The Path Forward for Multimodal AI with Darius Lam, Founder and CEO of NEX

Welcome to AI in the Real World! I'm Andrew Han, a partner at Foundation Capital, and I'll be your host today. I work closely with technical founders who are building software to solve hard, valuable problems.

I’m excited to chat with Darius Lam, founder and CEO of NEX, a recent addition to our portfolio. Darius was previously head of product for computer vision at Cerebras, another Foundation Capital company that's building wafer-scale chips for AI workloads.

Today, Darius develops state-of-the-art multimodal foundation models at NEX. Our conversation explores the ins and outs of creating these models, including training efficiency, output controllability, and the last mile of AI deployment. I also get Darius's take on the evolution of open source AI and what every AI founder should know before they write their first line of code.

It was a really fun conversation that I think you'll enjoy! Here's Darius.

Chapters:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:03:36) Darius's journey into computer vision
(00:06:50) Founding NEX
(00:09:33) Training a foundation model from scratch
(00:11:14) Key innovations at NEX
(00:12:26) Challenges of competing as a startup
(00:15:00) What NEX hopes to achieve
(00:18:58) Why vertical integration matters
(00:21:18) The development stack for AI-native products
(00:28:49) User growth and education
(00:31:54) Where AI is heading next
(00:39:29) Lessons learned from building NEX