Podcasts

Conversations with interesting people in AI. For technical deep dives and more content, check out Ground Zero

Tiny models will run the World | Vikhyat K (Co-founder, Moondream AI)

Bringing an amazing podcast with Vik, Co-founder of Moondream AI. We have discussed the importance of data quality, post training, and vision AI in particular. There are lot of easter eggs in this conversation. I hope you will enjoy this! More episodes: https://www.groundzeroai.in/podcasts SIGNALS: https://www.groundzeroai.in/signals COMMUNITY BLOGS with BOUNTIES: https://www.groundzeroai.in/spotlights -------------------------------------------------------------------- Vikhyat K [Guest]: https://x.com/vikhyatk Himanshu [Host at GroundZero]: https://x.com/himanshustwts GroundZero: https://x.com/groundzero_twt ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To sponsor a future episode: https://www.groundzeroai.in/partner To partner or collaborate: ground0ai.lab@gmail.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- TIMESTAMP: 00:00:00 - Vik's story and Moondream 00:18:50 - The core thesis of small and scale 00:28:35 - The data problem 00:33:35 - Deciding the training architecture 00:43:20 - Post-Training and RL perf 00:46:06 - Post-Training recipes of Moondream 3 00:47:40 - Open Source and VLM development priorities 00:52:05 - AI War : America and China 00:55:07 - Moondream acquisition and Future 01:04:08 - Community Questions 01:16:40 - Trivia, Lores and Opinions on current state of AI 01:28:07 - Advice to 20yo

812 views • Dec 16, 2025

0.99 hours

The Story of Dhravya Shah | 20yo raised $3M to build SuperMemory

Bringing an exciting pod with Dhravya Shah. We had talked about his journey and experiences. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Dhravya Shah [Guest]: https://x.com/DhravyaShah Himanshu [Host at GroundZero]: https://x.com/himanshustwts GroundZero: https://x.com/groundzero_twt ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To sponsor a future episode: https://buymeacoffee.com/himanshustwts To partner or collaborate: ground0ai.lab@gmail.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- TIMESTAMP: 00:00:00 - Teaser 00:01:39 - Introduction 00:02:42 - What is SuperMemory? Explaining the Product 00:04:43 - Coolest Use Cases & Customer Stories 00:07:48 - Early Days: Growing Up in Mumbai & Learning to Code 00:09:24 - First Success: Discord Bot & Twitter Screenshot Tool Acquisition 00:13:11 - The IIT Story: Myth vs Reality 00:14:38 - The 40-Week Building Streak 00:17:37 - Learning Strategy & Resources 00:20:18 - From AnyContext to SuperMemory: The Origin Story 00:21:16 - List of Failed Projects & Lessons Learned 00:25:04 - Getting Attacked & Accidentally Joining Cloudflare 00:26:30 - Relationship Support & Building While in College 00:27:57 - How to Sell Your Projects & Acquisitions 00:29:23 - Working at Mem0 & Key Differences with SuperMemory 00:33:51 - Cloudflare Experience & Working with CEO Dane Knecht 00:36:00 - The Fundraising Journey: From Buildspace to $3M Round 00:40:51 - Why Skip Y Combinator? 00:42:16 - O-1 Visa Story: Becoming "Officially Extraordinary" 00:44:14 - Being a Solo Founder: Challenges & Benefits 00:47:20 - Hiring Philosophy & Team Culture at SuperMemory 00:51:46 - India vs Bay Area: Ecosystem Differences 00:53:10 - Vision vs Profit: What Matters in Early Stage 00:54:26 - Thought on Joining College 00:55:18 - What's Next for SuperMemory (Local-First & Nova) 00:57:38 - Advice for Aspiring Builders & Students 00:59:00 - Closing Thoughts

4.8k views • Oct 12, 2025

2.08 hours

Model is the Product | Common Corpus, Mid-Training, Open Science

Bringing an exciting pod with Pierre-Carl Langlais (aka Alexandar Doria). We'd discussed about pre-training recipes, common corpus, mid-training, agentic systems, good post-training and everything AI. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Alexender Doria [Guest]: https://x.com/Dorialexander Himanshu [Host at GroundZero]: https://x.com/himanshustwts GroundZero: https://x.com/groundzero_twt ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To sponsor a future episode: https://buymeacoffee.com/himanshustwts To partner or collaborate: ground0ai.lab@gmail.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- TIMESTAMP: 00:00:00 - TEASER 00:01:12 - INTRO 00:02:03 - Who is Alexander Doria [Pierre-Carl Langlais]? 00:04:10 - Early career: From humanities to AI research 00:07:50 - Meeting influential people in computational humanities 00:10:00 - How the idea of Pleias came about 00:13:30 - Building Pleias: Infrastructure and compute challenges in Europe 00:17:06 - Team structure and work culture at Pleias 00:19:06 - What is "open science" and why it matters 00:21:53 - Big announcement: OpenSynthetic initiative 00:25:25 - Synthetic data experiments and surprising results 00:28:11 - "The Model is the Product" - explained 00:31:56 - Implications for companies building on top of models 00:35:25 - Differentiation in a world of shared base models 00:38:40 - Common Corpus: Origins and development 00:44:12 - The lack of open, legally clear datasets 00:47:03 - Anthropic's use of Common Corpus for mechanistic interpretability 00:50:20 - What makes good post-training? 00:54:00 - Reasoning under 400M parameters in SLMs 00:56:35 - Generalist scaling is stalling - where are the diminishing returns? 00:59:40 - Will specialization always win over scale? 01:02:00 - Opinionated and task-specialized models 01:06:29 - How inference cost drops change monetization models 01:09:12 - New value layers beyond token marketplaces 01:11:38 - Major technical obstacles to embedding workflows in models 01:13:40 - How smaller labs can compete on training infrastructure 01:15:36 - Should startups raise capital for AI training? 01:17:16 - What new capabilities do models need for orchestration? 01:19:50 - Designing verifier functions for agentic models 01:22:17 - RL in domains with weak or delayed rewards 01:24:50 - Multi-step training loops: Draft, verify, refine, backtrack 01:26:38 - The scarcity of agentic data and bootstrapping solutions 01:29:32 - Making agent training tractable at scale 01:31:44 - What is mid-training and why it matters 01:34:55 - Deployment, use cases, and hybrid model architectures 01:37:37 - Human-in-the-loop for regulated domains 01:39:48 - Advice for startups positioning in this transition 01:41:58 - Europe's structural challenges in AI 01:45:52 - Tokenizers: The overlooked competitive frontier 01:49:59 - Training LLMs on personal data and dead languages 01:52:12 - World models and JEPA architectures 01:53:50 - Building agentic systems: Stack and RL environments 01:55:34 - The art of training good RL models 01:58:49 - Trivia: Underrated habits and mindsets in research 02:00:09 - AI Twitter community and its impact 02:01:40 - Advice for folks starting in AI research 02:03:27 - Final thoughts and wrap-up

1.1k views • Oct 5, 2025

1.70 hours

The Lore of 20yo ML Researcher at Prime Intellect | RL, Agents and Intelligence

The Lore of Kalomaze! Bringing an exciting pod with Kalomaze (20 yo ml researcher, prime intellect). We'd discussed about training, fine-tuning, RL, scaling or llms in general and some interesting TPOT lores too. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Kalomaze [Guest]: https://x.com/kalomaze Himanshu [Host at GroundZero]: https://x.com/himanshustwts GroundZero: https://x.com/groundzero_twt ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To sponsor a future episode: https://buymeacoffee.com/himanshustwts To partner or collaborate: ground0ai.lab@gmail.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- TIMESTAMP: 00:00:00 - TEASER 00:01:06 - INTRO 00:01:49 - Organic Influence 00:02:46 - "Extremely Silly Jester" 00:04:04 - School Days, Diving into ML Research 00:09:27 - Developing "Research Taste" & The Art of Selection 00:11:45 - Dropping College, Parents' Reaction, Plan Ahead 00:18:13 - How a Reddit Post Led to a Job at Shopify 00:23:53 - Why He Chose Prime Intellect Over Other Offers 00:29:27 - A Day in the Life: Workload at PI 00:31:53 - Story of Verifiers, GRPO, and Semi-Verifiable Rewards 00:40:02 - Progress on Synthesizers 00:43:28 - The Environment Hub: A Hugging Face for RL? 00:47:47 - How ideas to research emerge, Experimentation 00:51:38 - Defining "Taste" in Research 00:54:15 - The Future of Supervised Fine-Tuning 01:01:48 - The Flaw in "Pure Reasoner" Models & Thoughts on GPT-OSS 01:05:34 - Perspective on the Chinese Open Source AI Surge 01:07:58 - The Art of Training a Good RL Model 01:10:08 - How to Learn a New Field: A Hacker's Approach 01:12:33 - Handling Disagreements with Formally Experienced Researchers 01:14:49 - Recipe to RLHF 01:19:47 - Scaling Bigger Models vs. Designing Better Rewards 01:26:31 - Rethinking Progress & The Post-AGI Narrative 01:29:27 - The Most Unexpected Part of Working at Prime Intellect 01:30:09 - Trivia Round Begins 01:30:25 - Code Reviews from Will? 01:33:43 - A Hidden Secret About Will! 01:34:26 - The Underrated Mindset That Gives Him an Edge 01:36:18 - Take on AI Tech Twitter ("TPOT") 01:38:16 - How Kalomaze shaped up + Advise 01:41:17 - Podcast Wrap-up

1.9k views • Sep 3, 2025

1.41 hours

LLMs for Everyone | Pre-training, Fine-Tuning, Scaling RL, Open Source | Daniel Han, Unsloth

Daniel Han on: * Early Career Trajectory * Founding Unsloth, GTM Strategy * LLM Pre-training, Fine-tuning, Scaling RL * How did YC help and much more.. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Daniel Han [Guest]: https://x.com/danielhanchen Himanshu [Host at GroundZero]: https://x.com/himanshustwts GroundZero: https://x.com/groundzero_twt ---------------------------------------------------------------------- This episode is powered by Bhindi AI (cursor for your apps): https://bhindi.io ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To sponsor a future episode: https://buymeacoffee.com/himanshustwts To partner or collaborate: ground0ai.lab@gmail.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- TIMESTAMP (00:00:00) - TEASER (00:01:00) - INTRO (00:02:10) - Early Career (00:04:47) - Hyperlearn and Sciblox (00:09:30) - Bug Bounty Guy (00:12:32) - Questions for Daniel (00:30:20) - Scaling RL, GRPO and Transformer moment (00:42:35) - Unsloth: GTM, YC aid, next big thing and more (00:59:10)- General: learning process, multi-gpu, advices and more

4.7k views • Aug 16, 2025

1.26 hours

Soham Parekh Unplugged with Himanshu | GroundZero YT

Welcome to another episode of GroundZero Talks. This is our first in-person episode. Today, we have Soham Parekh or "Everyone's favorite founding engineer". Early July, X users have shared dozens of stories about encounters with Soham Parekh, a software engineer who seems to have been simultaneously working at multiple Silicon Valley startups. We'd discussed his whole journey, experiences and reflections in this episode. Hope you'll find it insightful. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Soham Parekh [Guest]: https://x.com/realsohamparekh Himanshu [Host at GroundZero]: https://x.com/himanshustwts GroundZero AI: https://x.com/groundzero_twt This episode is sponsored by Bhindi AI (cursor for your apps). Checkout https://bhindi.io ---------------------------------------------------------------- To sponsor a future episode: https://buymeacoffee.com/himanshustwts To partner or collaborate: ground0ai.lab@gmail.com ------------------------------------------------------------------- TIMESTAMPS (00:00:00) - TEASER (00:00:45) - INTRO (00:02:40) - Define Soham Parekh, Early Career (00:05:10) - Current routine and Interests (00:06:38) - Soham - a Generalist? (00:08:05) - How has been life since twitter blowout? (00:09:17) - Academics, Dropping out, Grad School (00:10:38) - Acing Tech Interviews, Open Source (00:11:44) - Curious about Low-level internals (00:14:30) - Mistakes, Tutorial hell, Interviews (00:17:12) - What was the first immediate reaction? (00:18:45) - Reaction of family and friends (00:20:10) - What were the misconceptions floating around? (00:21:15) - Dev-shop of 20 Interns?, Interviews, Contributions (00:25:03) - Did Soham give any company his 100%, working parallely? (00:27:55) - How picky Soham was choosing startups to interview? (00:29:58) - How was a typical day with peak workload? (00:31:20) - Why should anyone trust your words/work ethic? (00:32:32) - Incurred interest on integrity, Work Trials (00:35:10) - Crazy story with a startup (00:36:25) - How much Soham used Cursor/AI tools with jobs? (00:38:25) - Did Soham interview at Frontier AI Labs? (00:40:02) - Sharing MVPs among different companies? (00:42:38) - Mutual understanding/friendships with founders? (00:44:38) - Managing onboarding at multiple startups? (00:48:12) - Surviving background checks (00:49:56) - Difference between culture in SF and India (00:52:08) - Thoughts on Agentic AI space (00:58:13) - Which one startup excited Soham most? (01:01:00) - Contradictory statement in TBPN Interview, self perception now (01:02:14) - Negative stereotype reinforced for remote work (01:04:45) - What is one thing startups are completely missing now? (01:07:15) - What kind of tech product Soham will build in current era? (01:09:30) - How would Soham react with moonlighting as a CEO? (01:12:05) - What excites Soham more with current startup (Darwin) (01:14:05) - Final thoughts (01:15:21) - CHEERS!

18.0k views • Jul 19, 2025

1.72 hours

RL, Reasoning, Reward Hacking, AI Timeline and Post AGI | Will Brown (Research at Prime Intellect)

Will Brown on: - Early Career Trajectory (Industry and Academia) - GenAI Handbook - RL and Reasoning - Self-Improving Agents - AI Timeline - Reward Hacking - Post AGI Landscape ------------------------------------------------------------- Will Brown [Guest]: https://x.com/willccbb Himanshu [Host at GroundZero]: https://x.com/himanshustwts GroundZero AI: https://x.com/groundzero_ai ------------------------------------------------------------- To sponsor a future episode: https://buymeacoffee.com/himanshustwts To partner or collaborate: groundzeroai.lab@gmail.com --------------------------------------------------------------- TIMESTAMPS (00:00:00) - INTRO (00:02:00) - Career Trajectory, Love for Maths and Algorithms (00:06:24) - Early Motivation and PhD experience (00:12:22) - Teaching, Open Source, GenAI Handbook (00:17:27) - Rubrik Engineering and Approach to Design (00:23:06) - RL over Instruction Tuning (00:26:07) - Journey behind VERIFIERS (00:33:30) - RL experiments on SLMs (00:37:06) - Decentralized Training and Inference (00:40:28) - Self-Improving agents (00:44:05) - GRPO in Multimodal settings, Robotics (00:49:00) - Challenges in Curriculum Learning (00:52:02) - Kimi Dev 72B? (00:54:55) - Reinforcement Pre-training (00:57:53) - Do LLMs have hit a wall (in novelties)? (01:02:06) - LLM and Classical Agents (01:05:10) - LLMs as Evaluators or Doers (01:07:19) - Do models know when they're Reward Hacking? (01:12:42) - Training agents in diverse environments (01:14:55) - What if solving reward hacking accidentally gives us alignment? (01:16:28) - Will AGI collapse decentralized system into centralized one? (01:19:24) - The Illusion of the Illusion of Thinking (01:20:21) - LLMs in Quant Trading (01:22:21) - Thoughts on Pattern Matching in Intelligence? huhhh, let's relax! (01:23:55) - Kalomaze's hidden secret (01:24:30) - Which frontier lab Will is bullish on? (01:26:57) - Finest teams in AI Research (01:30:45) - Is xAI late compared to other frontier labs? (01:32:35) - How to become an Experimentalist? (01:33:49) - Underrated mindset that has been an edge in Will's research? (01:34:41) - "Cheat Code" in RL Research that has been game changing? (01:35:45) - What Will think about AGI? (01:38:01) - Will's advice to 20yo high school/college grads (01:39:23) - Classical ML in current age of AI Research (01:41:10) - What Will have to say for a general audience? (01:42:29) - Concluding!

4.1k views • Jun 22, 2025

2.32 hours

Post-Training, RL, Experiments and Indic AI | Tokenbender

Tokenbender on: - Post Training - RL and Reasoning - Post AGI Landscape - Experiments - Indic AI Landscape ------------------------------------------------------------- Tokenbender [Guest]: https://x.com/tokenbender Himanshu [Host at GroundZero]: https://x.com/himanshustwts GroundZero AI: https://x.com/groundzero_ai -------------------------------------------------------------- To sponsor a future episode: https://buymeacoffee.com/himanshustwts --------------------------------------------------------------- TIMESTAMPS (00:00:00) - INTRO (00:01:30) - Career Trajectory and Motivation (00:10:00) - Non-CS Background and Building Intuitions (00:14:00) - Journey with Codecherrypop and Small Models (00:21:50) - Partner-In-Crime and Roleplay Series (00:28:45) - Post-Training and how it is evolved? (00:36:45) - Is pre-training actually dead? (00:45:10) - RL over next-token-predictors? (00:52:10) - Reliable agents, RL in training workload (00:58:07) - Weak priors and Reward Sparsity (01:01:20) - What's new RL sauce? (01:06:11) - RL from Zero Pre-train, Coherent text and Beyond (01:12:01) - Intelligence isn't flat, Optimizing for one sharp spike? (01:16:37) - Sampling and Creating Data for Models, New approaches? (01:20:55) - Role of failures (01:24:26) - Obsession over next number (01:27:05) - Shallow safety alignment (01:31:58) - RL over Diffusion Models, 'aha' moments (01:37:40) - 50x in productivity? (01:40:18) - How do you build the mindset to keep experimenting? (01:48:20) - Writing papers on AI research (01:51:10) - How you look up to open source models, what next? (01:53:45) - Finding or Creating synthetic datasets (01:56:08) - TRIVIA (02:07:06) - Indic AI Landscape, Challenges (02:12:32) - ADVICE FOR STUDENTS (02:16:50) - FINAL THOUGHTS FROM TOKENBENDER

3.6k views • Jun 1, 2025

1.51 hours

ML Research | Career in Japan | AI4Bharat | GroundZero AI Talks EP01 with Raj Dabre

Welcome to GroundZero AI Talks EP01 with Raj Dabre! Agenda: Machine Learning Unplugged: Research, Trends, and the Road Ahead Dr. Raj Dabre is a: - Researcher- NICT, Japan - Adjunct Faculty - IIT Madras (AI4Bharat) - Visiting Professor- IIT Bombay

2.0k views • Jan 12, 2025

Last updated: Jan 15, 2026