Amr and I met on a genAI panel and everything he said was both insightful and contrarian. Immediately, I knew I wanted to introduce him to you. Amr is a legend in the search space who, by the way, also founded Cloudera which went public in 2017 at a valuation of over $5B.

Dr. Amr Awadallah is a luminary in the world of information retrieval. He's the CEO and cofounder of Vectara, a company that is revolutionizing how we find meaning across all languages of the world using the latest advances in Deep Neural Networks, Large Language Models, and Natural Language Processing. He previously served as VP of Developer Relations for Google Cloud. Prior to joining Google in Nov 2019, Amr co-founded Cloudera in 2008 and as Global CTO. He also served as vice president of product intelligence engineering at Yahoo! from 2000-2008. Amr received his PhD in EE from Stanford University, and his Bachelor and Masters Degrees from Cairo University, Egypt.

Listen and learn...

1. How Amr discovered the power of "talking to software" via LLMs while at Google 2. About the history of new computing modalities 3. About the current state of generative AI 4. The technical explanation for hallucination in LLMs 5. How do we mitigate bias in LLM models and prevent copyright infringement 6. Why a semantic understanding of queries is the next frontier in search 7. The challenge faced by search providers of making money incorporating ads into LLM-based answers 8. How "grounded search" will fix the hallucination problem 9. What is a "fact" in the era of ChatGPT? 10. How long before we have "antivirus sofware for fact-checking" genAI propaganda 11. How should AI be regulated... and who is responsible for AI regulation 12. The next big idea in genAI Amr and I are ready to fund 13. Amr's advice to entrepreneurs... and to himself

References in this episode...

Eric Olson, Consensus CEO, on AI and the Future of WorkD Das, Sorcero CEO, on AI and the Future of WorkSeth Earley, Earley Information Science, on AI and the Future of WorkChatGPT for searching scientific papers