AI Roundtable: Where Do We Stand and What's Next? | Ep 14
Episode Summary
A panel of AI and machine learning practitioners—Joel Foreman (Director of AI at Airworks), Nicos Vasilioglou (VP of Research at Relational AI), and Kevin (Partner at TechCXO)—discuss the current state of AI, distinguishing hype from reality, practical applications, and future directions. They explore LLM capabilities, ethical concerns around training data, the need for AI infrastructure standards, and emerging opportunities in medicine, optimization, and enterprise applications.
Pull Quotes
On why technical founders struggle with calling their work 'AI'
“I think engineers tend to undersell what they do, even when they're trying to oversell it. And I think the engineering marketing interaction is part of what's just playing out there.”
On whether LLMs truly reason or just predict tokens
“Even if you are a parrot, you're a very smart parrot. If you can win math olympiads and you can solve problems and you can solve geometry, even if you are a parrot, from a business perspective it doesn't really matter.”
“I'm concerned about is that we're moving into an area where it's seen as knowledge instead of information and I think that's the risk in overreliance on LLMs.”
On why AI adoption requires cleaning up enterprise data
“Language models are basically forcing us to tidy up our mess and our technical debt so that they can actually work. It's giving you motivations like, you know, if you don't tidy up your room, we're not going out tonight.”
“We haven't seen a company that could have existed without language models. It's language models first. I think we expect more innovation on the business side.”
Transcript
Hi welcome to Tales From The Sky Lounge, a podcast about business consulting and venture investing. We get out there in the world and we talk to people who are making it happen and get their stories. If you could like and subscribe it really helps us get our message out.
So today we have a special treat in the Sky Lounge. We have a panel of very smart AI machine learning people. So hello Joel, Nick, and Kevin, it's good to have you here on the Sky Lounge.
Hey, good to meet you here. Yeah Joel, why don't you start us off and tell us a little bit about you and what you're working on.
Sure, hi. I'm Joel Foreman, director of AI at Airworks. So Airworks is a company that works on making sense of the world around us from overhead imagery, LIDAR, and all sorts of other different data streams. We largely work in the construction and transportation industry along with some government work. So most of what I'm up to lately is getting overhead imagery and then trying to draw blueprints automatically from it with AI and trying to do 3D stuff with that as well. A little bit more about me, I went to University of Michigan where I got my PhD in mechanical engineering focused on control systems. I spent seven years in consulting after that doing a bunch of different things with some machine learning on microscopes for product defects and spent a year and a half for a defense contractor doing more machine learning, trying to make radar and RC farther, among other things. I've been at Airworks about two and a half years.
Nick, why don't you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you're working on.
Want to go deeper?
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