You Say Data, I Say Dayta

LLMs, AI, and the Semantic Layer - What They Mean for You

August 01, 2023 Joe Forish Season 3 Episode 8
You Say Data, I Say Dayta
LLMs, AI, and the Semantic Layer - What They Mean for You
Show Notes Chapter Markers

You are probably wondering about Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, and their impact on you, your business, and the world. 

In this episode, I chat with Paul Blankley and Ryan Janssen about LLMs, AI, and the semantic layer - where they were in the past, what they are doing today, and their impact on our future.

Paul and Ryan are the Co-founders of Zenlytic, the world’s first self-serve BI tool. 

Paul is the Co-founder / CTO of Zenlytic, a self-serve BI tool that uses LLMs to provide a simple chat interface to complex business data. He's worked in data for 7+ years and is passionate about all things data and AI. He has a master's from Harvard in Data Science, and he lives in Denver, CO, where he spends his free time snowboarding, running, and rock climbing.

Ryan is the CEO of Zenlytic. Prior to co-founding Zenlytic, he worked as a software engineer and a venture capitalist and private equity investor.  He has a masters degree from Harvard in computational science and an MBA from Oxford.  Fun fact: Ryan has lived in 4 countries across 3 continents.


Other Resources Mentioned in the Episode:

Finding Asteroids Down the Back of the Couch: A Novel Approach to the Minor Planet Linking Problem

Office of Planetary Defense

Attention is All You Need Whitepaper

Chelyabinsk Event

Semantic Layer Explained

Lump of Labor Fallacy

Paul and Ryan met when The Transformer Paper was published
Team member 11 just joined Zenlytic
Paul, Ryan, and Matt worked on plotting the orbits of asteroids through developing a new algorithm
How to make Earth safe from asteroids
Asteroid was close to earth in 2013 - Chelyabinsk Event
Ryan launched a VC fund and his 3 takeaways
Cofounders are essential
LLMs and use case on self serve analytics
LLMs and the their impact on industry with automation and speed
Wonderful real life example of LLMs - VBA script in powerpoint from ChatGPT
LLMs impact on jobs
End consumer’s life is much better from cloud technology
Semantic layer is the collection of metrics that company uses
Semantic layer does the complicated work of getting the SQL query
LLM looks at the context from the semantic layer and saves you from LLM hallucinations
The result will be trustworthy from self serve BI
Examples of when people don’t want to trust the data
Zenlytic business explained