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We probe the sharpest minds in AI in search for the truth about what’s real today, what will be real in the future and what it all means for businesses and the world. If you’re a builder, researcher or investor navigating the AI world, this podcast will help you deconstruct and understand the most important breakthroughs and see a clearer picture of reality. Follow this show and consider enabling notifications to stay up to date on our latest episodes.
Unsupervised Learning is a podcast by Redpoint Ventures, an early-stage venture capital fund that has invested in companies like Snowflake, Stripe, and Mistral.
Hosted by Redpoint investor Jacob Effron alongside Patrick Chase, Jordan Segall and Erica Brescia.
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Ep 96: Nebius CTO on Racing the Hyperscalers Before AWS Wakes Up
Nebius CTO Danila Shtan joins Jacob Effron to talk about what it takes to run an AI cloud at the frontier, and why he thinks the hyperscalers haven’t won this market yet. Today Nebius is a Nasdaq-listed AI cloud with infrastructure deals wi
Ep 95: Modal CEO on the Future of Inference, the Chaos of the GPU Market & Origins of the Sandbox Bet
Jacob Effron and Pat Chase sit down with Erik Bernhardsson, co-founder and CEO of Modal, for his second appearance on Unsupervised Learning, now with the company past a $1B run rate. They dig into how the AI compute market actually works be
Ep 94: Applied Compute CEO on the Limits of RL, the New AI Hyperscaler & Why Post-Training Wins Inference
Yash Patil, a former OpenAI researcher who worked on Codex and now runs Applied Compute, argues that post-training is the most overlooked part of the AI stack and the key to owning your intelligence. He explains when companies should optimi
Ep 93: CEO of Redwood Research Buck Shlegeris on OpenAI/HuggingFace Revelations, Fixing AI Safety & Takeover Odds
Jacob sits down with Buck Shlegeris, CEO of Redwood Research, one of the organizations that led the independent investigation into OpenAI/Hugging Face's incident. They dig into the incident itself, Buck's reactions to it, and what he believ
AI Vibe Check: Chinese Open Models, Distillation & The Hugging Face Breach
In this installment of their recurring roundtable, Jacob, Ari, and Rob dig into the accelerating Chinese open-source model race, debating whether Kimi K3 has actually closed the gap with the US frontier or just looks like it has, and whethe
Ep 92: xAI Co-Founder Unpacks the Future of Model Development
Igor Babuschkin, co-founder of River AI and formerly a co-founder of xAI, joins to unpack a career that spans nearly every major AI lab: he led the StarCraft and AlphaCode work at DeepMind, joined OpenAI's reasoning team years before o1 shi
Ep 91: Top AI Analyst Unpacks Today's AI Hype Cycle
Benedict Evans, one of tech's most widely-read analysts, joins Jacob Effron. The conversation centers on Benedict's core thesis that comparing AI's scale to past platform shifts (the internet, mobile, PCs) is analytically useless, and that
Ep 90: AI Pioneer Jürgen Schmidhuber on the State of AI Today
Dr. Jürgen Schmidhuber, a renowned scientist and AI researcher widely regarded as one of the pioneers in the field, originated key ideas behind today's transformers, LSTMs, and recursive self-improvement through his lab's work. He argues th
AI Vibe Check: Lab Wars, Why APIs Might Vanish & Future Predictions
Six months after their last roundup, Jacob sits down with Ari Morcos (Datology AI CEO, former Meta AI researcher) and Rob Toews (Radical Ventures partner, Forbes AI columnist) to take stock of an AI landscape that has shifted dramatically:
Ep 89: AI Research Legend’s Honest Assessment of Where We Are
This episode with Lukasz Kaiser, co-author of the seminal "Attention Is All You Need" transformer paper and former researcher at both Google Brain and OpenAI, is a wide-ranging conversation about the fundamental limits of current AI archite
Ep 88: Unpacking DeepMind's Quest for SuperIntelligence with Demis Hassabis' Biographer
Sebastian Mallaby spent three years and 30+ hours interviewing Demis Hassabis in the back of a British pub to write The Infinity Machine, and the conversation uses that reporting to surface the most underexplored figure in AI. Demis founded
Ep 87: Gemini Co-Lead on World Models, RL's Next Domains & Continual Learning
Oriol Vinyals, VP of Research at Google DeepMind and co-lead of the Gemini program, joins Jacob the day after Google I/O to unpack the research underpinning Google's latest announcements and where frontier AI is heading. The conversation mo
Ep 86: Yann LeCun on Leaving Meta, Breaking The LLM Paradigm, & Why Hinton is Wrong
Yann LeCun, Turing Award winner and former Chief AI Scientist at Meta, joins Jacob Effron. The conversation centers on Yann's contrarian thesis that LLMs are a dead-end on the path to human-level intelligence, despite being useful products
Ep 85: Has AI Infra Stabilized, FM Vibe Shift, & What's Next for Coding Agents
This episode is a wide-ranging conversation between Jacob and Swyx (Shawn Wang), an AI engineer, podcaster, and now operator at Cognition, who sits at a uniquely informed intersection of builder, investor, and community organizer in the AI
Ep 84: OpenAI’s Chief Scientist on Continual Learning Hype, RL Beyond Code, & Future Alignment Directions
Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI's Chief Scientist, sits down with Jacob to cover the full arc of where AI research stands today and where it's headed. The conversation spans the explosive growth of coding agents and what it signals about near-term A
Ep 83: Owning the System of Record, AI-Native Org Charts, & Why ITSM is The Most Vulnerable Legacy Category
Serval is one of the fastest-growing AI-native enterprise software companies right now, and this episode is a rare inside look at the deliberate architectural, go-to-market, and talent decisions behind that growth. Jake Stauch breaks down w
Ep 82: Behind Legora's $550M Raise, Model Competition, Doubling Revenue Every Quarter, & US Expansion
Max Junestrand, CEO of Legora, joins Jacob Effron and Logan Bartlett to discuss the company's $550M Series D and share a candid account of what building an AI-native company at speed actually looks like from the inside. Max argues that the
Ep 81: Ex-OpenAI Researcher On Why He Left, His Honest AGI Timeline, & The Limits of Scaling RL
This episode features Jerry Tworek, a key architect behind OpenAI's breakthrough reasoning models (o1, o3) and Codex, discussing the current state and future of AI. Jerry explores the real limits and promise of scaling pre-training and rein
AI Vibe Check: The Actual Bottleneck In Research, SSI’s Mystique, & Spicy 2026 Predictions
Ari Morcos and Rob Toews return for their spiciest conversation yet. Fresh from NeurIPS, they debate whether models are truly plateauing or if we're just myopically focused on LLMs while breakthroughs happen in other modalities. They reveal
Ep 80: CEO of Surge AI Edwin Chen on Why Frontier Labs Are Diverging, RL Environments & Developing Model Taste
Edwin Chen is the founder and CEO of Surge AI, the data infrastructure company behind nearly every major frontier model. Surge works with OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google, providing the high-quality data and evaluation infrastructure tha
Ep 79: OpenAI's Head of Product on How the Best Teams Build, Ship and Scale AI Products
This episode features Olivier Godement, Head of Product for Business Products at OpenAI, discussing the current state and future of AI adoption in enterprises, with a particular focus on the recent releases of GPT 5.1 and Codex. The convers
Ep 78: Jordan Schneider, Host of China Talk, on AI Race, Key Policy Decisions & Unpacking Geopolitical Chip Tension
This week on Unsupervised Learning, Jacob Effron is joined by Jordan Schneider, host of China Talk, who challenges widespread assumptions about US-China AI competition. China's AI development is driven by private capital and market competit
Ep 77: Anthropic’s Dianne Na Penn on Opus 4.5, Rethinking Model Scaffolding & Safety as a Competitive Advantage
This episode features Dianne Na Penn, a senior product leader at Anthropic, discussing the launch of Claude Opus 4.5 and the evolution of frontier AI models. The conversation explores how Anthropic approaches model development—balancing amb
Ep 76: Sora Creators Bill Peebles, Rohan Sahai & Thomas Dimson on Their Unexpected Viral Success
This episode features the core team behind Sora, OpenAI's groundbreaking video generation platform that became the #1 app in the App Store. Bill Peebles (research lead), Rohan Sahai (product lead), and Thomas Dimson (engineering/product lea
AI Round Up: Ari Morcos from Datalogy AI and Rob Toews from Radical VC on Karpathy Reactions, OpenAI’s Dealmaking, & Bubble Reality Check
This episode features Rob Toews from Radical Ventures and Ari Morcos, Head of Research at Datology AI, reacting to Andrej Karpathy's recent statement that AGI is at least a decade away and that current AI capabilities are "slop." The discus
AI Round Up: Ari Morcos from Datalogy AI and Rob Toews from Radical VC on AI Talent Wars, xAI’s $200B Valuation, & Google’s Comeback
This episode features a deep dive into the current state of AI model progress with Ari Morcos (CEO of Datalogy AI and former DeepMind/Meta researcher) and Rob Toews (partner at Radical Ventures). The conversation tackles whether model progr
Ep 75: Nano Banana’s Oliver Wang and Nicole Brichtova - Behind the Breakthrough as Gemini Tops the Charts
Fill out this short listener survey to help us improve the show: https://forms.gle/bbcRiPTRwKoG2tJx8 This week on Unsupervised Learning, Jacob sits down with Nicole Brichtova and Oliver Wang, the Google researchers behind "Nano Banana" - th
Ep 74: Chief Scientist of Together.AI Tri Dao On The End of Nvidia's Dominance, Why Inference Costs Fell & The Next 10X in Speed
Fill out this short listener survey to help us improve the show: https://forms.gle/bbcRiPTRwKoG2tJx8 Tri Dao, Chief Scientist at Together AI and Princeton professor who created Flash Attention and Mamba, discusses how inference optimization
Ep 73: General Partner of Felicis Peter Deng on on AI Pricing Tactics, Reaction to GPT-5 & Why Voice is Underrated
In this episode, Jacob sits down with Peter Deng, General Partner at Felicis and former Product Leader at OpenAI, Facebook, and Uber. Peter shares his insider perspective on building ChatGPT Enterprise in just seven weeks and leading voice
Ep 72: Co-Founder of Chai Discovery Joshua Meier on 99% Faster Drug Discovery, BioTech’s AlphaGo Moment, Building Photoshop for Molecules
In this episode, Jacob sits down with Joshua Meier, co-founder of Chai Discovery and former Chief AI Officer at Absci, to explore the breakthrough moment happening in AI drug discovery. They discuss how the field has evolved through three d
