Latest Interviews

'The Future of Software With GenAI' by Marek Kalnik, Group Partner Theodo | RAISE Summit 2024

Marek Kalnik

Industry leaders and enterprise innovators are rapidly integrating generative AI tools like GitHub Copilot and autonomous agents into software production, with over one million paid licenses and near-universal developer exposure driving a shift from simple automation to system-wide architectural redesign. As AI capabilities mature to solve 13–14% of real-world tasks autonomously and achieve high correctness on coding benchmarks, organizations are evolving from "co-pilot" models toward two-tiered structures where machines handle execution while humans focus on high-level design, quality assurance, and security-sensitive asset creation. This transformation promises to redefine team roles, reduce development costs, and enable new business models centered on personalized software and legacy system maintenance.

Keynote by Wes Cummins, CEO and Co-Founder of Applied Digital | RAISE Summit 2024 | Paris

Wes Cummins

Applied Digital CEO Wes Cummings outlined the company's strategic pivot from blockchain mining to purpose-built, high-power-density data centers located near renewable energy generation to address the critical power scarcity driving AI expansion. By co-locating liquid-cooled facilities with wind farms and utilizing curtailed energy, the firm aims to deliver over 400 megawatts of capacity while serving early enterprise customers like Character AI. This infrastructure shift responds to a market bottleneck where forecasts predict US data center power needs could quadruple by 2030, far exceeding historical construction rates.

Responsible AI Activation: Governance AI | RAISE Summit 2024 | Paris

Teos, Nicole Butna, Shyam Nagarajan, Rinald Manohar

Moderated by INSEAD professor Theos, a panel of AI strategy experts Nicole Butna, IBM consultant Shyam Nagarajan, and blockchain specialist Rinald Manohar identified critical risks such as human dependency on automation, data poisoning, and the potential for un-audited systems to mirror financial crises. The discussion established a consensus that effective AI governance must evolve from reactive compliance to proactive "ethics by design," requiring board-level oversight and multi-party accountability to manage self-evolving models and synthetic data feedback loops. To bridge the current maturity gap and regulatory skepticism, the panel advocated for treating AI governance as essential infrastructure comparable to financial auditing, emphasizing shared global values and cost-effective tamper-proof auditability to foster industry trust.

Architects of Transformation: Foundational Models in Generative AI | RAISE Summit 2024 | Paris

Daphné Leprince-Ringuet, Pablo, Milos, Nan, Marco, Artur Polis

Moderated by Daphné Leprince-Ringuet, the "Architects of Transformation" panel featured experts from Rave, DeepSets, Gena, and Defector to analyze the critical disconnect between enterprise expectations for deterministic AI and the stochastic reality of foundational models. The discussion highlighted that while companies like Defector have successfully deployed AI agents to double financing origination, widespread adoption remains hindered by legal concerns over training data, the high cost of production-grade infrastructure, and a severe talent mismatch between research engineers and product-focused builders. Participants concluded that the industry is shifting toward licensed, IP-safe "walled gardens" and emphasized that future success depends on integrating AI as a controlled operational component rather than a standalone feature.

AI Unleashed : Navigating the Future with Next Gen Applications | RAISE Summit 2024 | Paris

Tamara Brisk, Nicolas Guillon, Sixt, Jean-Paul, Francois Chollette, Arthur Kleinmann

At the RAISE Summit's "AI Unleashed" panel, industry leaders from Animage, X-Plane, and L'Oréal detailed the critical transition from generic generative AI tools to specialized, agentic applications capable of handling high-stakes industrial workflows. The discussion highlighted that while early models struggle with niche data and latency, second-generation systems must leverage proprietary datasets and human-in-the-loop verification to automate complex tasks such as public tender responses and personalized beauty diagnostics. Participants concluded that successful commercial adoption requires overcoming significant barriers including production costs, hallucination management, and workforce cultural resistance to redefine media creation and corporate efficiency.

Machine Unlearning: Making AI Forget | RAISE Summit 2024 | Paris

Ben Luria

Hirundo addresses the critical compliance gap identified by Stanford research, where 83% of foundational models violate the EU AI Act by trapping irreversible personal data and sensitive information. The company offers a neuro-surgical unlearning platform that enables engineers and compliance officers to selectively erase specific data from trained models in minutes, achieving 95% efficiency gains over traditional retraining. Backed by Alpha Intelligence Capital and led by a team including the former Dean of Computer Science at the Technion, Hirundo positions selective unlearning as the essential standard for navigating global data privacy regulations without sacrificing model performance.

Production Ready RAG | RAISE Summit 2024 | Paris

David Leconte

David Leconte, a Solution Engineer at DataStax, outlines a strategy to bridge the gap between experimental RAG prototypes and production deployment by introducing a curated solution stack. This approach combines the new RackStack library management tool, the high-performance AstraDB vector database, and the Longflow workflow engine to address critical stability, compliance, and integration challenges faced by major enterprises. By offering verified packages, 10-millisecond latency, and automated support, the platform enables organizations to safely scale generative AI applications in regulated sectors without the risks associated with fragmented open-source frameworks.

The Collapse of the Human Empire: Reflexions from the AGI | RAISE Summit 2024 | Paris

Laurent Alexandre, Charles-Edouard Boué

Laurent Alexandre and Charles-Edouard Boué predict that the current AI investment bubble, driven by unsustainable unit economics, will collapse within eighteen months to trigger a new era of techno-politics and aggressive regulation. The discussion highlights critical barriers to Artificial General Intelligence, including the physical limitations of moving from 2D to 3D environments, entropy management challenges, and the paradox where human-AI collaboration yields lower diagnostic accuracy than AI alone. Ultimately, the speakers argue that the future dominance of machines may lead to a "machine aristocracy," yet the primary risk to human civilization stems from internal societal failures like elite corruption rather than inherent machine hostility.

RFS: Machine learning to simulate the physical world

Software tools relying on physics-based models for complex tasks like weather prediction and drug discovery face severe computational bottlenecks that require supercomputers and weeks of processing time. AI models function as efficient general function approximators that solve these same physics problems in seconds on standard hardware, eliminating the need for massive computational resources. This initiative targets founders seeking to enter markets that were previously infeasible by leveraging this technology to reduce prediction latency from days to seconds.

Chamath Palihapitiya & Groq CEO Jonathan Ross | RAISE Summit 2024 | Paris

Chamath Palihapitiya, Jonathan Ross, Olivier Ollier

Grok CEO Jonathan Ross, a former Google TPU architect, presents a strategic shift in the AI industry where hardware-focused inference is poised to surpass training as the dominant market force. Leveraging proprietary Low Precision Units and an alternative supply chain strategy, the company has attracted 75,000 developers in just 30 days and secured a massive compute partnership with Aramco Digital to challenge NVIDIA's infrastructure monopoly. With projections to deploy 1.5 million LPUs by next year, Grok aims to redefine AI deployment costs and latency standards while positioning non-tech enterprises as primary consumers of global compute capacity.

Inside The Hard Tech Startups Turning Sci-Fi Into Reality

Y Combinator advises hard tech founders to leverage a $500,000 investment and three-month timeline to validate specific technical kernels rather than building full-scale complex products. By isolating manageable milestones—such as securing massive Letters of Intent or demonstrating proof-of-concept prototypes—companies like Boom Supersonic and Relativity Space de-risk their ventures to achieve billion-dollar valuations or successful commercial launches. This strategy prioritizes "timeline compression" and tangible execution over traditional fundraising, allowing teams to mitigate technical risks while capitalizing on obvious market demand.

All-In Summit 2023 Recap

Chamath, Jason

The Awning Conference in Los Angeles convened high-profile figures including Ray Dalio and industry grinders to discuss geopolitical shifts, the transformative potential of AI, and radical scientific advancements like viral brain cancer therapy. Despite logistical friction involving key personality lateness and pre-event resource shortages, the event fostered unscripted debates on macroeconomic trajectories, the rise of "luxury beliefs," and the necessity of separating Silicon Valley from Washington's regulatory influence. Participants ultimately emphasized that despite global instability, collective agency and open dialogue remain the defining mechanisms for addressing humanity's upcoming crises of meaning and governance.

AI-augmented game development with Inworld co-founder Kylan Gibbs

Kylan Gibbs

Kylan In-World has launched a vertically integrated platform combining a local execution runtime engine with an AI studio to resolve the industry tension between technical performance and creative control in game development. Backed by strategic partnerships with NVIDIA, Microsoft Studios, and Ubisoft, the system powers dynamic narratives by processing multi-modal inputs in parallel to generate real-time quests, adjust environmental states, and modify mission objectives based on player dialogue. By prioritizing local latency reduction over cloud-based models, the technology enables non-scripted interactions where emotional states and relationship dynamics evolve in the backend to directly influence gameplay mechanics.

AI integration for enterprise ft. CJ Desai of ServiceNow

CJ Desai, Chirantan "CJ" Desai, Sonya, Sam, Arthur, Daniela, Pat, Andy, Jensen, Doug Leone, Frank Slutman, Jess, Fred Luddy, Bill, Allen, Tim, Michelle, Charlie, Peter, Fabio

ServiceNow, the third-largest global SaaS provider with a $155 billion market cap, achieved $10 billion in annual recurring revenue through strict organic growth under the leadership of CEO Bill McDermott and COO CJ Nayak. The company is currently executing "Act Two" by integrating small, cost-efficient AI models and expanding into new sectors like public safety, while maintaining an 82% gross margin through disciplined financial constraints. With 8,000 enterprise customers led by CIOs demanding specific return on investment, ServiceNow prioritizes workflow automation and outcome-based selling over generic technology adoption to sustain its 26% annual growth rate.

AI-powered workflow automation with Zapier co-founder Mike Knoop

Mike Knoop

Zapier is launching Zapier Central, a new platform that replaces its traditional workflow canvas with natural language "AI Bots" capable of executing over 500,000 autonomous actions. These self-healing agents utilize zero-shot inference to automatically configure triggers, resolve parameters, and repair broken steps when external variables shift without manual intervention. The system now supports all 7,000 existing integrations while allowing users to refine bot behavior through direct feedback and a threading feature for step-level approval.