“The future is agents”: Building a platform for RAG agents
Contextual AI offers a platform for building RAG agents. Get started with their docs here.
Connect with Douwe on LinkedIn.
Congrats to Stack Overflow user Smrutiranjan Sahu, who earned a Stellar Question badge by asking How to define type for a function callback (as any function type, not universal any) used in a method parameter.
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SaaStr 717: How Enterprise SaaS Companies are Buying AI (or Not) with ContextualAI, Anthropic, and Glean
SaaStr 717: How Enterprise SaaS Companies are Buying AI (or Not) with ContextualAI, Anthropic, and Glean
While AI seems to have gone mainstream for consumers and smaller SaaS companies, but what about the big guys?
While the first generation of Generative AI is great, it's not quite ready to solve Enterprise problems. So, where are we now in the adoption cycle for the Enterprise world?
We brought together an Enterprise SaaS panel with:
Douwe Kiela, CEO of ContextualAI
Benjamin Mann, co-founder of Anthropic
Arvind Jain, CEO of Glean
and Sandhya Hedge, General Partner at Unusual VC
To help us figure out how to sell GenAI software to some of the biggest organizations in the world.
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SaaStr hosts the largest SaaS community events on the planet.
Join us in 2024 at:
SaaStr Annual: Sept. 10-12 in the SF Bay Area. Join 12,500 SaaS professionals, CEOs, revenue leaders and investors for the world's LARGEST SaaS community event of the year. Podcast listeners can grab a discount on tickets here: https://www.saastrannual2024.com/buy-tickets?promo=fave20
SaaStr Europa: June 5-6 in London. We'll be hosting the 5th SaaStr Europa in London for two days of content and networking. Join 3,000 SaaS and Cloud leaders. Podcast listeners can grab a discount on Europa tickets here: https://www.saastreuropa2024.com/buy-tickets?promo=fave200
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20VC: The Biggest AI Leaders on What Matters More; Model Size or Data Size & Where Does The Value in AI Accrue; to Startups or to Incumbents
Richard Socher is the founder and CEO of You.com. Richard previously served as the Chief Scientist and EVP at Salesforce.
Douwe Kiela is the CEO of Contextual AI, building the contextual language model to power the future of businesses. Previously, he was the Head of Research at Hugging Face, and before that a Research Scientist at Facebook AI Research.
Alex Lebrun is the Co-Founder and CEO of Nabla, an AI assistant for doctors. Prior to Nabla, he led engineering at Facebook AI Research. Alex founded Wit.ai, acquired by Facebook in 2015.
Tomasz Tunguz is the Founder and General Partner @ Theory Ventures, just announced last week, Theory is a $230M fund that invests $1-25m in early-stage companies that leverage technology discontinuities into go-to-market advantages.
Sarah Guo is the Founding Partner @ Conviction Capital, a $100M first fund purpose-built to serve "Software 3.0" companies. Prior to founding Conviction, Sarah was a General Partner at Greylock where she made investments in the likes of Figma, Coda and Neeva.
Emad Mostaque is the Co-Founder and CEO @ StabilityAI, the parent company of Stable Diffusion. Stability are building the foundation to activate humanity's potential. To date, Emad has raised over $110M with Stability with the latest round reportedly pricing the company at $4BN.
Clem Delangue is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Hugging Face, the AI community building the future. To date, Clem has raised over $160M from the likes of Sequoia, Coatue, Addition and Lux Capital to name a few.
Cris Valenzuela is the CEO and co-founder of Runway, the company that trains and builds generative AI models for content creation. To date, Cris has raised over $285M for the company from the likes of Lux Capital, Felicis, Coatue, Amplify, and Nvidia to name a few.
Noam Shazeer is the co-founder and CEO of Character.AI. A renowned computer scientist and researcher, Shazeer is one of the foremost experts in artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP).
The Two Most Pressing Questions in AI:
What matters more the size of the model or the size of the data?
Where does the value accrue in the next 5-10 years; to startups or to incumbents?
20VC: Why Data Size Matters More Than Model Size, Why The Google Employee Was Wrong; OpenAI and Google Have the Advantage & Why Open Source is Not Going to Win with Douwe Kiela, Co-Founder @ Contextual AI
Douwe Kiela is the CEO of Contextual AI, building the contextual language model to power the future of businesses. Last month Contextual closed a $20M funding round including Bain Capital, Sarah Guo, Elad Gil and 20VC. He is also an Adjunct Professor in Symbolic Systems at Stanford University. Previously, he was the Head of Research at Hugging Face, and before that a Research Scientist at Facebook AI Research.
In Today's Episode with Douwe Kiela We Discuss:
1. Founding a Foundational Model Company in 2023:
How did Douwe make his way into the world of AI and ML over a decade ago?
What are some of his biggest lessons from his time working with Yann LeCun and Meta?
How does Douwe's background in philosophy help him in AI today?
2. Foundational Model Providers: Challenges and Alternatives:
What are the biggest problems with the existing foundational data models?
Will there be one to rule them all? How does the landscape play out?
Why does Douwe believe OpenAI's data acquisition strategy has been the best?
3. Data Models: Size and Structure:
Why does Douwe believe it is naive to think the open approach will beat the closed approach?
What are the biggest downsides to the open approach?
Does the size of data model matter today? What matters more?
How important is access to proprietary data? Are VCs naive to turn down founders due to a lack of access to proprietary data?
4. Regulation and the World Around Us:
How does Douwe expect the regulatory landscape to play out around AI?
Why is Europe the worst when it comes to regulation? Will this be different this time?
How does Douwe analyse Elon's petition to pause the development of AI for 6 months?
Do founders building AI companies have to be in the valley?
Multimodal, Multi-Lingual NLP at Hugging Face with John Bohannon and Douwe Kiela - #589
In this extra special episode of the TWIML AI Podcast, a friend of the show John Bohannon leads a jam-packed conversation with Hugging Face’s recently appointed head of research Douwe Kiela. In our conversation with Douwe, we explore his role at the company, how his perception of Hugging Face has changed since joining, and what research entails at the company. We discuss the emergence of the transformer model and the emergence of BERT-ology, the recent shift to solving more multimodal problems, the importance of this subfield as one of the “Grand Directions'' of Hugging Face’s research agenda, and the importance of BLOOM, the open-access Multilingual Language Model that was the output of the BigScience project. Finally, we get into how Douwe’s background in philosophy shapes his view of current projects, as well as his projections for the future of NLP and multimodal ML.
The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/589
