Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy on Using Data to Create Simple, Reliable AI for Businesses

Training Data

All of us as consumers have felt the magic of ChatGPT—but also the occasional errors and hallucinations that make off-the-shelf language models problematic for business use cases with no tolerance for errors. Case in point: A model deployed to help create a summary for this episode stated that Sridhar Ramaswamy previously led PyTorch at Meta. He did not. He spent years running Google’s ads business and now serves as CEO of Snowflake, which he describes as the data cloud for the AI era.

Ramaswamy discusses how smart systems design helped Snowflake create reliable "talk-to-your-data" applications with over 90% accuracy, compared to around 45% for out-of-the-box solutions using off the shelf LLMs. He describes Snowflake's commitment to making reliable AI simple for their customers, turning complex software engineering projects into straightforward tasks.

Finally, he stresses that even as frontier models progress, there is significant value to be unlocked from current models by applying them more effectively across various domains.

Hosted by: Sonya Huang and Pat Grady, Sequoia Capital

Mentioned in this episode:

Cortex Analyst: Snowflake’s talk-to-your-data API

Document AI: Snowflake feature that extracts in structured information from documents