Latest Interviews

Vipul Ved Prakash, Together AI ｜ RAISE Summit 2025

Vipul Ved Prakash, John Furrier, Aviv Paul

Co-founded by Paul Ved Prakash, Together AI operates as an AI acceleration cloud that recently deployed a high-density Grace Blackwell 200 cluster in Memphis to deliver 1.4 petaflops of computing power for large-scale model training. The platform hosts over 200 open-source models and drives significant growth among "AI-native" customers by integrating specialized infrastructure for thermal management and dynamic workload orchestration. As the market shifts toward "Agentech," the company addresses generative AI limitations through test-time compute mechanisms and parameter-efficient inference techniques that enable complex, multi-step reasoning workflows.

Vipul Ved Prakash, Together AI ｜ RAISE Summit 2025 1

Vipul Ved Prakash, John Furrier, Aviv Paul

Together AI, an "AI acceleration cloud" founded three years ago, is deploying specialized supercomputer clusters like the new Memphis Grace Blackwell 200 to facilitate large-scale generative AI training and inference. Serving 80% "AI-native" clients in sectors from robotics to healthcare, the platform distinguishes itself through hardware-software co-optimization that enables real-time reasoning and supports a library of 200 open-source models. As the industry shifts from basic inference to multi-step agent technologies, Together AI aims to bridge the enterprise gap for integrated stacks by dynamically balancing high-density workloads across its unified cloud infrastructure.

Prashanth Chandrasekar, Stack Overflow ｜ Raise Summit 2025

Prashanth Chandrasekar, John Furrier, Prashant Thir

Stack Overflow CEO Prashant Thir highlights a critical market shift where high AI adoption clashes with declining trust, driving a demand for human-in-the-loop validation to counteract generic content and hallucinations. The company leverages its official data licensing agreements with major AI labs to boost model accuracy by 30–40% while simultaneously expanding enterprise offerings like Uber's Genie into dynamic knowledge intelligence layers. This strategy combines a growing revenue stream from AI reinforcement learning and data licensing with a community vision to transform the platform into a "trust network" that blends expert curation with AI speed.

Mike Mattacola, Coreweave ｜ Raise Summit 2025

Mike Mattacola, John Furrier

Held in Paris, the RAISE Summit 2025 convened industry leaders to address the critical intersections of AI infrastructure expansion, sovereignty, and energy constraints. CoreWeave leveraged its strategic partnership with Dell and NVIDIA to outpace competitors by deploying H100, H200, and GB200 hardware generations first, while managing massive scaling complexities through joint troubleshooting and agile operational models. The event highlighted a structural industry shift from general-purpose IT to specialized AI engineering, characterized by high-density rack consolidation and a dramatic decline in x86 market share as physical data center requirements drive immediate procurement and deployment strategies.

Alison Wagonfeld, Google Cloud ｜ RAISE Summit 2025

Alison Wagonfeld, John Furrier

At the 2025 RAISE Summit in Paris, Google Cloud detailed its transition to a full-stack AI-first strategy that integrates DeepMind research directly into products like BigQuery while leveraging partners such as Databricks and hardware collaborations with Nvidia. The company championed open interoperability standards, specifically the Model Context Protocol and Agent-to-Agent protocol, to enable secure cross-platform agent interactions and mitigate vendor lock-in for over 500 enterprise customers. This approach addresses a market shift toward replatformization and internal AI competency centers, allowing organizations to extract measurable ROI through application-layer business logic rather than focusing solely on hardware advancements.

Roman Chernin, Nebius ｜ Raise Summit 2025

Roman Chernin, John Furrier, Robin Sheeran

Nebius, a publicly traded full-stack AI cloud provider founded one year ago, has expanded its infrastructure to seven global locations and targets operating tens of thousands of GPUs by year-end. The company differentiates itself through proprietary liquid-cooled engineering and a pay-per-consumption model that accommodates diverse workloads ranging from real-time inference to massive training clusters. Nebius is pursuing a tenfold revenue growth to one billion Russian Rubles while pivoting its customer base toward established enterprises in life sciences and FinTech to support the transition to "AI factories."

Rajiv Ramaswami, Nutanix ｜ RAISE Summit 2025

Rajiv Ramaswami, John Furrier

At the RAISE Summit 2025 in Paris, Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswamy unveiled a strategic partnership with NVIDIA to deliver a fully integrated enterprise AI infrastructure stack designed to support generative AI inference for the 28,000 companies Nutanix currently serves. This solution combines Nutanix's simplified base with NVIDIA's microservices and reference architectures to enable secure, turnkey deployment of AI workloads across data centers, edge locations, and public clouds. By abstracting hardware and containerization complexity, the collaboration targets the "vast majority" of enterprises that will consume rather than train models, facilitating immediate use cases like document summarization and automated translation while supporting future multi-agent workflows.

Naveen Rao, Databricks ｜ RAISE Summit 2025

Naveen Rao, John Furrier

At the RAID Summit in Paris, Databricks executives outlined a strategic pivot from raw data analytics to treating information as proprietary ingredients for generating competitive AI assets. Jonathan Frankel championed a methodological shift that inverts traditional machine learning by using observational data to validate pre-defined world models, while introducing automated evaluation frameworks to replace the "magic thinking" of earlier generative AI trends. Concurrently, the platform's integration of "Genie" enables natural language querying to dynamically generate SQL and visualizations, signaling a broader industry transition where business logic becomes deeply embedded within automated data infrastructure.

Sequoia’s Roelof Botha: Why Venture Capital is Broken & How Great Companies Are Built

Roelof Botha, Jason Calacanis

Sequoia Capital, led by a third generation of partners, sustains its legacy by prioritizing long-term value creation and consensus decision-making over aggressive fee maximization. The firm counters industry capital overhang by deploying proprietary AI tools and maintaining a selective investment strategy that has historically generated trillions in public market value through companies like Apple and Nvidia. While navigating geopolitical shifts by separating its Chinese operations and adapting to a regulatory landscape that has drastically reduced startup formation there, Sequoia continues to back founders with exceptional curiosity despite unconventional profiles.

Actress Shefali Shah: Stories that Move; Strength that Inspires | Asia Summit 2025

Shefali Shah, Teresa Whang, Curtis S. Chin

Acclaimed actress Shefali Shah, known for her Emmy-winning role as DCP Shreya Sharma in Netflix's *Delhi Crime*, discusses the industry's shift from limiting stereotypical roles to complex character portrayals. She details the upcoming third season of the series, which tackles human trafficking and bride sales through a narrative blending multiple true cases, while highlighting her work in *The Three of Us* and *Adolescence* to explore dementia and social media's impact on children. Shah further emphasizes her advocacy for women's and children's safety, urging audiences to view her award-winning projects to understand these critical social issues.

The Future of Software Engineering: Cognition’s Russell Kaplan

Russell Kaplan, Marco Argenti

Cognition, founded by former Olympiad medalists and now valued at $4 billion, is advancing software engineering by deploying Devin, an autonomous AI agent capable of executing end-to-end development tasks. The company differentiates itself through a dual-product strategy combining Devin for independent execution with the recently acquired Windsurf IDE for human-in-the-loop collaboration, targeting enterprise integration into proprietary codebases. While AI capabilities in coding are projected to double every seven months, Cognition aims to elevate Devin to senior engineer status within a year, though future growth is anticipated to be constrained by energy availability rather than data scarcity.

The Shutdown’s Economic Impact

Alec Phillips, Alison Nathan

A partisan role reversal has precipitated a broad federal government shutdown as Democrats withhold support for clean spending bills to demand the extension of ACA health insurance subsidies, a move that polling suggests is driving voter blame toward Republicans. The crisis faces a critical resolution pressure point on October 15 when active-duty military personnel miss a pay cycle, a deadline that historically compels congressional action to avoid widespread economic disruption. While the shutdown projects to reduce Q4 GDP by approximately 0.3 percentage points and delay key economic data releases, market analysts and the Federal Reserve anticipate the stalemate will resolve quickly through a targeted fiscal compromise.

Smart Finance: The Intersection of AI, Technology, Talent, and Transformation | Asia Summit 2025

Krist Boo, Asilah Azil, Marcelo Claure, Andreas Kreuz

Global AI investment is surging toward $500 billion annually, yet a 95% failure rate persists as enterprises struggle to move beyond pilot programs, with only top performers like T-Mobile and K Health demonstrating significant commercial payback. While 47% of organizations report recent AI risk incidents, the primary barrier to value realization remains cultural resistance and workflow inertia rather than technology, necessitating CEO-led change management and governance models that treat agents as corporate citizens. As geopolitical dynamics force Southeast Asian nations like Singapore to adopt a multipolar strategy leveraging both US and Chinese strengths, the race for success now hinges on massive workforce reskilling and the strategic integration of human capital with autonomous systems.

Anthropic: The Great Equaliser: How Agentic AI Is Powering Europe’s Next Generation of Startups

Guillaume, Charlie

Guillaume, Head of Anthropic for EMEA, discusses the strategic deployment of the Cloud4 coding model which self-wrote 90% of its own code to power a growing ecosystem of European startups like Dust and Lovable. The conversation highlights how major enterprises including BMW and Novo Nordisk are utilizing these models as virtual collaborators to accelerate R&D and customer service, while emphasizing Anthropic's strict data sovereignty and safety policies to address European regulatory concerns. Amidst this expansion, the company aims to hire over 100 new staff members across its London, Dublin, and Zurich offices to support the region's robust AI funding environment and mitigate local talent gaps.

NextSilicon & More Than Moore. The Silicon Revolution: Why the Future of Hardware is Software

Next Silicon introduces a reconfigurable compute platform that utilizes a smart runtime algorithm to dynamically adjust chip hardware within 20 nanoseconds for CPU, GPU, and AI workloads without requiring code rewrites. This "software-aware hardware" targets the most computationally intensive code segments to deliver projected performance speedups of 4x to 10x while consuming only a quarter of the energy used by static ASICs. By supporting established languages and frameworks like CUDA and PyTorch, the system aims to decouple hardware efficiency from the need to pre-anticipate future algorithmic shifts.