Sarah Catanzaro — Remembering the Lessons of the Last AI Renaissance

Sarah Catanzaro — Remembering the Lessons of the Last AI Renaissance

Author: Lukas Biewald February 2, 2023 Duration: 1:16:24

Sarah Catanzaro is a General Partner at Amplify Partners, and one of the leading investors in AI and ML. Her investments include RunwayML, OctoML, and Gantry.

Sarah and Lukas discuss lessons learned from the "AI renaissance" of the mid 2010s and compare the general perception of ML back then to now. Sarah also provides insights from her perspective as an investor, from selling into tech-forward companies vs. traditional enterprises, to the current state of MLOps/developer tools, to large language models and hype bubbles.

Show notes (transcript and links): http://wandb.me/gd-sarah-catanzaro

---

⏳ Timestamps:

0:00 Intro

1:10 Lessons learned from previous AI hype cycles

11:46 Maintaining technical knowledge as an investor

19:05 Selling into tech-forward companies vs. traditional enterprises

25:09 Building point solutions vs. end-to-end platforms

36:27 LLMS, new tooling, and commoditization

44:39 Failing fast and how startups can compete with large cloud vendors

52:31 The gap between research and industry, and vice versa

1:00:01 Advice for ML practitioners during hype bubbles

1:03:17 Sarah's thoughts on Rust and bottlenecks in deployment

1:11:23 The importance of aligning technology with people

1:15:58 Outro

---

📝 Links

📍 "Operationalizing Machine Learning: An Interview Study" (Shankar et al., 2022), an interview study on deploying and maintaining ML production pipelines: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.09125

---

Connect with Sarah:

📍 Sarah on Twitter: https://twitter.com/sarahcat21

📍 Sarah's Amplify Partners profile: https://www.amplifypartners.com/investment-team/sarah-catanzaro

---

💬 Host: Lukas Biewald

📹 Producers: Riley Fields, Angelica Pan

---

Subscribe and listen to Gradient Dissent today!

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

👉 Google Podcasts: http://wandb.me/google-podcasts​

👉 Spotify: http://wandb.me/spotify​


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
Matthew Davis — Bringing Genetic Insights to Everyone [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 43:02
Matthew explains how combining machine learning and computational biology can provide mainstream medicine with better diagnostics and insights. --- Matthew Davis is Head of AI at Invitae, the largest and fastest growing…
Clément Delangue — The Power of the Open Source Community [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 46:35
Clem explains the virtuous cycles behind the creation and success of Hugging Face, and shares his thoughts on where NLP is heading. --- Clément Delangue is co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face, the AI community building th…
Wojciech Zaremba — What Could Make AI Conscious? [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 44:27
Wojciech joins us to talk the principles behind OpenAI, the Fermi Paradox, and the future stages of developments in AGI. --- Wojciech Zaremba is a co-founder of OpenAI, a research company dedicated to discovering and ena…
Phil Brown — How IPUs are Advancing Machine Intelligence [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 57:10
Phil shares some of the approaches, like sparsity and low precision, behind the breakthrough performance of Graphcore's Intelligence Processing Units (IPUs). --- Phil Brown leads the Applications team at Graphcore, where…
Alyssa Simpson Rochwerger — Responsible ML in the Real World [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 45:29
From working on COVID-19 vaccine rollout to writing a book on responsible ML, Alyssa shares her thoughts on meaningful projects and the importance of teamwork. --- Alyssa Simpson Rochwerger is as a Director of Product at…
Sean Taylor — Business Decision Problems [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 45:41
Sean joins us to chat about ML models and tools at Lyft Rideshare Labs, Python vs R, time series forecasting with Prophet, and election forecasting. --- Sean Taylor is a Data Scientist at (and former Head of) Lyft Ridesh…
Polly Fordyce — Microfluidic Platforms and Machine Learning [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 45:55
Polly explains how microfluidics allow bioengineering researchers to create high throughput data, and shares her experiences with biology and machine learning. --- Polly Fordyce is an Assistant Professor of Genetics and…
Adrien Gaidon — Advancing ML Research in Autonomous Vehicles [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 48:02
Adrien Gaidon shares his approach to building teams and taking state-of-the-art research from conception to production at Toyota Research Institute. --- Adrien Gaidon is the Head of Machine Learning Research at the Toyot…
Nimrod Shabtay — Deployment and Monitoring at Nanit [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 33:59
A look at how Nimrod and the team at Nanit are building smart baby monitor systems, from data collection to model deployment and production monitoring. --- Nimrod Shabtay is a Senior Computer Vision Algorithm Developer a…

«1...678910