972: In Case You Missed It in February 2026
Jon Krohn recaps the month of February in this episode of In Case You Missed It. Across four interviews with Will Falcon (Episode 965), Tom Griffiths (Episode 969), Antje Barth (Episode 963), and Praveen Murugesan (Episode 967), Jon questions the brains behind some of the AI industry’s most innovative companies about launching a startup, developing a popular product, what artificial intelligence can still learn from human intelligence, and how AI might finally start to think on its own.
Additional materials: www.superdatascience.com/972
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965: From PhD Side Project to $500M ARR: Will Falcon’s PyTorch Lightning Story
CEO of Lightning AI Will Falcon speaks to podcast host and Lightning AI fellow Jon Krohn about the company’s merger with Voltage Park, and why Will has named it the “full-stack AI neo-cloud for enterprises and frontier labs”. Lightning AI’s offer is a secure, flexible, and collaborative environment that can run on the cloud, all essentials for early-stage startups. Listen to the episode to hear Will Falcon discuss Lightning AI Studio, founding PyTorch Lightning, and how he came to found his AI company.
This episode is brought to you by the Dell, by Intel, by Fabi and by Cisco.
Additional materials: www.superdatascience.com/965
Interested in sponsoring a SuperDataScience Podcast episode? Email natalie@superdatascience.com for sponsorship information.
In this episode you will learn:
(02:20) Lightning AI’s merger with Voltage Park
(20:54) About neo-clouds
(43:51) How Will founded Lightning AI
(54:48) Current gaps in the AI in workplace
#183 Will Falcon: Lightning Studio, an iOS for AI Developers?
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Explore the world of AI development with Will Falcon, creator of PyTorch Lightning and founder of Lightning AI.
In this episode of Eye on AI, Will takes us through the groundbreaking journey of Lightning Studio, a revolutionary cloud-based platform that's reshaping how AI tools and frameworks are integrated and scaled. From his unique start in the US military to leading AI innovation, Will offers a comprehensive look at the evolution of machine learning technologies that simplify and accelerate the deployment of AI models.
The discussion delves into the creation of PyTorch Lightning, highlighting its role in democratizing AI development by structuring code and enabling scalability across thousands of machines. Will also outlines the pivotal shift from traditional coding practices to a streamlined, cloud-based environment, making advanced AI tools accessible to a global community of developers.
Tune in as we uncover the layers of technology that drive AI forward and discuss the future of AI development platforms.
Will's insights are crucial for anyone interested in the intersection of AI, software engineering, and cloud infrastructure.
Make sure to hit the like button and subscribe for more insights into the technologies shaping our world.
This episode is sponsored by Oracle. AI is revolutionizing industries, but needs power without breaking the bank. Enter Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI): the one-stop platform for all your AI needs, with 4-8x the bandwidth of other clouds. Train AI models faster and at half the cost. Be ahead like Uber and Cohere.
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Will Falcon — Making Lightning the Apple of ML
Will Falcon is the CEO and co-founder of Lightning AI, a platform that enables users to quickly build and publish ML models.
In this episode, Will explains how Lightning addresses the challenges of a fragmented AI ecosystem and reveals which framework PyTorch Lightning was originally built upon (hint: not PyTorch!) He also shares lessons he took from his experience serving in the military and offers a recommendation to veterans who want to work in tech.
Show notes (transcript and links): http://wandb.me/gd-will-falcon
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⏳ Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
01:00 From SEAL training to FAIR
04:17 Stress-testing Lightning
07:55 Choosing PyTorch over TensorFlow and other frameworks
13:16 Components of the Lightning platform
17:01 Launching Lightning from Facebook
19:09 Similarities between leadership and research
22:08 Lessons from the military
26:56 Scaling PyTorch Lightning to Lightning AI
33:21 Hiring the right people
35:21 The future of Lightning
39:53 Reducing algorithm complexity in self-supervised learning
42:19 A fragmented ML landscape
44:35 Outro
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Connect with Lightning
📍 Website: https://lightning.ai
📍 Twitter: https://twitter.com/LightningAI
📍 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/pytorch-lightning/
📍 Careers: https://boards.greenhouse.io/lightningai
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💬 Host: Lukas Biewald
📹 Producers: Riley Fields, Anish Shah, Cayla Sharp, Angelica Pan, Lavanya Shukla
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Subscribe and listen to our podcast today!
👉 Apple Podcasts: http://wandb.me/apple-podcasts
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