Episode 37 | Bob Van Luijt | CEO @ Weaviate

Posted on Wednesday, Sep 18, 2024 | Category: Cloud Technology | Series: Exploring the Cloud | Cloud, Technology, Sales, Marketing, AI, Data
Today Chad is talking with Bob van Luijt, Founder and CEO at Weaviate, the premiere Open Source Vector Database company. Their conversation is wide ranging from Bob’s background studying music composition at Berklee College of Music leading him to eventually decide that he should become a tech founder, to the early days and foundations of Weaviate and how he thinks the AI space will evolve to combat today’s early problems of LLM hallucinations.

Show Notes

Episode #37 of “Can I get that software in blue?”, a podcast by and for people engaged in technology sales. If you are in the technology presales, solution architecture, sales, support or professional services career paths then this show is for you!

Today Chad is talking with Bob van Luijt, Founder and CEO at Weaviate, the premiere Open Source Vector Database company. Their conversation is wide ranging from Bob’s background studying music composition at Berklee College of Music leading him to eventually decide that he should become a tech founder, to the early days and foundations of Weaviate and how he thinks the AI space will evolve to combat today’s early problems of LLM hallucinations.

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Links mentioned in the episode:

History of Weaviate: https://weaviate.io/blog/history-of-weaviate

Bob’s Ted Talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/bob_van_luijt_digital_technology_through_the_lens_of_language

University of Kent Meshcode Memory News Article: https://www.kent.ac.uk/news/science/27956/a-new-theory-for-how-memories-are-stored-in-the-brain

Meshcode Paper: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33716664/

Antifragile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragile_(book)

Nearest Neighbor Benchmarks: https://ann-benchmarks.com/

OpenAI and Newscorp Licensing Deal: https://variety.com/2024/digital/news/news-corp-openai-licensing-deal-1236013734/

DSPY self-improving pipelines: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.03714

Guests

Bob van Luijt

Bob van Luijt

Bob van Luijt is a technology entrepreneur, technologist, and new media artist from the Netherlands. He is the co-founder of Weaviate and the chairman of the Creative Software Foundation.

Van Luijt received a bachelor’s degree from Artez Institute of the Arts. After completing his studies he worked on projects including his album The Core.

In March 2016 Van Luijt started the open source vector search engine Weaviate. He has published and lectured about (open-source) software business models and the positioning of broadly applicable infrastructure software (e.g., databases and search engines).

For more information see his Wikipedia page here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_van_Luijt