Nikita Shamgunov is a native of Russia, coming to the US for grad school in 2005. Eventually he worked at Microsoft on the SQL Server product. A fun fact - Nikita quit business school on the first day, and decided to join Facebook and find his future co-founder. All of this worked out, and he and his co-founder built SingleStore, which is one of the highest valued companies at YC. Outside of tech, he was a semi-professional athlete in Ping Pong, achieving the status of Top 10 in Washington State back when he was at Microsoft.
Nikita completed his "tour of duty" at SingleStore, and post that, he joined a venture fund. He pitched incubating an idea of his at the fund, which was rolling up all Postgres instances in the world. He started to engineer an approach, the team, and the architecture - and did so in some very unique, and deliberate ways.
Today, we are releasing another episode in our series entitled Minting Unicorns - Blockchain, AI and Dubai, sponsored by the City of Dubai.
Dubai is the new global center of gravity, connecting the world in a way few places can. As a hub for trade, tourism, innovation, and finance, Dubai offers the ideal environment for startups and scale-ups to thrive. Entrepreneurs find a home here, whether in health-tech, fintech, AI, or renewable energy, supported by SME-focused programs that empower high-potential companies to scale globally. From flexible regulations to tax incentives, world-class infrastructure to access to global investors managing $1 trillion, Dubai understands what businesses need to scale fast.
For today’s episode, we are speaking with Mohammad Albalooshi, CEO of the DIFC Innovation Hub, a driving force behind Dubai’s innovation ecosystem and a key player in empowering startups and scaleups across the MEASA region.
Questions:
Tell me and my audience a little bit about you.
What is the DIFC Innovation Hub, and what role does it play in driving innovation in Dubai and the broader region? How did it come to be, and what vision does it fulfill?
Can you tell us more about the Dubai AI Campus? What is its mission, and how does it support the development of AI-driven innovation?
So I’m an entrepreneur looking to build the next big thing in fintech — how does the DIFC Innovation Hub support startups and scaleups in this space? Can you share some examples of companies that have benefited from your ecosystem?
Dubai is positioning itself as a global hub for fintech and innovation. How does the DIFC contribute to making this vision a reality?
Is it necessary for entrepreneurs to be physically located in Dubai or the MEASA region to join the DIFC Innovation Hub and its programs, or can global innovators participate from anywhere in the world?
What are the Dubai AI License and the DIFC License? How do these frameworks support entrepreneurs and businesses within the innovation ecosystem?
How is DIFC planning to expand its role in the innovation ecosystem over the next 5-10 years?
What new programs or initiatives can we expect to see from the DIFC Innovation Hub to attract global talent and businesses?
What advice would you give to startups and entrepreneurs, particularly those from outside the UAE, who are considering Dubai as a base for their operations?
Rev Lebaredian is the Vice President, Omniverse & Simulation Technology at NVIDIA. He joins Big Technology Podcast for a conversation about NVIDIA's push to develop AI that understands the dynamics of the real world, including physics. In this conversation, we cover how NVIDIA is building this technology, what it might be useful for (things like robotics and building common sense into AI models), how it will change labor, and even potentially warfare. We also cover how AI videos today possess a solid understanding of the real world. Tune in for the first few minutes where we discuss Lebaredian's perspective on DeepSeek and Jevon's Paradox.
Cory O'Daniel has had an interesting path to technology, growing his career in a number of cloud architect roles at Ripple, DealScience and The RealReal. He has rich experience in DevOps, the cloud and platform engineering. But outside of tech, he is married with 2 kids, living in Southern California. He loves driving (and destroying) RC cars - like the ones that go 65-70 miles per hour. He jumps them off a lot of ramps, his highest jump behind 20 feet upwards... which of course, he landed.
Cory noticed that there is a huge knowledge gap regarding the cloud, especially during his time doing professional services. He would leave a project post completion, and see a major gap in how the client understood what was built. He and his co-founders had the idea to build a product to allow platform engineers to diagram their infra - and fuel developers engineering process.
Push is a browser-based identity security platform that detects and blocks identity attacks, enforces security controls, and monitors employee logins to cloud accounts.
Dylan Patel is the founder of SemiAnalysis, a research & analysis company specializing in semiconductors, GPUs, CPUs, and AI hardware. Nathan Lambert is a research scientist at the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) and the author of a blog on AI called Interconnects.
Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep459-sc
See below for timestamps, transcript, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex, etc.
OUTLINE:
(00:00) – Introduction
(13:28) – DeepSeek-R1 and DeepSeek-V3
(35:02) – Low cost of training
(1:01:19) – DeepSeek compute cluster
(1:08:52) – Export controls on GPUs to China
(1:19:10) – AGI timeline
(1:28:35) – China’s manufacturing capacity
(1:36:30) – Cold war with China
(1:41:00) – TSMC and Taiwan
(2:04:38) – Best GPUs for AI
(2:19:30) – Why DeepSeek is so cheap
(2:32:49) – Espionage
(2:41:52) – Censorship
(2:54:46) – Andrej Karpathy and magic of RL
(3:05:17) – OpenAI o3-mini vs DeepSeek r1
(3:24:25) – NVIDIA
(3:28:53) – GPU smuggling
(3:35:30) – DeepSeek training on OpenAI data
(3:45:59) – AI megaclusters
(4:21:21) – Who wins the race to AGI?
(4:31:34) – AI agents
(4:40:16) – Programming and AI
(4:47:43) – Open source
(4:56:55) – Stargate
(5:04:24) – Future of AI
Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover 1) The DeepSeek impact on Silicon Valley 2) The four areas of margin in AI 3) How OpenAI is positioned after this week 4) Whether OpenAI can be fine losing the lead on model building 5) DeepSeek's impact on Anthropic 6) Why Amazon is happy about DeepSeek 7) Should NVIDIA be taking the worst of it? 8) Okay, let's discuss Jevon's Paradox 9) We have a discord now 10) Apple made Siri even dumber
Listen to Bill Tarr from AWS and Brian Rinaldi (then at LaunchDarkly and now at Localstack) talk about the opportunity to extend feature flags beyond deployment and rollout and into entitlement management and monetization.
Torrey Leonard lived in Maryland prior to moving to New York City. In 7th grade, his claim to fame was building the world's largest Minecraft server in the world. In early high school, he had over a million users, made 6 figures, and was fueled by open source software that still runs on most Minecraft servers today. Outside of tech and gaming, he loves to play pickleball and really enjoys skiing - though he confesses that in New York, it's harder to do these hobbies, financially and logistically.
Last summer, Torrey built a platform that allowed you to build out voice agents. After doing so, he realized that there wasn't a good way to do this through a UI, and he realized this was an obvious thing that needed to be built. He decided to leave his prior company to pursue this vision - which headed towards the Zapier for call center agents.
