The A.I. and Machine Learning Landscape, with investor George Mathew

Today, razor-sharp investor George Mathew (of Insight Partners, which has a whopping $100-billion AUM 😮) brings us up to speed on the Machine Learning landscape, with a particular focus on Generative A.I. trends.

George:
• Is a Managing Director at Insight Partners, an enormous New York-based venture capital and growth equity firm ($100B in assets under management) that has invested in the likes of Twitter, Shopify, and Monday.com.
• Specializes in investing in A.I., ML and data "scale-ups" such as the enterprise database company Databricks, the fast-growing generative A.I. company Jasper, and the popular MLOps platform Weights & Biases.
• Prior to becoming an investor, was a deep operator at fast-growing companies such as Salesforce, SAP, the analytics automation platform Alteryx (where he was President & COO) and the drone-based aerial intelligence platform Kespry (where he was CEO & Chairman).

Today’s episode will appeal to technical and non-technical listeners alike — anyone who’d like to be brought up to speed on the current state of the data and machine learning landscape by a razor-sharp expert on the topic.

In this episode, George details:
• How sensational generative A.I. models like GPT-4 are bringing about a deluge of opportunity for domain-specific tools and platforms.
• The four layers of the "Generative A.I. Stack" that supports this enormous deluge of new applications.
• How RLHF — reinforcement learning from human feedback — provides an opportunity for you to build your own powerful and defensible models with your proprietary data.
• The new LLMOps field that has emerged to support the suddenly ubiquitous LLMs (Large Language Models), including generative models.
• How investment criteria differ depending on whether the prospective investment is seed stage, venture-capital stage, or growth stage.
• The flywheel that enables the best software companies to scale extremely rapidly.

The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.

Data Science for Private Investing — LIVE with Drew Conway

This week's guest is prominent data scientist and author Dr. Drew Conway. Working at Two Sigma, one of the world's largest hedge funds, Drew leads data science for private markets (e.g., real estate, private equity).

If you aren't familiar with Drew already, he:
• Serves as Senior Vice President for data science at Two Sigma
• Co-authored the classic O'Reilly Media book "ML for Hackers"
• Was co-founder and CEO of Alluvium, which was acquired in 2019
• Advised countless successful data-focused startups (e.g., Yhat, Reonomy)
• Obtained a PhD in politics from New York University

In this episode, he covers:
• What private investing is
• How data science can lead to better private investment decisions
• The differences between creating and executing models for public markets (such as stock exchanges) relative to private markets
• What he looks for in the data scientists he hires and how he interviews them

This is a special SuperDataScience episode because it's the first one recorded live in front of an audience (at the The New York R Conference in September). Eloquent Drew was the willing guinea pig for this experiment, which was a great success: We filmed in a single unbroken take and fielded excellent audience questions.

Listen or watch here.