Rodrigo Liang, SambaNova CEO, shares how he raised more than $1B to launch and grow the first generative AI unicorn

Today’s guest is one of the original AI-first entrepreneurs. SambaNova paved the way for generations of other companies including today’s generative AI cohort. Rodrigo Liang, CEO, and his team have raised more than a billion dollars from a legendary group of investors including Temasek, BlackRock, GV, and Walden International.

The original vision for SambaNova’s chip architecture and software products came from work his co-founders did at Stanford’s famous AI Lab. Today, SambaNova has embraced generative AI and is again leading the industry. Before founding SambaNova, Rodrigo held senior leadership roles at Oracle and Sun after having received his masters and bachelors degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford.

Listen and learn… 

1. Why AI will be bigger than the internet 
2. How SambaNova migrated from designing AI chip architectures to software 
3. How to build your own LLM like ChatGPT 
4. Where there are opportunities for companies beyond NVIDIA in the AI chip space 
5. What will lead to the “trough of disillusionment” for AI 
6. What are adjacent opportunities for AI outside chat that are at the early stages of maturity 
7. How every knowledge worker will soon benefit from an AI personal assistant 
8. How to address the problem of popular LLMs being trained mostly on English content
9. Why we’re in the “Linux moment for AI” 
10. What contributes to the cost and complexity of training new LLMs 
11. What is fine-tuning and how does it work 

References in this episode… 

• Sam Altman calls for global cooperation to regulate AI
• The SambaNova technical blog 
• The SambaNova partnership with Together.xyz to train BLOOMChat 
• Christopher Nguyen, Aitomatic CEO, on AI and the Future of Work