Gradient Dissent: Conversations on AI

Hosted by Lukas Biewald

TechnologyInterviews guestsExplicit

Website RSS feed

Episodes

137

Latest episode

May 2026

Language

About the show

Join Lukas Biewald on Gradient Dissent, an AI-focused podcast brought to you by Weights & Biases. Dive into fascinating conversations with industry giants from NVIDIA, Meta, Google, Lyft, OpenAI, and more. Explore the cutting-edge of AI and learn the intricacies of bringing models into production.

Listen to episodes

60 recent

June 16, 20261 hr 14 min

He's Building an AI That Can't Lie | Dan Klein

"We are going to switch from the problem in AI being that nothing works to the problem being that everything works."Dan Klein has been studying language models for over two decades and is now a professor of computer science at Berkeley. His new company, Scaled Cognition, is built around one question: how do you build a system that will not lie to you?In this episode, Dan joins Lukas Biewald to talk about why every LLM output is technically a hallucination, how reinforcement learning can quietly teach AI to deceive you, and what it actually takes to build models that check their own work.He also gets into why reliability is the one part of AI that hasn't kept pace and why that matters more than most people realize.Connect with us here: Dan KleinScaled CognitionLukas BiewaldWeights and Biases

May 26, 20261 hr 14 min

He Raised $70M to Cure Every Disease With AI | Samuel G. Rodriques, Edison Scientific

Samuel Rodriques left physics because there were no unsolved problems left.Instead, he built an AI scientist named Kosmos to cure every disease, solve aging, and map the human brain.In this episode:The cure his AI proposed for blindnessWhy he would never touch a peptideWhether we'll need human scientists in 20 yearsWhat's stopping America in drug discoveryConnect with us here:Samuel RodriquesEdison ScientificLukas BiewaldWeights & Biases

April 15, 202645 min

Uber, Nissan, and Mercedes Chose This Self-Driving Startup | Alex Kendall, Wayve

"Every vehicle is capable of driverless operation. That's clearly the steady state of where we're going."Wayve started in a rented house in Cambridge with $1.5M, a car in the garage, and an aim to integrate end-to-end AI into driving. A decade later it's driven across 506 cities without a single HD map and is worth over $8.6 billion.In this episode, CEO Alex Kendall joins Lukas Biewald to talk about how he built the AI driver Uber, Nvidia, Mercedes, and Nissan all backed, and why putting self-driving AI into 100 million cars a year is a far bigger bet than 10,000 robotaxis.Waymo and Tesla both come up. He doesn't shy away.Connect with us here: Alex KendallLukas BiewaldWayveWeights and Biases

March 31, 202643 min

Why Netflix, Uber, and Spotify Never Lag: The Database Nobody Talks About | Aaron Katz

"Companies designing for agents, not humans, are going to get a lot of lift."ClickHouse started as an internal tool at Yandex. Today it's the database Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta and Tesla all run on.In this episode, CEO Aaron Katz joins Lukas Biewald to talk about how he turned an open source project into a $15B company, why he acquired LangFuse knowing it could cost him customers, and what he's actually building for the agent era.Snowflake, Datadog and Databricks all come up. He doesn't shy away.Connect with us here:Aaron Katz: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaron-katz-5762094ClickHouse: https://www.linkedin.com/company/clickhouseinc/Lukas Biewald: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lbiewald/Weights and Biases: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wandb/00:00 Trailer00:57 The Origin Story: From Yandex to ClickHouse Inc.04:43 Building ClickHouse Cloud & Raising $300M10:36 Growing Up Around Xerox PARC12:51 Salesforce, Mark Benioff & the Dot-Com Bust15:32 Cloud Skeptics vs. AI Skeptics | History Repeating18:05 Building a Modern Go-To-Market Playbook21:57 The SaaS Crash, Agents & the Future of Infrastructure27:09 The Datadog Love-Hate Story35:21 Hardest Moments: Russia, SVB & Sleepless Nights43:16 Outro

February 5, 202650 min

The $64M Bet on an AI That Has to Be Right | Carina Hong, CEO of Axiom

Formal verification already consumes years of human effort.In this episode, Lukas Biewald talks with Carina Hong, Founder & CEO of Axiom, about why verification is becoming the real bottleneck in high stakes AI systems.They discuss how Axiom uses AI to take on the tedious checking that stretches verification cycles across years, starting with formal mathematics and extending to hardware and software.Carina also explains why Axiom’s approach to auto-formalization mirrors spec driven models like Kiro from AWS.Connect with us here:Carina Hong: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carina-hong/Axiom: https://www.linkedin.com/company/axiommath/Lukas Biewald: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lbiewald/Weights & Biases: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wandb/

January 20, 20261 hr 7 min

What a $42B Software Co. Really Spends on AI Tools

“I don't worry about being replaced by AI. I worry about being replaced by someone who's really good at using AI.”Atlassian has 10,000+ engineers currently split-testing the world’s top AI coding tools, from GitHub Copilot and Cursor to Claude Code. In this episode, Co-Founder & CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes joins Lukas Biewald to share what their data reveals about the world's best AI tools today.Hear how 24 years of building a tech giant and a massive internal study on AI productivity have shaped Mike's vision for the future of dev jobs.Connect with us here:Mike Cannon-Brookes: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mcannonbrookes/?originalSubdomain=auAtlassian: https://www.linkedin.com/company/atlassian/?viewAsMember=trueLukas Biewald: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lbiewald/ Weights & Biases: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wandb/00:00 Trailer01:08 Introduction03:11 Connecting Technology and Business Teams07:22 The Impact of AI on Business Workflows13:26 Developer Productivity and AI21:03 Measuring Developer Efficiency25:41 Future of AI in Development34:59 Legacy Technology and Code Changes39:29 AI's Role in Developer Productivity47:40 AI and Junior Developers52:30 Product-Led Growth and Business Strategy01:00:29 Core Metrics for Sustainable Growth01:06:56 Staying Creative in the Tech Industry

January 6, 202653 min

Inside the $41B AI Cloud Challenging Big Tech | CoreWeave SVP

The future of AI training is shaped by one constraint: keeping GPUs fed.In this episode, Lukas Biewald talks with CoreWeave SVP Corey Sanders about why general-purpose clouds start to break down under large-scale AI workloads.According to Corey, the industry is shifting toward a "Neo Cloud" model to handle the unique demands of modern models.They dive into the hardware and software stack required to maximize GPU utilization and achieve high goodput.Corey’s conclusion is clear: AI demands specialization.Connect with us here:Corey Sanders: https://www.linkedin.com/in/corey-sanders-842b72/ CoreWeave: https://www.linkedin.com/company/coreweave/ Lukas Biewald: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lbiewald/ Weights & Biases: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wandb/(00:00) Trailer(00:57) Introduction(02:51) The Evolution of AI Workloads(06:22) Core Weave's Technological Innovations(13:58) Customer Engagement and Future Prospects(28:49) Comparing Cloud Approaches(33:50) Balancing Executive Roles and Hands-On Projects(46:44) Product Development and Customer Feedback

December 16, 20251 hr 0 min

Why Physical AI Needed a Completely New Data Stack

The future of AI is physical. In this episode, Lukas Biewald talks to Nikolaus West, CEO of Rerun, about why the breakthrough required to get AI out of the lab and into the messy real world is blocked by poor data tooling. Nikolaus explains how Rerun solved this by adopting an Entity Component System (ECS), a data model built for games, to handle complex, multimodal, time-aware sensor data. This is the technology that makes solving previously impossible tasks, like flexible manipulation, suddenly feel "boring." Connect with us here: Nikolaus West: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikolauswest/Rerun: https://www.linkedin.com/company/rerun-io/Lukas Biewald: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lbiewald/Weights & Biases: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wandb/

December 1, 202514 min

The Engineering Behind the World’s Most Advanced Video 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 of the most compute-intensive areas of machine learning.Cristóbal breaks down the architecture behind Gen 4.5 and explains the role of “taste” in model development. He details the engineering improvements in motion and camera control that solve long-standing issues like the restrictive “tripod look,” and shares why video models are starting to function as simulation engines with applications beyond media generation.Connect with us here:Cristóbal Valenzuela: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cvalenzuelabRunway: https://www.linkedin.com/company/runwayml/Lukas Biewald: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lbiewald/Weights & Biases: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wandb/

November 18, 202559 min

The CEO Behind the Fastest-Growing AI Inference Company | Tuhin Srivastava

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 modern inference, including why dedicated deployments matter, how runtime and infrastructure bottlenecks stack up, and what makes serving large models fundamentally different from smaller ones.Tuhin also explains how vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, and SGLang differ in practice, what it takes to tune workloads for new chips like the B200, and why reliability becomes harder as systems scale. The conversation dives into company-building, from killing product lines to avoiding premature scaling while navigating a market that shifts every few weeks.Connect with us here: Tuhin Srivastva: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tuhin-srivastava/ Lukas Biewald: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lbiewald/Weights & Biases: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wandb/