Shows / The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
A series of informal conversations with thought leaders, researchers, practitioners, and writers on a wide range of topics in technology, science, and of course big data, data science, artificial intelligence, and related applications. Anchored by Ben Lorica (@BigData), the Data Exchange also features a roundup of the most important stories from the worlds of data, machine learning and AI. Detailed show notes for each episode can be found on https://thedataexchange.media/ The Data Exchange…
Episodes
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
When AI Writes the Code, Who Proves It Works?
Ben Lorica speaks with Leo de Moura, creator of Lean, VP and Distinguished Scientist at AWS, and Chief Architect of the Lean Focused Research Organization…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
Let Domain Experts Build the Agents
Akshay Sharma, ML Engineer at Lyft, and Nick Ung, Staff Applied Scientist at Lyft, explain how their team is building a platform that lets domain experts…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
AI Is Coming for Tasks Before It Comes for Jobs
MIT FutureTech director Neil Thompson joins Ben Lorica to discuss how AI is reshaping work, the economy, and the future of automation. Drawing on recent…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
Why Build Your Own AI Model When Frontier Models Already Exist?
In this episode, we talk with Joel Hron, CTO of Thomson Reuters, about the company’s decision to develop its own frontier AI model, Thomson, using open-weight…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
Why AI Makes Games Worse—and How to Make Them Better
Piero Molino, CEO and co-founder of Studio Atelico, joins Ben Lorica to discuss what happens when AI becomes a core game mechanic rather than a cost-cutting…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
What Comes After Transformers?
Ben Lorica speaks with Zuzanna Stamirowska, CEO of Pathway, about the company’s push beyond transformers toward models that reason in latent space, learn from…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
Inside OpenAI's First Chip
Richard Ho, VP of Hardware at OpenAI, explains how the team built Jalapeño, its first custom AI accelerator, and why controlling more of the hardware stack…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
Navier-Stokes and AI generated work: If You Can't Explain It, Did You Really Do It?
Ben Lorica is joined by Evangelos Simoudis for a wide-ranging discussion on how AI is reshaping knowledge work: from the Navier-Stokes controversy and the need…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
The Missing Data for Spatial Intelligence
Ben Lorica talks with David Fattal, founder and CTO of Leia Inc., about why stereo data could become an important ingredient for AI systems that need to…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
Your AI Agent Is Costing You More Than You Think
Ben Lorica talks with Abi Aryan, AI engineer, author of LLMOps: Managing Large Language Models in Production, about how deploying generative AI is turning into…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
Reasoning Doesn't Start With Language
Ben Lorica speaks with Andrew Dai, co-founder and CEO of Elorian AI, about why today’s frontier models still struggle with complex visual reasoning and why…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
An Agent Is Just an LLM in a For-Loop
Maarten Grootendorst, a developer relations engineer at Google DeepMind and co-author of Hands-On Large Language Models and An Illustrated Guide to AI Agents…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
The Bloomberg Terminal for AI Compute
Steve Hou, Head of Research at Silicon Data, joins Ben Lorica to unpack the data behind the AI compute market: GPU rental indices, forward curves, and token…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
Can China Do to Robotaxis What It Did to Solar?
Ben Lorica talks with Evangelos Simoudis about three forces reshaping AI: why recent “rogue agent” incidents may be more about permissions, identity, and…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
Why Video Is AI's Next Great Frontier
Yoon Kim, President and Chief Strategy Officer of TwelveLabs, explains why understanding video takes more than bolting a language model onto a stream of…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
Your AI Safety Tests Are Lying to You
Andrew Burt, CEO and co-founder of Luminos, joins Ben Lorica to unpack Luminos’s new report, A Practical Guide to Agentic and Gen AI Risk Evals. Subscribe to…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
Enterprise AI Is Moving Slower Than You Think
Ben Lorica speaks with Denise Teng, partner at Gradient Ventures, about the real state of enterprise AI adoption, why security and data privacy still slow…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
Why Observability May Be AI’s Next Frontier
Ameet Talwalkar, Carnegie Mellon ML professor and Chief Scientist at Datadog, joins Ben Lorica to trace time series foundation models from skepticism to…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
AI Is Producing More Code, but Is It Producing More Value?
Ben Lorica sits down with Evangelos Simoudis to unpack why open-weights models are closing the gap with frontier labs and pushing enterprises toward “corporate…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
Stop Renting Generic Intelligence for Your Business
Manos Koukoumidis, CEO of Oumi, returns to the podcast to make the case that most enterprises are wildly inefficient, using bloated generic AI models for tasks…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
The Data Layer Enterprise AI Has Been Missing
Andrew Moore, CEO of Lovelace, former head of Google Cloud AI, and former dean of Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science, joins the podcast to discuss…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
The Hidden Failure Modes of AI Agents
Ben Lorica speaks with Helen Gu, CEO of InsightFinder AI and professor at North Carolina State University, about why reliability is becoming a central…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
The Data Stack Wasn't Built for AI — Here's What Comes Next
Ben Lorica talks with Chang She, co-founder and CEO of LanceDB, about the limitations of traditional analytical data tools like Pandas and Parquet when applied…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
The SaaSpocalypse Is Coming — But Don't Count Out the Incumbents
Ben Lorica is joined by Evangelos Simoudis for a wide-ranging check-in on how AI is reshaping mobility, enterprise software, and corporate strategy. Subscribe…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
AI Agents Are Implemented, Not Adopted
Ben Lorica speaks with Hamza Tahir, co-founder of Kitaru, about what it takes to move AI agents from demos to production. They discuss the difference between…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
Why Your AI Agent Isn't Ready to Ship (And How to Know When It Is)
In this episode, host Ben Lorica sits down with Zhou Yu, associate professor of computer science at Columbia University and co-founder of Arklex AI. Subscribe…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
Why Foundation Models Haven’t Replaced Classical Machine Learning
In this episode, Ben Lorica sits down with Doris Xin and Moustafa Abdelbaky, co-founders of Disarray, to discuss why classical machine learning models remain…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
When "Garbage In, Garbage Out" Gets It Wrong
Ben Lorica speaks with Terrence Lee-St. John, founder of Enli and lead author of From Garbage to Gold: A Data Architectural Theory of Predictive Robustness…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
As Code Generation Speeds Up, Who Tests the Output?
In this episode, Ben Lorica talks with Evan Marshall, CTO of Ito AI, about why software testing and QA are becoming the critical bottleneck in the age of…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
The Gap Between AI Hype and Enterprise Reality
In this episode, Ben Lorica talks with Richard Garris and Barry Dauber from Databricks, about what enterprises are actually struggling with as they move AI…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
Reading the Tea Leaves: What the World's Top AI Researchers Are Really Working On
Ben Lorica talks with Nick Vasiloglou, VP of Research at Relational AI, about Nick’s deep dive into NeurIPS 2025 and what people in industry should actually…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
From Web Video to Real-World Robots
Ben Lorica speaks with Changan Chen, co-founder and Chief Research Officer at Rhoda AI, about what it takes to build foundation models for robots that can…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
Why Your AI Committee Might Be Your Biggest AI Problem
In this episode, Ben Lorica and Evangelos Simoudis discuss how enterprises are structuring their internal AI efforts, highlighting the friction between…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
Building Mathematical Superintelligence
Ben Lorica speaks with Tudor Achim, cofounder of Harmonic, about the fast progress of AI for mathematical reasoning and what it would take to build…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
Your First AI Employee Is Already Clocking In
In this episode, host Ben Lorica sits down with Kay Zhu, Co-founder & CTO of Genspark AI, to explore the rapid evolution of autonomous AI agents and the…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
Are Multi-Agent Systems More Complex Than They Need to Be?
In this episode, host Ben Lorica sits down with Arun Kumar (Associate Professor at UC San Diego and Co-founder/CTO of RapidFire AI) to explore the rapidly…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
Coding Agents Meet Data Science
In this episode, Ben Lorica is joined by Mikio Braun, Senior Principal Applied Scientist at Zalando, for a wide-ranging conversation about the practical…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
World Models Are Here—But It’s Still the GPT-2 Phase
In this episode, host Ben Lorica speaks with Jeff Hawke, CTO at Odyssey, about world models — a category of AI that generates continuous, interactive…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
The Hidden Challenges of Running AI at Scale in Production
Chen Goldberg, EVP of Engineering at CoreWeave, joins the podcast to discuss the critical infrastructure shifts required as companies move AI from pilot to…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
What No One Tells You About Staying Employable in the AI Era
In this episode, host Ben Lorica is joined by Evangelos Simoudis to explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping the modern workplace and what knowledge…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
Adaptation: The Missing Layer Between Apps and Foundation Models
Ben Lorica talks with Sudip Roy (Co-founder & CTO, Adaption Labs) about why enterprise AI adoption stalls in the “last 5%” of reliability — and why waiting for…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
Securing the "YOLO" Era of AI Agents
Jason Martin, Director of Adversarial Research at HiddenLayer, returns to discuss the security implications of OpenClaw, a viral open-source AI personal…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
Building the Open Source Alternative to AWS
In this episode, Umur Cubukcu, co-founder of Ubicloud, explains what an “open cloud” should mean in practice — starting with an open-source control plane and…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
Breaking the Memory Wall in the Age of Inference
In this episode, Sid Sheth, founder and CEO of d-matrix, discusses the company’s approach to AI inference hardware with a focus on solving the memory…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
Is Waymo Actually Profitable? The Real Cost of the Robotaxi Revolution
Ben Lorica and Evangelos Simoudis discuss two critical technology infrastructure topics: the evolving economics of autonomous vehicles and growing local…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
Beyond Vibe Coding: Building Your Entire Business with AI
Ethan Ouyang, Technical Lead at Atoms, joins the podcast to discuss the rise of “vibe business”: multi-agent AI systems that can research a market, design a…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
The Rise of the Machine Identity: Securing the AI Workforce and AI Agents
Ben Lorica talks with Jason Martin (co-founder of Permiso Security) about what it means to secure AI agents as they proliferate across enterprises. Subscribe…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
Why Traditional Observability Falls Short for AI Agents
Lior Gavish, CTO and co-founder of Monte Carlo Data, joins Ben Lorica to discuss the critical transition from data observability to agent observability in…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
Teaching AI How to Forget
In this episode, Ben Lorica speaks with Ben Luria, CEO and co-founder of Hirundo, about the emerging necessity of machine unlearning for enterprise AI…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
The Humanoid Hype Cycle: Separating “Shiny Objects” from Real Utility
In this episode, Ben Lorica and Evangelos Simoudis of Synapse Partners to break down the most significant developments from CES 2026. They explore the…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
The Junior Data Engineer is Now an AI Agent
Matthew Glickman, Co-founder and CEO of Genesis Computing and former VP of Product at Snowflake, joins Ben Lorica to discuss the emergence of AI data agents…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
The Truth About Agents in Production
In this panel discussion from the PyTorch conference, Ben Lorica speaks with Samuel Colvin (Pydantic), Aparna Dhinakaran (Arize AI), Adam Jones (Anthropic)…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
The best books we read this year 📚
To mark the season, we’re sharing twelve non-fiction selections for the twelve days of Christmas. These are books we enjoyed and found worth passing along…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
The Developer’s Guide to LLM Security
Steve Wilson, Chief AI and Product Officer at Exabeam and lead of the OWASP GenAI Security Project, discusses the practical realities of securing Large…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
Is AI a Utility? Defining Usability and Public Trust
In this episode, Ben Lorica and Evangelos Simoudis of Synapse Partners explore the complex reality behind AI-driven layoffs, from automation and upskilling…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
How to Build AI Copilots That Teach Rather Than Automate
In this episode, host Ben Lorica talks with Sakana AI research scientist Stefania Druga, formerly a research scientist at Google DeepMind, about building AI…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
The AI Revolution Finally Comes to Structured Data
Stanford professor and Kumo.ai co-founder Jure Leskovec introduces the concept of a relational foundation model for structured enterprise data. Subscribe to…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
Building the Knowledge Layer Your Agents Need
This episode features Philip Rathle, CTO of Neo4j, discussing the real-world state of Graph RAG and its journey from prototype to production in enterprise AI…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
How Language Models Actually Think
Emmanuel Ameisen, an interpretability researcher at Anthropic, joins the podcast to demystify how large language models work. Subscribe to the Gradient Flow…
- The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
How AI Is Reshaping Jobs, Budgets, and Data Centers
Ben Lorica and Evangelos Simoudis of Synapse Partners explore the complex reality behind AI-driven layoffs, from automation and upskilling gaps to strategic…