Programmatic AI data development, Multimodal AI, False dichotomy of fine-tuning vs RAG, Compute-optimal LLMs | Alex Ratner, CEO of Snorkel AI

Alex Ratner is the CEO of Snorkel AI, a platform that provides programmatic data labeling and foundation models to enable companies to build AI applications. They've raised $135M so far from amazing investors such as Addition, Greylock, Google Ventures, and Lightspeed. He was previously the cofounder and CEO of SiftPage. He has a bachelors degree from Harvard and a PhD from Stanford.

In this episode, we cover a range of topics including:
- Making AI data development first-class and programmatic
- The data-centric step for every model-centric step
- False dichotomy of fine tuning vs RAG
- Foundation model dynamics: winner take all vs diverse models
- Training compute-optimal LLMs
- Designing multimodal datasets (DataComp)
- Distilling Step-by-Step
- 'GPT-You' for every enterprise

Alex's favorite books: Foundation series books (Author: Isaac Asimov)

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