Imagine being able to deploy an AI agent and getting a return of over $100m from that single deployment. My guest today, Nikunj Bajaj, has facilitated that multiple times! Lots to learn from him, enjoy!
Nikunj:
• CEO and co-founder of TrueFoundry, a Bay Area-based startup that has raised over $20m to solve the thorniest problems that enterprises face when deploying agents.
• His clients include demanding organizations like NVIDIA and Siemens.
• Was previously ML tech lead at Facebook.
• Holds a master's in computer science from University of California, Berkeley.
The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.
Filtering by Tag: #superdatascience
Episode #1000: Join Us Live for the First-Ever Interactive SDS Podcast!
Ten years ago, Kirill Eremenko founded The SuperDataScience Podcast. To celebrate the upcoming Episode #1000, we are inviting you to join us both in a format we've never tried before:
It will be the first-ever interactive episode where you can join in online as we record, and ask your questions... or I suppose just make comments! You'll be able to ask share your thoughts in the chat or come right onto the show via video.
Kirill (founder, original host) and I (current host) will both be there, so you can ask us anything, e.g.:
• Did Kirill think the show would last ten years and 1000 episodes?
• How has data science transformed over the past decade?
• Did Jon have hair on his head ten years ago?
Date: Next Thursday, June 4th
Time: 5pm Eastern Time / 2pm Pacific Time
To get a calendar invite that includes the URL to join us live, check out the Luma link below ⬇️
luma.com/7vl7mdos
The "Super Data Science Podcast with Jon Krohn" is available on all major podcasting platforms and a video version is on YouTube. Whether you join us or not for the interactive recording, Episode #1000 will be published on Friday June 12th!
End-to-End Foundation Models for the Energy Industry, with Jazmia Henry
What does it take to build foundation LLMs from scratch today? Deeply impressive Jazmia Henry breaks down the four stages in today's episode, enjoy!
Jazmia:
• Holds degrees from Tulane University and Columbia University... and is partway through a PhD at the University of Oxford.
• Held a technical fellowship at Stanford University.
• Previously worked as a data strategist at Morgan Stanley, head of ML at The Motley Fool and a Lead Applied AI engineer at Microsoft.
• Published a top paper at NeurIPS, the world's most prestigious academic AI conference.
• Currently works as "Member of Technical Staff for AI/ML" at collide., a Texas-based startup that’s building AI infrastructure (including all aspects of specialized foundation models) for the energy industry.
Key topics covered in this episode include:
• What foundation models are.
• Her "full-stack" foundation-model building's four distinct stages.
• How reinforcement learning (RL) models are "bursty" because they idle the GPU during reward calculation and then dump enormous loads on it all at once.
• Reward hacking by RL models.
Thanks to Mark Freeman II for recommending Jazmia as a guest.
The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.
AI’s Putting Recent Grads Out of Work; Here’s How to Get Hired Anyway!
Computer science/engineering grads had an employment advantage (see chart) that, since ChatGPT's release, has disappeared. Is A.I. to blame? Here's what the data say and what new grads (or anyone!) can do about it:
THE EMPLOYMENT LANDSCAPE
• NY Fed: unemployment for recent computer-science grads (22-27) sits at 7.0%, and computer engineering at 7.8% (roughly on par with fine arts and anthropology grads!)
• Compare that to ~5.8% for recent grads overall and ~4% for the whole US workforce.
• Eighteen-year-olds are voting with their feet: US undergrad CS enrolment fell 11% in 2025; computer programming fell a stunning 26%.
• Demand is shrinking too: Handshake postings are down ~50% from their 2022 peak, and Revelio Labs data suggest entry-level software and data-analysis postings have dropped as much as 67%.
IS A.I. TO BLAME?
• "Yes" camp: A 2025 Stanford University study found employment for 22-25-year-olds in A.I.-exposed jobs dropped 13% since 2022, while older workers held steady. The Dallas Fed replicated it... and the decline comes from juniors never being hired, not layoffs.
• "Not so fast" camp: Google economists found posting declines were just as steep for senior workers and predate ChatGPT. A Fed study of 1M+ firms found "null effects." Their take: high interest rates and a post-pandemic hangover, with A.I. as a convenient scapegoat.
WHAT YOU CAN DO:
1. Stop competing on raw code. The human edge is now system design, architecture and deciding what to build in the first place.
2. Pick a domain. "A.I. engineer" is a common résumé; "A.I. engineer who worked alongside a hospital team for two summer internships" is a short list.
3. Build a public portfolio. Substantive GitHub repos and a Kaggle project beat CVs sent into the void.
4. Get fluent with agentic tooling, e.g., RAG, model evaluation, multi-agent orchestration. PwC found A.I.-skilled workers earn a 56% wage premium (!!!)
5. Lean on your network. Referrals and warm intros are crushing mass (often GenAI-produced) applications in this market.
The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.
How to Build AI-First Organizations, with Jacob Miller and Jeremy Mumford
After today's fun episode with Jacob and Jeremy — authors of the brand-new book "Architected Intelligence" — you’ll have all the key info to build successful AI features, AI products and AI-first companies. Enjoy!
Jeremy Mumford and Jacob Miller serve as Lead AI Engineer and Vice President of Platform Intelligence, respectively, at Pattern, a giant Utah-based tech company that IPO’ed on the Nasdaq exchange about six months ago.
Jacob and Jeremy's brand-new "Architected Intelligence" book was published by Wiley and this episode focuses almost exclusively on this invaluable book.
Episode highlights include:
• The "User Agnosticism Tenet", which means designing products and processes so they can be executed equally well by a human, an AI agent, or any hybrid combo.
• The shift in the "define-build-feedback" loop today where "building" is no longer the bottleneck, which means "definition" and "feedback" are where teams win or lose.
• Why workflows are deterministic, predictable, and cheaper than agents, and why the natural progression is skills first, then workflows, and only then agents.
• Why data engineering is the bedrock of AI engineering.
• Why velocity is the only durable moat in a world where everyone has access to the same frontier models.
Thanks to podcast superfan Jonathan Bown for recommending Jeremy and Jacob as guests!
The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.
Tokenmaxxing vs AI Hardware Bottlenecks
Humans (like Reinforcement Learning algos) can "reward hack": "Tokenmaxxing" being a perfect example, after employers started using "number of tokens" consumed as a proxy for developers' productivity.
Even if humans weren't engaging in this pointless time-, money- and energy-consuming behavior, however, demand for A.I. compute is so vast that everyone's scrambling to to make more available. Alas, four tricky hardware bottlenecks face us:
1. GPUs:
• NVIDIA data-center GPU lead times now run 36–52 weeks, with Blackwell chips sold out through mid-2026.
• The real choke point isn't fabrication: It's TSMC's "CoWoS" advanced packaging, which is sold out through 2026. Nvidia alone has locked up ~60% of CoWoS capacity through 2027.
2. High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM):
• Demand has quintupled since 2023, and only three companies (SK hynix, Samsung and Micron) make it.
• All three are sold out well into 2026 and new HBM factories take 18–24 months to come online.
3. CPUs:
• As workloads shift toward agentic AI, the CPU:GPU ratio jumps from ~1:12 (for GenAI-only chatbots) to 1:1.
• Intel's CFO says the server-CPU shortfall "starts with a B" — billions in unmet demand so server CPU prices are up 10–20% in just the past couple of months.
4. Electricity: Hyperscaler build-outs are now gated by grid interconnect (18–36 months) and transformer lead times.
THE BIG MISMATCH
• The top 5 hyperscalers alone (Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle) are on track for ~$725B in combined 2026 capex.
• That's roughly 6x the hyperscalers' 2022 spend, with ~75% going to A.I. infrastructure.
• Hardware suppliers, however, have grown capex by only ~50%.... a 6x increase in demand met by only a 50% increase in supply is a big mismatch!
REASONS FOR OPTIMISM
Demand will continue to be high but I'm optimistic we'll continue to squeeze more juice from every lemon because, e.g.:
• Algorithmic efficiency keeps improving — Google's TurboQuant recently briefly tanked memory stocks by promising to materially cut inference memory needs.
• LLM efficiency gains via mixture-of-experts and smarter inference scheduling continue to compound.
• The tokenmaxxing trend is a corporate farce that will fade.
The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.
Pair Programming with AI in Your Python Notebook, with Dr. Trevor Manz
Exceptional technical episode today with Dr. Trevor Manz on "marimo Pair", an actually!) game-changing pair-programming A.I.-agent companion that lifts heavy loads within your Python data-science notebook.
More on Trevor:
• 27-time NCAA Swimming All-American & National Champion.
• Master's in Computational Biology from University of Cambridge.
• PhD in Bioinformatics from Harvard University.
• Creator of the popular open-source "anywidget" project (amongst many others, particularly in visualizing bioinformatics data, e.g., genomics data).
• Now a founding engineer at marimo.io, where he is leading the charge on marimo Pair.
Seriously, marimo Pair is unreal. A complete reimagining of what's possible in a Jupyter notebook-style environment in the agentic A.I. era. You will hear (and see) my mind explode in this episode!
We also discuss:
• Agent skills.
• Recursive language models.
• A number of other open-source projects, largely in data viz/analysis.
The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.
Security for Mythos-Era Agentic Risks, with Rubrik’s Anneka Gupta and Cal Al-Dhubaib
Mythos finds security vulnerabilities at ~100X the rate of publicly available models, and comparable open-weight models are ~6 months away. Scary? Thankfully my guests today, Anneka and Cal, have solutions!
Anneka:
• Chief Product Officer at Rubrik.
• Lecturer in Product Management at Stanford University.
• Climbed the ladder from software engineer to President (!!) during an 11-year tenure at LiveRamp.
• Holds a degree in math and computational sciences from Stanford.
Cal:
• Principal Technologist at Rubrik.
• Formerly founder and CEO of Pandata, which was acquired by Further.
• Highly sought-after keynote speaker.
• Holds a degree in data science from Case Western Reserve University.
This is an exceptional episode with two brilliant, entertaining and highly knowledgeable guests. It can be enjoyed by anyone! In it, they cover:
• How Anthropic's Mythos model can be pointed at a code repository and autonomously surface every vulnerability inside it, and how Anthropic itself estimates Mythos-class capabilities will reach other labs within six to eighteen months, with open-weight versions likely to follow.
• How code-gen models make it easy for attackers by scaling up their capabilities... and by vibe-coders not being aware of vulnerabilities they have!
• How Rubrik's Agent Cloud delivers three pillars of resilience: visibility into every agent in your environment, governance and runtime control through the SAGE small language model, and remediation through Agent Rewind.
• Why the next wave of knowledge work is inherently cross-functional, with A.I. attorneys, security pros, and data scientists all needing shared literacy in A.I. risk.
The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.
AI Infrastructure, Ray, and Why Nonlinear Careers Win, with Linda Haviv
For folks in A.I., software, data science, things are moving so fast, it's easy to be overwhelmed. Luckily, A.I. engineer Linda Haviv makes it a joy to stay up to date! Today, we discuss career tips as well as open-source A.I. tech like Ray.
More on Linda:
• Until recently, was Staff Developer Advocate at Anyscale, makers of Ray, an open-source framework for managing, executing and optimizing A.I. compute.
• Previously was A.I. Developer Advocate at Amazon Web Services (AWS).
• Before that, was a software developer at Fox Corporation.
• Was a professional singer in New York up until her second (of three!) children was born.
• Holds a degree in philosophy from Baruch College.
In this episode, Linda ebulliently covers:
• How "A.I. infrastructure" refers to the compute stack, tooling and frameworks purpose-built for A.I. and ML workloads.
• Ray is a Python-native open-source distributed computing framework that lets engineers distribute training, data processing and model serving across GPUs without needing to become distributed systems experts.
• How building in public, creating content and contributing to open source are not just career insurance... they're how you find your community, attract unexpected opportunities and learn faster through teaching.
• And much more!
The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.
The Four Types of Memory Every AI Agent Needs, with Richmond Alake
To build an effective A.I. agent, getting its memory right is essential. In today's episode, our agent-memory guide is brilliant (and very funny!) machine-learning architect and engineer, Richmond Alake.
More on Richmond:
• Director of A.I. developer experience at Oracle.
• Previously roles include: staff developer advocate for AI/ML at MongoDB, ML architect at Slalom, writer for NVIDIA and computer-vision engineer at Loveshark.
• Holds a master's in ML and robotics from the University of Surrey.
In this episode, Richmond magnificently covers:
• How agent memory is the encapsulation of systems (embedding models, rerankers, databases, and LLMs) that allow AI agents to learn and adapt with new information over time, rather than starting from scratch every session.
• The four types of agent memory (all drawn from human cognition).
• Memory-first agent harnesses.
• Predictions for a flattening of AI engineering roles, where the future developer will need end-to-end understanding of the full agent stack.
The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.
Building AI Agents Where 99.9% Accuracy Isn't Good Enough, with Raju Malhotra
The headlines shout “SaaSpocalypse,” but I don’t buy it. Neither does my guest today, Raju Malhotra, who argues that, thanks to humans collaborating with agents on optimized workflows, the SaaS opportunity is now far bigger than ever before.
More on Raju:
Chief Product & Technology Officer (CPTO) at Certinia, an Austin, Texas-based company whose Professional Services Automation software is used by over 1400 organizations around the world.
Was previously CPTO at PAR Technology and Khoros.
Earlier, spent 12 years at Microsoft working on cornerstone products like Visual Studio .NET.
Holds an MBA from The Wharton School and an undergrad in computer engineering.
In this episode, we cover:
Traditional SaaS isn't dead… instead, it's evolving into a hybrid of SaaS plus agentic capabilities, where humans and agents work together in optimized workflows.
By removing the human-skills constraint from professional services delivery, the agentic revolution could expand the addressable market by 7-8X.
The Agentforce 360 platform (by combining probabilistic AI with deterministic logic and guardrails) empowers innovators to turn their ideas into scalable software businesses, allowing businesses like Certinia to bring AI agents securely and reliably to their customers, even in sensitive industries where 0.1% error rates are unacceptable.
The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.
AI in the Classroom: How a Top Elementary School Is Doing It Right, with Principal Traci Walker Griffith
Long overdue episode today on how A.I. can support children's education. Hard to imagine a better guest than Traci Walker Griffith, principal of a K-8 school that has used innovations like A.I. to become Boston's #1 school.
In this episode, we discuss:
How Traci transformed The Eliot School from an underperforming school on the closure list into the highest-performing school in Boston.
How kids as young as four at the Elliott work with robots and coding tools like Kibo and Scratch Junior, learning that the quality of their input determines the quality of their output ("garbage in, garbage out").
How, for younger students in kindergarten through fourth grade, teachers use A.I. behind the scenes.
How students in grades five through eight interact with A.I. directly, enabling them to build metacognition and critical-thinking skills.
Her concrete guidance for schools (or parents!) considering incorporating A.I. into pedagogy.
The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.