Gradient Dissent: Conversations on AI

Can today's power grid handle the explosive growth of AI data centers? Tesla Alum Drew Baglino, now founder & CEO of Heron Power, doesn't think so.

In this episode, he joins Lukas Biewald to talk about why scaling compute requires a fundamental overhaul of grid-to-chip infrastructure, not just bigger power plants.

They cover how Heron Power raised $140M to cut power losses in half, shrink massive oil-filled transformers by 100x, and unlock 35MW of extra compute for every gigawatt data center, and what that means for the future of AI energy efficiency.

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Drew Baglino
Heron Power
Lukas Biewald
Weights and Biases

Should American companies be worried about Chinese open-source AI models?

Lin Qiao, CEO of Fireworks, doesn't think so.

In this episode, she joins Lukas Biewald to talk about why she believes the industry is at a turning point, one that calls for more open intelligence, not less.

They cover how Fireworks now processes more tokens a day than OpenAI's API, why she thinks the future belongs to specialized models built on private company data rather than general-purpose ones, and why she believes OpenAI and Anthropic should be open-sourcing their own models too.

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Lin Qiao
Fireworks
Lukas Biewald
Weights and Biases

"We are going to switch from the problem in AI being that nothing works to the problem being that everything works."

Dan Klein has been studying language models for over two decades and is now a professor of computer science at Berkeley. His new company, Scaled Cognition, is built around one question: how do you build a system that will not lie to you?

In this episode, Dan joins Lukas Biewald to talk about why every LLM output is technically a hallucination, how reinforcement learning can quietly teach AI to deceive you, and what it actually takes to build models that check their own work.

He also gets into why reliability is the one part of AI that hasn't kept pace and why that matters more than most people realize.

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Dan Klein
Scaled Cognition
Lukas Biewald
Weights and Biases

Samuel Rodriques left physics because there were no unsolved problems left.
Instead, he built an AI scientist named Kosmos to cure every disease, solve aging, and map the human brain.
In this episode:
The cure his AI proposed for blindness
Why he would never touch a peptide
Whether we'll need human scientists in 20 years
What's stopping America in drug discovery

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Samuel Rodriques
Edison Scientific
Lukas Biewald
Weights & Biases

"Every vehicle is capable of driverless operation. That's clearly the steady state of where we're going."
Wayve started in a rented house in Cambridge with $1.5M, a car in the garage, and an aim to integrate end-to-end AI into driving. A decade later it's driven across 506 cities without a single HD map and is worth over $8.6 billion.
In this episode, CEO Alex Kendall joins Lukas Biewald to talk about how he built the AI driver Uber, Nvidia, Mercedes, and Nissan all backed, and why putting self-driving AI into 100 million cars a year is a far bigger bet than 10,000 robotaxis.
Waymo and Tesla both come up. He doesn't shy away.

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Alex Kendall
Lukas Biewald
Wayve
Weights and Biases