Ep 35: Vik Korrapati Is Building Vision AI the Slow Way. It's Working. Artwork

Zero Prime Podcast

The Zero Prime Podcast with Pete Soderling explores the early stories of top startups as seen through the eyes of their engineer-founders. In each episode we uncover insights on what it takes to start a company as an engineer in the words of the founders themselves. From the most cutting edge infrastructure companies to the newest trends in developer tooling, we introduce you to the engineer-founder personalities behind the up and coming software startups that you can’t afford to ignore.

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Zero Prime Podcast

Ep 35: Vik Korrapati Is Building Vision AI the Slow Way. It's Working.

April 30, 2026 • Data Council

0:00 | 14:02

On this episode of the Zero Prime podcast, Pete Soderling sits down with Vik Korrapati, Co-founder & CTO of Moondream — an open-source vision language model that lets any developer build vision AI apps through prompting, no PhD required.

Vik shares what he's learned building Vision AI in the trenches:

Why the benchmark everyone optimizes for is the wrong one
How an unglamorous engineering philosophy beats flashy research breakthroughs
Why his team rewrote the parts of the stack everyone else ignores
The hallucination problem nobody in vision AI is talking about

If you've ever wondered what it really takes to get vision AI out of the demo and into production — Vik has the receipts.

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Pete Soderling

Host