Ben Lerner was a fan of tech growing up, along side being into math and science. Right out of school, he joined a startup called Data Nitro, which attempted to integrate python into excel. Ever since then, he has been jamming in the tech and startup world. Outside of tech, he married to a computational biologist. He enjoys padel, which is kind of like Pickleball meets Tennis, and of course ping pong. Though, with his full time job as a CEO, he often finds his hobby is going home to write code.
Ben realized that LLMs are really good at understanding code, leaps and bounds better than prior ML models. While he was at Google, he was also digging into how to apply LLMs to coding in general. Applying both of these things, he and his co-founders are seeing where this can be applied to the real world, starting with Snowflake compute.
Demis Hassabis is the CEO of Google DeepMind and Nobel Prize winner for his groundbreaking work in protein structure prediction using AI.
Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep475-sc
See below for timestamps, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex, etc.
OUTLINE:
(00:00) – Introduction
(00:29) – Sponsors, Comments, and Reflections
(08:40) – Learnable patterns in nature
(12:22) – Computation and P vs NP
(21:00) – Veo 3 and understanding reality
(25:24) – Video games
(37:26) – AlphaEvolve
(43:27) – AI research
(47:51) – Simulating a biological organism
(52:34) – Origin of life
(58:49) – Path to AGI
(1:09:35) – Scaling laws
(1:12:51) – Compute
(1:15:38) – Future of energy
(1:19:34) – Human nature
(1:24:28) – Google and the race to AGI
(1:42:27) – Competition and AI talent
(1:49:01) – Future of programming
(1:55:27) – John von Neumann
(2:04:41) – p(doom)
(2:09:24) – Humanity
(2:12:30) – Consciousness and quantum computation
(2:18:40) – David Foster Wallace
(2:25:54) – Education and research
Today, I'm talking with Kolton Andrus, CEO and Founder of Gremlin. You may remember previously when we spoke with Matt, the prior CTO of the company. Since that time frame, a lot has changed at the company, going through several arcs and foundational changes that are leading to not only assessing weaknesses in your infrastructure, but walking you through how to fix it (and eventually, fixing it for you).
Questions:
Tell us a little bit of an overview about you.
Your time at Amazon & Netflix were big influences on the importance of chaos engineering and reliability testing. Can you tell me what was so foundational about your time there?
What is next iteration of Gremlin? What has changed in the platform primarily? Tell me about the arcs of the company here.
In 2022, there was a leadership transition and you increased your focus on the product. What are some of the most exciting developments that came from these last 3 years?
Where does AI fit into Chaos Engineering? And where does it not fit? Can you unpack your viewpoint here?
What are you most excited about in the next chapter for Gremlin, and for the broader SRE space?
What advice would you give a founder just getting started?
I couldn't be more excited about the future of Gremlin. Given the arcs the company has gone through, it's evident that Kolton has built foundational layers into the platform, and is steering the ship towards responsible chaos engineering, reliability, automation and much more.
Thank you for listening to today's episode. If you'd like to learn more about Gremlin, please visit gremlin.com.
Ed Zitron is the owner of EZPR, host of Better Offline, and author of the Where’s Your Ed At newsletter. Zitron joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss whether the generative-AI boom is an unsustainable bubble ready to pop. Tune in to hear him debate OpenAI’s multi-billion-dollar burn rate, Microsoft’s leverage, and the economics behind ChatGPT. We also cover Nvidia’s GPU market, SoftBank’s colossal bets, advertiser drift from Google Search, and the hype around “AI companions." Hit play for a sharp, no-fluff conversation about the economics of AI.
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Buchi Reddy lives in North Austin, having recently moved there with his family. He is originally from south India, and grew up in a farming family before moving to the metro and studying engineering. Post college, he spent many years building high frequency trading systems, before moving to Silicon Valley and joining companies there, just as Cisco and Traceable, which you as the audience are very familiar with. Outside of tech, he is married with a 7 year old son. He and his family enjoy hiking, overnight camping, and living just far enough away from the craziness of downtown Austin to still enjoy it.
While he was interviewing customers at a prior company, Buchi spotted a wide gap for enterprises, where API's were not tested properly before going to production. Baffled by this, he wanted to go bridge the gap, and build something to automate this testing.
Join us on YouTube at pythonbytes.fm/live to be part of the audience. Usually Monday at 10am PT. Older video versions available there too.
Finally, if you want an artisanal, hand-crafted digest of every week of the show notes in email form? Add your name and email to our friends of the show list, we'll never share it.
Michael #1: Distributed sqlite follow up: Turso and Litestream
Michael Booth:
Turso marries the familiarity and simplicity of SQLite with modern, scalable, and distributed features.
Seems to me that Turso is to SQLite what MotherDuck is to DuckDB.
Mike Fiedler
Continue to use the SQLite you love and care about (even the one inside Python runtime) and launch a daemon that watches the db for changes and replicates changes to an S3-type object store.
Howard Cohen, former Senior Advisor at the Department of Defense's Defense Media Activity and current strategist at CX Studios joins the show to unpack the power of non-kinetic capabilities in modern defense strategy. From web consolidation and cost-saving at scale to safeguarding national security through strategic communications, he shares insights from his work leading digital modernization across the Department of Defense. Together, they explore why public-facing websites are more than just digital real estate—they're mission-critical infrastructure in the information age.
Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover: 1) Can Zuck and Elon buy their way into the AI race? 2) Will scaling laws turn AI progress over to the biggest tech 3) Grok's new AI avatars - Rudy and Ani 4) Grok's Ani AI bot gets steamy quickly 5) Why AI companies are counting on companion/love bots 6) The backlash to Aqui-Hire-Sitions after Windsurf, Scale, etc. 7) Did Big Tech antitrust backfire? 8) OpenAI announces ChatGPT Agent 9) Is Perplexity's Comet browser a player 10) Kimi K2 wows with coding availability 11) Can AI industry apply lessons from coding elsewhere? 12) One last word from Ani
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Every year the core developers of Python convene in person to focus on high priority topics for CPython and beyond. This year they met at PyCon US 2025. Those meetings are closed door to keep focused and productive. But we're lucky that Seth Michael Larson was in attendance and wrote up each topic presented and the reactions and feedback to each. We'll be exploring this year's Language Summit with Seth. It's quite insightful to where Python is going and the pressing matters.
