DeepSeek, Stargate and AI's $600 Billion Question with Sequoia's David Cahn

DeepSeek, Stargate and AI's $600 Billion Question with Sequoia's David Cahn

Author: Lukas Biewald January 28, 2025 Duration: 58:16

In this episode of Gradient Dissent, host Lukas Biewald sits down with David Cahn, partner at Sequoia Capital, for a compelling discussion on the dynamic world of AI investments. They dive into recent developments, including DeepSeek and Stargate, exploring their implications for the AI industry. Drawing from his articles, "AI's $200 Billion Question" and "AI's $600 Billion Question," David unpacks the financial challenges and opportunities surrounding AI infrastructure spending and the staggering revenue required to sustain these investments. Together, they examine the competitive strategies of cloud providers, the transformative impact of AI on business models, and predictions for the next wave of AI-driven growth. This episode offers an in-depth look at the crossroads of AI innovation and financial strategy.

Mentioned Articles:

AI’s $200B Question

AI’s $600B Question

🎙 Get our podcasts on these platforms:

Apple Podcasts: http://wandb.me/apple-podcasts

Spotify: http://wandb.me/spotify

Google: http://wandb.me/gd_google

YouTube: http://wandb.me/youtube

Connect with David Cahn:

@DavidCahn6

Follow Weights & Biases:

https://twitter.com/weights_biases

https://www.linkedin.com/company/wandb

Join the Weights & Biases Discord Server:

https://discord.gg/CkZKRNnaf3


Lukas Biewald hosts Gradient Dissent: Conversations on AI, a series that moves beyond theoretical discussions to examine how artificial intelligence is actually built and deployed. Each episode features a direct, unscripted talk with a leading practitioner-you’ll hear from engineers and researchers at places like NVIDIA, Meta, Google, Lyft, and OpenAI. The focus is on the tangible challenges and breakthroughs they encounter, from initial research to the complex reality of putting models into production. This isn't about abstract futures; it's a grounded look at the decisions shaping the field right now. Biewald, bringing his perspective from Weights & Biases, steers conversations toward the practical trade-offs and collaborative efforts that define modern AI work. For anyone in technology or business who wants to understand the mechanics behind the headlines, this podcast offers a rare, candid window into the process. You’ll come away with a clearer sense of how ideas become functional systems and what it really takes to operate at the cutting edge.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 100

Gradient Dissent: Conversations on AI
Podcast Episodes
Scaling LLMs and Accelerating Adoption with Aidan Gomez at Cohere [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 51:31
On this episode, we’re joined by Aidan Gomez, Co-Founder and CEO at Cohere. Cohere develops and releases a range of innovative AI-powered tools and solutions for a variety of NLP use cases.We discuss:- What “attention” m…
Neural Network Pruning and Training with Jonathan Frankle at MosaicML [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:02:00
Jonathan Frankle, Chief Scientist at MosaicML and Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University, joins us on this episode. With comprehensive infrastructure and software tools, MosaicML aims to help busin…
Shreya Shankar — Operationalizing Machine Learning [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 54:38
About This EpisodeShreya Shankar is a computer scientist, PhD student in databases at UC Berkeley, and co-author of "Operationalizing Machine Learning: An Interview Study", an ethnographic interview study with 18 machine…
Jeremy Howard — The Simple but Profound Insight Behind Diffusion [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:12:57
Jeremy Howard is a co-founder of fast.ai, the non-profit research group behind the popular massive open online course "Practical Deep Learning for Coders", and the open source deep learning library "fastai".Jeremy is als…
Jerome Pesenti — Large Language Models, PyTorch, and Meta [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 52:35
Jerome Pesenti is the former VP of AI at Meta, a tech conglomerate that includes Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, and one of the most exciting places where AI research is happening today.Jerome shares his thoughts on T…
D. Sculley — Technical Debt, Trade-offs, and Kaggle [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:00:26
D. Sculley is CEO of Kaggle, the beloved and well-known data science and machine learning community.D. discusses his influential 2015 paper "Machine Learning: The High Interest Credit Card of Technical Debt" and what the…