The Data Stack Show - The PRQL: Exploring the Evolution of AI and ML with Rishabh Bhargava of refuel

Episode Date: February 12, 2024

In this bonus episode, Eric and Kostas preview their upcoming conversation with Rishabh Bhargava of refuel.

Welcome to the Data Stack Show Prequel. This is a short bonus episode where we preview the upcoming show. You'll get to meet our guest and hear about the topics we're going to cover. If they're interesting to you, you can catch the full-length show when it drops on Wednesday. We are here on the Data Stack Show with Rish Bhargava. Rish, thank you for giving us some of your time. Thank you for having me. All right.

Well, give us the overview. You are running a company that is in a space that is absolutely insane right now, which is AI and LLMs. But give us the brief background. How did you get into this? And then give us a quick overview of Refuel. Awesome. Yeah. So look, I'm currently the CEO and co-founder of Refuel, but been generally in the space of data, machine learning, and AI for about eight years. Was at grad school at Stanford, studying computer science, researching machine

learning, and then spent a few years at a company called PrimaDart AI, where I was an early ML engineer. The problems we were trying to solve back then were, how do you take in the world's unstructured text, allow people to ask any questions, get a two-pager to read, so all of these kind of interesting NLP problems. And then spent a few years after that solving data infrastructure problems. How do you move terabytes of data, point A to point B, lots of data pipeline stuff. And that led into starting Refuel. One of the key reasons why we started was just how do you make good, clean, reliable

data accessible to teams and businesses? And that's the genesis of the company. And here we are. Very cool. And that's the genesis of the company. And here we are. And Eric, you know, I know Rish from the COVID days. So for me, it's very exciting to see the evolution through all this and see him today building in this space. I remember talking almost two and a half years ago about what he was thinking.

Back then, LLMs were not the thing that they are today. So for me, at least, it's very fascinating because I have the journey of the person in front of me here, and I'm really happy to get into more details about that. So definitely, we have to chat about it. But also, I think we have the perfect person here to talk about what it means to build a product and a company in such an explosive, almost, environment. Things are changing literally from day to day when it comes to these technologies like LLMs and AI and machine learning. And just keeping up with the pace from the perspective of a founder, I think it's a very unique experience.

So I'd love to talk also about that with you, Ries. And here also what's happening. You're probably having a much better understanding of what is going on with all these technologies out there, but also how you experience that, trying to build something, right? And of course, talk about the product itself. What about you?

What are some topics that you are really excited about talking today with us? Look, I'm super excited to talk about just the world of generative AI, how quickly it's evolving. But Kostas and I, both of you, have spent so much time talking to folks in data and how the world of LLMs impacts the world of data, right? How do you get better data, cleaner data,

all of those fun topics? And frankly, what does it mean, right? What are the opportunities for businesses and enterprises when this, as you said, explosive technology is really taking off? So excited to dig into these topics. Yep. I think we are ready for an amazing episode here. What do you think, Eric? Let's do it. Let's do it. All right. That's a wrap for the prequel. The full-length episode will drop Wednesday morning. Subscribe now so you don't miss it.