Podcasts · Technology · News
The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
Ben Lorica
300 episodes
A series of informal conversations with thought leaders, researchers, practitioners, and writers on a wide range of topics in technology, science, and of course big data, data science, artificial intelligence, and related applications. Anchored by Ben Lorica (@BigData), the Data Exchange also features a roundup of the most important stories from the worlds of data, machine learning and AI. Detailed show notes for each episode can be found on https://thedataexchange.media/ The Data Exchange podcast is a production of Gradient Flow [https://gradientflow.com/].
Episodes page 1 of 6
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Let Domain Experts Build the Agents
Akshay Sharma, ML Engineer at Lyft, and Nick Ung, Staff Applied Scientist at Lyft, explain how their team is building a platform that lets domain experts create customer-facing AI agents while engineers provide the…
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AI Is Coming for Tasks Before It Comes for Jobs
MIT FutureTech director Neil Thompson joins Ben Lorica to discuss how AI is reshaping work, the economy, and the future of automation. Drawing on recent research, Thompson explains why AI’s impact on most occupations…
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Why Build Your Own AI Model When Frontier Models Already Exist?
In this episode, we talk with Joel Hron, CTO of Thomson Reuters, about the company’s decision to develop its own frontier AI model, Thomson, using open-weight models and decades of proprietary content and expertise.…
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Why AI Makes Games Worse—and How to Make Them Better
Piero Molino, CEO and co-founder of Studio Atelico, joins Ben Lorica to discuss what happens when AI becomes a core game mechanic rather than a cost-cutting tool. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩…
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What Comes After Transformers?
Ben Lorica speaks with Zuzanna Stamirowska, CEO of Pathway, about the company’s push beyond transformers toward models that reason in latent space, learn from experience, and maintain state over long time horizons.…
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Inside OpenAI's First Chip
Richard Ho, VP of Hardware at OpenAI, explains how the team built Jalapeño, its first custom AI accelerator, and why controlling more of the hardware stack could lower inference costs and improve performance.…
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Navier-Stokes and AI generated work: If You Can't Explain It, Did You Really Do It?
Ben Lorica is joined by Evangelos Simoudis for a wide-ranging discussion on how AI is reshaping knowledge work: from the Navier-Stokes controversy and the need to protect intellectual property to whether workers should…
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The Missing Data for Spatial Intelligence
Ben Lorica talks with David Fattal, founder and CTO of Leia Inc., about why stereo data could become an important ingredient for AI systems that need to understand the physical world. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow…
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Your AI Agent Is Costing You More Than You Think
Ben Lorica talks with Abi Aryan, AI engineer, author of LLMOps: Managing Large Language Models in Production, about how deploying generative AI is turning into a distributed systems problem. Subscribe to the Gradient…
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Reasoning Doesn't Start With Language
Ben Lorica speaks with Andrew Dai, co-founder and CEO of Elorian AI, about why today’s frontier models still struggle with complex visual reasoning and why simply scaling language-centric architectures may not solve…
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An Agent Is Just an LLM in a For-Loop
Maarten Grootendorst, a developer relations engineer at Google DeepMind and co-author of Hands-On Large Language Models and An Illustrated Guide to AI Agents, joins Ben Lorica to explain the concepts developers need to…
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The Bloomberg Terminal for AI Compute
Steve Hou, Head of Research at Silicon Data, joins Ben Lorica to unpack the data behind the AI compute market: GPU rental indices, forward curves, and token expenditure trends that reveal a market still tightening…
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Can China Do to Robotaxis What It Did to Solar?
Ben Lorica talks with Evangelos Simoudis about three forces reshaping AI: why recent “rogue agent” incidents may be more about permissions, identity, and governance than runaway intelligence; how the belief that AGI is…
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Why Video Is AI's Next Great Frontier
Yoon Kim, President and Chief Strategy Officer of TwelveLabs, explains why understanding video takes more than bolting a language model onto a stream of frames. He walks through how TwelveLabs’ two foundation models,…
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Your AI Safety Tests Are Lying to You
Andrew Burt, CEO and co-founder of Luminos, joins Ben Lorica to unpack Luminos’s new report, A Practical Guide to Agentic and Gen AI Risk Evals. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩…
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Enterprise AI Is Moving Slower Than You Think
Ben Lorica speaks with Denise Teng, partner at Gradient Ventures, about the real state of enterprise AI adoption, why security and data privacy still slow deployment, and why open weights may become increasingly…
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Why Observability May Be AI’s Next Frontier
Ameet Talwalkar, Carnegie Mellon ML professor and Chief Scientist at Datadog, joins Ben Lorica to trace time series foundation models from skepticism to Datadog’s Toto V1 and V2. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow…
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AI Is Producing More Code, but Is It Producing More Value?
Ben Lorica sits down with Evangelos Simoudis to unpack why open-weights models are closing the gap with frontier labs and pushing enterprises toward “corporate AI sovereignty.” They then apply an attenuation-funnel…
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Stop Renting Generic Intelligence for Your Business
Manos Koukoumidis, CEO of Oumi, returns to the podcast to make the case that most enterprises are wildly inefficient, using bloated generic AI models for tasks that demand specialized ones. He argues that companies…
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The Data Layer Enterprise AI Has Been Missing
Andrew Moore, CEO of Lovelace, former head of Google Cloud AI, and former dean of Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science, joins the podcast to discuss YottaGraph, a knowledge graph growing by a billion facts a…
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The Hidden Failure Modes of AI Agents
Ben Lorica speaks with Helen Gu, CEO of InsightFinder AI and professor at North Carolina State University, about why reliability is becoming a central challenge for enterprise AI. They discuss AI incident response,…
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The Data Stack Wasn't Built for AI — Here's What Comes Next
Ben Lorica talks with Chang She, co-founder and CEO of LanceDB, about the limitations of traditional analytical data tools like Pandas and Parquet when applied to AI workloads. They discuss the rise of the “multimodal…
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The SaaSpocalypse Is Coming — But Don't Count Out the Incumbents
Ben Lorica is joined by Evangelos Simoudis for a wide-ranging check-in on how AI is reshaping mobility, enterprise software, and corporate strategy. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩…
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AI Agents Are Implemented, Not Adopted
Ben Lorica speaks with Hamza Tahir, co-founder of Kitaru, about what it takes to move AI agents from demos to production. They discuss the difference between workflows and agents, why “harness engineering” is becoming…
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Why Your AI Agent Isn't Ready to Ship (And How to Know When It Is)
In this episode, host Ben Lorica sits down with Zhou Yu, associate professor of computer science at Columbia University and co-founder of Arklex AI. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩…
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Why Foundation Models Haven’t Replaced Classical Machine Learning
In this episode, Ben Lorica sits down with Doris Xin and Moustafa Abdelbaky, co-founders of Disarray, to discuss why classical machine learning models remain essential despite the rise of foundation models and LLMs.…
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When "Garbage In, Garbage Out" Gets It Wrong
Ben Lorica speaks with Terrence Lee-St. John, founder of Enli and lead author of From Garbage to Gold: A Data Architectural Theory of Predictive Robustness. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩…
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As Code Generation Speeds Up, Who Tests the Output?
In this episode, Ben Lorica talks with Evan Marshall, CTO of Ito AI, about why software testing and QA are becoming the critical bottleneck in the age of coding agents. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩…
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The Gap Between AI Hype and Enterprise Reality
In this episode, Ben Lorica talks with Richard Garris and Barry Dauber from Databricks, about what enterprises are actually struggling with as they move AI from demo to deployment. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow…
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Reading the Tea Leaves: What the World's Top AI Researchers Are Really Working On
Ben Lorica talks with Nick Vasiloglou, VP of Research at Relational AI, about Nick’s deep dive into NeurIPS 2025 and what people in industry should actually pay attention to. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter…
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From Web Video to Real-World Robots
Ben Lorica speaks with Changan Chen, co-founder and Chief Research Officer at Rhoda AI, about what it takes to build foundation models for robots that can operate in the real world. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow…
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Why Your AI Committee Might Be Your Biggest AI Problem
In this episode, Ben Lorica and Evangelos Simoudis discuss how enterprises are structuring their internal AI efforts, highlighting the friction between top-down AI governance committees and bottom-up “shadow IT”…
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Building Mathematical Superintelligence
Ben Lorica speaks with Tudor Achim, cofounder of Harmonic, about the fast progress of AI for mathematical reasoning and what it would take to build “mathematical superintelligence.” Subscribe to the Gradient Flow…
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Your First AI Employee Is Already Clocking In
In this episode, host Ben Lorica sits down with Kay Zhu, Co-founder & CTO of Genspark AI, to explore the rapid evolution of autonomous AI agents and the concept of hiring your first “AI employee.” Subscribe to the…
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Are Multi-Agent Systems More Complex Than They Need to Be?
In this episode, host Ben Lorica sits down with Arun Kumar (Associate Professor at UC San Diego and Co-founder/CTO of RapidFire AI) to explore the rapidly evolving discipline of agent engineering. Subscribe to the…
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Coding Agents Meet Data Science
In this episode, Ben Lorica is joined by Mikio Braun, Senior Principal Applied Scientist at Zalando, for a wide-ranging conversation about the practical realities of AI-powered coding agents. They explore the unique…
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World Models Are Here—But It’s Still the GPT-2 Phase
In this episode, host Ben Lorica speaks with Jeff Hawke, CTO at Odyssey, about world models — a category of AI that generates continuous, interactive simulations from images or text prompts. Subscribe to the Gradient…
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The Hidden Challenges of Running AI at Scale in Production
Chen Goldberg, EVP of Engineering at CoreWeave, joins the podcast to discuss the critical infrastructure shifts required as companies move AI from pilot to production. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩…
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What No One Tells You About Staying Employable in the AI Era
In this episode, host Ben Lorica is joined by Evangelos Simoudis to explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping the modern workplace and what knowledge workers must do to adapt. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow…
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Adaptation: The Missing Layer Between Apps and Foundation Models
Ben Lorica talks with Sudip Roy (Co-founder & CTO, Adaption Labs) about why enterprise AI adoption stalls in the “last 5%” of reliability — and why waiting for the next frontier model release is usually the wrong bet.…
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Securing the "YOLO" Era of AI Agents
Jason Martin, Director of Adversarial Research at HiddenLayer, returns to discuss the security implications of OpenClaw, a viral open-source AI personal assistant that was entirely vibe-coded and has exploded to…
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Building the Open Source Alternative to AWS
In this episode, Umur Cubukcu, co-founder of Ubicloud, explains what an “open cloud” should mean in practice — starting with an open-source control plane and extending to transparency, portability, and freedom from…
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Breaking the Memory Wall in the Age of Inference
In this episode, Sid Sheth, founder and CEO of d-matrix, discusses the company’s approach to AI inference hardware with a focus on solving the memory bottleneck problem. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩…
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Is Waymo Actually Profitable? The Real Cost of the Robotaxi Revolution
Ben Lorica and Evangelos Simoudis discuss two critical technology infrastructure topics: the evolving economics of autonomous vehicles and growing local opposition to AI data centers. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow…
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Beyond Vibe Coding: Building Your Entire Business with AI
Ethan Ouyang, Technical Lead at Atoms, joins the podcast to discuss the rise of “vibe business”: multi-agent AI systems that can research a market, design a product, build and launch it, and iterate toward revenue.…
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The Rise of the Machine Identity: Securing the AI Workforce and AI Agents
Ben Lorica talks with Jason Martin (co-founder of Permiso Security) about what it means to secure AI agents as they proliferate across enterprises. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩…
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Why Traditional Observability Falls Short for AI Agents
Lior Gavish, CTO and co-founder of Monte Carlo Data, joins Ben Lorica to discuss the critical transition from data observability to agent observability in production environments. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow…
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Teaching AI How to Forget
In this episode, Ben Lorica speaks with Ben Luria, CEO and co-founder of Hirundo, about the emerging necessity of machine unlearning for enterprise AI. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow Newsletter 📩…
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The Humanoid Hype Cycle: Separating “Shiny Objects” from Real Utility
In this episode, Ben Lorica and Evangelos Simoudis of Synapse Partners to break down the most significant developments from CES 2026. They explore the explosion of humanoid robotics and the transition toward…
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The Junior Data Engineer is Now an AI Agent
Matthew Glickman, Co-founder and CEO of Genesis Computing and former VP of Product at Snowflake, joins Ben Lorica to discuss the emergence of AI data agents tailored for the data engineering persona. Subscribe to the…
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