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AI-powered Search for the Enterprise — with Deedy Das of Glean
Description
The most recent YCombinator W23 batch graduated 59 companies building with Generative AI for everything from sales, support, engineering, data, and more:
Many of these B2B startups will be seeking to establish an AI foothold in the enterprise. As they look to recent success, they will find Glean, started in 2019 by a group of ex-Googlers to finally solve AI-enabled enterprise search. In 2022 Sequoia led their Series C at a $1b valuation and Glean have just refreshed their website touting new logos across Databricks, Canva, Confluent, Duolingo, Samsara, and more in the Fortune 50 and announcing Enterprise-ready AI features including AI answers, Expert detection, and In-context recommendations.
We talked to Deedy Das, Founding Engineer at Glean and a former Tech Lead on Google Search, on why he thinks many of these startups are solutions looking for problems, and how Glean’s holistic approach to enterprise probllem solving has brought so much success.
Deedy is also just a fascinating commentator on AI current events, being both extremely qualified and great at distilling insights, so we also went over his many viral tweets diving into Google’s competitive threats, AI Startup investing, and his exposure of Indian University Exam Fraud!
Show Notes
* Deedy on LinkedIn and Twitter and Personal Site
* Glean
* Deedy on Google vs ChatGPT
* Deedy on Google Ad Revenue
* Deedy on How much does it cost to train a state-of-the-art foundational LLM?
* Deedy on Google LaMDA cost
* Deedy’s Indian Exam Fraud Story
* Lightning Round
* Favorite Products: (covered in segment)
* Favorite AI People: AI Pub
* Predictions: Models will get faster for the same quality
* Request for Products: Hybrid Email Autoresponder
* Parting Takeaway: Read the research!
Timestamps
* [00:00:21] Introducing Deedy
* [00:02:27] Introducing Glean
* [00:05:41] From Syntactic to Semantic Search
* [00:09:39] Why Employee Portals
* [00:12:01] The Requirements of Good Enterprise Search
* [00:15:26] Glean Chat?
* [00:15:53] Google vs ChatGPT
* [00:19:47] Search Issues: Freshness
* [00:20:49] Search Issues: Ad Revenue
* [00:23:17] Search Issues: Latency
* [00:24:42] Search Issues: Accuracy
* [00:26:24] Search Issues: Tool Use
* [00:28:52] Other AI Search takes: Perplexity and Neeva
* [00:30:05] Why Document QA will Struggle
* [00:33:18] Investing in AI Startups