Gradient Dissent: Conversations on 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 […]
In this episode of Gradient Dissent, Lukas Biewald talks with Tuhin Srivastava, CEO and founder of Baseten, one of the fastest-growing companies in the AI inference ecosystem. Tuhin shares the real story behind Baseten’s rise and how the market finally aligned with the infrastructure they’d spent years building. They get into the core challenges of […]
In this episode of Gradient Dissent, Lukas Biewald talks with the CEO & founder of Surge AI, the billion-dollar company quietly powering the next generation of frontier LLMs. They discuss Surge’s origin story, why traditional data labeling is broken, and how their research-focused approach is reshaping how models are trained. You’ll hear why inter-annotator agreement […]
In this episode of Gradient Dissent, Lukas Biewald sits down with Arvind Jain, CEO and founder of Glean. They discuss Glean’s evolution from solving enterprise search to building agentic AI tools that understand internal knowledge and workflows. Arvind shares how his early use of transformer models in 2019 laid the foundation for Glean’s success, well […]
In this episode of Gradient Dissent, Lukas Biewald talks with Martin Shkreli — the infamous “pharma bro” turned founder — about his path from hedge fund manager and pharma CEO to convicted felon and now software entrepreneur. Shkreli shares his side of the drug pricing controversy, reflects on his prison...
In this episode of Gradient Dissent, host Lukas Biewald talks with Sualeh Asif, the CPO and co-founder of Cursor, one of the fastest-growing and most loved AI-powered coding platforms. Sualeh shares the story behind Cursor’s creation, the technical and design decisions that set it apart, and how AI models are...
In this episode of Gradient Dissent, host Lukas Biewald talks with Christopher Ahlberg, CEO of Recorded Future, a pioneering cybersecurity company leveraging AI to provide intelligence insights. Christopher shares his fascinating journey from founding data visualization startup Spotfire to building Recorded Future into an industry leader, eventually leading to its...
In this episode of Gradient Dissent, host Lukas Biewald speaks with Captain Jon Haase, United States Navy about real-world applications of AI and autonomy in defense. From underwater mine detection with autonomous vehicles to the ethics of lethal AI systems, this conversation dives into how the U.S. military is integrating...
In this episode of Gradient Dissent, host Lukas Biewald sits down with João Moura, CEO & Founder of CrewAI, one of the leading platforms enabling AI agents for enterprise applications. Joe shares insights into how AI agents are being successfully deployed in over 40% of Fortune 500 companies, what tools...
In this episode of Gradient Dissent, host Lukas Biewald sits down with Mike Knoop, Co-founder and CEO of Ndea, a cutting-edge AI research lab. Mike shares his journey from building Zapier into a major automation platform to diving into the frontiers of AI research. They discuss DeepSeek’s R1, OpenAI’s O-series...