The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica

Hosted by Ben Lorica

Technology Business News

Website RSS feed LinkedIn YouTube

Episodes

362

Latest episode

Aug 2026

Language

EN-US

About the show

A series of informal conversations with thought leaders, researchers, practitioners, and writers on a wide range of topics in technology, science, and of course big data, data science, artificial intelligence, and related applications. Anchored by Ben Lorica (@BigData), the Data Exchange also features a roundup of the most important stories from the worlds of data, machine learning and AI. Detailed show notes for each episode can be found on https://thedataexchange.media/ The Data Exchange podcast is a production of Gradient Flow [https://gradientflow.com/].

Listen to episodes

60 recent

August 13, 202645 min

The Bloomberg Terminal for AI Compute

Steve Hou , Head of Research at Silicon Data , joins Ben Lorica to unpack the data behind the AI compute market: GPU rental indices, forward curves, and token expenditure trends that reveal a market still tightening despite talk of oversupply. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩 https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon · RSS . Detailed show notes and transcript, can be found on The Data Exchange web site .

August 8, 202654 min

Can China Do to Robotaxis What It Did to Solar?

Ben Lorica talks with Evangelos Simoudis about three forces reshaping AI: why recent “rogue agent” incidents may be more about permissions, identity, and governance than runaway intelligence; how the belief that AGI is near is helping sustain enormous investment in AI models and data centers despite unanswered questions about margins and ROI; and whether Chinese robotaxi companies can challenge Waymo globally by following a playbook similar to China’s rise in solar and batteries. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩 https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon · RSS . Detailed show notes and transcript, can be found on The Data Exchange web site .

August 6, 202639 min

Why Video Is AI's Next Great Frontier

Yoon Kim , President and Chief Strategy Officer of TwelveLabs , explains why understanding video takes more than bolting a language model onto a stream of frames. He walks through how TwelveLabs’ two foundation models, Marengo and Pegasus, embed and describe video content at scale, and how the company’s new agent, Jockey, orchestrates them for tasks like security investigations, sports film review, and documentary editing. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩 https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon · RSS . Detailed show notes and transcript, can be found on The Data Exchange web site .

July 30, 202626 min

Your AI Safety Tests Are Lying to You

Andrew Burt , CEO and co-founder of Luminos , joins Ben Lorica to unpack Luminos’s new report, A Practical Guide to Agentic and Gen AI Risk Evals . Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩 https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon · RSS . Detailed show notes and transcript, can be found on The Data Exchange web site .

July 23, 202636 min

Enterprise AI Is Moving Slower Than You Think

Ben Lorica speaks with Denise Teng , partner at Gradient Ventures , about the real state of enterprise AI adoption, why security and data privacy still slow deployment, and why open weights may become increasingly important for regulated industries. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩 https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon · RSS . Detailed show notes and transcript, can be found on The Data Exchange web site .

July 16, 202650 min

Why Observability May Be AI’s Next Frontier

Ameet Talwalkar , Carnegie Mellon ML professor and Chief Scientist at Datadog , joins Ben Lorica to trace time series foundation models from skepticism to Datadog’s Toto V1 and V2 . Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩 https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon · RSS . Detailed show notes and transcript, can be found on The Data Exchange web site .

July 11, 202656 min

AI Is Producing More Code, but Is It Producing More Value?

Ben Lorica sits down with Evangelos Simoudis to unpack why open-weights models are closing the gap with frontier labs and pushing enterprises toward “corporate AI sovereignty.” They then apply an attenuation-funnel lens to AI coding tools — more code, but far less shipped software and usage growth — before turning to “neoconsulting,” the outcomes-based services model reshaping Accenture, Palantir, and the big Indian IT firms. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩 https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon · RSS . Detailed show notes and transcript, can be found on The Data Exchange web site .

July 9, 202653 min

Stop Renting Generic Intelligence for Your Business

Manos Koukoumidis , CEO of Oumi , returns to the podcast to make the case that most enterprises are wildly inefficient, using bloated generic AI models for tasks that demand specialized ones. He argues that companies should stop renting intelligence from frontier labs and start owning, customizing, and compounding it. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩 https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon · RSS . Detailed show notes and transcript, can be found on The Data Exchange web site .

July 2, 202650 min

The Data Layer Enterprise AI Has Been Missing

Andrew Moore , CEO of Lovelace , former head of Google Cloud AI, and former dean of Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science, joins the podcast to discuss YottaGraph , a knowledge graph growing by a billion facts a week that serves as a context engine for enterprise AI agents. He explains why fully automatic knowledge graph construction is the only viable path at scale, why entity resolution remains a brutal engineering problem, and how graph theory tricks make million-node queries answerable in under a second. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩 https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon · RSS . Detailed show notes and transcript, can be found on The Data Exchange web site .

June 25, 202651 min

The Hidden Failure Modes of AI Agents

Ben Lorica speaks with Helen Gu , CEO of InsightFinder AI and professor at North Carolina State University, about why reliability is becoming a central challenge for enterprise AI. They discuss AI incident response, monitoring agents in production, domain-specific small language models, causal inference for operational data, and why the “last 1%” of accuracy and reliability is often the hardest part of deploying AI 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 and transcript, can be found on The Data Exchange web site .