Expert Insights on the Last AI Renaissance: Interview with Sarah Catanzaro of Amplify Partners

Sarah Catanzaro is a General Partner at Amplify Partners, and one of the leading investors in AI and ML. Her investments include RunwayML, OctoML, and Gantry.

Sarah and Lukas discuss lessons learned from the "AI renaissance" of the mid 2010s and compare the general perception of ML back then to now. Sarah also provides insights from her perspective as an investor, from selling into tech-forward companies vs. traditional enterprises, to the current state of MLOps/developer tools, to large language models and hype bubbles.

---

⏳ Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
1:10 Lessons learned from previous AI hype cycles
11:46 Maintaining technical knowledge as an investor
19:05 Selling into tech-forward companies vs. traditional enterprises
25:09 Building point solutions vs. end-to-end platforms
36:27 LLMS, new tooling, and commoditization
44:39 Failing fast and how startups can compete with large cloud vendors
52:31 The gap between research and industry, and vice versa
1:00:01 Advice for ML practitioners during hype bubbles
1:03:17 Sarah's thoughts on Rust and bottlenecks in deployment
1:11:23 The importance of aligning technology with people
1:15:58 Outro

---

📝 Links

---

Connect with Sarah:

---

💬 Host: Lukas Biewald
📹 Producers: Riley Fields, Angelica Pan

---

Subscribe and listen to Gradient Dissent today!

[fredguth]

I nod so much listening this interview that I was worried for my neck 😂 great chat