Unsupervised Learning with Jacob Effron

by Redpoint Ventures

Unsupervised Learning with Jacob Effron

by Redpoint Ventures

We probe the sharpest minds in AI in search for the truth about what’s real today, what will be real in the future and what it all means for businesses and the world. If you’re a builder, researcher or investor navigating the AI world, this podcast will help you deconstruct and understand the most important breakthroughs and see a clearer picture of reality. Follow this show and consider enabling notifications to stay up to date on our latest episodes. Unsupervised Learning is a podcast by Redpoint Ventures, an early-stage venture capital fund that has invested in companies like Snowflake, Stripe, and Mistral. Hosted by Redpoint investor Jacob Effron alongside Patrick Chase, Jordan Segall and Erica Brescia.

12 HOURS AGO

AI Ready

Ep 91: Top AI Analyst Unpacks Today's AI Hype Cycle

Benedict Evans, one of tech's most widely-read analysts, joins Jacob Effron. The conversation centers on Benedict's core thesis that comparing AI's scale to past platform shifts (the internet, mobile, PCs) is analytically useless, and that the more product...

Jul 09

Ep 90: AI Pioneer Jürgen Schmidhuber on the State of AI Today

Dr. Jürgen Schmidhuber, a renowned scientist and AI researcher widely regarded as one of the pioneers in the field, originated key ideas behind today's transformers, LSTMs, and recursive self-improvement through his lab's work. He argues that true AGI rema...

Jun 12

AI Vibe Check: Lab Wars, Why APIs Might Vanish & Future Predictions

Six months after their last roundup, Jacob sits down with Ari Morcos (Datology AI CEO, former Meta AI researcher) and Rob Toews (Radical Ventures partner, Forbes AI columnist) to take stock of an AI landscape that has shifted dramatically: coding agents cr...

Jun 03

Ep 89: AI Research Legend’s Honest Assessment of Where We Are

This episode with Lukasz Kaiser, co-author of the seminal "Attention Is All You Need" transformer paper and former researcher at both Google Brain and OpenAI, is a wide-ranging conversation about the fundamental limits of current AI architectures and wheth...

Jun 01

Ep 88: Unpacking DeepMind's Quest for SuperIntelligence with Demis Hassabis' Biographer

Sebastian Mallaby spent three years and 30+ hours interviewing Demis Hassabis in the back of a British pub to write The Infinity Machine, and the conversation uses that reporting to surface the most underexplored figure in AI. Demis founded the original AI...

May 22

Ep 87: Gemini Co-Lead on World Models, RL's Next Domains & Continual Learning

Oriol Vinyals, VP of Research at Google DeepMind and co-lead of the Gemini program, joins Jacob the day after Google I/O to unpack the research underpinning Google's latest announcements and where frontier AI is heading. The conversation moves from world m...

May 15

Ep 86: Yann LeCun on Leaving Meta, Breaking The LLM Paradigm, & Why Hinton is Wrong

Yann LeCun, Turing Award winner and former Chief AI Scientist at Meta, joins Jacob Effron. The conversation centers on Yann's contrarian thesis that LLMs are a dead-end on the path to human-level intelligence, despite being useful products — because they c...

Apr 23

Ep 85: Has AI Infra Stabilized, FM Vibe Shift, & What's Next for Coding Agents

This episode is a wide-ranging conversation between Jacob and Swyx (Shawn Wang), an AI engineer, podcaster, and now operator at Cognition, who sits at a uniquely informed intersection of builder, investor, and community organizer in the AI world. The two c...

Apr 09

Ep 84: OpenAI’s Chief Scientist on Continual Learning Hype, RL Beyond Code, & Future Alignment Directions

Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI's Chief Scientist, sits down with Jacob to cover the full arc of where AI research stands today and where it's headed. The conversation spans the explosive growth of coding agents and what it signals about near-term AI capability, th...

Apr 02

Ep 83: Owning the System of Record, AI-Native Org Charts, & Why ITSM is The Most Vulnerable Legacy Category

Serval is one of the fastest-growing AI-native enterprise software companies right now, and this episode is a rare inside look at the deliberate architectural, go-to-market, and talent decisions behind that growth. Jake Stauch breaks down why he made the c...

Mar 11

Ep 82: Behind Legora's $550M Raise, Model Competition, Doubling Revenue Every Quarter, & US Expansion

Max Jungestål, CEO of Legora, joins Jacob Effron and Logan Bartlett to discuss the company's $550M Series D and share a candid account of what building an AI-native company at speed actually looks like from the inside. Max argues that the AI application l...

Jan 29

Ep 81: Ex-OpenAI Researcher On Why He Left, His Honest AGI Timeline, & The Limits of Scaling RL

This episode features Jerry Tworek, a key architect behind OpenAI's breakthrough reasoning models (o1, o3) and Codex, discussing the current state and future of AI. Jerry explores the real limits and promise of scaling pre-training and reinforcement learni...

2025/12/18

AI Vibe Check: The Actual Bottleneck In Research, SSI’s Mystique, & Spicy 2026 Predictions

Ari Morcos and Rob Toews return for their spiciest conversation yet. Fresh from NeurIPS, they debate whether models are truly plateauing or if we're just myopically focused on LLMs while breakthroughs happen in other modalities. They reveal why infinite c...

2025/12/15

Ep 80: CEO of Surge AI Edwin Chen on Why Frontier Labs Are Diverging, RL Environments & Developing Model Taste

Edwin Chen is the founder and CEO of Surge AI, the data infrastructure company behind nearly every major frontier model. Surge works with OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google, providing the high-quality data and evaluation infrastructure that powers their m...

2025/12/10

Ep 79: OpenAI's Head of Product on How the Best Teams Build, Ship and Scale AI Products

This episode features Olivier Godement, Head of Product for Business Products at OpenAI, discussing the current state and future of AI adoption in enterprises, with a particular focus on the recent releases of GPT 5.1 and Codex. The conversation explores h...

2025/12/05

Ep 78: Jordan Schneider, Host of China Talk, on AI Race, Key Policy Decisions & Unpacking Geopolitical Chip Tension

This week on Unsupervised Learning, Jacob Effron is joined by Jordan Schneider, host of China Talk, who challenges widespread assumptions about US-China AI competition. China's AI development is driven by private capital and market competition—not central ...

2025/12/02

Ep 77: Anthropic’s Dianne Na Penn on Opus 4.5, Rethinking Model Scaffolding & Safety as a Competitive Advantage

This episode features Dianne Na Penn, a senior product leader at Anthropic, discussing the launch of Claude Opus 4.5 and the evolution of frontier AI models. The conversation explores how Anthropic approaches model development—balancing ambitious capabilit...

2025/11/03

Ep 76: Sora Creators Bill Peebles, Rohan Sahai & Thomas Dimson on Their Unexpected Viral Success

This episode features the core team behind Sora, OpenAI's groundbreaking video generation platform that became the #1 app in the App Store. Bill Peebles (research lead), Rohan Sahai (product lead), and Thomas Dimson (engineering/product lead with Instagram...

2025/10/24

AI Round Up: Ari Morcos from Datalogy AI and Rob Toews from Radical VC on Karpathy Reactions, OpenAI’s Dealmaking, & Bubble Reality Check

This episode features Rob Toews from Radical Ventures and Ari Morcos, Head of Research at Datology AI, reacting to Andrej Karpathy's recent statement that AGI is at least a decade away and that current AI capabilities are "slop." The discussion explores wh...

2025/09/24

AI Round Up: Ari Morcos from Datalogy AI and Rob Toews from Radical VC on AI Talent Wars, xAI’s $200B Valuation, & Google’s Comeback

This episode features a deep dive into the current state of AI model progress with Ari Morcos (CEO of Datalogy AI and former DeepMind/Meta researcher) and Rob Toews (partner at Radical Ventures). The conversation tackles whether model progress is genuinely...