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The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica

Ben Lorica

A series of informal conversations with thought leaders, researchers, practitioners, and writers on a wide range of topics in technology, science, and of course big data, data science, artificial intelligence, and related applications. Anchored by Ben Lorica (@BigData), the Data Exchange also features a roundup of the most important stories from the worlds of data, machine learning and AI. Detailed show notes for each episode can be found on https://thedataexchange.media/ The Data Exchange podcast is a production of Gradient Flow [https://gradientflow.com/].

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29 episodes
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English

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October 1 · 58 min
Why AI Makes Games Worse—and How to Make Them Better
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. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩 https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon · RSS. Detailed show notes and transcript, can be found on The Data Exchange web site.
September 24 · 46 min
What Comes After Transformers?
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. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩 https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon · RSS. Detailed show notes and transcript, can be found on The Data Exchange web site.
September 17 · 35 min
Inside OpenAI's First Chip
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. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩 https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon · RSS. Detailed show notes and transcript, can be found on The Data Exchange web site.
September 12 · 56 min
Navier-Stokes and AI generated work: If You Can't Explain It, Did You Really Do It?
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. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩 https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon · RSS. Detailed show notes and transcript, can be found on The Data Exchange web site.
September 10 · 44 min
The Missing Data for Spatial Intelligence
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. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩 https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon · RSS. Detailed show notes and transcript, can be found on The Data Exchange web site.
September 3 · 30 min
Your AI Agent Is Costing You More Than You Think
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. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩 https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon · RSS. Detailed show notes and transcript, can be found on The Data Exchange web site.
August 27 · 40 min
Reasoning Doesn't Start With Language
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. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩 https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon · RSS. Detailed show notes and transcript, can be found on The Data Exchange web site.
August 20 · 35 min
An Agent Is Just an LLM in a For-Loop
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. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩 https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon · RSS. Detailed show notes and transcript, can be found on The Data Exchange web site.
August 13 · 45 min
The Bloomberg Terminal for AI Compute
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. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩 https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon · RSS. Detailed show notes and transcript, can be found on The Data Exchange web site.
August 8 · 54 min
Can China Do to Robotaxis What It Did to Solar?
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. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩 https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon · RSS. Detailed show notes and transcript, can be found on The Data Exchange web site.
August 6 · 39 min
Why Video Is AI's Next Great Frontier
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. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩 https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon · RSS. Detailed show notes and transcript, can be found on The Data Exchange web site.
July 30 · 26 min
Your AI Safety Tests Are Lying to You
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. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩 https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon · RSS. Detailed show notes and transcript, can be found on The Data Exchange web site.
July 23 · 36 min
Enterprise AI Is Moving Slower Than You Think
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. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩 https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon · RSS. Detailed show notes and transcript, can be found on The Data Exchange web site.
July 16 · 50 min
Why Observability May Be AI’s Next Frontier
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. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩 https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon · RSS. Detailed show notes and transcript, can be found on The Data Exchange web site.
July 11 · 56 min
AI Is Producing More Code, but Is It Producing More Value?
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. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩 https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon · RSS. Detailed show notes and transcript, can be found on The Data Exchange web site.
July 9 · 53 min
Stop Renting Generic Intelligence for Your Business
Manos Koukoumidis, CEO of Oumi, returns to the podcast to make the case that most enterprises are wildly inefficient, using bloated generic AI models for tasks that demand specialized ones. He argues that companies should stop renting intelligence from frontier labs and start owning, customizing, and compounding it. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩 https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon · RSS. Detailed show notes and transcript, can be found on The Data Exchange web site.
July 2 · 50 min
The Data Layer Enterprise AI Has Been Missing
Andrew Moore, CEO of Lovelace, former head of Google Cloud AI, and former dean of Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science, joins the podcast to discuss YottaGraph, a knowledge graph growing by a billion facts a week that serves as a context engine for enterprise AI agents. He explains why fully automatic knowledge graph construction is the only viable path at scale, why entity resolution remains a brutal engineering problem, and how graph theory tricks make million-node queries answerable in under a second. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩 https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon · RSS. Detailed show notes and transcript, can be found on The Data Exchange web site.
June 25 · 51 min
The Hidden Failure Modes of AI Agents
Ben Lorica speaks with Helen Gu, CEO of InsightFinder AI and professor at North Carolina State University, about why reliability is becoming a central challenge for enterprise AI. They discuss AI incident response, monitoring agents in production, domain-specific small language models, causal inference for operational data, and why the “last 1%” of accuracy and reliability is often the hardest part of deploying AI systems. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩 https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon · RSS. Detailed show notes and transcript, can be found on The Data Exchange web site.
June 18 · 40 min
The Data Stack Wasn't Built for AI — Here's What Comes Next
Ben Lorica talks with Chang She, co-founder and CEO of LanceDB, about the limitations of traditional analytical data tools like Pandas and Parquet when applied to AI workloads. They discuss the rise of the “multimodal lakehouse,” the unique data storage and retrieval challenges introduced by AI agents, and how LanceDB provides both lightweight embedded memory and massive-scale infrastructure. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩 https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon · RSS. Detailed show notes and transcript, can be found on The Data Exchange web site.
June 13 · 41 min
The SaaSpocalypse Is Coming — But Don't Count Out the Incumbents
Ben Lorica is joined by Evangelos Simoudis for a wide-ranging check-in on how AI is reshaping mobility, enterprise software, and corporate strategy. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩 https://gradientflow.substack.com/ Subscribe: Apple · Spotify · Overcast · Pocket Casts · AntennaPod · Podcast Addict · Amazon · RSS. Detailed show notes and transcript, can be found on The Data Exchange web site.

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