In short
A Raise Summit in Paris “hot takes” episode spanning enterprise AI adoption, physical AI, data centers, open vs closed models, token economics, and AI search/retrieval costs. Guests argue the industry is shifting from hype to ROI, budgets, and infrastructure realities (power, CapEx, regulation), with “physical AI” progressing more linearly due to safety constraints.
Guests (backgrounds)
- Kassar (Applied Intuition) – leads physical/embedded AI for “intelligence on a billion machines”; 1,000+ engineers.
- Dylan Patel (SemiAnalysis) – AI/semiconductor analyst focused on infra and data-center economics.
- Mark (Nebius) – data-center operator; builds a diversified portfolio (20 DCs).
- Arvind (Glean) – enterprise AI for context retrieval; “context graphs.”
- Laura (NYSE social) – communications for New York Stock Exchange.
- Apoorv (Altimeter) – VC/AI strategy; “four seasons” CIO lecture framing.
- Nikhil (TurboPuffer) – AI workload search/retrieval powering agents (Cursor/Notion/Lagora/Anthropic).
- Barak (Wonderful AI) – enterprise applied AI partner outside the US; first institutional investor.
- Max (Lagora) – legal AI company; consumption-based token pricing.
- Gil (Merge) – CTO; focuses on integration/productivity concerns.
Key claims + examples
- Enterprise budgets tightening; “reconciliation” replaces “give me everything.”
- Physical AI: diffusion slower; fewer disruptive spikes; safety drives linear progress.
- Applied Intuition examples: defense ship intelligence (Huntington Wells), construction/ports/mines (Heidelberg Materials).
- SemiAnalysis: optimizing data-center infra for last 6 months’ workloads risks wasted spend.
- Nebius: competitors get “single-threaded” on one project; Nebius uses multi-project portfolio; builds from “dirt up.”
- Glean: reduces token usage by picking cheaper models and supplying context in one shot; open-source context demand.
- TurboPuffer: search is still too expensive; petabyte-scale search costs tens of millions (tens of TB currently); uses object storage (S3/GCS) plus caching.
- Wonderful: geographies will matter more than verticals; expanded to 30+ countries.
- Lagora: consumption-based pricing aligns value; “European startups” should build globally (not rely on summer travel).
- Altimeter: CIOs should plan for multi-model “evergreen climate” (open source + frontier).
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOCommencement Speech Reflections
0:45 to 3:56
Kassar discusses his commencement speech and the evolving job market in AI.
“and let's say the audience, it's not like East Coast, West Coast elite schools.”
Current Trends in AI
3:56 to 9:48
Kassar shares insights on current AI trends and the shift in enterprise budgets.
“Obviously, the broad stuff that we don't need to talk about are things about the IPOs that are happening and kind of just how some companies are sucking up lots of revenue.”
Insights on Physical AI and Future Predictions
9:48 to 14:00
Kassar talks about the physical AI sector and his predictions on the industry's future.
“and so I think there's going to be a little bit of a pullback.”
Reflections on General Motors and AI
14:00 to 16:29
A discussion about historical lessons from GM's failures and their relevance to today's AI landscape.
“And he leaves, he created the DeLorean, the car that's in Back to the Future.”
Data Centers in Paris
17:29 to 18:48
Insights on the regulatory challenges and considerations for data centers in Paris.
“I mean, Paris is beautiful, but it's hot as, yeah.”
Trends in Data Center Infrastructure
18:50 to 20:40
Discussion on the current trends and common pitfalls in data center infrastructure planning.
“but then there's a lot of people who are just like, I spent too much money on my token.”
Token Economics and Behavior Change
20:43 to 22:58
Debate on token budgeting and its impact on behavior in AI workflows.
“Yeah, I mean, co-design is the important thing, right?”
Cultural Differences in Snack Flavoring
23:00 to 24:17
A lighthearted discussion on the differences in chip flavoring across regions.
“Don't just waste money on tokens for the laws.”
Data Center Strategies with Mark
24:30 to 26:54
Mark discusses his perspective on data center build-out challenges and opportunities.
“how are you doing fantastic it's been a great time here at Raze how are the vibes at Raze You know, the energy is real high.”
Future Prospects in AI with Nebius
26:57 to 28:00
A conversation about the potential growth and future developments in AI and data centers.
“most advanced technology data centers have ever had.”
Show all 30 chapters
Revenue and Traction in AI
28:00 to 28:35
Learn about Nebius's revenue growth and expansion in AI solutions.
“And being able to expand our solution set from the model training that people are doing today into the inferencing that we started to offer and into agentic workloads.”
Glean's Role in AI Contextualization
28:35 to 29:58
Discover how Glean helps businesses leverage AI with context and cost efficiency.
“What is the major trend that you're seeing that's going on here today?”
Challenges in AI Adoption
29:58 to 30:43
Explore the main challenges businesses face in measuring AI ROI.
“And second, with our context graph, we can actually, when a model is trying to do some complex work, it doesn't have to spend all this time just trying to assemble the raw materials to do that work.”
Glean's Hot Take on Open Source
30:43 to 31:59
Hear Glean's perspective on the future dominance of open-source AI models.
“What is the biggest challenge that you have been hitting recently?”
Networking and Trends at RAISE
32:00 to 34:13
Learn about key trends and networking dynamics at the RAISE conference.
“We're here with New York Stock Exchange star of the show.”
CIO Insights on AI's Seasonal Changes
34:13 to 36:18
Understand how CIOs view the current climate and trends in AI technology.
“There's a reason why NYSE and NYSE Ward are the main media sponsors of Raise.”
Stanford Lectures and AI Applications
36:18 to 37:54
Explore the lineup of speakers and insights shared during Stanford AI lectures.
“And I think that evergreen season, the climate looks like you'll have a portion of your workloads going through open source, as Jesse from Decagon wrote very eloquently.”
Future Expectations in AI
37:54 to 38:22
Discuss upcoming trends and expectations in the AI landscape.
“Oh wow I'm looking to the seasonal changes in the climate this year.”
Turbo Puffer: AI Workload Search Engine
38:22 to 40:48
Understand Turbo Puffer's role in optimizing search for AI workloads.
“A little hot, a little chaotic, but you know, we're telling people to puff.”
Search Cost Challenges
40:48 to 42:01
Learn about the high costs associated with search in AI and Turbo Puffer's goals.
“And Turbo Puffer was founded because we thought Search was an order of magnitude too expensive at the time.”
AI Product Features and User Experience
42:01 to 42:50
Learn about new AI techniques improving user interaction and search results.
“that we're going to build into the product so that you as the user, just you puff harder.”
Global Expansion in AI
42:55 to 43:38
Explore why geographic focus is becoming more crucial than industry verticals in AI.
“So we are in the middle of chaos here at Raze.”
Secrets to Success in AI
43:39 to 45:00
Understand the importance of differentiation and geographic focus in AI companies.
“And that you can go horizontal without a vertical specialization with AI, as long as you're able to solve the go-to-market strategy with it.”
The European AI Landscape
45:01 to 46:00
Insights on the European AI market and competition with US and global players.
“I've done a few of these in the US, in London, in the Nordics and it's always a bit of a different flavour but it's been great.”
Innovative Pricing Models in Legal AI
46:01 to 47:53
Learn about the shift to consumption-based pricing in the legal AI sector.
“Well I think the vibe in Europe overall versus companies like Legora is quite different.”
Challenges Facing European Startups
47:54 to 49:26
Discuss the complacency observed in European startups compared to global competitors.
“the product leader and innovator in our space.”
Security Concerns in AI Integrations
49:27 to 51:44
Examine the security implications of integrating AI into business systems.
“We have Gil here, CTO of Merge, which we recently did an amazing episode with you guys at the New York Stock Exchange.”
The Importance of Human Touch in Travel AI
51:45 to 54:44
Explore the indispensable role of human involvement in AI-driven travel solutions.
“Actually, I've never been in such a bizarre place to do an interview, so that's cool.”
Data's Role in AI Innovation
54:45 to 56:00
Understand how data is essential for successful AI applications and innovations.
“stuff, but we need to remember that we're all humans and this needs to stay.”
The Importance of Data in AI
56:00 to 56:39
Discover why data is essential for AI applications and its resurgence in importance.
“So the pace of innovation in service of our customers really excites me.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Raised. Raised. Raised. Raised. Paris. Paris. Paris. Paris. Paris is beautiful but it's hot as...
0:09Paris in the middle of the summer. Middle of the heat. People are ignoring it. They're showing up. We have Kassar of Applied Intuition. Kassar, how are you doing?
0:19Qasar Younis:I'm doing fantastic. Thanks for having me again. Good to see you. So you're coming off of what some people are saying, a historic commencement speech. You didn't get canceled for talking about AI. So what happened there? Yeah, it was at my undergrad. I think, I mean, to give credit where credit is due, I think it's, you know, I went to this place called the General Motors Institute, Kettering University. Now I talk about it in the commencement speech. and let's say the audience, it's not like East Coast, West Coast elite schools. I think like the GMI, you know, mostly guys, the GMI guys are like more, you know, Midwest pragmatic.
1:00Qasar Younis:So I didn't expect booze, thankfully. And I'm, you know, from there and hometown, hometown person. So, but yeah, I mean, I gave, I think, what is my authentic opinion, which is, I think you can't have a lot of anxiety about this year new grad, I mean, if you talk to new grads, we hire obviously lots of them. That's the prime fears. Like, is my career done? Is everything? And I just don't believe that. I like fundamentally, I don't believe like jobs are all going away. And I just, it doesn't, if there's something in my mind, I could be, this might age really poorly. By the way, it's also not true already.
1:36It has been reported that jobs have only increased.
1:39Qasar Younis:Yeah. And if you look at like when I was graduating, there was this whole big looming technological reckoning and that was the that was the internet and you know all these things were being changed at the time and uh there was a whole view of like what's going to happen to the businesses i'm still in you know 25 years later and obviously we still drive and we still you know we still need construction equipment and we so i think there's something similar in the future like these things are not going well they're going to change because technology changes things. So I talked about that, and I think it landed well.
2:11Qasar Younis:I think the risky bet in the commencement speech was it wasn't like everything will be lollipops and rainbows. It's like, hey, that's life. Your 20s are actually a pretty tough time in your life. You've got to kind of figure out how to get in the right groove, and you have to do this in this very volatile environment that we have. That's a soft way to put it. I think Jensen Wong once said at Stanford, I wish you all pain and suffering. Yeah, exactly. It's part of that. And I think there's the other extreme, which is imagine you don't have to work. That's very unfulfilling, too. And so if you are going to work, then you should work on things that are really important because you only get to live once.
3:00Qasar Younis:and so I think like I'm a believer like you know doing the laundromat like you know the classic immigrant like laundromat or doing it those job my my parents those jobs are just as hard and every time people ask me like as a founder like oh must be tough like applied and or whatever it's like yeah but you know it's harder like working at like Taco Bell like that's a hard job and so I think like for new grads you have to have that perspective too which is like there's going to be difficulty even if there wasn't an ai boom there's always difficulty that's the part of you know of growing up and finding your way and stuff like that so i managed to wrap that in like a more cohesive way in 10 minutes inspiring bow yeah exactly yeah yeah yeah okay so to bring it to current day we're at the raise summit in paris ai is buzzing all around us It's like a big expo.
3:55What are the trends that you're seeing in the room and around what's going on right now in AI?
4:01Qasar Younis:Obviously, the broad stuff that we don't need to talk about are things about the IPOs that are happening and kind of just how some companies are sucking up lots of revenue. Super positive. That proves that there's something there. It's not hollow. I think below the surface, which is like the rumblings, is what's that reconciliation? And then reconciliation in enterprise, the world that we are, we're an enterprise company, is like budgets and cost consciousness is becoming like a more core theme. Whereas, let's say, if we were talking 12 months ago, there was way more of give me everything and I'll take five of it.
4:40Qasar Younis:And now it's like, what are you giving me and how much I'm going to pay? And I think that reconciliation will have downstream impacts on everybody. Not only the big companies going public, but also the small startups that are trying to find their little niche. So I think that's a big talking talk. In the physical AI world where we're at, the way to think about physical AI versus, let's say, the large language model universe is the diffusion is slower. Because you're dealing with safety. You're dealing with physical machines in the real world. And so it's way more linear. So that you don't have these big spikes and crashes.
5:16Qasar Younis:There aren't like new entrants that come in and disrupt. It's just because it's safety oriented. So that's a bit more of what, you know, when we last talked or in the last year, it's kind of continuing the same trajectory. So when we last talked, you had a lot of big announcements that came out. Since then, you've had even more. So what's going on at Applied Intuition? Yeah, I mean, one part of it is we are like a sizable company. So we have a thousand plus engineers doing a lot. So every month we're hopefully producing a lot of good new products that our customers are consuming. But like at a high level in all of our major areas, you know, our mission is to get intelligence onto a billion machines.
5:57Qasar Younis:And so you kind of deconstruct that. Like, how do you do that? Obviously, the obvious ones that people always think about us are cars and trucks because that's consumers. They understand that. But similarly, we've had announcements in defense where we're working with shipmakers to put intelligence on the actual ships. Huntington Wells in that specific example. Or we're working with Heidelberg Materials to put intelligence in queries and in ports and in mines. So we continue on that. We had a bunch of announcements. I won't bore the audience with them. but you can go through all those verticals and we're just continuing to push intelligence into each of those verticals and uh our our like macro hypothesis which is you can take a model and put it on many machines and it can perform really well i think continues to hold why we believe that's really important is it's very expensive to train and deploy these models and these are models and and we're not repurposing other folks.
6:58Qasar Younis:So collecting data, training, pre-training, we're talking big numbers in the way everybody talks big numbers. But what's different about us is we want to also reconcile that with customer revenue. So we're always trying to balance that, which is different about us than other companies. There's a version where you're just like, hey, we're going to spend a lot of money on this and we'll figure out how to make money in the future. We try to create some balance there. Isn't it right you barely touched any of your funding? Yeah, we're still in that phase, which is great, which we're super happy about.
7:30It's less about the ego of saying that.
7:34Qasar Younis:I think it's more about we have a lot of resources to put towards any opportunity that we think is worth deploying a billion dollars for or deploying multiple billion dollars for. And so, yeah, and I think we have some big announcements coming in the next, like, the biggest announcements in the company's history. Yeah, yeah. So I can't say in my notes day, they said, whatever you do, don't talk about X, Y, and Z. Because internally, it's something we've been working on for a long time. A couple of things we're working on, product side and the customer side. But that's the way I always think about our company.
8:09Qasar Younis:We're a thousand engineers. We have some resources. Our mission is to put intelligence on a billion machines. So how do we do that in the most effective way possible within the context of everything happening in the summit and everything happening in the competitive world, everything happening with our customers? Yeah. But I think one thing that is worth saying is like, I think everybody who makes physical machines, whether it's defense companies or construction companies or automotive companies, they're not like, their head isn't in the sand about AI. They recognize they need to put intelligence on the machines.
8:44Qasar Younis:And so that's really works well for us. Yeah. I don't know how you're going to go bigger than the last physical intelligence day. You had Marc Andreessen there, You had so many big announcements. So we're going to have to sneak into this one somehow. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think, I mean, I'm a believer that I'm pitching my own book here, which is like I think the physical world and AI going into that, I think when we look back, I think that's going to be the bigger story. As I look back 25 years from now, I think we'll look back. It's kind of like if you look at the early days of the Internet, there were companies that were really focused on getting websites up, static websites up.
9:19Qasar Younis:So when you look back over the last 25, 30 years of the Internet, You really think about Amazon. You really think about Apple. You know, so I think like those broader themes of like phones getting in everybody's pockets and delivery becoming ubiquitous. Those macro themes, I think, will be the big ones rather than like a specific model launching and then the government saying no. And then like that all is going to be forgotten. So I think that's where my like mind is always at. On that note, I have to ask you, what is your hottest take right now? I think, oh man, the hottest take. I think the cost structure that we're currently seeing from whether it's from how much we spend on model training and development to employees to, we're at that phase of the bubble where it's like, you know, all the opulence in the companies is what people talk about rather than the products.
10:16Qasar Younis:and so I think there's going to be a little bit of a pullback. Maybe that's not a hot take, but I think it's coming. And a lot of times when people talk about this concept of a boom and bust, the view is the bust always takes longer than you think it is, but I think the cycles move a lot faster. So if there was really a bust in 21, it's like, oh, well, you typically have a longer time horizon where you have a buildup and maybe that pullback happens. It's not necessarily a hot take, but it's like I think about it. I think about like so I'm just yeah I would talk about books I read you know a lot and I just finished this book called the rise and fall of LTCM the book title is when genius failed but that's really LTCM was this hedge fund in the late 90s that was a bunch of these you know savants geniuses and they they kind of do what what's happening now with compute which is like they just used leverage and they found themselves in a really bad position.
11:17Qasar Younis:And suddenly this untouchable firm, so lauded in, in New York, uh, in wall street collapses and collapses very, very, uh, like, you know, kind of dramatically. And like, maybe cause I read right before I go to sleep, like it's in the back of my mind. It's like, could there be an LTCM situation in our business where you have something that's so elite and hopeful and then suddenly like some things don't were and it stumbles and it has it has real repercussions in the ltcm case that was because the broader global markets in russia is it uh and in asia started behaving in ways that nobody thought would happen and it compounded so like is there something that happens more peripherally in the ai business and then it has a domino effect into our business like that's what i kind of think about a little bit so but I'm like you know I'm in the you know only the paranoid survive so I'm like you can be asked me this question at any point in the last 10 years I'd always be like where is the hidden risk like that's like one thing I'd really like implore founders to do is that you always want to be thinking about hidden risk in your company in your leadership team in your technical strategy in the market at large and how you play it.
12:39I was going to ask you about the books.
12:41Qasar Younis:Yes. So what else are you reading right now? Like literally at this moment, and I always have to keep reading new stuff because if I get an interview, I can't be recycling books. The non-technical books I'm reading, which are interesting, are Society of Captives, which is about the American prison system. And then it's written in the 1950s. Really good book. Also, I recommend to founders to read stuff which is outside of our industry to give you like some, you know, like reflection on like, how does this kind of apply here? I'm reading The Courage to Be Disliked, which I think people think is hilarious because nobody thinks that I don't mind being disliked.
13:24Qasar Younis:So it's like, that's a great book. I'm reading, I'm also reading something else and I just, it skips my mind. But I'm constantly reading. Genghis Khan? I just finished Jack Waterford's Genghis Khan book as well. Also fantastic, Making the Modern World, also fantastic. What were your biggest lessons from Genghis Khan? That's just a nice popcorn book. A better book that I just finished and I would really recommend, especially if you are an enterprise watching this, like you're on the consuming side of AI and it's a book written by John DeLorean who is supposed to be the next CEO of General Motors in the 70s, or next president of GM.
14:03Qasar Younis:And he leaves, he created the DeLorean, the car that's in Back to the Future. So he wrote this bombastic book called On a Clear Day That You Can See General Motors. But then after he wrote it, he was like, this can't be published. It's too crazy. And I'm starting a car company and I can't alienate it. But his co-author basically publishes it anyways through lawsuits and everything. But it's a phenomenal book because at the time, General Motors was at the top of the business world. And it's like right now, if somebody wrote a bombastic book about SpaceX or Anthropic or something, it's saying it's all screwed up.
14:46Qasar Younis:300 pages of why it's not good. And it's written in the late 70s when GM is doing so well. but the punchline is like those things actually came to be true the reason gm actually struggled it would be another 20 years we're very clear in that book uh so if you're an enterprise the reason i i was just uh with the leadership at one of the big oems in germany the board uh and the ceo all the most senior people and um i told them you should read this even though it's it's from the 70s because I think large organizations have the same almost endemic problems AI or not AI it's like how leads work together like that but anyways long way of saying on a clear day you can see General Motors is a good book sounds like we need a bit of reflection some personal audits going on there so as we close out what are you most looking forward to I you know it could be in any timeline Some people say 12 months is too long.
15:44Maybe it's the next weekend. I don't know. What are you most looking forward to?
15:49Qasar Younis:I mean, it's like to a hammer, everything's a nail. Like, I think self-driving cars is really everything. And, you know, when I go around Paris, you see data collection vehicles. And you're like, it's even coming here. Like, you know, it's just like not Sunnyvale. And so now, like, every city I go to typically, with a trained eye, you can see like, oh, that's a data collection. We go like that. Those are sensors that are not for self. They're to collect data to train models. And so I think that's all I see all the time. Yeah. That's fantastic. Well, Kaser, thank you so much. Yeah, thanks for having me.
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17:15It's time to get Brex AF. Learn more at brex.com slash sorcery. That's b-r-e-x dot com slash s-o-u-r-c-e-r-y. Bye. We're here with Dylan Patel of Semi Analysis out here in Paris. Dylan, how are you? I'm doing well, yeah. I mean, Paris is beautiful, but it's hot as, yeah. I don't know AC. Paris is meant to be enjoyed in spring and fall, not in summer. It's not an optimal place for data centers, right? I think it's mostly a regulatory thing, but yeah. Paris is, you know, they have all this spare power. One of the funny things is like, they're like, oh, okay, let's build a bunch data centers. But then Spain, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany all freaked out because it's like, oh wait, all this spare power is actually like keeping our grid alive.
18:11If you stop selling us the spare power and you build data centers, our grids are screwed. And so there's been a lot of pushback from the other EU countries like, don't build data centers in France because we need the nuclear power. It's very interesting. So you are a conference surfer. You love I love conferences. I just listened to your interview with Sequoia on this. You built semi analysis off of riding the wave of conferences. So I'm very curious, what are the biggest trends that are going on at Rez this year? I would say a lot of people here just trying to figure out what the hell is going on.
18:47And I think there's like a wide array of people. There's a lot of people who are super deep in infra and they're making deals here. but then there's a lot of people who are just like, I spent too much money on my token. What do I do? Right. I spent too many tokens. So there's a wide range of sort of people here. I think it's fun. It's fun that way because then you get like such a wide perspective of people and you can walk up to someone and they're like a G and they know a lot of stuff and like a great connection. Then you walk up to someone and you're like, wow, I need to get out of this conversation as soon as possible.
19:22Like Molly, you know. Stop. Oh, God. Okay. Well, anyways, let's cut to the chase. What is your hottest take right now? I think a lot of people are trying to build all these optimized solutions for data centers. And they're just looking at like a backward looking view, right? Like what happened at the lab six months ago? And what does it look like there? Or what does it look like now? Okay, I'm going to build my three year infrastructure with that in mind, instead of like flexibility and general purpose capabilities. And then when they actually end up building that infra, it's going to be, a lot of it may be useless.
20:00Or not useless, but less optimal than something that is more general purpose or more flexible. It feels like a lot of people are trying to optimize on the current rather than think about where the workload is heading and then optimizing. And that's going to lead to a lot of wasted infra spend. I think most people don't know what they're doing. They're just buying the NVIDIA stuff. But a lot of people are also just like, they think they know what they're doing and then they're buying and building and optimizing and customizing. And then ultimately they're gonna waste a bunch of money. So it'll be fun to see where things head out and how they plan out.
20:37And then what people do with all this infra that maybe isn't super useful with where models are in two years. Okay, we're gonna run through some quick topics, okay? I want your take on all of them. Let's start with co-design. How do you feel? Yeah, I mean, co-design is the important thing, right? But when you try to do software hardware co-design without knowing where the software is headed, where the models are headed, then you end up in a pit, right? That's sort of the issue. But if you don't do software hardware co-design, you're also going to end up with like, info that is not optimized. So it's tough.
21:09Open source first closed. The theme here is that all, like there's multiple Chinese model labs who are telling telling all the inference guys, hey, our next model is not going to be open source. We're going to license it to you. Open is dying quickly, unfortunately. What do you, how do you think the costs of memory should trickle down? Should they go to the customer or should players be taking that price on themselves? I'm a very big fan of trickle down economics. Out of pocket. So trickle down, I think they're going to trickle down a lot. I think you've already seen server pricing go up, like B200s, B300s that you're buying now versus last year.
21:53The price is significantly higher. We've seen next generation hardware receive price increases before they've even started production. Like here was the quoted price and now the quoted price is higher. So it's definitely going to get passed down. And we see that with cost of tokens not falling as fast as they were previously because the cost of memory is flowing through. How do you feel about token maxing? I love token maxing. I think anyone who doesn't token max is going to get left behind. I think all this token budgeting stuff is loser mentality. If you're token budgeting hardcore, then your people are not going to learn the new workflows.
22:35And then they're not going to reshape your company and make it more efficient and drive a lot more work with fewer people. So ultimately, token budgeting is a fallacy. Now, ROI is important, but ultimately, the only way to get people to change their behavior is you measure them and you force them to do things differently. And token budgeting is like pulling back on them. So I think, you know, there's got to be some rationality. Don't just waste money on tokens for the laws. Don't give bonuses to people based on how many tokens they use or comp. But at the same time, like, don't just like clamp down on people wholesale.
23:11Is it true you fired someone for using Haiku? I did not fire. I got mad at someone because their model was set to haiku and they didn't even realize it. They were like cloud codes mid blah blah blah and they spent they still were trying to token use a lot of tokens. They spent like a thousand dollars on haiku. I was like what the hell what are you doing? And they're like oh my bad I didn't even realize they changed to Opus or Fable now and they're so much more productive because they're not just like asking the model to do the same thing over and over and over again. Okay lastly this is a pressing question.
23:43what is your favorite chip right now um i've been a real big fan of the takis blue heat um it's quite spicy limey it's it's good it's good right i think um you know the other thing that i have a theory on and i don't know if this is true or not but chips in europe have less seasoning than chips in america and mexico and like there is this like entire thing right where like developing countries or less cultured countries are less flavoring their food and the European idea is like oh you know our ingredients are high quality and so I think this extends to chips as well it's just horrible you need more flavoring or MSG please amazing thank you so much Dylan all right see you thank you we have Mark here from Nebius Mark how are you doing fantastic it's been a great time here at Raze how are the vibes at Raze You know, the energy is real high.
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24:40You can see it around us right now. Ton of attention, ton of participation. Really impressed at how they pulled a global audience to Paris in the middle of the summer, in the middle of the heat. People are ignoring it. They're showing up, and it's been a fantastic experience. What are the biggest trends that you're seeing here? It's incredible. The discussion shifting from what our AI native is building to when our enterprise is adopting. So it's really incredible to actually have the discussion where we're seeing the bridges being built to see enterprise adoption take place. Lots of discussion about, you know, obviously the CapEx and power and stock prices, which I think at the end of the day is a bit of a distraction because this is a marathon that we're running.
25:24And actually being able to drive that enterprise adoption, that's the critical next stage for the entire industry. Well, I can understand you guys have a lot of fans over there at Nebius and a lot of fans of the stock, too. So I want to ask you, what is your hottest take today? Hottest take today, and boy, that's such a wonderfully generous offer. Hottest take today is incredible opportunities in front of us. and staying focused on the long term to not only serve today's immediate needs, but how are we going to help to transform industries and how are we going to help to make enterprises successful with AI?
26:06What is the biggest problem you're seeing with the build-out of data centers? The biggest problem with the build-out of data centers is something that Nebius is not experiencing, which is that a lot of people are focused on single individual projects. Our organization has built a portfolio of opportunities. Today we have 20 data centers. We're multiplying that into the future. So the biggest challenge that many of our competitors are facing is being single-threaded, which is strange when you're in a multi-threaded parallel processing industry and getting stuck with a single project. The challenges are that a lot of things are happening locally with different community challenges, regulatory challenges, power challenges, which everybody faces.
26:49Fortunately at Nebius, we're actually pursuing a broad, diversified portfolio approach. The beautiful thing about the data centers being created today is they have some of the most advanced technology data centers have ever had. So whether it's from new memory to optics, how are you guys thinking about that? All the time looking at the interesting innovation that's taking place. The fact that we can actually build from scratch, from dirt up, and be able to look at each layer of the entire data center stack and be able to consider new methods, new technology, new providers, puts us in a unique position to be able to take advantage of all those advances.
27:28So we're always looking at the new and innovative things that are taking place to be able to improve the quality, the capabilities, the reliability of the solutions that we're delivering. Amazing. Okay. As we close out, what are you most looking forward to in the next 12 months? the next 12 months in AI is an eternity. I mean, I had been at Nebius for 12 months, actually 13 months. And if you look back 13 months ago, it was a completely different company. So the next 13 months is talking about the tens of billions that are being generated in Nebius revenue and the extraordinary traction they were gaining with not only the phenomenal AI natives that we're working with, but also making our way to scale enterprise and big brand adoption.
28:19And being able to expand our solution set from the model training that people are doing today into the inferencing that we started to offer and into agentic workloads. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much, Mark. Pleasure. I really enjoyed the conversation. We're here with Arvind of Glean. Arvind, how are you doing? Doing very well. How's RAISE treating you? This is a fantastic conference. I didn't expect what I saw here. What is the major trend that you're seeing that's going on here today? Have you been able to actually see anything? Well, I've not been able to attend most of the talks because there are so many good people at this event.
28:59So just like getting to meet them all has taken all of my time. But some trends are clear. Number one, all the new AI companies are here. And the big trend, in my opinion, is open source and how that is fundamentally changing the full AI stack and bringing rise to a whole bunch of new companies that have new opportunities with open source. So what's going on at Glean? What's hot right now? Well, Glean is actually, we're finding ourselves in the midst of very, very good timing. So, when you think about AI, making it work in the enterprise, the two big things are context. Like how do you bring all these agents that you want to automate the work that humans do.
29:42They need that context, that data, that information that humans use to do the same work. And that's actually something that we are really, really good at. So being the leader in context crafts is actually helping create a massive demand for Glean. And then the second big trend in the industry is people keep complaining about like they can't measure the return on investment Where is the business value coming from and so Glean comes in handy on that front at least from a bottom line perspective Because we do really really good in terms of helping a customer reduce their token usage in two different ways One we can pick the right model since we work with all the closed domain and open source models We can pick the right model for the right task which is cheaper for them, but still gets the work done.
30:25And second, with our context graph, we can actually, when a model is trying to do some complex work, it doesn't have to spend all this time just trying to assemble the raw materials to do that work. With Glean, they get that context in one shot, so we actually make most of your AI workloads much faster and very cheaper. What is the biggest challenge that you have been hitting recently? A challenge, I think, from a business perspective, it is finally businesses are running into this, you know, that, well, we're going to actually measure our spend on AI. And so that is creating a little bit of friction, you know, now with all these customers having so many different tools, so many different choices, you know, to bet on.
31:06It's getting confusing for them to pick, you know, who's the right partner to, you know, to actually start the AI transformation journey on. So that's been always the challenge in AI because suddenly when AI became hot, every software company in the world became an AI company and it's confusing the buyers. So clarifying that doubt in them, helping them understand the landscape, what companies do what work and why is Glean relevant in this crowded mix of technology providers, You know, that's always been like, you know, the difficult task for us. All right. Now I have to ask you a difficult question.
31:44What is your hottest take right now? Well, I think open source models are going to dominate AI in fencing. You know, you'll see in the next two years we'll shift to where it's almost no open source to where it's going to be almost all open source. Amazing. Okay. Arvind, thank you so much. Thank you. We're here with New York Stock Exchange star of the show. How are you doing? Well, I'm better now that I'm with you. I mean, but this is kind of incredible, actually. It's my first time in Paris. I'm Laura, by the way. Hi. I run social for the New York Stock Exchange, so I like to think I have the best job in the world.
32:19You might have the best job in the world, but luckily, being at the New York Stock Exchange means I get to work with you a lot, so it's kind of a win-win. But yeah, this is kind of incredible. First time in Paris, and I get... First time in Paris. Yeah, I get the whole hullabaloo. I get it. Paris is amazing. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. Also, it's hard to beat New York in my eyes. Tried and true, so I understand the lore and the love of the Louvre. How about that? Whoa. When I was on my way over here, I was like, you know what? I could commute. Straight up. The flight wasn't that bad. I came from LA.
32:55I just slept the whole time. I could probably just commute here. Hop, skip and jump. Yeah. And we have the match tonight. I'm very excited. It's France-Morocco. So there might be riots. We're going to see. And you will see Molly and I on the pitch. No kidding. We are not going. No, that's in the United States. Right. All right, Laura. So you have been around Raze. You've been seeing all the companies come in and through and around the New York Stock Exchange booth. You've done media yourself. What is something we should all be paying attention to? What is the trend of the day? The hottest thing happening here at Raze.
33:28I would say folks are going to be saying AI all day, authentic cloud, quantum, all of our favorite words. I believe the thing that's making these companies stand out is their access and visibility. It's their partnerships. A lot of those partnerships are happening here. We're seeing it in real time, watching real C-suite founders, entrepreneurs actually meeting in person to close deals. It's actually kind of crazy to see it with my own eyes. you only hear about it, I think, in closed doors and golf courses and karaoke bars. But I firmly believe that it is about the story you're telling, how well you're telling it, and where you're going to go from there, how it's going to set you apart.
34:10And that has a lot to do with what we're doing, right? There's a reason why NYSE and NYSE Ward are the main media sponsors of Raise. Hello. There's a reason NYSE is one of your sponsors. And also, Raise rang the bell. Come on. Come on. the biggest financial stage like the epicenter of global finance there is a storytelling aspect to it that like sets people apart and if you can stand out and if you can you know cut through the noise I think there's a lot of noise honestly and I think if you have a clear message and you have a clear goal with really good people that's what helps with being in person and stuff is you meet the actual real good people talk about vibe coding it's all about vibe you know vibe meeting vibe media our new podcast Molly and Laura amazing place to end it Laura thank you so much thank you so much see you at the New York Stock Exchange we're here with a poor from altimeter a poor how are you doing good glad to be here how's raised this year things are definitely upgraded since last year yeah it's big big time big guests big speakers big companies?
35:18Great, like really good setup. Lots of great founders. Really excited to meet a lot of the CIOs. I got to know the CIO of Goldman last night, CIO of Procter & Gamble, and where they are on their AI journey has been the biggest learning for me. I've been waiting to ask you this question for quite some time because you've gone viral a lot recently with your Stanford lectures. so aboard what is your hottest take right now well today of all days there's four seasons in AI they're called open AI and tropic SpaceX and Google so if you're a CIO if you're a CEO if you're about to make a multi-million billion dollar decision of which lab to build your intelligence on plan for the climate not for a weather what does that mean that's multi-model routing that's evals that's thinking about post train custom models yeah that's out of stake it's a it's a four seasons of the year so what's the climate that's a great question the climate is evergreen right so you've got to plan for if you're about to spend a hundred million dollars you don't want to get stuck in one of the seasons sometimes the summer is long sometimes it's it's a heat wave but I think but I think you I think you want an evergreen evergreen season.
36:37And I think that evergreen season, the climate looks like you'll have a portion of your workloads going through open source, as Jesse from Decagon wrote very eloquently. A big portion of their volume goes through open source, about 90 % now. And then the frontier stuff, you know, discovering new use cases will always go through the most intelligent models. Coding might stay there for a long time. And so planning for that multi-model world planning to have not get stuck in one regime is a climate for people who have not seen your lectures just yet highly recommend it who have you spoken with I know you've brought on different guests and you bring them for the students what was the plan there oh you know we had a we had a great lineup it's a it's a labor of love and I was really excited to bring back some of those conversations back to school you know if you're a student and you're making a big life decision I wanted to make sure that you saw the whole AI stack from chips to data centers to models and the ultimately the AI applications and so we had a great set of speakers across all of the parts of the stack we had folks from Nvidia and grok we had Ali Gozi from Databricks we had to him from base stand we had such and from open AI the folks from anthropic so it's a great lineup and we're very lucky to have them amazing okay to close out what are you most looking forward to this year?
38:00Oh wow I'm looking to the seasonal changes in the climate this year. Well you guys saw what happened today Saul from OpenAI goes live. SpaceX Michael Truel just launched a model at his opus level. You know it's what a great time to be alive and watch the seasons change. Amazing. Anything else? Did we miss anything? Anything you want to share? More to come later in the year. More to come later in the year. Thank you so much Apoorv. Thank you. We have Nikhil from Turbo Puffer. Nikhil how are you So well. Love being here in Paris. A little hot, a little chaotic, but you know, we're telling people to puff.
38:34So we have to address the rumors you don't sell puffer jackets. No, those are internal only. We do have puffer jackets, but only for a select few. Now if you go to tpuff.supply, we do occasionally drop new merch there, so stay tuned. Oh my gosh. Okay, so let's get into it. For people who don't know Turbo Puffer. PUFFER. WHAT IS IT? WE ARE A SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZED FOR AI WORKLOAD. WE POWER RETRIEVAL FOR CURSOR, NOTION, LAGORA, ANTHROPIC, SOME OF THE BIGGEST NAMES IN THE BUSINESS. WHAT THAT MEANS IS IF YOU THINK OF A PRODUCT THAT HAS A SEARCH BAR, WE WANT TO BE THE THING POWERING THAT SEARCH BAR.
39:13WE ARE THE THING POWERING THAT SEARCH BAR IN MANY CASES. BUT FOR ANY AGENTIC APPLICATION, THEY'RE SEARCHING ON YOUR BEHALF BEHIND THE SCENES. SO YOU MIGHT BE ASKING FOR A REPORT ON SALES. the first thing that agent is going to do is search Turbo Popper for everything mentioning sales and get that all into the context window of the model. Amazing. Okay. Given that, what are you seeing as the biggest trends here at Raise? So much data. I've been talking to folks. We used to think in terms of gigabytes or terabytes, folks are coming up to me with not just one, but 10 or hundreds of petabytes that they want to search over.
39:46Now, I'm not sure everyone is prepared for the cost of searching over 100 petabytes. There's a bit of a negotiation. What is the cost on that? So our largest workloads cost tens of millions of dollars to search over right now. And those are web scale use cases with tens of terabytes. Searching petabytes is going to cost another order of magnitude or two on top of that. And what is the architecture behind it? So the reason that this is viable at all, the reason folks are able to do vector search over the entire web on TurboPover is because we're based on object storage. So that's S3 or Google Cloud Storage, which is rock bottom storage prices, the absolute cheapest storage you can get.
40:24The problem is it's really slow. So our innovation is we add all this caching on top of S3 so that you see performance that's almost equivalent to what you get with a system that's not based on object storage. But you get something much closer to the economics of object storage. Damn. Okay. Are you ready for the hardest question of the day? I'm so ready. What is your hottest take right now? I think search is still too expensive. And Turbo Puffer was founded because we thought Search was an order of magnitude too expensive at the time. We've brought it down by an order of magnitude. But it kills us that there are still products out there that are limited in their ambition because Search is still too expensive.
41:02So we're always looking for ways to bring the cost down even more. If you think about it, if you're spending$5 on Turbo Puffer per user, but you're only charging your users$5 a month, the economics just don't work. But if we can bring that cost down by an order of magnitude, so you're only spending 50 cents a user on searches, suddenly you're able to build a product where you couldn't before. Your margins work, you get crazy growth, you explode. So that's what we're always looking for. What product isn't currently in the market because search is too expensive? Amazing. So what's next? More relevance.
41:34We started with vector search. We added keyword search. We added regex. But what people actually care about is, are my searches good? They don't care about, did I get 95 % of the results I should have gotten for this vector search? They care about, is my agent performing? Is it completing the tasks successfully? So our task is, how do we get the best possible search results fed to these agents so they actually complete the tasks? So we're taking more and more of that in-house. There's a bunch of new techniques like lane interaction, like search agents that we're going to build into the product so that you as the user, just you puff harder.
42:08You send more queries to Turbo Puffer, and you can trust that you're getting good results, and you don't have to worry as much about the mechanics of search. Amazing. Thank you so much, Nikhil. Yeah, thank you for having me. If you're building what's next in AI, you need to know MongoDB, the database platform developers love and built for the agents you're running. MongoDB stores searches and reasons over your data in real time, with vector search and embeddings from Voyage AI all in the same system. No separate pipelines, no stitching together 10 different tools. It's why 75 % of the Fortune 100 and leading AI-native startups run on MongoDB.
42:46Build and scale from your first user to billions of vectors. Go to mongodb.com slash AI to learn more. That's mongodb.com slash AI to learn more. Bye. So we are in the middle of chaos here at Raze. It is very popular this year and we have Barack from Wonderful AI. So Barack, welcome. Hey Molly, good to see you. It is absolutely chaotic here in Paris at the Rated Summit. I'm Barack. I'm from Wonderful. I'm the chief strategy officer at Wonderful. I'm actually the first institutional investor in the company and then joined because I believe in it so much. We're an enterprise applied AI partner to the world's largest enterprises outside of the US.
43:28We're both a platform and a partner to them. So what is your hottest take right now? I believe geographies will be even bigger than verticals when it comes to AI. When you look at actual labor and labor displacement and what's actually happening in the world and where it's likely to go, countries are way more interesting from an expansion perspective and a focus perspective than verticals. And that you can go horizontal without a vertical specialization with AI, as long as you're able to solve the go-to-market strategy with it. Damn, we are back in Uber land grab competition stage. That's exactly right.
44:05It's like the enterprise applied AI playbook with the Uber go to market strategy. We're in over 30 countries around the world and pretty much the last six months that we've expanded to most of them. So it's quite a wild ride. So what is the secret to wonderful? It's really the focus and the strategy. I think generally in the AI universe, the opportunity is massive, but one of the hardest things for companies is how to actually differentiate and to break out from the pack. What it requires is a non-consensus insight that you need to actually be right about. I think for Wonderful, that was really the geographic focus to go generalized, to go horizontal in terms of the use cases that you can actually offer for enterprises, but to actually focus on rest of world versus US.
44:48That was the non-consensus part. The rest of it around the challenges with Applied AI and what you actually need is very similar to the way most of us probably think about it. but it's the playbook that you bring to it and local delivery that was most non-consensus about that wonderful what's your favorite country wow great question i live most of the year in tel aviv so i'm i'm biased towards israel but to visit and that i've had the pleasure of visiting was japan really opened up in office and i was there about a month ago uh tokyo is is just i mean japan in general is like a completely unique world and especially as as it relates to the enterprise playbook and how they do business and the respect culture and everything it's it's fascinating and I love it amazing great place to end thank you Brock yeah lovely to meet you Molly everyone we have max from lagora max how's race for you it's very warm the electricity went out yesterday I keep getting pestered by customers but I think that's a great thing and it has been a fun time to come to Paris I think.
45:53I've done a few of these in the US, in London, in the Nordics and it's always a bit of a different flavour but it's been great. So you're based in Europe. How is the Europe vibe right now? Well I think the vibe in Europe overall versus companies like Legora is quite different. So I think the general vibe is there's a fear that some of the best frontier models get locked up in the States. And there's a lot of discussion around how do you continue winning in manufacturing and these types of markets that are important. And then you have really fast growing software companies like Legora, where we adopted a global mindset from day one.
46:35And so we don't really view ourselves as only European. I think we view ourselves as very global. and we have been competing at the global stage from day one and so we still wake up every day thinking about what can we do more what can we do next which is really thrilling did you expect this level of growth I think going into this I didn't really know what to expect I think I've had a very unique experience fundraising and working in our market that most startups doesn't have typically you don't raise 600 million dollars in two weeks but we got some great advice when we were in Y Combinator which is if you build a great company it's easy to fundraise and if you build a great product I think it's easy to you know work with customers and to deliver value so no I did not expect this but I think that we are leveling up and we are you know meeting the opportunity when it's now being presented to us so legal AI is one of the fastest growing categories stories right now and it's super competitive.
47:42How are you dealing with the token situation? So we were actually the first legal AI company to move into consumption based pricing. And I think that's really important because it one just continues to solidify that we're the product leader and innovator in our space. But secondly, it really aligns the value that we bring with the way that the business model works. So if you have a flat rate and you say, you know,$200,$300 per user per month, and then they use$2 ,000 worth of tokens, you have a problem. And so we've been running at a very positive gross margin for a long time, and this will help us continue to do so.
48:20And I think it helps our customers already see where their tokens are being spent and how to think about that long term. Because, you know, token consumption have been the business modeling coding tools since inception. It's the pricing model of the big labs. And now it's going to be the pricing model in legal. And I expect many of the other companies to follow us into that. Damn. Okay. I have a really hard question for you right now. Are you ready? Shoot. What is your hottest take right now? My hottest take is that there is a lot of complaining from European startups rather than just locking in and building for the global stage, I think there's a bit of laziness.
49:06It's nice in the summers here to go to Italy or to go to France where we are today. But if you want to build the biggest companies in the world, you need to look past that. And you need to understand that you're competing with the US, you're competing with China. And if you want to win globally, you need to work as hard as they do. Sorry, you can't go to Saint-Tropez. No, sorry. The great lock-in is year-round. Yes, that's exactly it. Amazing. Thank you so much, Max. Thank you, Molly. We have Gil here, CTO of Merge, which we recently did an amazing episode with you guys at the New York Stock Exchange.
49:42It was great. How are you doing, Gil? I'm doing great. Happy to be here in Paris for the conference. Okay. We have one burning question that I know you've been waiting for. What is your hottest take right now in AI? I think some people are starting to agree with this. Token maxing not working. You're getting zero results from using more tokens. It was cool to encourage your employees to use more AI. But I think what we're seeing now is we're not getting more output. The only thing that people are seeing a real connection between I guess you know you know sort of productivity and usage of AI is how you use AI to bring your cycle times down get feedback and iterate really quickly.
50:17I love asking you this question because you are so technical and it is a fun fear mongering topic. So what are THE BIGGEST CONCERNS PEOPLE SHOULD BE WATCHING OUT FOR WITH INTEGRATING ALL THESE APIS WITH ALL OF THESE NEW AI APPLICATIONS? I THINK MAINLY IT'S SECURITY. I THINK DOWN MARKET, WHO CARES? YOU'RE GOING TO LET YOUR OWN PERSONAL DATA FLOW. I DO IT FOR MY PERSONAL CONSUMPTION. BUT WHEN IT COMES TO BUSINESSES, THEY ARE JUST AFRAID OF DATA FLOWING OUT OF THE SYSTEM. SO INTEGRATIONS ARE THE POINT WHERE AN LLM ACTUALLY BECOMES DANGEROUS. SOMETHING ISOLATED, I MENTIONED this before but something isolated and LLM it might insult you but it's not gonna do much worse than that but the second nothing can send your data elsewhere that's where all the problems come in so I think we're just gonna see a lot more governance and locking down before we see AI really opened up to the masses to talk to all your systems I think Alex Karp recently went viral for this rant of AI sovereignty within your organization you agree I absolutely agree I it's just it's there's never been a good position in business to hand over the fate of your company, your future, your development to another company.
51:23So I think people are going to want sovereignty. They're going to want control over their own systems. Whether that means hosting in-house or using third parties, they want the flexibility to switch whenever they do not want to be locked in. Amazing. Well, Gil, we will let you go, but what are you most looking forward to at Raise this year? Honestly, I think what's been so cool, I know this is probably an untraditional answer, but the mix of sort of this really classic French architecture and these statues from the year 1500 mixed with all the AI. And it's such a cool juxtaposition. I'm loving being here.
51:55Perfect place to end it. Thank you so much, Gil. Thank you. Ariel, welcome to Sorcery. I'm happy to be here. We're here at the Illuminati. Yes. Actually, I've never been in such a bizarre place to do an interview, so that's cool. So we're fresh off stage. We were just talking about Nivan and how you guys are dominating travel. What is your hottest take right now with travel? I think the hottest take is what we talked about, how humans are still so important, both for meeting and being here, but also supporting all of this. It was actually a cool outcome of this interview. I mean, it is true. We were talking about this, but hallucinations.
52:32You can't have an AI agent do everything, especially with travel, because it's so, so complex. So how are you at Navon helping solve this? It's so, so important. Think about it. If I send you to the wrong flight, I'll tell you that I upgraded your flight and we didn't do it. I'll send you to the wrong room. People are so, so emotional when it comes to travel. They care about it. So you cannot have any fuck-ups. Halluzination is a huge, huge, huge fuck-up. We've built our own platform, our own model to prevent that. And we are supporting most of our customers by using our own AI platform that actually does not hallucinate.
53:10Before you've had a customer come over to you, I would assume, what has been the worst travel story you've ever heard? It's actually my travel story. This is the travel story that started Navan. I was one of the first ones to start an offshore operation in Ukraine, in Odessa, Ukraine. And I went there, arrived there in the middle of the night, freezing cold. By the way, I hate the cold. freezing cold came to the hotel because of some credit card issue the hotel canceled my reservation and they told me to go down the street and find a new hotel the travel agency didn't pick up the software didn't work I walked with my luggage like down the street one hotel after the other until I found something but this was by far my worst travel experience and really what inspired me to start a company so you've been public now for almost a year a year.
54:04That's pretty incredible. So you guys are also ripping. So what's going on there? What are the latest stats? Yeah, we grew last quarter by 50 percent in terms of usage. We grew our revenue by 40 percent. We became cash flow positive, became profitable. So our kind of stats are amazing. But the most important thing we have more and more users using us. We have more than 10 billion dollars of bookings a year now going really, really fast. So more people are joining this kind of of the one thing. Amazing. Well, thank you so much, Arielle. And I think we closed out on stage with bullish on humans.
54:38Yes. And I think that's the most important thing. It's the most important thing to figure out because nothing matters. We can do all of this AI infrastructure, the AI fun stuff, but we need to remember that we're all humans and this needs to stay. Perfect. Thank you. CJ, welcome to Sorcery. Great to be here. Great to be in Paris. Great to be in Paris. It's fun. Fresh off the stage, you're very popular today, by the way. I keep hearing your name from everyone. Thank you. So what excites you right now? Number one is about customer-focused innovation and making sure we are the foundational layer for all AI applications and agentic applications.
55:21So that's number one. Number two, making our customers really successful as they roll out AI and there is clear ROI that they can see and they have a peace of mind when they use us as the data layer so that's really exciting. And third is just the pace of innovation. We want to move fast for our customers. We do these things called dot local conferences that are very local, hence the name dot local. Next one is in San Francisco. We want to make many announcements there. After that one is in New York. We want to make announcements there. Then it's in Mumbai. We want to make announcement there, which are all related to innovation.
56:00So the pace of innovation in service of our customers really excites me. I have to ask you a very difficult question. Yes. What is your hottest take in AI right now? My simple answer, which I believe to be true, is data is the unsung hero and data is back. You cannot create an AI application without a great data layer and your AI application is as good as your data. As the kids would say, facts. Yes, facts. And it tracks. Well, great. So you heard it here, big data is back. Thank you, CJ. Thank you very much.
From the publisher
Day 2 of RAISE Summit in Paris, the biggest AI summit in Europe. 12 founders, operators, and investors give us their hottest takes on the debates splitting the room right now: is token maxing genius or a waste, is open source dying or about to take over, and are we in a bubble.The disagreements were the best part. Dylan Patel (SemiAnalysis) loves token maxing and says open source is dying quickly, while others call token maxing the wrong approach entirely. Qasar Younis (Applied Intuition) on the opulence phase of the cycle and the pullback he sees coming. Apoorv Agrawal (Altimeter) on the four seasons of AI and planning for the climate, not the weather. Plus enterprise ROI, physical AI, petabyte-scale search, and why data is back."Open is dying quickly." - Dylan Patel, SemiAnalysis. "There are four seasons in AI. They're called OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX, and Google." - Apoorv Agrawal, Altimeter.Guest lineup:Dylan Patel, CEO, SemiAnalysisQasar Younis, CEO, Applied IntuitionApoorv Agrawal, Partner, Altimeter CapitalArvind Jain, CEO, GleanAriel Cohen, CEO, NavanCJ Desai, CEO, MongoDBGil Feig, CTO, MergeNikhil Benesch, CTO, TurboPufferBarak Kaufman, Chief Strategy Officer, WonderfulMax Junestrand, CEO, LegoraMarc Boroditsky, CRO, NebiusLaura Diorio, Social Media, NYSEThis episode is brought to you by Brex, MongoDB, and Assembly AI.Molly on X: https://x.com/MollySOShea𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒• Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery • MongoDB–Millions of developers and more than 65,200+ customers across industries, including ~75% of the Fortune 100, rely on MongoDB for their most important applications. With integrated capabilities for operational data, search, real-time analytics, & AI-powered data retrieval, MongoDB helps organizations everywhere move faster, innovate more efficiently, & simplify complex architectures. https://mongodb.com/ai• AssemblyAI–Millions of developers use AssemblyAI to power their voice ai applications and features. One API gives you access to best-in-class speech-to-text, voice agent, and speech understanding models for both pre-recorded and real-time audio. Granola, ClickUp & HeyGen are scaling with AssemblyAI - get $50 of free credits today at http://AssemblyAI.com/sourcery𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒00:00 RAISE Summit Day 200:12 Qasar Younis (Applied Intuition)03:46 AI Trends at RAISE05:29 Applied Intuition Updates09:46 Bubble Risks and Books15:37 Self-Driving Future17:29 Dylan Patel (SemiAnalysis)22:05 Tokenmaxxing Debate24:31 Marc Boroditsky (Nebius)28:37 Arvind Jain (Glean)32:02 Laura Diorio (NYSE)35:03 Apoorv Agrawal (Altimeter): Four Seasons of AI38:23 Nikhil Benesch (TurboPuffer)42:18 CJ Desai (MongoDB): Agent Data Layer43:00 Barak Kaufman (Wonderful)45:34 Max Junestrand (Legora)49:35 Gil Feig (Merge)51:58 Ariel Cohen (Navan): Bullish on Humans54:54 CJ Desai (MongoDB): Data Is Back#podcast #investing #technology #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup #siliconvalley




