Building adaptive AI models that can learn and complete tasks in the physical world requires precision but these AI robots could completely change manufacturing and logistics processes. Peter Chen, the co-founder and CEO of Covariant, leads the team that is building robots that will increase manufacturing efficiency, safety, and create warehouses of the future. 

Today on No Priors, Peter joins Sarah to talk about how the Covariant team is developing multimodal models that have precise grounding and understanding so they can adapt to solve problems in the physical world. They also discuss how they plan their roadmap at Covariant, what could be next for the company, and what use case will bring us to the Chat-GPT moment for AI robots.

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Show Notes: 
(0:00) Peter Chen Background
(0:58) How robotics AI will drive AI forward
(3:00) Moving from research to a commercial company
(5:46) The argument for building incrementally 
(8:13) Manufacturing robotics today
(12:21) Put wall use case
(15:45) What’s next for Covariant Brain
(18:42) Covariant’s customers
(19:50) Grounding concepts in Ai
(25:47) How scaling laws apply to Covariant
(29:21) Covariant’s driving thesis
(32:54) the Chat-GPT moment for robotics
(35:12) Manufacturing center of the future
(37:02) Safety in AI robotics

Building the factories of the future with Covariant CEO Peter Chen

At this moment of inflection in technology, co-hosts Elad Gil and Sarah Guo talk to the world's leading AI engineers, researchers and founders about the biggest questions: How far away is AGI? What markets are at risk for disruption? How will commerce, culture, and society change? What’s happening in state-of-the-art in research? “No Priors” is your guide to the AI revolution. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com.
Sarah Guo is a startup investor and the founder of Conviction, an investment firm purpose-built to serve intelligent software, or "Software 3.0" companies. She spent nearly a decade incubating and investing at venture firm Greylock Partners.
Elad Gil is a serial entrepreneur and a startup investor. He was co-founder of Color Health, Mixer Labs (which was acquired by Twitter). He has invested in over 40 companies now worth $1B or more each, and is also author of the High Growth Handbook.

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Garry Tan is a notorious founder-turned-investor who is now running one of the most prestigious accelerators in the world, Y Combinator. As the president and CEO of YC, Garry has been credited with reinvigorating the program. On this week’s episode of No Priors, Sarah, Elad, and Garry discuss the shifting demographics of YC founders and how AI is encouraging younger founders to launch companies, predicting which early stage startups will have longevity, and making YC a beacon for innovation in AI companies. They also discussed the importance of building companies in person and if San Francisco is, in fact, back. 

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Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @garrytan

Show Notes: 
(0:00) Introduction
(0:53) Transitioning from founder to investing
(5:10) Early social media startups
(7:50) Trend predicting at YC
(10:03) Selecting YC founders
(12:06) AI trends emerging in YC batch
(18:34) Motivating culture at YC
(20:39) Choosing the startups with longevity
(24:01) Shifting YC found demographics
(29:24) Building in San Francisco 
(31:01) Making YC a beacon for creators
(33:17) Garry Tan is bringing San Francisco back

How YC fosters AI Innovation with Garry Tan

Alexandr Wang was 19 when he realized that gathering data will be crucial as AI becomes more prevalent, so he dropped out of MIT and started Scale AI. This week on No Priors, Alexandr joins Sarah and Elad to discuss how Scale is providing infrastructure and building a robust data foundry that is crucial to the future of AI. While the company started working with autonomous vehicles, they’ve expanded by partnering with research labs and even the U.S. government.  

In this episode, they get into the importance of data quality in building trust in AI systems and a possible future where we can build better self-improvement loops, AI in the enterprise, and where human and AI intelligence will work together to produce better outcomes. 

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Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @alexandr_wang

(0:00) Introduction
(3:01) Data infrastructure for autonomous vehicles
(5:51) Data abundance and organization
(12:06)  Data quality and collection
(15:34) The role of human expertise
(20:18) Building trust in AI systems
(23:28) Evaluating AI models
(29:59) AI and government contracts
(32:21) Multi-modality and scaling challenges

The Data Foundry for AI with Alexandr Wang from Scale

Mikey Shulman, the CEO and co-founder of Suno, can see a future where the Venn diagram of music creators and consumers becomes one big circle. The AI music generation tool trying to democratize music has been making waves in the AI community ever since they came out of stealth mode last year. Suno users can make a song complete with lyrics, just by entering a text prompt, for example, “koto boom bap lofi intricate beats.” You can hear it in action as Mikey, Sarah, and Elad create a song live in this episode. 

In this episode, Elad, Sarah, And Mikey talk about how the Suno team took their experience making at transcription tool and applied it to music generation, how the Suno team evaluates aesthetics and taste because there is no standardized test you can give an AI model for music, and why Mikey doesn’t think AI-generated music will affect people’s consumption of human made music. 

Listen to the full songs played and created in this episode:

Whispers of Sakura

Stone 

Statistical Paradise

Statistical Paradise 2


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Show Notes: 
(0:00) Mikey’s background
(3:48) Bark and music generation
(5:33) Architecture for music generation AI
(6:57) Assessing music quality
(8:20) Mikey’s music background as an asset
(10:02) Challenges in generative music AI
(11:30) Business model
(14:38) Surprising use cases of Suno
(18:43) Creating a song on Suno live
(21:44) Ratio of creators to consumers
(25:00) The digitization of music
(27:20) Mikey’s favorite song on Suno
(29:35) Suno is hiring

Music consumers are becoming the creators with Suno CEO Mikey Shulman

This week on No Priors hosts, Sarah and Elad are catching up on the latest AI news. They discuss the recent developments in AI like Meta’s new AI assistant and the latest in music generation, and if you’re interested in generative AI music, stay tuned for next week’s interview! Sarah and Elad also get into device-resident models, AI hardware, and ask just how smart smaller models can really get. These hardware constraints were compared to the hurdles AI platforms are continuing to face including computing constraints, energy consumption, context windows, and how to best integrate these products in apps that users are familiar with.

Have a question for our next host-only episode or feedback for our team? Reach out to show@no-priors.com

Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil 

Show Notes: 
(0:00) Intro
(1:25) Music AI generation
(4:02) Apple’s LLM
(11:39) The role of AI-specific hardware
(15:25) AI platform updates
(18:01) Forward thinking in investing in AI
(20:33) Unlimited context
(23:03) Energy constraints

Context windows, computer constraints, and energy consumption with Sarah and Elad

Scott Wu loves code. He grew up competing in the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) and is a world class coder, and now he's building an AI agent designed to create more, not fewer, human engineers. This week on No Priors, Sarah and Elad talk to Scott, the co-founder and CEO of Cognition, an AI lab focusing on reasoning. Recently, the Cognition team released a demo of Devin, an AI software engineer that can increasingly handle entire tasks end to end.

In this episode, they talk about why the team built Devin with a UI that mimics looking over another engineer’s shoulder as they work and how this transparency makes for a better result. Scott discusses why he thinks Devin will make it possible for there to be more human engineers in the world, and what will be important for software engineers to focus on as these roles evolve. They also get into how Scott thinks about building the Cognition team and that they’re just getting started. 

Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com
Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @ScottWu46

Show Notes: 
(0:00) Introduction
(1:12) IOI training and community
(6:39) Cognition’s founding team
(8:20) Meet Devin
(9:17) The discourse around Devin
(12:14) Building Devin’s UI
(14:28) Devin’s strengths and weakness 
(18:44) The evolution of coding agents
(22:43) Tips for human engineers
(26:48) Hiring at Cognition

Building the factories of the future with Covariant CEO Peter Chen

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