In this episode I talk with Cody Coleman, the founder and CEO of Coactive AI.
Unstructured data is the future. But actually harnessing its power is an overwhelming proposition. Coactive makes it easy for companies to understand and leverage the unstructured data sitting in their servers… starting with images and videos and eventually expanding beyond.
Cody is an inspiring human being. He was born in prison while his mom was incarcerated, and then went on to study at MIT for undergrad and Stanford for his PhD. Inspired by his legendary advisor, Prof. Matei Zaharia, co-founder of Databricks, Cody founded Coactive AI at the end of his PhD. His life mission is showing that anyone can be successful regardless where they come from.
We chat about Cody’s journey, Coactive’s technical approach, and, as always, our predictions for AGI and the future of AI. Hope you enjoy!
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Time Stamps
1:50 Cody’s early life journey: being born in prison, being put into foster care, and then getting into MIT
4:20 Video games as an escape and how he picked Computer Science as a major
6:15 Imposter syndrome and arriving at MIT
8:00 Story of my life: “You’re smart, you’ll figure it out” - Discovering he was dyslexic
9:45 Why did Cody get a PhD?
13:30 Existential crisis in PhD year 3 and the mental shift that turned it around
20:00 The sparknotes of Cody’s PhD research at Stanford
30:20 The initial inspiration for Coactive: embeddings all the way back in 2017!
37:00 What are customers doing with Coactive?
46:00 Project out to infinity: What does the world look like because of Coactive?
51:00 How Coactive works in the internet of the future?
56:20 Have we achieved AGI? Why or why not?
1:02:20 Where we’ll see signs AGI first?
1:05:25 As a black man in engineering and the startup world, what’s Cody’s self talk around being a minority?
1:17:45 How Cody approaches goal setting
1:23:25 Asks of the audience
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Links to resources mentioned in this episode:
Cody’s TEDx Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stxJMsxxxtA
Cody’s PhD research part 1: https://ddkang.github.io/papers/dawnbench-nips17.pdf, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1911.02549
Cody’s PhD research part 2: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2007.00077
Embeddings at Pinterest 2019: https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/unifying-visual-embeddings-for-visual-search-at-pinterest-74ea7ea103f0
Embeddings at Meta 2018: https://engineering.fb.com/2018/10/15/ai-research/dynamic-meta-embeddings/
“Free Guy” movie: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6264654/
“The 3 Body Problem” Book Series: https://www.amazon.com/Three-Body-Problem-Cixin-Liu/dp/0765382032
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Cody’s Accounts:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/codyaustun/
Twitter: https://x.com/codyaustun
Coactive AI: https://www.linkedin.com/company/coactiveai/
Lina’s Accounts:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/lina_colucci
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lina-colucci/
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The Edge of Infinity: Imagining the Future of AI
Will AI change the world? Everyone agrees that AI will change a lot about society, but no one knows exactly how. My name is Lina Colucci. I founded Infinity AI and got my PhD from MIT and Harvard. I talk to other AI founders, engineers, and researchers who are building the future of artificial intelligence. Together, we predict the ways AI will shape our world both in the near-term and as we project out to infinity.
Join us and let’s imagine the future of AI together.
