Ep 32: CEO and Founder of Pinecone Edo Liberty on Pioneering Vector Databases, Barriers to Productionalizing Models and Why What’s Happening with GPUs is Not Sustainable

Pinecone has raised over $130 million and was most recently valued at $750 million. On this week’s Unsupervised Learning, we sat down with CEO and Founder of Pinecone, Edo Liberty. Pinecone is arguably one of the most important elements in today's modern datastack. Edo shared with us the most common use cases of Pinecone, the evolving landscape of vector databases, challenges in building vector databases, the "painful" launch of serverless model, and what people get wrong the most about Pinecone.

 

(0:00) intro

(0:33) what was it like when ChatGBT came out?

(6:29) Edo’s favorite applications built on Pinecone

(10:34) will we see more image and video applications in 2024?

(14:58) best ways to deal with hallucinations

(18:12) the evolving landscape of vector databases

(20:27) if Edo had to build a product, what would his stack look like?

(31:45) helping clients versus letting them figure things out

(36:38) moving to a serverless model

(40:33) what areas of AI should new startups target?

(45:18) Amazon SageMaker

(50:38) over-hyped/under-hyped

(51:30) biggest surprises while building Pinecone

(56:13) Jacob and Pat debrief

 

With your co-hosts: 

@jacobeffron 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health 

@patrickachase 

- Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn 

@ericabrescia 

- Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) 

@jordan_segall 

- Partner at Redpoint

Jacob is an AI investor at Redpoint Ventures. He's led Redpoint's investments in companies like Abridge, Physical Intelligence & Legora. Follow Jacob on Twitter (@jacobeffron).

On Unsupervised Learning we probe the sharpest minds in AI in search for the truth about what's real today, what will be real in the future and what it all means for businesses and the world. If you're a builder, researcher or investor navigating the AI world, this podcast will help you deconstruct and understand the most important breakthroughs and see a clearer picture of reality. Subscribe to this show to stay up to date on our latest episodes.