
Loading summary
Casser
Raised, raised, raised, raised Paris, Paris, Paris,
Dylan Patel
Paris Paris is beautiful but it's hot as
Mark
Paris in the middle of the summer, middle of the heat. People are ignoring it. They're showing up.
Interviewer Molly
We have Kasser of Applied Intuition. Casser, how are you doing?
Casser
I'm doing fantastic. Thanks for having me again. Good to see you.
Interviewer Molly
So you're coming off of what some people are saying, a historic commencement speech. You didn't get canceled for talking about AI. So what happened there?
Casser
Yeah, it was at my undergrad, I think. I mean, to give credit where credit is due, I think it's, you know, I went to this place called the General Motors Institute, Kettering University. Now I talk about it in the commencement speech, and let's say the audience. It's not like East coast, west coast elite schools where I. I think, like the gmi, you know, mostly guys. The GMI guys are like more, you know, Midwest pragmatic. So I didn't expect booze, thankfully, and I'm, you know, from there and hometown person, so. But yeah, I mean, I gave, I think, what is my authentic opinion, which is, I think you can have a lot of anxiety about this. You're a new grad. I mean, if you talk to new grads, we hire, obviously, lots of them. That's the prime fears, like, is my career done? Is everything? And I just don't believe that I, like, fundamentally, I don't believe, like, jobs are all going away. And I just. It doesn't. There's something in my mind that could be. This might age really poorly, by the way.
Interviewer Molly
It's also not true. Already it has been reported that jobs have only increased.
Casser
Yeah. And if you look at, like, when I was graduating, there was this whole big looming technological reckoning. And that was the. That was the Internet. And, you know, all these things were being changed at the time. And there was a whole view of, like, what's going to happen to the businesses I'm still in, you know, 25 years later. And obviously we still drive and we still, you know, we still need construction equipment and we sell. So I think there's something similar in the future. Like, these things are not going well. They're going to change because technology changes things. So I talked about that, and I think it, like, landed well. I think the risky bet in the commencement speech was it wasn't like, everything will be, you know, lollipops and rainbows. It's like, hey, that's Life. Like, your 20s are actually a pretty tough time in your life. You got to kind of figure out how to get in the right, you know, groove. And you have to do this in this, like, very volatile environment that we have.
Interviewer Molly
Yeah, well, that's a soft way to put it. I think Jensen Huang once said at Sports Stanford, I wish you all pain and suffering. So.
Casser
Yeah, exactly. It's part of that. And I think, like. Like there. There's like the other extreme, which is like, imagine you don't have to work or you don't, you don't. That's very unfulfilling, too. And if so if you are going to work, then you should work on things that are really important because you only get to live once. And so I think, like, I'm a believer, like, you know, doing the laundromat, like, you know, the classic immigrant, like, Laundromat or doing those job. My. My parents. Those jobs are just as hard. And every time people ask me, like, as a founder, like, oh, must be tough, like applied and. Or whatever, it's like, yeah, but you know, what's harder? Like, working at, like, Taco Bell, like, that's a hard job. And so I think, like, for new grads, you have to have that perspective, too, which is like, there's going to be difficulty. Even if there wasn't an AI Boom. There's always difficulty. That's the part of growing up and finding your way and stuff like that. So I managed to wrap that in a more cohesive way in 10 minutes.
Interviewer Molly
Inspiring bow.
Casser
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Interviewer Molly
Okay, so to bring it to current day, we're at the raise summit in Paris. AI is buzzing all around us. It's like a big expo. What are the trends that you're seeing in the room and around what's going on right now in AI?
Casser
Obviously, the broad stuff that we don't need to talk about are things about the IPOs that are happening and kind of just how some companies are, you know, sucking up lots of revenue. Super positive. That proves that there's something there. It's not hollow. I think the. Below the surface, which is like the rumblings, is, what's that? Reconciliation. And that reconciliation in enterprise, the world that we are, we're an enterprise company, is like budgets and cost consciousness is becoming like a more core theme. Whereas, let's say if we were talking 12 months ago, there was way more of give me everything and I'll take five of it. And now it's like, what are you giving me and how much am I going to pay? And I think that reconciliation will have downstream impacts on everybody, not only the big companies. Going public, but also the small startups that are trying to find their little niche in groups. I think that's a big talking talk in the physical AI world where we're at the way to think about physical AI versus let's say the large language model universes. The diffusion is slower because you're dealing with safety, you're dealing with physical machines in the real world. And so it's way more linear so that you don't have these big spikes and crashes. There aren't new entrants that come in and disrupt. It's just because it's safety oriented. So that's a bit more of what, you know, when we last talked or in the last year, it's kind of continuing the same trajectory.
Interviewer Molly
So when we last talked you had a lot of big announcements that came out. Since then you've had even more. So what's going on at Applied Intuition?
Casser
Yeah, I mean one part of it is we are like a sizable company, so we have a thousand plus engineers doing a lot. So every month we're hopefully producing a lot of good new products that our customers are consuming. But like at a high level in all of our major areas, you know, our mission is to get intelligence onto a billion machines. And so when you kind of deconstruct that, like how do you do that? Obviously the obvious ones that people always think about us are cars and trucks because that's consumers, they understand that. But similarly, we've had announcements in defense and where we are, we're working with, you know, ship makers to put intelligence on the actual ships. Huntington Wells in that specific example, or we're working with Heidelberg materials to put intelligence in queries and in ports and in mines. So we continue on that. So each of the. We had a bunch of announcements. I won't, you know, bore the audience with them, but you can go through all those verticals. And we're just continuing to push intelligence into each of those verticals. And our like macro hypothesis, which is you can take a model and put it on many machines and it can perform really well, I think continues to hold. Why we believe that's really important is it's very expensive to train and deploy these models. And these are models and we're not like repurposing other folks. So collecting data, training, pre training, we're talking big numbers in the way everybody talks big numbers. But what's different about us is we want to also reconcile that with customer revenue. So we're always trying to balance that, which is, you know, different about us than Other companies, there's a version where you just like, hey, we're going to spend a lot of money on this and we'll figure out how to make money in the future. We try to create some balance there, isn't it?
Interviewer Molly
Right. You barely touched any of your funding.
Casser
Yeah, we're still in that phase, which is great. Yeah, yeah. Which is great. We're super happy about. I'm less. It's less about like the ego of saying that. I think it's more about we have a lot of resources to put towards any opportunity that we think is worth deploying a billion dollars towards or deploying multiple billion dollars for. And so, yeah, and I think we have some big announcements coming in the next. Like, like the biggest announcements in the company's histories. Yeah, yeah. So I can't say in, in my notes, they, they said whatever you do, don't talk about X, Y and Z. Because internally it's something we've been working on for a long time. A couple of things we're working on, product side and the customer side. But that's the way I always think about our company. We're 1,000 engineers, we have some resources. Our mission is to put intelligence on a billion machines. So how do we do that in the most effective way possible within the context of everything happening in the summit and everything happening in the competitive world, everything happening with our customers? Yeah. But I think one thing that is worth saying is like, I think everybody who makes physical machines, whether it's defense companies or construction companies or automotive companies, they're not like their head isn't in the sand about AI. They recognize they need to put intelligence on these machines. And so that's really works well for us.
Apoorv
Yeah.
Interviewer Molly
I don't know how you're going to go bigger than the last Physical Intelligence day. You had Marc Andries in there, you had so much, so many big announcements. So we're going to have to sneak into this one somehow.
Casser
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think, I think, I mean, I'm believer that I'm pitching my own book here, which is like, I think the physical world and AI going into that. I think when we look back, I think that's going to be the bigger story. As in look back 25 years from now. I think we'll look back. It's kind of like if you look at the early days of the Internet, there were companies that really focused on getting websites of static websites up. And so when you look back over the last 25, 30 years of the Internet, you really think about Amazon you really think about Apple, you know, so I think like those broader themes of like, phones getting in everybody's pockets and delivery becoming ubiquitous, those macro themes I think will be the big ones rather than like a specific model launching and then the government saying no and like the head all is going to be forgotten. So I think. And that's where my, like, mind is always at.
Interviewer Molly
On that note, I have to ask you, what is your hottest take right now?
Casser
I think, oh, man, the hottest take. I think the cost structure that we're currently seeing, from whether it's from how much we spend on model training and development to employees to we're at that phase of the bubble where it's like, you know, like all the opulence in the companies is what people talk about rather than the products. And so I think, I think there's going to be a little bit of a pullback. Maybe that's not a hot take, but I think it's coming. And a lot of times when people talk about this concept of a boom and bust, the view is the bus always takes longer than you think it is. But I think the cycles move a lot faster. So if there was really a bust in 21, it's like, oh, well, you typically have a longer time horizon where you have a buildup and maybe that pullback happens. It's not necessarily a hot take, but it's like, I think about it, I think about like. So I'm just. Yeah, I would talk about books I read, you know, a lot. And I just finished this book called the Rise and Fall of ltcm. The book title is When Genius Failed. But that's really. LTCM was this hedge fund in the late 90s that was a bunch of these, you know, savants, geniuses, and they, they kind of do what, what's happening now with compute, which is like, they just use leverage and they found themselves in a really bad position. And suddenly this untouchable firm, so lauded in, in New York, in Wall street, collapses and collapses very, very like, you know, kind of dramatically. And like, maybe because I read right before I go to sleep, like it's in the back of my mind, it's like, could there be an LTCM situation in our business where you have something that's so elite and hopeful and then suddenly, like, some things don't work and it stumbles and it has, it has real repercussions? In the LTCM case, that was because the broader global markets in Russia and in Asia started behaving in ways that nobody thought would happen. And it compounded. So like, is there something that happens more peripherally in the AI business and then it has a domino effect into our business? Like that's what I kind of think about a little bit. But I'm like, you know, I'm in the, you know, only the paranoid survive. So like you'd be asking me this question at any point in the last 10 years. I'd always be like, where is the hidden risk? Like that's like one thing I'd really like implore founders to do is like you always want to be thinking about hidden risk in your company, in your leadership team, in your technical strategy, in the market at large and how you play it.
Interviewer Molly
I was going to ask you about the books.
Casser
Yes.
Interviewer Molly
So what else are you reading right now?
Casser
Like literally at this moment? And I always have to keep reading new stuff because if I get an interview, I can't be recycling books. The non technical books I'm reading which are interesting are Society of Captives, which is about the American prison system and then it's written in the 1950s. Really good book. They also, I recommend to founders to read stuff which is outside of our industry to give you like some, you know, like reflection on like, how does this kind of apply here? I'm reading the current. The. The. The courage to be disliked, which I think people think is hilarious because nobody thinks that I don't mind being disliked. So it's like, that's a great book I'm reading. I'm also reading something else and it skips my mind.
Interviewer Molly
Genghis Khan.
Casser
I just finished Jack Waterford's Genghis Khan book as well. Also fantastic. Making the modern world. Also fantastic.
Interviewer Molly
What were your biggest lessons from Genghis Khan?
Casser
That's just a nice like popcorn book. A better book that I just finished and I would really recommend, especially if you are an enterprise watching this, like you're on the consuming side of AI. And it's a book written by John DeLorean, who is supposed to be the next CEO of General Motors in the 70s or next president of GM. And he leaves. He created the DeLorean, the car that's in Back to the Future. So he wrote this like bombastic book called on a clear day that you can see General Motors. But then after he wrote it, he was like, this can't be published. Like it's too, it's too crazy. And I'm starting a car company and I can't alienate it. But his co author basically publishes it anyways through lawsuits and everything. But it's A phenomenal book because at the time General Motors was like at the top of folks walking through here, at the top of the business world. And it's like right now like saying like if somebody wrote a bombastic book about SpaceX or anthropic or something and saying like it's all screwed up, 300 pages of why it's not good and the crazy. It's written in the late 70s when GM is doing so well. But the punchline is like those things actually came to be true. The reason GM actually struggled, it would be another 20 years. We're very clear in that book. So if you're an enterprise, the reason I was just with the leadership at one of the big OEMs in Germany, the board and the CEO, all the, all the most senior people. And I told them you should read this. Even though it's, it's from the 70s because I think large organizations have the same almost endemic problems. AI or not AI, it's like how leads work together like that. But anyways, long way of saying on a clear day you can see General Motors is a good book.
Interviewer Molly
Sounds like we need a bit of reflection. Some personal audits going on there.
Casser
Exactly.
Interviewer Molly
So as we close out, what are you most looking forward to? I, you know it could be in any timeline. Some people say 12 months is too long, maybe it's the next weekend. I don't know. What are you most looking forward to?
Casser
I mean I, I mean it's like to a hammer everything's a nail. Like I think self driving cars is, is really everything. And you know you, you're. When I go, go around Paris, you see data collection vehicles and you're like it's even coming here. Like you know, which is like not Sunnyvale. And so now like every city I go to typically with a trained eye you can see like oh, that's a data collection to go like that. Those are sensors that are not for self to collect data to train models. And so I think that's all I see all the time.
Interviewer Molly
Yeah, that's fantastic. Well Keser, thank you so much.
Casser
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Podcast Host Molly
This episode is brought to you by Brex. My favorite. You become what you spend on. And I refuse to spend my time on work that shouldn't exist. Expense reports, receipt chasing and manual closes the companies building. What's next from Vercel OpenAI, Anthropic Granola and Deepgram all made the same call. They all run on Brex. Brex is the intelligent finance platform that combines cards, expenses and banking into A single stack with agentic finance built in. AI agents that handle expenses automatically, enforce policy before spend happens and close your books in minutes. That's why sorcery runs on Brex so I can spend time on building and not busy work. It's time to get Brex AF. Learn more at brex.com sorcery that's B R E X.com S O U R C E Bye.
Interviewer Molly
We're here with Dylan Patel of Semianalysis out here in Paris. Dylan, how are you?
Max
I'm doing well.
Dylan Patel
Yeah, it's. I mean Paris is beautiful, but it's hot as. Yeah, I don't know. AC Paris is meant to be enjoyed in spring and fall, not in summer.
Interviewer Molly
It's not an optimal place for data centers. Right.
Dylan Patel
I think it's mostly a regulatory thing. But yeah, yeah, Parents Paris is they have all this spare power. One of the funny things is they were like, oh, okay, let's build a bunch of data centers. But then Spain, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany all freaked out because it's like, oh wait, all this spare power is actually keeping our grid alive. If you stop selling us the spare power and you build data centers, our grids are screwed. So there's been a lot of pushback from the other EU countries, like don't build data centers in France because we need the nuclear power. It's very interesting.
Interviewer Molly
So you are a conference surfer. You love conferences. I just listened to your interview with Sequoia on this. You built some of the analysis off of Riding the Wave of conferences. So I'm very curious. What are the biggest trends that are going on at Raise this year?
Dylan Patel
I would say a lot of people here are just trying to figure out what the hell's going on. And I think there's like a wide array of people. Like, there's a lot of people who are super deep in infra and like, you know, they're making deals here. But then there's a lot of people who are just like, I spent too much money on my token. What do I do? Right. I spent too many tokens. So there's a wide range of sort of people here, I think. I think it's fun. It's fun that way because then you get like such a wide perspective of people and you can walk up to someone and they're like a G and they know a lot of stuff and like a great connection. Then you walk up to someone and you're like, wow, I need to get out of this conversation as soon as possible. Like Molly, you know, like
Interviewer Molly
oh God. Okay, well anyways, let's cut to the chase. What is your hottest take right now?
Dylan Patel
I think a lot of people are trying to build all these optimized solutions for data centers and they're just looking at like a backward looking view, right? Like what happened at the lab six months ago and what does it look like there or what does it look like now? Okay, I'm going to build my three year infrastructure with that in mind instead of like flexibility and general purpose, you know, capabilities. And then when they actually end up building at infra, it's going to be a lot of it may be useless or not useless, but like less optimal than something that is more. More general purpose or more flexible. It feels like a lot of people are trying to optimize on the current rather than think about where the workload is heading and then optimizing and that's going to lead to a lot of wasted infraspan. I think most people don't know what they're doing. They're just buying the Nvidia stuff. But a lot of people are also just like they think they know what they're doing and then they're buying and building and optimizing and customizing and then ultimately they're going to waste a bunch of money. So it'll be fun to see where things head out and how they plan out and then what people do with all this infra that maybe isn't super useful with where models are in two years.
Interviewer Molly
Okay, we're going to run through some quick topics. Okay, I want your take on all of them. Let's start with co design. How do you feel?
Dylan Patel
Yeah, I mean co design is the important thing, right. But when you try to do software hardware co design without knowing where the software is headed, where the models are headed, then you end up with a.
Casser
In a pit. Right.
Dylan Patel
That sort of issue. But if you don't do software hardware co design, you're also going to end up with like infra that is not optimized. So it's tough.
Interviewer Molly
Open source versus closed.
Dylan Patel
The theme here is that all like there's multiple Chinese model labs who are telling all the inference guys, hey, our next model is not going to be open source. We're going to license it to you. So open is dying quickly, unfortunately.
Interviewer Molly
How do you think the costs of memory should trickle down? Should they go to the customer or should players be taking that price on themselves?
Dylan Patel
I'm a very big fan of trickle down economics out of pocket. So trickle down, I think they're going to trickle down a lot. I think you've already seen server pricing go up like B2 hundreds, B3 hundreds that you're buying now versus last year. The price is significantly higher. We've seen next generation hardware receive price increases before they've even started production. Like here's the quoted price and now the quoted price is higher. So it's definitely going to get passed down. And we see that with cost of tokens not falling as fast as they were previously because the cost of memory is flowing through.
Interviewer Molly
How do you feel about token maxing?
Dylan Patel
I love token maxing. I think anyone who doesn't token max is going to get left behind. I think all this token budgeting stuff is loser mentality. If you're token budgeting hardcore, then your people are not going to learn the new workflows and then they're going to get. They're not going to reshape your company and make it more efficient and drive a lot more work with fewer people. So ultimately token budgeting is a fallacy. Now ROI is important, but ultimately the only way to get people to change their behavior is you measure them and you force them to do things differently. And token budgeting is like pulling back on them. So I think, you know, there's got to be some rationality. Don't just waste money on tokens for the lulls. Don't give bonuses to people based on how many tokens they use or comp. But at the same time like don't just like clamp down on people wholesale.
Interviewer Molly
Is it true you fired someone for using haiku?
Dylan Patel
I did not fire. I got mad at someone because their model was set to haiku and they didn't even realize it. They were like Claude codes mid blah blah blah. And they still were trying to token use a lot of tokens. They spent like a thousand dollars on haiku. I was like, what the hell? What are you doing? And they're like, oh, my bad. I didn't even realize they changed to Opus or Fable now. And they're so much more productive because they're not just like asking the model to do the same thing over and over and over again.
Interviewer Molly
Okay, lastly, this is a pressing question. What is your favorite chip right now?
Dylan Patel
I've been a real big fan of the Takis Blue Heat. It's quite spicy limey. It's good. It's good, right? I think. You know the other thing that I have a theory on, and I don't know if this is true or not, but chips in Europe have less seasoning than Chips in America and Mexico and like there is this like entire thing right, where like developing countries or less cultured countries are less flavoring their food. And the European idea is like, oh, you know, our ingredients are high quality. And so I think this extends to chips as well.
Interviewer Molly
It's just horrible. You need more flavoring, more msg, please. Amazing. Thank you so much, Dylan.
Dylan Patel
All right, see you. Thank you.
Interviewer Molly
We have Mark here from Nevius. Mark, how are you doing?
Mark
Fantastic. It's been a great time here at Raise.
Interviewer Molly
How are the vibes at Raise?
Mark
You know, the energy is real high. You can see it around us right now. Ton of attention, ton of participation. Really impressed at how they pulled a global audience to Paris in the middle of the summer, in the middle of the heat. People are ignoring it. They're showing up and it's been a fantastic experience.
Interviewer Molly
What are the biggest trends that you're seeing here?
Mark
It's incredible, the discussion shifting from what our AI native is building to when our enterprise is adopting. So it's really incredible to actually have the discussion where we're seeing the bridges being built to see enterprise adoption take place. Lots of discussion about, you know, obviously the capex and power and stock prices which I think at the end of the day is a bit of a distraction because this is a marathon that we're running and actually being able to drive that enterprise adoption, that's the critical next stage for the the entire industry.
Interviewer Molly
Well, I can understand you guys have a lot of fans over there at nebbyus and a lot of fans of the stock too. So I want to ask you, what is your hottest take today?
Mark
Hottest take today. And boy, that's such a wonderfully generous offer. Hottest take today is incredible. Opportunity is in front of us. The staying focused on the long term to not only serve today's immediate needs, but how are we going to help to transform industries and how are we going to help to make enterprises successful with AI?
Interviewer Molly
What is the biggest problem you're seeing with the build out of data centers?
Mark
The biggest problem with the build out of data centers is something that nebbyz is not experiencing, which is that a lot of folks are. A lot of people are focused on single individual projects. Our organization has built a portfolio of opportunities. Today we have 20 data centers. We're multiplying that into the future. So the biggest challenge that many of our competitors are facing is being single threaded, which is strange when you're in a multi threaded parallel processing industry and getting stuck with a single project. The challenges are that a lot of Things are happening locally with different community challenges, regulatory challenges, power challenges which everybody faces. Fortunately, at Nebbys, we're actually pursuing a broad, diversified portfolio approach.
Interviewer Molly
The beautiful thing about the data centers being created today is they have some of the most advanced technology data centers have ever had. So whether it's from new memory to optics, how are you guys thinking about
Mark
that all the time? Looking at the interesting innovation that's taking place. The fact that we can actually build from scratch, from dirt up and be able to look at each layer of the entire data center stack and be able to consider new methods, new technology, new providers, puts us in a unique position to be able to take advantage of all those advances. So we're always looking at the new and innovative things that are taking place to be able to improve the quality, the capabilities, the reliability of the solutions that we're delivering.
Interviewer Molly
Amazing. Okay, as we close out, what are you most looking forward to in the next 12 months?
Mark
The next 12 months in AI is an eternity. I mean, I have been at Nebias for 12 months, actually 13 months. And if you look back 13 months ago, it was a completely different company. So the next 13 months is talking about the tens of billions that are being generated in Nebbyus revenue and the extraordinary traction they were gaining with not only the phenomenal AI natives that we're working with, but also making our way to scale enterprise and big brand adoption and being able to expand our solution set from the model training that people are doing today into the inferencing that we started to offer, and into agentic workloads.
Interviewer Molly
Fantastic. Well, thank you so much, Mark.
Mark
Pleasure. I really enjoyed the conversation.
Interviewer Molly
We're here with Arvind of Glean. Arvind, how are you doing?
Arvind
Doing very well.
Interviewer Molly
How's raise treating you?
Arvind
This is a fantastic conference. I didn't expect, you know, what I saw here.
Interviewer Molly
What is the major trend that you're seeing that's going on here today? Have you been able to actually see anything?
Arvind
Well, I've not been able to attend most of the talks because there's so many good people at this event. So just like, you know, getting to meet them all like has taken all of my time but, but sometimes I clear number one, like, you know, all the, all the new companies are here and, and the big trend in my opinion is open source and how that is fundamentally changing, like the fully I stack, you know, and bringing, bringing sort of rise to a whole bunch of new companies, you know, that have new opportunities with open source.
Interviewer Molly
So what's going on at Glean what's hot right now?
Arvind
Well, Glean has actually we're finding ourselves in the midst of very, very good timing. So when you think about AI making it work in the enterprise, the two big things are context. Like, how do you bring, you know, like all these agents that you want to automate the work that humans do? Like they need that context, that data, that information that humans use to do the same work. And that's actually like something that we are really, really good at. So, so being the leader in context graphs is actually helping create a massive demand for Glean. And then the second big trend in the industry is people keep complaining about like they can't measure the return on investment, where is the business value coming from? And so Glean comes in handy on that front, at least from a bottom line perspective because we do really, really good in terms of helping a customer reduce their token usage in two different ways. One, we can pick the right model, since we work with all the closed domain and open source models, we can pick the right model for the right task, which is cheaper for them but still gets the work done. And second, with our context graph, we can actually, when a model is trying to do some complex work, it doesn't have to spend like all this time just trying to assemble the raw materials to do that work. You know, with Glean, they get that context in one shot. So we actually make most of your AI workloads much faster and very cheaper.
Interviewer Molly
What is the biggest challenge that you have been hitting recently?
Arvind
Challenge? I think from business perspective it is finally businesses are running into this, you know, that, well, we're going to actually measure our spend on AI and so that, that is creating a little bit of friction, you know, now with all these customers having so many different tools, so many different choices, you know, to bet on, it's getting confusing for them to pick, you know, who's the right partner to, you know, to, to actually start their transformation journey on. So, so that's been always like, you know, the challenge in AI, like, you know, because, you know, like suddenly when AI became hot, every software company in the world became an AI company. And it's confusing the buyers. So, you know, clarifying that doubt in them, like helping them understand the landscape, what, what companies do, what work. And why is Glean relevant? Like, you know, in this, in this crowded mix of technology providers, you know, that's always been like, you know, the, that the difficult task for us.
Interviewer Molly
All right now I have to ask you a difficult question. What is your hottest take right now?
Arvind
Well, I think open source models are going to dominate AI inferencing. You know, you'll see in the next two years, we'll shift to where it's almost no open source, to where it's going to be almost all open source.
Interviewer Molly
Amazing. Okay, Arvind, thank you so much.
Arvind
Thank you.
Interviewer Molly
We're here with New York Stock Exchange, star of the show. How are you doing?
Laura
Well, I'm better now that I'm with you, I mean, but this is kind of incredible, actually. It's my first time in Paris. I'm Laura, by the way. Hi. I run social for the New York Stock Exchange, so I like to think I have the best job in the world. You might have the best job in the world, but luckily being at the New York Stock Exchange means I get to work with you a lot. So it's kind of a win win. But yeah, this is kind of incredible. First time in Paris and I get. First time in Paris, I get the whole hullabaloo. I get it.
Interviewer Molly
Paris is amazing.
Laura
Yeah, it's pretty amazing. Also, it's hard to beat New York in my eyes. Tried and true. So I. I understand the lore and
Dylan Patel
the love of the Louvre.
Laura
How about that?
Apoorv
Whoa.
Interviewer Molly
When I was on my way over here, I was like, you know what? I could commute straight up if the
Laura
flight wasn't that bad.
Interviewer Molly
I came from la. I just slept the whole time. I should probably just commute here.
Laura
Hop, skip and a jump. Yeah. And we have the match tonight and I'm very excited. It's France, Morocco, so there might be riots.
Interviewer Molly
We're going to see.
Laura
And you will see Molly and I on the pitch. No kidding. We are not going. No.
Interviewer Molly
That's in the United States, right? All right, Laura, so you have been around Rays. You've been seeing all the companies come in and through, through and around the New York Stock Exchange booth. You've done media yourself. What is something we should all be paying attention to? What is the trend of the day?
Laura
The hottest thing happening here at Raise, I would say folks are going to be saying AI all day. Magentic, cloud, quantum, all of our favorite words. I believe the thing that's making these companies stand out is their access and visibility. It's their partnerships. A lot of those partnerships are happening here. We're seeing it in real time, watching real C suite founders, entrepreneurs actually meeting in person to close deals. It's actually kind of crazy to see it with my own eyes. You only hear about it, I think, in, you know, closed doors and golf courses and Karaoke bars. But I firmly believe that it is about the story you're telling, how well you're telling it and where you're going to go from there, how it's going to set you apart. And that has a lot to do with what we're doing. Right. Like there's a reason why NYC and NYC Wired are the main media sponsors of Raise. Hello. There's a reason NYSE is one of your sponsors.
Interviewer Molly
And also Raise rang the bell.
Laura
Come on, come on. The biggest financial stage, like the epicenter of global finance. There is a storytelling aspect to it that sets people apart. And if you can stand out and if you can, you know, cut through the noise. I think there's a lot of noise, honestly. And I think if you have a clear message and you have a clear goal with really good people, that's what helps with being in person and stuff is you meet the actual real good people. Talk about Vibe coding. It's all about Vibe, you know, Vibe meeting, Vibe Media. Our new podcast, Molly and Laura.
Interviewer Molly
Amazing place to end it. Laura, thank you so much.
Laura
Thank you so much. See at the New York Stock Exchange.
Interviewer Molly
We're here with apoorv from Altimeter apoorv, how are you doing?
Apoorv
Good.
Glad to be here.
Interviewer Molly
How's Raise this year?
Apoorv
Things are definitely upgraded since last year.
Interviewer Molly
Yeah, big, big time, big guests, big
Apoorv
speakers, big companies, Great, like really good setup, lots of great founders, really excited to meet. A lot of the CIOs got to know the CIO of Goldman last night. CIO, Procter and Gamble and where they are on their AI journey has been the biggest learning for me.
Interviewer Molly
I've been waiting to ask you this question for quite some time because you've gone viral a lot recently with your Stanford lectures. So apoorb, what is your hottest take right now?
Apoorv
Well, today of all days there's Four Seasons in AI. They're called OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX and Google. So if you're a CIO, if you're a CEO, if you're about to make multimillion billion dollar decision of which lab to build your intelligence on, Plan for the climate, not for weather. What does that mean? That's multimodal routing. That's evals. That's thinking about post trained custom models. Yeah, that's out of stake. It's, it's four seasons of the year.
Interviewer Molly
So what's the climate?
Apoorv
That's a great question. The climate is evergreen. Right. So you've got to plan for. If you're about to spend $100 million, you don't want to get stuck in one of the seasons. Sometimes the summer is long, sometimes it's. It's a heat wave. But I think, But I think you. I think you want an evergreen, Evergreen season, and I think that evergreen season, the climate looks like you'll have a portion of your workloads going through open source. As Jesse from decagon wrote very eloquently, a big portion of their volume goes through open source, about 90% now. And then the frontier stuff, you know, discovering new use cases will always go through the most intelligent models. Coding might stay there for a long time. And so planning for that multimodal world, planning to not get stuck in one regime, is a climate for people who,
Interviewer Molly
who have not seen your lectures just yet. Highly recommend it. Who have you spoken with? I know you brought on different guests and you bring them for the students. What was the plan there?
Apoorv
Oh, you know, we had a great lineup. It's a labor of love, and I was really excited to bring back some of those conversations back to school. You know, if you're a student and you're making a big life decision, I wanted to make sure that you saw the whole AI stack, from chips to data centers to models and ultimately the applications. And so we had a great set of speakers across all of the parts of the stack. We had folks from Nvidia and Groq, we had Ali Goatsi from DataBricks, we had two. And from base stand, we had Sachin from OpenAI, the folks from Anthropic. So it's a great lineup and we're very lucky to have them.
Interviewer Molly
Amazing. Okay, to close out, what are you most looking forward to this year?
Apoorv
Oh, wow. I'm looking to the seasonal changes in the climate this year. Well, you guys saw what happened today. Saul from OpenAI goes live. SpaceX. Michael True just launched a model at his opus level. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's. What a great time to be live and watch the seasons change.
Interviewer Molly
Amazing. Anything else? Do we miss anything? Anything you want to share to come
Apoorv
later in the year?
Interviewer Molly
More to come later in the year. Thank you so much.
Apoorv
Thank you.
Interviewer Molly
We have Nikhil from turbopuffer. Nikhil, how are you doing so well.
Nikhil
Love being here in Paris. A little hot, a little chaotic, but, you know, we're telling people to puff,
Interviewer Molly
so we have to address the rumors. You don't sell puffer jackets.
Nikhil
No, those are internal only. We do have puffer jackets, but only for a select few. Now, if you go to T puff, that Supply. We do occasionally drop new merch there, so stay tuned.
Interviewer Molly
Oh my gosh. Okay, so let's get into it for people who don't know. Turbo Puffer. Yeah, what is it?
Nikhil
So we are a search engine optimized for AI workloads. So we power retrieval for cursor, for notion, for lagora, for anthropic, some of the biggest names in the business. And what that means is if you think of a product that has a search bar, we want to be the thing powering that search bar. We are the thing powering that search bar in many cases. But for any agentic application, they're searching on your behalf behind the scenes. So you might be asking for for a report on sales. The first thing that agent is going to do is search turbo popper for everything mentioning sales and get that all into the context window of a model.
Interviewer Molly
Amazing. Okay, given that, what are you seeing as the biggest trends here at raise so much data?
Nikhil
I've been talking to folks we used to think in terms of gigabytes or terabytes. Folks are coming up to me with not just one but ten or hundreds of petabytes that they want to search for. Now I'm not sure everyone is prepared for the cost of searching over 100 petabytes. There's a bit of a negotiation.
Interviewer Molly
What is the cost on that?
Nikhil
So our largest workloads cost tens of millions of dollars to search over right now. And those are web scale use cases with tens of terabytes. Searching petabytes is going to cost another order of magnitude or 2 on top of that.
Interviewer Molly
And what is the architecture behind it?
Nikhil
So the reason that this is viable at all, the reason folks are able to do do vector search over the entire web on TurboPuffer is because we're based on object storage. So that's S3 or Google Cloud storage, which is rock bottom storage prices. The absolute cheapest storage you can get. The problem is it's really slow. So our innovation is we had all this caching on top of S3 so that you see performance that's almost equivalent to what you get with the system that's not based on object storage, but you get something much closer to the economics of object storage.
Interviewer Molly
Damn. Okay, are you ready for the hardest question of the day?
Nikhil
I'm so ready.
Interviewer Molly
What is your hottest take right now?
Nikhil
I think search is still too expensive. And Turbo Puffer was founded because we thought search was an order of magnitude too expensive. At the time. We've brought it down by an order of magnitude but it Kills us that there are still products out there that are limited in their ambition because search is still too expensive. So we're always looking for ways to bring the cost of down even more. If you think about it, if you're spending $5 on Turbo Puffer per user, but you're only charging your users $5 a month, the economics just don't work. But if we can bring that cost down by an order of magnitude, so you're only spending 50 cents a user on searches, suddenly you're able to build a product where you couldn't before, your margins work, you get crazy growth, you explode. So that's what we're always looking for. What product isn't currently in the market because search is too expensive.
Interviewer Molly
Amazing. So what's next?
Nikhil
More relevance. We started with vector search. We added keyword search, we added regex. But what people actually care about is are my searches good? They don't care about did I get 95% of the results I should have gotten for this vector search? They care about is my agent performing? Is it completing the task successfully? So our task is how do we get the best possible search results fed to these agents so they actually complete the tasks. So we're taking more and more of that in house. There's a bunch of new techniques like late interaction, like search agents that we're going to build into the product so that you as the user just, you puff harder, you send more queries to turbopuffer and you can trust that you're getting good results and you don't have to worry as much about the mechanics of search.
Interviewer Molly
Amazing. Thank you so much, Nikhil.
Nikhil
Yeah, thank you for having me.
Podcast Host Molly
If you're building what's next in AI, you need to know MongoDB, the database platform developers love and built for the agents you're running. MongoDB stores searches and reasons over your data in real time with vector search and embeddings from Voyage AI all in the same system. No separate pipelines, no stitching together 10 different tools. It's why 75% of the Fortune 100 and leading AI native startups run on MongoDB. Build and scale from your first user to billions of vectors. Go to mongodb.com AI to learn more. That's mongodb.com/AI to learn more. Bye.
Interviewer Molly
So we are in the middle of chaos here at Raise is very popular this year and we have Barack from wonderful AI. So Barack, welcome.
Barack
Hey Molly, great to see you. It is absolutely chaotic here in Paris. At the Raise summit, I'm Barack I'm from Wonderful. I'm the Chief Strategy Officer at Wonderful. I'm actually the first institutional investor in the company, then joined because I believe in it so much. We're an enterprise applied AI partner to the world's largest enterprises outside of the us. We're both a platform and a partner to them.
Interviewer Molly
So what is your hottest take right now?
Barack
I believe geographies will be even bigger than verticals when it comes to AI. When you look at actual labor and labor displacement and what's actually happening in the world and where it's likely to go, countries are way more interesting from an expansion perspective and a focus perspective than verticals. And that you can go horizontal without a vertical specialization with AI as long as you're able to solve the go to market strategy with it.
Interviewer Molly
Damn, we are back in Uber landgraab competition stage.
Barack
That's exactly right. It's like the enterprise applied AI playbook with the Uber go to market strategy. We're in over 30 countries around the world in pretty much the last six months that we've expanded to most of them. So it's quite a wild ride.
Interviewer Molly
So what is the secret to Wonderful?
Barack
It's really the focus and the strategy. I think generally in the AI universe the opportunity is massive. But one of the hardest things for companies is how to actually differentiate and to break out from the pack. What it requires is a non consensus insight that you need to actually be right about. I think for Wonderful, that was really the geographic focus to go generalized to go horizontal in terms of the use cases that you can actually offer for enterprises. But to actually focus on rest of world versus us that was the non consensus part. The rest of it around the challenges with applied AI and what you actually need is very similar to the way most of us probably think about it. But it's the playbook that you bring to it and local delivery that was most non consensus about Wonderful.
Interviewer Molly
What's your favorite country?
Barack
Wow, great question. I live most of the year in Tel Aviv so I'm, I'm biased towards Israel. But to visit and that I've had the, the pleasure of visiting was Japan where we opened up an office and I was there about a month ago. Tokyo is, is just, I mean Japan in general is like a completely unique world and especially as, as it relates to the enterprise playbook and how they do business and the respect culture and everything. It's, it's fascinating and I love it.
Interviewer Molly
Amazing. Great place to end. Thank you. Brock.
Barack
Yeah, lovely to meet you Molly. Bye everyone.
Interviewer Molly
We have Max from Lagora. Max, how's Ray's for you?
Max
It's very warm. The electricity went out yesterday. I keep getting pestered by customers, but I think that's a great thing and it has been a fun time to come to Paris. I think it's, you know, I've done a few of these in the us, in London, in the Nordics, and it's always a bit of a different flavor, but it's been great.
Interviewer Molly
So you're based in Europe?
Max
Yes.
Interviewer Molly
How is the Europe vibe right now?
Max
Well, I think the vibe in Europe overall versus companies like Ligora is quite different. So I think the general vibe is there's a fear that some of the best frontier models get locked up in the States and there's a lot of discussion around how do you continue winning in manufacturing in these types of markets that are important. And then you have really fast growing software companies like Ligora, where we are adopted a global mindset from day one. And so we don't really view ourselves as only European. I think we view ourselves as very global and we have been competing at the global stage from day one. And so we still wake up every day thinking about what can we do more, what, what can we do next? Which is really thrilling.
Interviewer Molly
Did you expect this level of growth?
Max
I think going into this I didn't really know what to expect. I think I've had a very unique experience fundraising and working in our market that most startups doesn't have. Typically you don't raise $600 million in two weeks. But we got some great advice when we were in Y Combinator, which is if you build a great company, it's easy to fundraise and if you build a great product, I think it's easy to work with customers and to deliver value. So no, I did not expect this, but I think that we are leveling up and we are meeting the opportunity when it's now being presented to us.
Interviewer Molly
So legal AI is one of the fastest growing categories right now and it's so super competitive. How are you dealing with the token situation?
Max
So we were actually the first legal AI company to move into consumption based pricing. And I think that's really important because IT one just continues to solidify that we're the product leader and innovator in our space. But secondly, it really aligns the value that we bring with the way that the business model works. So if you have a flat rate and you say, you know, 200, $300 per user per month and then they use $2,000 worth of tokens, you have a problem. And so we've been running at a very positive gross margin for a long time and this will help us continue to do so and I think helps our customers already see where their tokens are being spent and how to think about that long term. Because, you know, token consumption have been the business model encoding tools since inception. It's the pricing model of the big labs and now it's going to be the pricing model in legal and I expect many of the other companies to follow us into that.
Interviewer Molly
Damn. Okay, I have a really hard question for you right now. Are you ready?
Nikhil
Shoot.
Interviewer Molly
What is your hottest take right now?
Max
My hottest take is that there is a lot of complaining from European startups rather than just locking in and, you know, building for the global stage. I think there's a bit of laziness. There's, you know, it's nice in the summers here to go to Italy or to go to France, where we are today, but if you want to build, you know, the biggest companies in the world, you need to look past that and you need to understand that you're competing with the us, you're competing with China, and if you want to win global, globally, you need to work as hard as they do.
Interviewer Molly
Sorry, you can't go to San Tropez.
Max
No, sorry.
Interviewer Molly
The great lock in is year round.
Max
Yes, that's exactly it.
Interviewer Molly
Amazing. Thank you so much, Max.
Max
Thank you, Molly.
Interviewer Molly
We have Gil here, CTO of Merge, which we recently did an amazing episode with you guys at the New York Stock Exchange.
Gil
It was great.
Interviewer Molly
How are you doing, Gil?
Gil
I'm doing great. Happy to be here in Paris for the conference.
Interviewer Molly
Okay. We have one burning question that I know know you've been waiting for.
Dylan Patel
Yeah.
Interviewer Molly
What is your hottest take right now in AI?
Gil
I think some people are starting to agree with this token maxing not working. You're getting zero results from using more tokens. It was cool to encourage your employees to use more AI, but I think what we're seeing now is we're not getting more output. The only thing that people are seeing a real connection between, I guess, you know, you know, sort of productivity and usage of AI is how you use AI to bring your cycle to times down, get feedback and iterate really quickly.
Interviewer Molly
I love asking you this question because you are so technical and it is a fun fear mongering topic. So what are the biggest concerns people should be watching out for with integrating all these APIs with all of these new applications?
Gil
I think mainly it's security down Market, who cares? You're going to let your own personal data flow. I do it for my personal consumption. But when it comes to. To businesses, they are just afraid of data flowing out of the system. So integrations are the point where an LLM actually becomes dangerous. Something isolated. I mentioned this before, but something isolated and it might insult you, but it's not going to do much worse than that. But the second that thing can send your data elsewhere, that's where all the problems come in. So I think we're just going to see a lot more governance and locking down before we see. I really opened up to the masses to talk to all your systems.
Interviewer Molly
I think Alex Karp recently went viral for this rant of AI sovereignty within your organization. You agree?
Gil
I absolutely agree. It's just there's never been a good position in business to hand over, you know, the fate of your company, your future, your development to another company. So I think people are going to want sovereignty. They're going to want control over their own systems. Whether that means, you know, hosting in house or using third parties. They want the flexibility to switch, switch whenever they want. They do not want to be locked in.
Interviewer Molly
Amazing. Well, Gil, we will let you go, but what are you most looking forward to at raise this year?
Gil
Honestly, I think what's been so cool. I know this is probably an untraditional answer, but the mix of sort of this really classic French architecture and these statues from the year 1500 mixed with all the AI and it just. It's such a cool juxtaposition. I'm loving being here.
Interviewer Molly
Perfect place to end it. Thank you so much, Gil.
Casser
Thank you, Ariel.
Interviewer Molly
Welcome to Sorcery.
Apoorv
I'm happy to be here.
Interviewer Molly
We're here at the Illuminati.
Apoorv
Yeah, it's like the most amazing, actually. I've never been in such a bizarre place to do an interview, so that's cool.
Interviewer Molly
So we're fresh off stage. We were just talking about Navon and how you guys are dominating travel. What is your hottest take right now with travel?
Apoorv
I think the hottest take is what we talked about. How humans are still so important, both for meeting and being here, but also supporting all of this. It was actually a cool outcome of this, of this interview.
Interviewer Molly
I mean, it is true we were talking about this, but hallucinations, you can't have an AI agent do everything, especially with travel, because it's so, so complex. So how are you at Navon helping solve this?
Apoorv
It's so, so important. Like, think about it. If I'll send you to the Wrong flight. I'll tell you that. I upgraded your flight and we did. And do it like, I'll send you to the wrong room. People are so, so emotional when it comes to travel. They care about it. So you cannot have any fuck ups. Hallucination is a huge, huge, huge fuck up. We've built our own platform, our own model to prevent that. And we are supporting most of our customers by using our own AI platform that actually does not hallucinate.
Interviewer Molly
Before you've had a customer come over to you, I would assume. What has been the worst travel story you've ever heard?
Apoorv
It's actually my travel story. This is the travel story that started Navan. I was one of the first ones to start an offshore operation in Ukraine, in Odessa, Ukraine. And I went there, arrived there in the middle of the night. Freezing cold, by the way. I hate the cold. Freezing cold. Came to the hotel because of some credit card issues. You. The hotel canceled my reservation and they told me to go down the street and find a new hotel. The travel agency didn't pick up. The software didn't work. I walked with my luggage, like down the street one, one hotel after the other until I found something. But this was by far my worst travel experience and really what inspired me to start a company.
Interviewer Molly
So you've been public now for almost a year?
Apoorv
Like nine months. Yeah.
Interviewer Molly
That's pretty incredible. So you guys are also ripping. So what's going on there? What are the latest stats?
Apoorv
Yeah, we grew last quarter by 50% in terms of usage. We grew our revenue by 40%. We became cash flow positive, became profitable. So our kind of stats are amazing. But the most important thing, we have more and more users using us. We have more than $10 billion of bookings a year now growing really, really fast. So more people are just joining this kind of Navan thing.
Interviewer Molly
Amazing. Well, thank you so much, Ariel. And I think we closed out on stage with bullish on humans.
Apoorv
Yes. And I think that's the most important thing. It's the most important thing to figure out because nothing matters. We can do all of this AI infrastructure, the AI fun stuff. But we need to remember that we are all humans and this needs to stay perfect.
Interviewer Molly
Thank you.
Laura
Cj.
Podcast Host Molly
Welcome to Sorcery.
CJ
Great to be here.
Interviewer Molly
It's great to be in Paris.
CJ
Great to be in Paris. It's fun.
Interviewer Molly
Fresh off the stage. You're very popular today, by the way.
Podcast Host Molly
I keep hearing your name from everyone.
CJ
Thank you. Thank you.
Interviewer Molly
So what excites you right now?
CJ
Number one, is about customer focused innovation. And making sure we are the foundational layer for all AI applications and agentic applications. So that's number one. Number two, making our customers really successful as they roll out AI. And there is clear ROI that they can see. And they have a peace of mind when they use us as the data layer. So that's really exciting. And third is just the pace of innovation. We want to move fast for our customers. We do these things called local conferences that are very local, hence the name local. Next one is in San Francisco. We want to make many announcements there. After that one is in New York. We want to make announcements there. Then it's in Mumbai. We want to make announcement there which are all related to innovation. So the pace of innovation in service of our customers really excites me.
Interviewer Molly
I have to ask you a very difficult question.
CJ
Yes.
Interviewer Molly
What is your hottest take in AI right now?
CJ
My simple answer, which I believe to be true, is data is the unsung hero. And data is back. You cannot create an AI application without a great data layer. And your AI application is as good as your data.
Interviewer Molly
As the kids would say, facts. Yes, facts.
CJ
And it tracks well.
Mark
Great.
Interviewer Molly
So you heard it here.
Podcast Host Molly
Big data is back.
Interviewer Molly
Thank you, cj.
CJ
Thank you very much.
Episode: Dylan Patel, SemiAnalysis, Nebius, Glean, Legora… 12 Hot Takes From The Biggest Names in AI
Date: July 19, 2026
This episode comes live from the bustling Raise Summit in Paris, where Molly O’Shea interviews top founders, CEOs, and investors to extract “hot takes” on the state and future of AI from industry powerhouses. The conversations center on physical AI, enterprise adoption, infrastructure trends, open source vs. closed models, data center innovation, and the economic realities impacting AI development – all under the energetic, sometimes chaotic, atmosphere of one of AI’s premier gatherings.
Timestamps: 00:16 – 08:47
Timestamps: 17:29 – 24:30
Timestamps: 24:31 – 28:34
Timestamps: 38:23 – 42:16
Timestamps: 28:37 – 32:01
Timestamps: 43:00 – 45:32
Timestamps: 45:34 – 49:34
Timestamps: 49:35 – 51:55
Timestamps: 35:03 – 38:22, 51:58 – 54:52
Timestamps: 54:54 – 56:39
Timestamps: 32:01 – 34:58
For listeners: Even if you missed the chaos of Paris, these takes from some of AI’s biggest names will give you a front-row seat to the current and coming state of the industry.