The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica

Ben Lorica and investor Evangelos Simoudis discuss the opportunities and risks revealed in Anthropic’s S-1, from explosive revenue growth and improving economics to mounting compute commitments, competition from open-weight models, and dependence on coding. They also examine SpaceX’s emerging neocloud business and whether access to cheap capital and growing demand can sustain it. Finally, they debate proposals for regulating frontier AI labs, including restrictions on AI self-improvement, independent testing, and mandatory disclosure of security incidents.

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Detailed show notes and transcript, can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

Ben Lorica speaks with Leo de Moura, creator of Lean, VP and Distinguished Scientist at AWS, and Chief Architect of the Lean Focused Research Organization, about how AI is making formal verification more accessible and potentially transforming software engineering.

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Akshay Sharma, ML Engineer at Lyft, and Nick Ung, Staff Applied Scientist at Lyft, explain how their team is building a platform that lets domain experts create customer-facing AI agents while engineers provide the underlying tools, guardrails, and evaluation infrastructure.

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MIT FutureTech director Neil Thompson joins Ben Lorica to discuss how AI is reshaping work, the economy, and the future of automation. Drawing on recent research, Thompson explains why AI’s impact on most occupations may unfold gradually rather than arrive as a sudden shock, why adoption continues to lag behind technical capabilities, and why the fixed costs of implementation favor larger firms.

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In this episode, we talk with Joel Hron, CTO of Thomson Reuters, about the company’s decision to develop its own frontier AI model, Thomson, using open-weight models and decades of proprietary content and expertise.

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Piero Molino, CEO and co-founder of Studio Atelico, joins Ben Lorica to discuss what happens when AI becomes a core game mechanic rather than a cost-cutting tool.

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Ben Lorica speaks with Zuzanna Stamirowska, CEO of Pathway, about the company’s push beyond transformers toward models that reason in latent space, learn from experience, and maintain state over long time horizons.

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Richard Ho, VP of Hardware at OpenAI, explains how the team built Jalapeño, its first custom AI accelerator, and why controlling more of the hardware stack could lower inference costs and improve performance.

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Ben Lorica is joined by Evangelos Simoudis for a wide-ranging discussion on how AI is reshaping knowledge work: from the Navier-Stokes controversy and the need to protect intellectual property to whether workers should still be expected to understand and defend AI-generated work.

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Detailed show notes and transcript, can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

Ben Lorica talks with David Fattal, founder and CTO of Leia Inc., about why stereo data could become an important ingredient for AI systems that need to understand the physical world.

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Ben Lorica talks with Abi Aryan, AI engineer, author of LLMOps: Managing Large Language Models in Production, about how deploying generative AI is turning into a distributed systems problem.

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Ben Lorica speaks with Andrew Dai, co-founder and CEO of Elorian AI, about why today’s frontier models still struggle with complex visual reasoning and why simply scaling language-centric architectures may not solve the problem.

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Maarten Grootendorst, a developer relations engineer at Google DeepMind and co-author of Hands-On Large Language Models and An Illustrated Guide to AI Agents, joins Ben Lorica to explain the concepts developers need to understand beneath today’s AI tools.

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Steve Hou, Head of Research at Silicon Data, joins Ben Lorica to unpack the data behind the AI compute market: GPU rental indices, forward curves, and token expenditure trends that reveal a market still tightening despite talk of oversupply.

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Detailed show notes and transcript, can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

Ben Lorica talks with Evangelos Simoudis about three forces reshaping AI: why recent “rogue agent” incidents may be more about permissions, identity, and governance than runaway intelligence; how the belief that AGI is near is helping sustain enormous investment in AI models and data centers despite unanswered questions about margins and ROI; and whether Chinese robotaxi companies can challenge Waymo globally by following a playbook similar to China’s rise in solar and batteries.

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Detailed show notes and transcript, can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

Yoon Kim, President and Chief Strategy Officer of TwelveLabs, explains why understanding video takes more than bolting a language model onto a stream of frames. He walks through how TwelveLabs’ two foundation models, Marengo and Pegasus, embed and describe video content at scale, and how the company’s new agent, Jockey, orchestrates them for tasks like security investigations, sports film review, and documentary editing.

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Detailed show notes and transcript, can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

Andrew Burt, CEO and co-founder of Luminos, joins Ben Lorica to unpack Luminos’s new report, A Practical Guide to Agentic and Gen AI Risk Evals.

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Ben Lorica speaks with Denise Teng, partner at Gradient Ventures, about the real state of enterprise AI adoption, why security and data privacy still slow deployment, and why open weights may become increasingly important for regulated industries.

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Detailed show notes and transcript, can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

Ameet Talwalkar, Carnegie Mellon ML professor and Chief Scientist at Datadog, joins Ben Lorica to trace time series foundation models from skepticism to Datadog’s Toto V1 and V2.

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Detailed show notes and transcript, can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

Ben Lorica sits down with Evangelos Simoudis to unpack why open-weights models are closing the gap with frontier labs and pushing enterprises toward “corporate AI sovereignty.” They then apply an attenuation-funnel lens to AI coding tools — more code, but far less shipped software and usage growth — before turning to “neoconsulting,” the outcomes-based services model reshaping Accenture, Palantir, and the big Indian IT firms.

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Detailed show notes and transcript, can be found on The Data Exchange web site.