The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
Ben Lorica
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
Mentioned books
33 snips
Apr 2, 2026 • 52min
Are Multi-Agent Systems More Complex Than They Need to Be?
Arun Kumar, Associate Professor at UC San Diego and co-founder/CTO of RapidFire AI, researches data systems, ML engineering, and agent engineering. He discusses ensembles vs multi-agent workflows. He explains memory, dynamic topologies, and tool use differences. He covers systematic evaluation, failure taxonomy, AutoML for agents, observability, and scaling experiments for robust LLM-based pipelines.
22 snips
Mar 26, 2026 • 42min
Coding Agents Meet Data Science
Mikio Braun, Senior Principal Applied Scientist at Zalando who builds AI-powered developer tools, discusses coding agents applied to data science workflows. He covers practical limits like unvetted data and timeouts. They explore team-level effects: faster velocity, testing and review bottlenecks, and how agents change collaboration and skill needs.
Mar 19, 2026 • 44min
World Models Are Here—But It’s Still the GPT-2 Phase
Jeff Hawke, CTO of Odyssey, builds general-purpose world models that generate interactive visual simulations from images or text. He explains how continuous video-like models are trained, early use cases like games and robotics, compute and latency challenges, stability limits on long runs, and the path toward scalable, real-time and on-device deployments.
9 snips
Mar 12, 2026 • 32min
The Hidden Challenges of Running AI at Scale in Production
Chen Goldberg, EVP of Engineering at CoreWeave and former Google engineering leader, speaks about moving AI from pilot to production. He covers when to choose AI-first clouds, specialized tooling and partner-style support, and why orchestration and hardware assumptions change for large-scale training and inference. Practical challenges like telemetry, resource constraints, and agent workloads are also discussed.
10 snips
Mar 7, 2026 • 43min
What No One Tells You About Staying Employable in the AI Era
Evangelos Simoudis, corporate innovation advisor and founder of corporateinnovation.co, brings experience advising incumbents and startups on applying AI to business processes. They discuss AI-driven layoffs and who is vulnerable. They highlight experimenting with AI tools, systems thinking and end-to-end process expertise. They stress verification, scenario expansion, and showing measurable purpose to stay valuable in a volatile labor market.
17 snips
Mar 5, 2026 • 33min
Adaptation: The Missing Layer Between Apps and Foundation Models
Sudip Roy, Co-founder and CTO of Adaption Labs known for building systems that adapt foundation models to real-world enterprise needs. He discusses why projects fail in the last 5% of reliability. He explores gradient-free, inference-time techniques for routing and combining models. He compares adaptation to fine-tuning and outlines practical tradeoffs for cost, deployment, and continuous improvement.
12 snips
Feb 26, 2026 • 52min
Securing the "YOLO" Era of AI Agents
Jason Martin, Director of Adversarial Research at HiddenLayer, is an AI security researcher who analyzes agent threats. He explains why OpenClaw went viral, how its design and defaults enable risky autonomy, and demos prompt-injection and takeover techniques. He also covers internet-facing instances, agent botnet risks, and concrete mitigation ideas in short, punchy segments.
18 snips
Feb 19, 2026 • 50min
Building the Open Source Alternative to AWS
Umur Cubukcu, co-founder of UbiCloud and long-time Postgres entrepreneur, discusses building an open-source control plane for cloud services. He covers what an open cloud means in practice. Topics include which cloud components must be open. They also discuss storage portability, egress barriers, running AI workloads, and UbiCloud’s product mix and roadmap.
9 snips
Feb 12, 2026 • 46min
Breaking the Memory Wall in the Age of Inference
Sid Sheth, founder and CEO of D‑Matrix, builds memory-centric AI inference hardware optimized for low-latency reasoning. He discusses SRAM-first accelerator designs, why HBM favors training not inference, digital in-memory compute to cut data movement, and trade-offs between latency and throughput. Practical deployment, software porting, and future multimodal/agentic inference trends are also covered.
11 snips
Feb 7, 2026 • 34min
Is Waymo Actually Profitable? The Real Cost of the Robotaxi Revolution
Evangelos Simoudis, a technology and corporate innovation expert focused on AI infrastructure and autonomous vehicles, explains robotaxi economics and fleet sizing. He contrasts Waymo, Tesla, and Uber strategies. They explore sensor choices, teleoperation, and safety perceptions. Discussion also covers local pushback and resource tradeoffs around AI data centers.
