Gradient Dissent: Conversations on AI

"We are going to switch from the problem in AI being that nothing works to the problem being that everything works."

Dan Klein has been studying language models for over two decades and is now a professor of computer science at Berkeley. His new company, Scaled Cognition, is built around one question: how do you build a system that will not lie to you?

In this episode, Dan joins Lukas Biewald to talk about why every LLM output is technically a hallucination, how reinforcement learning can quietly teach AI to deceive you, and what it actually takes to build models that check their own work.

He also gets into why reliability is the one part of AI that hasn't kept pace and why that matters more than most people realize.

Connect with us here:
Dan Klein
Scaled Cognition
Lukas Biewald
Weights and Biases

Samuel Rodriques left physics because there were no unsolved problems left.
Instead, he built an AI scientist named Kosmos to cure every disease, solve aging, and map the human brain.
In this episode:
The cure his AI proposed for blindness
Why he would never touch a peptide
Whether we'll need human scientists in 20 years
What's stopping America in drug discovery

Connect with us here:
Samuel Rodriques
Edison Scientific
Lukas Biewald
Weights & Biases

"Every vehicle is capable of driverless operation. That's clearly the steady state of where we're going."
Wayve started in a rented house in Cambridge with $1.5M, a car in the garage, and an aim to integrate end-to-end AI into driving. A decade later it's driven across 506 cities without a single HD map and is worth over $8.6 billion.
In this episode, CEO Alex Kendall joins Lukas Biewald to talk about how he built the AI driver Uber, Nvidia, Mercedes, and Nissan all backed, and why putting self-driving AI into 100 million cars a year is a far bigger bet than 10,000 robotaxis.
Waymo and Tesla both come up. He doesn't shy away.

Connect with us here:
Alex Kendall
Lukas Biewald
Wayve
Weights and Biases

"Companies designing for agents, not humans, are going to get a lot of lift."
ClickHouse started as an internal tool at Yandex. Today it's the database Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta and Tesla all run on.
In this episode, CEO Aaron Katz joins Lukas Biewald to talk about how he turned an open source project into a $15B company, why he acquired LangFuse knowing it could cost him customers, and what he's actually building for the agent era.
Snowflake, Datadog and Databricks all come up. He doesn't shy away.
Connect with us here:
Aaron Katz: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaron-katz-5762094
ClickHouse: https://www.linkedin.com/company/clickhouseinc/
Lukas Biewald: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lbiewald/
Weights and Biases: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wandb/
00:00 Trailer
00:57 The Origin Story: From Yandex to ClickHouse Inc.
04:43 Building ClickHouse Cloud & Raising $300M
10:36 Growing Up Around Xerox PARC
12:51 Salesforce, Mark Benioff & the Dot-Com Bust
15:32 Cloud Skeptics vs. AI Skeptics | History Repeating
18:05 Building a Modern Go-To-Market Playbook
21:57 The SaaS Crash, Agents & the Future of Infrastructure
27:09 The Datadog Love-Hate Story
35:21 Hardest Moments: Russia, SVB & Sleepless Nights
43:16 Outro

Formal verification already consumes years of human effort.
In this episode, Lukas Biewald talks with Carina Hong, Founder & CEO of Axiom, about why verification is becoming the real bottleneck in high stakes AI systems.
They discuss how Axiom uses AI to take on the tedious checking that stretches verification cycles across years, starting with formal mathematics and extending to hardware and software.
Carina also explains why Axiom’s approach to auto-formalization mirrors spec driven models like Kiro from AWS.
Connect with us here:
Carina Hong: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carina-hong/
Axiom: https://www.linkedin.com/company/axiommath/
Lukas Biewald: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lbiewald/
Weights & Biases: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wandb/