#100 - Why The AI Revolution Hasn't Even Started Yet with Oumi CEO Manos Koukoumidis

This week on GAEA Talks, Graeme Scott sits down with Manos Koukoumidis, co-founder and CEO of Oumi, joining from Seattle. Manos spent his career building the technology that became Gemini, then left Google because he became convinced it was the wrong answer for enterprise.At Google Cloud, Manos led science and engineering for natural language AI services. The model his teams built shipped as Google Cloud PaLM and later became Gemini. Before Google he was at Meta and at Microsoft, where in 2016 he built Zo.ai, an open-ended multimodal chatbot, six years before ChatGPT. He has been working in AI for close to twenty years, and he was pushing Google leadership to prioritise text-to-text generative models a full year before ChatGPT launched.Then he walked away from it. His reasoning is the spine of this episode. A handful of companies owning and controlling the most critical technology of the century is a terrible idea, and history is fairly clear on what happens when that much power concentrates in that few hands. But he also makes a colder, more practical argument. If AI is genuinely critical to your enterprise, why would you rent a generic model built for everybody and optimised for no one?His analogy is the sharpest we have had on the show. If you were performing surgery, would you rent the biggest Swiss Army knife available, one that happens to have a blade, and one the owner could take back mid-operation? Or would you use a scalpel that you own?Oumi exists to make the scalpel easy to build. The product launched a couple of months ago and Manos describes it as a frontier AI engineer, or Claude Code for AI development. You start with a prompt describing the model you want. It builds your evaluations, curates data against the gaps it identifies, selects the training strategy, trains, evaluates and iterates until it has the best model it can produce, then deploys it and keeps improving it in production. Human effort measured in minutes rather than months.