Chain of Thought

AI is accelerating at a breakneck pace, but model quality isn’t the only constraint we face.. There are major infrastructure requirements, energy needs, security, and data pipelines to run AI at scale. This week on Chain of Thought, Cisco’s President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel joins host Conor Bronsdon to reveal what it actually takes to build the critical foundation for the AI era.

Jeetu breaks down the three bottlenecks...

The transformer architecture has dominated AI since 2017, but it’s not the only approach to building LLMs - and new architectures are bringing LLMs to edge devices

Maxime Labonne, Head of Post-Training at Liquid AI and creator of the 67,000+ star LLM Course, joins Conor Bronsdon to challenge the AI architecture status quo. Liquid AI’s hybrid architecture, combining transformers with convolutional layers, delivers faster inferenc...

Most AI agents are built backwards, starting with models instead of system architecture.

Aishwarya Srinivasan, Head of AI Developer Relations at Fireworks AI, joins host Conor Bronsdon to explain the shift required to build reliable agents: stop treating them as model problems and start architecting them as complete software systems. Benchmarks alone won't save you. 

Aish breaks down the evolution from prompt engineering to conte...

This week, we're doing something special and sharing an episode from another podcast we love: The Humans of AI by our friends at Writer. We're huge fans of their work, and you might remember Writer's CEO, May Habib, from the inaugural episode of our own show.

From The Humans of AI:

Learn how Melisa Russak, lead research scientist at WRITER, stumbled upon fundamental machine learning algorithms, completely unaware of exist...

The incredible velocity of AI coding tools has shifted the critical bottleneck in software development from code generation to code reviews. 

Greg Foster, Co-Founder & CTO of Graphite, joins the conversation to explore this new reality, outlining the three waves of AI that are leading to autonomous agents spawning pull requests in the background. He argues that as AI automates the "inner loop" of writing code, the huma...

What’s the first step to building an enterprise-grade AI tool? 

Malte Ubl, CTO of Vercel, joins us this week to share Vercel’s playbook for agents, explaining how agents are a new type of software for solving flexible tasks. He shares how Vercel's developer-first ecosystem, including tools like the AI SDK and AI Gateway, is designed to help teams move from a quick proof-of-concept to a trusted, production-ready application.

Malte exp...

The technological moat is eroding in the AI era, what new factors separate a successful startup from the rest?

Aurimas Griciūnas, CEO of SwirlAI, joins the show to break down the realities of building in this new landscape. Startup success now hinges on speed, strong financial backing, or immediate distribution. Aurimas warns against the critical mistake of prioritizing shiny tools over fundamental engineering and the market gaps th...

As we enter the era of the AI engineer, the biggest challenge isn't technical - it's a shift in mindset. Hamel Husain, a leading AI consultant and luminary in the eval space, joins the podcast to explore the skills and processes needed to build reliable AI. 

Hamel explains why many teams relying on vanity dashboards and a "buffet of metrics" experience a false sense of security, which is no substitute for customize...

What if your next competitor is not a startup, but a solo builder on a side project shipping features faster than your entire team?

For Claire Vo, that's not a hypothetical. As the founder of ChatPRD, formerly the Chief Product and Technology Officer at LaunchDarkly, and host of the How I AI podcast, she has a unique vantage point on the driving forces behind a new blueprint for success.

She argues that AI accountability must be dri...

How do you build an AI-native company to a $7M run rate in just six months?

According to Marcel Santilli, Founder and CEO of GrowthX, the secret isn't chasing the next frontier model, it's mastering the "messy middle." Drawing on his deep experience at Scale AI and Deepgram, Marcel joins host Conor Bronsdon to share his framework for building durable, customer-obsessed businesses.

Marcel argues that the most critical skills for the A...

AI isn't just changing healthcare; it's providing the essential help needed to unlock a trillion-dollar opportunity for better care.

Andreas Cleve, CEO & Co-founder of Corti, steps in to shed light on AI's immense, yet often misunderstood, transformative potential in this high-stakes environment. Andreas refutes the narrative of healthcare being slow adopters, emphasizing its high bar for trustworthy technology and i...

AI agents offer unprecedented power, but mastering agent reliability is the ultimate challenge for agentic systems to actually work in production.

Mikiko Chandrashekar, Staff Developer Advocate at MongoDB, whose background spans the entire data-to-AI pipeline, unveils MongoDB's vision as the memory store for agents, supporting complex multi-agent systems from data storage and vector search to debugging chat logs. She highlights how ...

The age of ubiquitous AI agents is here, bringing immense potential - and unprecedented risk.

Hosts Conor Bronsdon and Vikram Chatterji open the episode by discussing the urgent need for building trust and reliability into next-generation AI agents. Vikram unveils Galileo's free AI reliability platform for agents, featuring Luna 2 SLMs for real-time guardrails and its Insights Engine for automatic failure mode analysis. This platfor...

The Internet of Agents is rapidly taking shape, necessitating innovative foundational standards, protocols, and evaluation methods for its success.

Recorded at Cisco's office in San Jose, we welcome Giovanna Carofiglio, Distinguished Engineer and Senior Director at Outshift by Cisco. As a leader of the AGNTCY Collective (an open-source initiative by Cisco, Galileo, LangChain, and many other participating companies), Giovanna outline...

When AI makes creating content and code nearly free, how do you stand out? Differentiation now hinges on two things: unique taste and effective distribution.

This week, Bharat Vasan, founder & CEO at Intangible and a "recovering VC," explains why the AI landscape compelled him to return to founding. He sees AI sparking a new creative revolution, similar to the early internet, that makes it easier than ever to bring ideas to life...

Unlocking AI agents for knowledge work automation and scaling intelligent, multi-agent systems within enterprises fundamentally requires measurability, reliability, and trust.

João Moura, founder & CEO of CrewAI, joins Galileo’s Conor Bronsdon and Vikram Chatterji to unpack and define the emerging AI agent stack. They explore how enterprises are moving beyond initial curiosity to tackle critical questions around provisioning, au...

How is an open ecosystem powering the next generation of AI for developers and leaders?

Broadcasting live from the heart of the action at AMD's Advancing AI 2025, Chain of Thought host Conor Bronsdon welcomes AMD’s Anush Elangovan, VP of AI Software, and Sharon Zhou, VP of AI. They unpack AMD's groundbreaking transformation from a hardware giant to a leader in full-stack AI, committed to an open ecosystem. Discover how new M...

What if the most valuable data in your enterprise—the key to your AI future—is sitting dormant in your backups, treated like an insurance policy you hope to never use?

Join Conor Bronsdon with Greg Statton, VP of AI Solutions at Cohesity, for an inside look at how they are turning this passive data into an active asset to power generative AI applications. Greg details Cohesity’s evolution from an infinitely scalable file system buil...

What if the pixels and polygons of your favorite video games were the secret architects of today's AI revolution?

Carly Taylor, Field CTO for Gaming at Databricks and founder of ggAI, joins host Conor Bronsdon to illuminate the direct line from video game innovation to the current AI landscape. She explains how the gaming industry's relentless pursuit of better graphics and performance not only drove pivotal GPU advancements...