No Priors Ep. 11 | With Matei Zaharia, CTO of Databricks

If you have 30 dollars, a few hours, and one server, then you are ready to create a ChatGPT-like model that can do what’s known as instruction-following. Databricks’ latest launch, Dolly, foreshadows a potential move in the industry toward smaller and more accessible but extremely capable AIs. Plus, Dolly is open source, requires less computing power, and fewer data parameters than its counterparts. Matei Zaharia, Cofounder & Chief Technologist at Databricks, joins Sarah and Elad to talk about how big data sets actually need to be, why manual annotation is becoming less necessary to train some models, and how he went from a Berkeley PhD student with a little project called Spark to the founder of a company that is now critical data infrastructure that’s increasingly moving into AI. 00:00 - Introduction 01:29 - Origin of Databricks 04:30 - Work at Stanford Lab 05:29 - Dolly and Role of Open Source 12:30 - Industry focus on high parameter count, understanding reasoning at small model scale 18:42 - Enterprise applications for Dolly & chat bots 25:06 - Making bets as an academic turned CTO 36:23 - The early stages of AI and future predictions