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

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

Chapters

• 2:08 Paul and Ryan met when The Transformer Paper was published
• 3:35 Team member 11 just joined Zenlytic
• 4:02 Paul, Ryan, and Matt worked on plotting the orbits of asteroids through developing a new algorithm
• 6:07 How to make Earth safe from asteroids
• 8:35 Asteroid was close to earth in 2013 - Chelyabinsk Event
• 9:09 Ryan launched a VC fund and his 3 takeaways
• 13:07 Cofounders are essential
• 14:17 LLMs and use case on self serve analytics
• 17:05 LLMs and the their impact on industry with automation and speed
• 17:58 Wonderful real life example of LLMs - VBA script in powerpoint from ChatGPT
• 20:34 LLMs impact on jobs
• 22:42 End consumer’s life is much better from cloud technology
• 24:51 Semantic layer is the collection of metrics that company uses
• 25:20 Semantic layer does the complicated work of getting the SQL query
• 25:47 LLM looks at the context from the semantic layer and saves you from LLM hallucinations
• 27:45 The result will be trustworthy from self serve BI
• 28:52 Examples of when people don’t want to trust the data
• 29:39 Zenlytic business explained