developers build reliable AI applications.Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter:  https://gradientflow.substack.com/Subscribe: Apple • Spotify • Overcast • Pocket Casts • AntennaPod • Podcast Addict • Amazon •  RSS.Detailed show notes - with links to many references - can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

Deepti Srivastava is the Founder and CEO of Snow Leopard. We dive into Snow Leopard's innovative approach to data integration, exploring its live data access model that bypasses traditional ETL pipelines to offer real-time data retrieval directly from source systems.Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter:  https://gradientflow.substack.com/Subscribe: Apple • Spotify • Overcast • Pocket Casts • AntennaPod • Podcast Addict • Amazon •  RSS.Detailed show notes - with links to many references - can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

Happy Thanksgiving

This is our monthly conversation on topics in AI and Technology with Paco Nathan, the founder of Derwen, a boutique consultancy focused on Data and AI.Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter:  https://gradientflow.substack.com/Subscribe: Apple • Spotify • Overcast • Pocket Casts • AntennaPod • Podcast Addict • Amazon •  RSS.Detailed show notes - with links to many references - can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

Vasant Dhar is a Professor at the Stern School of Business and the Center for Data Science at NYU. He's one of the creators of the Damodaran Bot, an AI-powered system designed to emulate the valuation analysis and investment insights of renowned finance professor Aswath Damodaran. This episode explores the transformative impact of AI in finance, covering applications such as generative AI, AI-powered valuation bots, systematic investing, and narrative analysis. It delves into the development of an AI valuation bot, discussing motivations, technical approaches, and challenges.Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter:  https://gradientflow.substack.com/Subscribe: Apple • Spotify • Overcast • Pocket Casts • AntennaPod • Podcast Addict • Amazon •  RSS.Detailed show notes - with links to many references - can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

Vaibhav Gupta is the CEO and co-founder of Boundary. In this episode, we explore BAML, an open source domain-specific language designed to streamline interactions with large language models (LLMs). Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter:  https://gradientflow.substack.com/Subscribe: Apple • Spotify • Overcast • Pocket Casts • AntennaPod • Podcast Addict • Amazon •  RSS.Detailed show notes - with links to many references - can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

In this conversation with Tim Persons, AI Leader at PwC, we explore the current landscape of generative AI adoption, examining how enterprises are navigating budget trends, moving from experimentation to full-scale deployment, and addressing cultural challenges along the way.Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter:  https://gradientflow.substack.com/Subscribe: Apple • Spotify • Overcast • Pocket Casts • AntennaPod • Podcast Addict • Amazon •  RSS.Detailed show notes - with links to many references - can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

This is our monthly conversation on topics in AI and Technology with Paco Nathan, the founder of Derwen, a boutique consultancy focused on Data and AI.Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter:  https://gradientflow.substack.com/Subscribe: Apple • Spotify • Overcast • Pocket Casts • AntennaPod • Podcast Addict • Amazon •  RSS.Detailed show notes - with links to many references - can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

Matt Welsh is a technical leader at Aryn AI, an AI-powered ETL system for RAG frameworks, LLM-based applications, and vector databases. In this episode, we explore how AI is revolutionizing programming and software development. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter:  https://gradientflow.substack.com/Subscribe: Apple • Spotify • Overcast • Pocket Casts • AntennaPod • Podcast Addict • Amazon •  RSS.Detailed show notes - with links to many references - can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

Mars Lan, Co-Founder & CTO at Metaphor1, an AI-powered social platform that enhances data governance by empowering all employees, not just data teams, to easily collaborate, search, and share insights through an intuitive, AI-driven interface. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter:  https://gradientflow.substack.com/Subscribe: Apple • Spotify • Overcast • Pocket Casts • AntennaPod • Podcast Addict • Amazon •  RSS.Detailed show notes - with links to many references - can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

Yishay Carmiel is the CEO of Meaning, a startup building real-time generative AI systems focused on voice applications.Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter:  https://gradientflow.substack.com/Subscribe: Apple • Spotify • Overcast • Pocket Casts • AntennaPod • Podcast Addict • Amazon •  RSS.Detailed show notes - with links to many references - can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

Aurimas Griciūnas is the  Chief Product Officer of Neptune.AI, a startup building experiment tracking tools for foundation model training. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter:  https://gradientflow.substack.com/Subscribe: Apple • Spotify • Overcast • Pocket Casts • AntennaPod • Podcast Addict • Amazon •  RSS.Detailed show notes - with links to many references - can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

This is our monthly conversation on topics in AI and Technology with Paco Nathan, the founder of Derwen, a boutique consultancy focused on Data and AI.Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter:  https://gradientflow.substack.com/Subscribe: Apple • Spotify • Overcast • Pocket Casts • AntennaPod • Podcast Addict • Amazon •  RSS.Detailed show notes - with links to many references - can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

Petros Zerfos and Hima Patel of IBM Research are part of the team behind Data Prep Kit, an open-source toolkit that helps process and prepare raw text and code data at scale for use in large language model applications.Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter:  https://gradientflow.substack.com/Subscribe: Apple • Spotify • Overcast • Pocket Casts • AntennaPod • Podcast Addict • Amazon •  RSS.Detailed show notes - with links to many references - can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

Dr. Andrew Ng is a globally recognized AI leader, founder of DeepLearning.AI and Landing AI, General Partner at AI Fund, Chairman and Co-Founder of Coursera, and Adjunct Professor at Stanford University. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter:  https://gradientflow.substack.com/Subscribe: Apple • Spotify • Overcast • Pocket Casts • AntennaPod • Podcast Addict • Amazon •  RSS.Detailed show notes - with links to many references - can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

Jay Dawani is CEO and founder of Lemurian Labs, a pioneering startup building a software stack for developing advanced AI systems, focusing on pushing the boundaries of computational capabilities and model performance.Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter:  https://gradientflow.substack.com/Subscribe: Apple • Spotify • Overcast • Pocket Casts • AntennaPod • Podcast Addict • Amazon •  RSS.Detailed show notes - with links to many references - can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

This is our monthly conversation on topics in AI and Technology with Paco Nathan, the founder of Derwen, a boutique consultancy focused on Data and AI.Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter:  https://gradientflow.substack.com/Subscribe: Apple • Spotify • Overcast • Pocket Casts • AntennaPod • Podcast Addict • Amazon •  RSS.Detailed show notes - with links to many references - can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

Evangelos Simoudis is Managing Director at Synapse Partners, a firm that assists corporations in implementing AI solutions, and invests in startups developing applications that exploit data using AI.Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter:  https://gradientflow.substack.com/Subscribe: Apple • Spotify • Overcast • Pocket Casts • AntennaPod • Podcast Addict • Amazon •  RSS.Detailed show notes - with links to many references - can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

Shuveb Hussain is co-founder of Unstract, a no-code platform that uses large language models to extract structured data from unstructured documents, allowing users to build API endpoints and ETL pipelines to automate document processing workflows. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter:  https://gradientflow.substack.com/Subscribe: Apple • Spotify • Overcast • Pocket Casts • AntennaPod • Podcast Addict • Amazon •  RSS.Detailed show notes - with links to many references - can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

Alfred Spector's distinguished career includes groundbreaking work in networked computing systems and leadership roles in research at IBM, Google, and Two Sigma Investments. He is currently a visiting scholar at MIT.Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter:  https://gradientflow.substack.com/Subscribe: Apple • Spotify • Overcast • Pocket Casts • AntennaPod • Podcast Addict • Amazon •  RSS.Detailed show notes - with links to many references - can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

This is our monthly conversation on trending topics in AI and Technology with Paco Nathan, the founder of Derwen, a boutique consultancy focused on Data and AI.Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter:  https://gradientflow.substack.com/Subscribe: Apple • Spotify • Overcast • Pocket Casts • AntennaPod • Podcast Addict • Amazon •  RSS.Detailed show notes - with links to many references - can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

Andrew Burt is co-founder of both Luminos.Law and Luminos.ai, entities building tools to help companies mitigate and manage AI risks. We dive into the critical topic of AI incident response, highlighting its unique challenges compared to traditional software incidents.Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter:  https://gradientflow.substack.com/Subscribe: Apple • Spotify • Overcast • Pocket Casts • AntennaPod • Podcast Addict • Amazon •  RSS.Detailed show notes can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

Chang She is CEO and co-founder of LanceDB, an open-source database designed for multimodal AI applications, offering scalable vector search, streaming training data, and interactive exploration of large AI datasets. In this episode we discuss Lance, an open-source columnar data format that tackles the unique challenges posed by modern AI and machine learning workloads.Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter:  https://gradientflow.substack.com/Subscribe: Apple • Spotify • Overcast • Pocket Casts • AntennaPod • Podcast Addict • Amazon •  RSS.Detailed show notes can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

Ajay Kulkarni and Mike Freedman are the co-founders of Timescale, a startup that provides an enhanced version of PostgreSQL optimized for time-series analytics, AI applications, and scalable relational workloads. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter:  https://gradientflow.substack.com/Subscribe: Apple • Spotify • Overcast • Pocket Casts • AntennaPod • Podcast Addict • Amazon •  RSS.Detailed show notes can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

Philip Rathle, CTO of Neo4j, joins the podcast to discuss the rising popularity of graph-enhanced retrieval augmented generation (GraphRAG).  He also discusses the potential impact of the new GQL graph query language standard. [Link to the demo that Philip showed.]Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter:  https://gradientflow.substack.com/Subscribe: Apple • Spotify • Overcast • Pocket Casts • AntennaPod • Podcast Addict • Amazon •  RSS.Detailed show notes can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

Paco Nathan is the founder of Derwen, a boutique consultancy focused on Data and AI. This episode is part of our series of monthly roundups and covers: the proposed California Senate Bill 1047 for regulating AI models, including its feasibility and potential unintended consequences. We also discuss the rising popularity of graph retrieval augmented generation (GraphRAG) techniques to mitigate hallucinations in large language models, while acknowledging the current limitations and future potential of integrating symbolic and statistical AI approaches. Additionally, we explore the concept of AI avatars in the workplace, highlighting the challenges and ethical considerations surrounding digital twins and agent-based systems.Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter:  https://gradientflow.substack.com/Subscribe: Apple • Spotify • Overcast • Pocket Casts • AntennaPod • Podcast Addict • Amazon •  RSS.Detailed show notes can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

Jiwoo Hong and  Noah Lee of KAIST AI are co-authors of ORPO: Monolithic Preference Optimization without Reference Model. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter:  https://gradientflow.substack.com/Subscribe: Apple • Spotify • Overcast • Pocket Casts • AntennaPod • Podcast Addict • Amazon •  RSS.Detailed show notes can be found on The Data Exchange web site.