The Data Stack Show - The PRQL: How Can Large Language Models Revolutionize Decision-Making? Featuring Amr Awadallah of Vectara

Episode Date: September 25, 2023

In this bonus episode, Eric and Kostas preview their upcoming conversation with Amr Awadallah of Vectara.

Welcome to the Data Stack Show prequel, where we replay a snippet from the show we just recorded. Kostas, are you ready to give people a sneak peek? I am, of course. Let's do it. Let's do it. Kostas, wow. I'm trying to process the span or the expanse maybe of that conversation with Amr from Vectara. I mean, what a heavy hitter, right? Like started a company, sold it to Yahoo, did data science stuff at Yahoo, founded Cloudera, went to Google, and then started a company that's doing stuff on LLMs. I mean, heavy hitter might be an understatement for someone who has that track record.

But what an approachable guy, first of all, right? I mean, just conversational, very helpful. I think one of the things that was really helpful for me was him breaking down the academic, sort of the technical academic advancements that have enabled modern AI as it sort of manifests in LLMs, right? People like to talk about, it's like they scraped the whole internet, right? And Microsoft just provided unlimited compute power. He really defined sort of the academic calendar starting in 2013 of the major breakthroughs and algorithms that enabled what we are experiencing today, which was, that was really helpful. To me, at least, I hope to our listeners. But I think the other thing was that, you know, I guess if I had to describe one of my big takeaways is that Amr really seems like a steward of technology, if that makes sense. He's not blindly forging ahead and he's thinking about what is being built.

And I think that actually is expressed in what his company, Vectara, provides, which is just starting out, it's an API, right? It's an endpoint. But I think that's reflective of his approach to how we wield these technologies. So I don't know, lots to think about. What do you think? Well, I want to emphasize only one thing.

I'll leave the rest for our audience to go and listen to the episode. But I want to share with everyone that we spent about an hour with someone who came to the United States from Egypt in 1995. Did a PhD in Stanford. Started the company. Got acquired by Yahoo. After that, started Cloudera. Company that went public, right?

Was the CTO there, one of the founders. VP of developer relationships at Google. And today, he's starting something again from zero, right? And the most important thing, which I don't know, for me at least was like probably the most unique and exciting thing of this whole conversation was like his energy and his excitement. Thinking that you have like a person

who has done all these things and after doing all these things has this energy and this excitement about starting something new i don't know i find it's something very unique something that you can find with people in technology and it's i don't know just for that i would suggest to anyone like to watch these episodes and they will be surprised with the things that they will learn from Mark. Yeah, I agree. I agree. Someone who has done all that, if they start something new, you probably should pay attention to it because they're not going to make a light bet. All right. Well, definitely listen to this one. Really fascinating conversation.

We get into the details of LLMs on a technical level. How do you actually go to market with that? But a great history as well. If you have not subscribed, definitely subscribe. You can get Data Sack Show wherever you get your podcasts, tell a friend, and we'll catch you on the next one.