The Data Stack Show - The PRQL: Farm to Table Abstract Mathematics

Episode Date: July 29, 2022

Eric and Kostas preview their upcoming conversation with Eric Damlier of Conexus AI.

Welcome to the Data Sack Show prequel, where we talk about the show that we just recorded to give you a little teaser. Costas, here's the teaser. What do you get when you cross a White House advisor, a venture capitalist, a math professor, and an entrepreneur. You get deep research directly to your table. You remember like this thing that you have like from like the farmer to your table? Farmer to table. Yeah, yeah. Farm to table. Exactly.

Like it's from MIT to your screen. Like that's what you get. Oh, that's so right. It's vertical. It is completely, it's complete vertical integration from foundational math to your user experience. That's incredible. You also get a really good podcast episode, which we just recorded. And it was so interesting. We talked about our guests advising the Obama administration on AI. And we talked about category theory and

sort of fundamental mathematics. So what, there are so many things that people could get excited about and hopefully we've given them a good teaser, but what did you love most about the episode we just recorded? I mean, okay. First of all, you have someone who has, like, very unique experience of solving problems at scale. Because, and when I say problems at scale, I mean, like, if you have someone who is advising the White House and communicating, like, with the leadership of other countries, like, to do, to do legislation and try

to understand the impact that AI has. That's a completely different level of scale when you are solving a problem, right? Which is not technical necessarily, but in terms of an organizational level of that, it's a completely different level, right? So that's something that I think is very, very interesting and something that I think everyone will enjoy is how you have a person who has such deep knowledge of very, let's say, not just technical things, but also, I mean, we are talking about some very, let's say, abstract mathematical terms here, right?

And how good he is in like articulating like the meaning of all that stuff in a way that like pretty much like everyone can understand. So that's like one of the things that's, it really motivates me like to try and become better in doing this. Like I think it's like a very important skill of everyone who's doing any kind of technical work or business around technology. We should try and nurture these skills much, much more. We already do.

So that's one thing. And the other is about the technology itself and how things that we might think that they are solved, we just need to re-solve them again when the scale changes, right? So yeah, aligning the data models of new databases, it might be something that like we can do right now, but if you have like to scale this problem to like 30 or 3000 databases, then you need to go back on the blackboards and create some new mathematics to drive that. So yeah, I think we will have like, we will get a

taste of this today. Yep. We'll definitely tune in. We talk about blackboards in the MIT math department. We talk about Uber's 300,000 databases, and of course, category theory and the White House. So you are not going to want to miss this one.