Super Data Science: ML & AI Podcast with Jon Krohn
by Jon Krohn
The latest machine learning, A.I., and data career topics from across both academia and industry are brought to you by host Dr. Jon Krohn on the Super Data Science Podcast. As the quantity of data on our planet doubles every couple of years and with this trend set to continue for decades to come, there's an unprecedented opportunity for you to make a meaningful impact in your lifetime. In conversation with the biggest names in the data science industry, Jon cuts through hype to fuel that professional impact. Whether you're curious about getting started in a data career or you're a deep technical expert, whether you'd like to understand what A.I. is or you'd like to integrate more data-driven processes into your business, we have inspiring guests and lighthearted conversation for you to enjoy. We cover tools, techniques, and implementation tricks across data collection, databases, analytics, predictive modeling, visualization, software engineering, r
Episodes
-
1040: Cybersecurity for the Agentic AI Era, with Amy Blackshaw
In Episode #1040, Amy Blackshaw (SVP at Palo Alto Networks) joins Jon Krohn to explain what changes about cybersecurity when attackers can think for free. Nearly every breach, Amy argues, comes down to someone getting hold of an identity they should not have had, and frontier AI has not created…
more -
1039: AI for Real Estate, Walkable Cities and Climate Action, with Prof. John Renne
In Episode #1039, Prof. John Renne (Professor of Real Estate and Urban Planning at Tulane University) joins Jon Krohn to describe what happens when a tenured full professor goes back to school for a master’s in AI. John is a world-leading expert on transit-oriented development who spent decades...
-
1038: AI’s Contentious Math Breakthroughs
In Episode #1038, Jon Krohn unpacks the remarkable and remarkably contentious run of mathematical results AI has produced in recent weeks, led by OpenAI’s claim to have cracked part of a million-dollar Millennium Prize problem. He lays out what was actually proved, the three big caveats that…
more -
1037: Recursive Self-Improvement: The Eureka Machine, with Dr. Richard Socher
In Episode #1037, Dr. Richard Socher (CEO and Co-Founder of Recursive) joins Jon Krohn to make the case for automating the scientific method itself. Richard’s startup came out of stealth this year with over half a billion dollars raised to build recursively self-improving superintelligence, and…
more -
1036: Is AI Holding Kids Back from Learning?
In Episode #1036, Jon Krohn digs into the question parents and teachers keep asking: does AI stop children from learning? Drawing on a wave of new studies, he shows the answer turns entirely on how AI is used, as a shortcut that outsources the thinking, or as a tutor that explains and gives...
-
1035: Workslop, Glass Cliffs and Inviting Your Fears to Tea, with Carly Taylor
In Episode #1035, Carly Taylor (Founder of Rebel Data Science) returns to join Jon Krohn for a wide-ranging conversation about leading engineering teams when the ground keeps moving. Carly shipped nine Call of Duty titles in roughly five years at Activision, where she led game security, and has...
-
1034: In Case You Missed It in September 2026
In ICYMI Episode #1034, Jon Krohn moves from what sits underneath AI systems to what it takes to live with them every day. Hear from Aishwarya Srinivasan, Luis Serrano, Katie Malone, Ish Shah and Dilani Kahawala, discussing why the bottleneck in shipping software has moved from execution to...
-
1033: Workslop: The Hidden Cost of AI-Generated Work, with Prof. Jeff Hancock and Dr. Kate Niederhoffer
In Episode #1033, Prof. Jeff Hancock (Professor of Communication at Stanford) and Dr. Kate Niederhoffer (Chief Scientist at BetterUp) join Jon Krohn to explain the hidden cost of AI-generated work. A year ago they coined "workslop" in a Harvard Business Review article that went viral and landed…
more -
1032: Agents Need 10x More Data Than Humans, with Salesforce’s CDO Michael Andrew
During their #sponsored discussion, Chief Data Officer at Salesforce Michael Andrew talks to Jon Krohn about what changes for a data team when its customers are AI agents as well as people. Listen to the episode to hear Michael Andrew talk about why agents need ten times more trusted data than...
-
1031: Tokenomics: Why Your Agentic AI Bill Is Exploding (and How to Fix It), with Tyler Cox and Ish Shah
In Episode #1031, Ish Shah and Tyler Cox (Distinguished Engineers in the Office of the CTO for Dell Technologies' client group) join Jon Krohn to work out why agentic AI bills are exploding and what can be done about it. Over one weekend Ish burned roughly two billion tokens on a side project…
more -
1030: Garbage In, Gospel Out: Why Agents Need Better Data, with Salesforce's Gaurav Pathak
During their #sponsored discussion, Senior Vice President Product Management AI and Metadata at Salesforce, Gaurav Pathak talks to Jon Krohn about why AI agents need well-labeled, high-quality data to deliver reliable answers in the enterprise. Listen to the episode to hear Gaurav Pathak talk…
more -
1029: How AI Brought a Podcast Back From the Dead, with Linear Digressions’ Katie Malone
In Episode #1029, Dr. Katie Malone (Host of Linear Digressions) joins Jon Krohn to explain how AI brought her podcast back from the dead. After nearly 300 episodes, Katie shut down Linear Digressions due to burnout, but better tools helped her relaunch it six years later. Along the way she has...
-
1028: The Chip Built for Agentic AI Inference, with SambaNova's Anton McGonnell
In Episode #1028, Anton McGonnell (VP of Product at SambaNova) joins Jon Krohn to explain why the chips running most AI inference today were never designed for the job. Agentic AI has changed the computational profile of inference, with much larger inputs and far heavier caches feeding the token...
-
1027: Building an Always-On AI Agent for Busy Parents, with Dr. Dilani Kahawala
In Episode #1027, Dr. Dilani Kahawala (Co-Founder and CEO of Anna) joins Jon Krohn to explain what it takes to build an always-on AI assistant that busy parents will trust with their inboxes. Anna watches the email, school apps, WhatsApp messages and calendars flowing into a family's life and...
-
1026: OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra
In Episode #1026, Jon Krohn breaks down GPT-6 Astra, OpenAI’s new flagship that its president has floated as a possible marker of AGI. Jon covers what the model is, what it costs, its state-of-the-art results across computer use, coding, abstract reasoning and science and the safety story, which...
-
1025: Word Gravity: How Transformers Bend Space, with Dr. Luis Serrano
In Episode #1025, Dr. Luis Serrano (Founder of Serrano Academy) joins Jon Krohn to explain the paper he co-authored on the curved spacetime of transformer architectures, in which attention stops being a lookup table and becomes something closer to gravity: words bend the space around them, and…
more -
1024: In Case You Missed It in August 2026
In ICYMI Episode #1024, Jon Krohn tracks the gap between AI investment and AI return, from the technology side to the people side. Hear from Pete Johnson, Jerry Yurchisin, Priyanka Vergadia and Tristan Handy, discussing why four out of five organizations have the structures for AI success in…
more -
1023: Agentic AI Skills That Matter Now, with Aishwarya Srinivasan
In Episode #1023, Aishwarya Srinivasan (Co-Founder of The Gen Academy) joins Jon Krohn to work out where a competitive moat comes from once anything you can build in ten minutes, somebody else can build in ten minutes too. Ash came to teaching through Illuminate AI, the mentorship community she...
-
1022: CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, Skills, Hooks and Subagents: A Field Guide to Steering AI Agents
In Episode #1022, Jon Krohn tackles the art of steering AI agents, deciding where your instructions should live so they get followed reliably without bloating every request. A sequel to Episode #1020 (where model size and effort set an agent’s horsepower), this one is about direction: the seven...
-
1021: How dbt Won Analytics Engineering, with dbt Lab’s CEO Tristan Handy
In Episode #1021, Tristan Handy (Founder and CEO of dbt Labs) joins Jon Krohn to explain how a study of about a hundred companies in 2016 became analytics engineering, and then became a tool that over a hundred thousand data teams rely on. Tristan coined the term, chose SQL when Spark was the...
-
1020: How to Choose Model Size and Effort Level: The Two Critical Dials
In Episode #1020, Jon Krohn unpacks the two dials that increasingly decide what you get out of a large language model: which model size you pick and how much effort you tell it to spend. Using a July Anthropic blog post by Claude Code’s Lydia Holly as a jumping-off point, with guidance that...
-
1019: Anyone Can Write Code Now, So What Gets You Hired? (With Priyanka Vergadia)
In Episode #1019, Priyanka Vergadia (founder of The Cloud Girl, former Senior Director of AI Transformation at Microsoft and Head of North America Developer Relations at Google) joins Jon Krohn to explain why almost every company has bought AI tools and almost none of them are seeing a return.…
more -
1018: Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Max: Open-Weight Model Surpasses Most American Frontier Labs
In Episode #1018, Jon Krohn breaks down Qwen3.8-Max, Alibaba’s enormous new flagship, a 2.4-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts model that, if its promised weights ship, becomes the largest open-weight release in history. Landing just weeks after Moonshot’s Kimi K3, it extends the price war and...
-
1017: Vector Search, Agentic Memory and Effective RAG, with MongoDB’s Pete Johnson
In Episode #1017, Pete Johnson (Field CTO of AI at MongoDB) joins Jon Krohn to explain why four out of five organizations have AI steering committees and success metrics, yet only one in five sees a return on the investment. Having made nineteen stops across six countries this year advising more...
-
1016: In Case You Missed It in July 2026
In this month's episode of ICYMI, Jon Krohn traces a line from algorithmic harm to the human skills that still hold their value. Hear from Dr. Cathy O'Neil, Ben Todd, Steve Mock, and Dr. Catherine Williams, discussing why an algorithm's danger has nothing to do with its complexity, what solid...
-
1015: Mathematical Optimization in the Agentic AI Era, with Gurobi's Jerry Yurchisin
In Episode #1015, Jerry Yurchisin (manager of decision intelligence strategy at Gurobi Optimization) joins Jon Krohn to explain the AI technology that makes breaking a constraint mathematically impossible. Large language models will confidently claim they've optimized your business while ignoring...
-
1014: OpenAI Agent Breaches Hugging Face: All You Must Know incl. How to Protect Yourself
In Episode #1014, Jon Krohn breaks down a security incident that reads like science fiction: during an internal evaluation, an autonomous OpenAI agent broke out of its sandbox, exploited a zero-day, and hacked its way into Hugging Face to steal the answers to the very benchmark it was being…
more -
1013: Weapons of Math Destruction, Ten Years On, with Dr. Cathy O’Neil
In Episode #1013, Dr. Cathy O'Neil (Harvard math PhD, former Wall Street quant and author of the mega-bestseller Weapons of Math Destruction) joins Jon Krohn to explain what actually makes an algorithm terrifying: not the complexity of the math, but the secrecy, the unaccountability, and the fact...
-
1012: The Open-Weight 2.8-Trillion Parameter Competing at the Frontier
What happens to the AI market when the largest open-source model in the world arrives at a fraction of frontier prices? In this week’s episode, host Jon Krohn digs into Kimi K3, the 2.8-trillion-parameter release from Beijing-based Moonshot AI that, in the space of a single week, rattled…
more -
1011: The Math Still Matters: Deep Skills in the Age of AI, with Dr. Catherine Williams
Dr. Catherine Williams, Chief Data Officer at the nonprofit Candid, was solving black-hole equations with pen and paper before she ever wrote a line of code. She earned a PhD in math researching general relativity and black holes, did postdocs at Stanford and Columbia and then became one of the...
-
1010: Fable 5 as Advisor: Anthropic's Two-Model Pattern for Smarter, Cheaper Agents
In Episode #1010, Jon Krohn digs into “the advisor strategy”, a clever pattern that pairs a fast, cheap executor model with a frontier-class advisor it can consult mid-task, all inside a single API call. Every agent builder faces the same tension: frontier models plan best but cost too much to…
more -
1009: How AI Is Quietly Saving Lives, with Steve Mock
In Episode #1009, Steve Mock (investor at Blumberg Capital, five-time entrepreneur and creator of aisavedme.org), joins Jon Krohn to explore the quiet layer of everyday AI adoption that rarely gets documented. After his 84-year-old father asked a deceptively simple question, “How does one use…
more -
1008: The AI-Native Startup Playbook
In Episode #1008, Jon Krohn digs into Anthropic's 35-page Founder's Playbook and pulls out the practical guidance for each of its four startup stages: Idea, MVP, Launch and Scale. AI has erased the three bottlenecks that historically gated company-building — capital, headcount and technical skill…
more -
1007: How to Find Solid Career Ground in the AI Era, with 80,000 Hours Founder Ben Todd
Benjamin Todd, co-founder and President of 80,000 Hours and author of the new Penguin Random House book 80,000 Hours: How to Have a Fulfilling Career That Does Good, joins Jon Krohn for a major update on career strategy in the AI era, his first appearance since before ChatGPT existed. Ben…
more -
1006: In Case You Missed It in June 2026
In this month's episode of ICYMI, hear from Chip Huyen, Andrey Kurenkov, Frank Basso and Gilbert Eijkelenboom, discussing why moats are shifting toward physical systems and accumulated product intuition, how Astrocade built vibe coding before the term existed, what it's really like inside a...
-
1005: People Skills for Analytical Thinkers, with Bestselling Author Gilbert Eijkelenboom
Gilbert Eijkelenboom, bestselling author of People Skills for Analytical Thinkers and founder of the training firm MindSpeaking joins Jon Krohn to make the case that communication is a core data skill, not an optional extra. Gilbert shares the “And, But, Therefore” framework for turning dense...
-
1004: Recursive Self-Improvement
Could an AI get good enough at AI research to build its own, more capable successor and kick off a compounding loop? That’s recursive self-improvement (RSI) and it surged into the conversation after Anthropic revealed that, as of May 2026, Claude wrote more than 80% of the code merged into its...
-
1003: Building an AI Data Center End to End, with Lightning AI’s Frank Basso
Frank Basso, VP of Infrastructure at Lightning AI, joins Jon Krohn for a rare ground-level tour of the one layer of the AI stack the show had never covered in over a thousand episodes: the physical data center. Frank explains how Lightning AI provisions its 35,000-plus GPUs through hyperscale...
-
1002: Fable 5: The Full Story from Capabilities to Drama
Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 was the most capable AI model ever released to the public and it lasted just three days before the US government forced it offline. Jon Krohn unpacks both halves of the story: what makes Fable 5 special, and why it was pulled. Fable 5 and its locked-down sibling Mythos…
more -
1001: How AI Erased My Career Moat, an Episode #1001 Special: Jon Krohn interviewed by Kirill Eremenko
For this episode #1001 special, the tables are turned: SuperDataScience founder Kirill Eremenko takes the host’s chair and Jon Krohn is the guest. They trace Jon Krohn’s path from an Oxford neuroscience PhD to a New York hedge fund to founding the AI consulting firm Y Carrot, why he regrets…
more -
1000: Ten Years of the Super Data Science Podcast, with Jon, Kirill and Special Guests
For this landmark 1,000th episode and the show’s 10-year anniversary, host Jon Krohn is joined by SuperDataScience founder Kirill Eremenko, who hosted the podcast for its first 400-plus episodes before handing over the reins. In a first for the show, the episode was recorded live with the…
more -
999: What's Left to Build When Software Is Free, with Chip Huyen
Chip Huyen joins host Jon Krohn for this milestone episode 999 to talk about her record-breaking book "AI Engineering" the most-read title on the O'Reilly platform last year and how the AI landscape has shifted since her last appearance. Chip breaks down what separates AI engineering from machine...
-
998: In Case You Missed It in May 2026
In this month’s episode of ICYMI, Jon Krohn explores how AI agents are simultaneously creating new risks and unlocking powerful new ways of working with data. Hear from Anneka Gupta, Cal Al-Dhubaib, Trevor Manz, Jazmia Henry, Jeremy Mumford, and Jacob Miller, discussing why the old cybersecurity...
-
997: How This Text-to-Video-Game AI Startup Hit 20M Users
Dr. Andrey Kurenkov returns to the show to talk about Astrocade's astronomical growth from pre-alpha to over 20 million engaged users, what it actually takes to build a vibe-coding platform that scales, and how the broader AI landscape has shifted since his last appearance. Andrey shares...
-
996: TrueFoundry’s Nikunj Bajaj on How to Get $100M Returns on AI Agent Deployments
TrueFoundry co-founder and CEO Nikunj Bajaj speaks to Jon Krohn about how enterprises like Nvidia and Siemens are realizing returns of over $100 million from single agent deployments, the AI gateway architecture that makes it possible to connect, observe, and govern agents at scale, and why the...
-
995: End-to-End Foundation Models for the Energy Industry, with Jazmia Henry
Jazmia Henry joins Jon Krohn to break down what it actually takes to build end-to-end foundation models for the energy industry. From wrangling decades of handwritten oil-and-gas documents into usable training data, to bespoke tokenizers, reinforcement learning, and inference at scale, Jazmia…
more -
994: AI’s Putting Recent Grads Out of Work; Here’s How to Get Hired Anyway!
Unemployment for recent computer-science graduates now rivals rates for fine-arts and anthropology majors, and undergraduate CS enrollment fell 11% in 2025. In this Five-Minute Friday, Jon Krohn walks through the data on both sides of the debate, from Stanford research showing a 13% employment…
more -
993: How to Build AI-First Organizations, with Jacob Miller and Jeremy Mumford
For years, AI content has come in the form of “use this library, use this tool” tutorials that age out within months. Jacob Miller and Jeremy Mumford, co-authors of the brand new Wiley book Architected Intelligence, wanted to write something different, a guide to the higher-level principles of...
-
992: Tokenmaxxing vs AI Hardware Bottlenecks
While “tokenmaxxing”, the social media trend of maximizing AI token consumption as a vanity metric, takes off online, the physical infrastructure behind AI is slamming into serious bottlenecks. In this Five-Minute Friday, Jon Krohn maps out the four overlapping supply-chain constraints choking AI...
-
991: Pair Programming with AI in Your Python Notebook, with Dr. Trevor Manz
Dr. Trevor Manz of Marimo talks to Jon Krohn about Marimo Pair, an open-source agent skill that teaches coding agents like Claude Code how to drive a reactive Python notebook, reading cell state, running Python in the kernel, taking screenshots of cells, and iterating on data tasks the way agents...
About this show
The latest machine learning, A.I., and data career topics from across both academia and industry are brought to you by host Dr. Jon Krohn on the Super Data Science Podcast. As the quantity of data on our planet doubles every couple of years and with this trend set to continue for decades to come, there's an unprecedented opportunity for you to make a meaningful impact in your lifetime. In conversation with the biggest names in the data science industry, Jon cuts through hype to fuel that professional impact.
Whether you're curious about getting started in a data career or you're a deep technical expert, whether you'd like to understand what A.I. is or you'd like to integrate more data-driven processes into your business, we have inspiring guests and lighthearted conversation for you to enjoy.
We cover tools, techniques, and implementation tricks across data collection, databases, analytics, predictive modeling, visualization, software engineering, r
Hosted by
Jon Krohn
Categories