Scott Clark
Co-Founder and CEO, Distributional. On 2 shows, 3 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutivescientistengineer@DrScottClark ↗LinkedIn ↗scottclark.io ↗
Scott Clark is an applied mathematician and entrepreneur who co-founded SigOpt, which was acquired by Intel in 2020, where he served as VP of AI and HPC engineering. He currently serves as co-founder and CEO of enterprise AI reliability platform Distributional.
2shows
3appearances
31statements
2resolved
2supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
5said about them ↓ Everything Scott Clark said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Clark: AI testing should use many weak estimators to detect behavioral differences
“Instead of trying to come up with a small number of strong estimators for performance, where we want to be able to conclusively say A is better than B, Instead, what we want is a large number of potentially weak estimators to be able to determine whether or no…”
Clark: Untuned deep learning models perform worse than tuned simple algorithms
“An untuned, sophisticated system will underperform a tuned simple system.”
Clark: System trust, not performance, limits enterprise AI value
“The thing that's holding back people getting value from these AI systems is not performance. It's not about squeezing out that last half a percent from some eval function or some performance metric. It's about being able to confidently trust these systems.”
Clark: High-level LLM evaluations mask undesired AI system behaviors
“We're seeing people do the exact same thing again today with LLMs, where they're focusing on these high-level metrics, these end outputs, these performance evals, and that ends up masking all of these potentially undesired behaviors within the system itself.”
Clark: Evaluating end-to-end AI performance hides upstream system failures
“And what I think a lot of firms are running into right now is if you're only looking at that last step, if you're only looking at the system's performance as a whole, it can be very difficult to understand when, where, and why behaviors are shifting within thi…”
Clark: Production generative AI adoption will drive dedicated AI ops teams
“I think as we see the rise of these gen AI platforms, we're going to see the rise of more AI ops, the people who have to make sure the system's working and understand when it isn't and then fix it.”
Clark: AI will continue to require supervised learning alongside unsupervised paradigms
“I think there's going to be need for all of it, to be honest. When it comes down to solving a very specific business problem like fraud detection, you don't want the algorithm to learn on its own. Just let a lot of fraud through as you slowly come up with an i…”
Clark: Machine learning is normalized tech; AI is cutting-edge novelty
“Like machine learning is the stuff that's now become easy and then AI is all the fun new stuff. And then as soon as it stops becoming the cutting edge, Then it just becomes, oh, that's just machine learning.”
Clark: Generative AI platform leaders are traditional machine learning veterans
“A lot of the people who are now in charge of building Gen AI platforms or productionizing these massive use cases are the same people who built those original machine learning systems.”
Clark: Generative shadow AI exposes intellectual property to external SaaS vendors
“And it was a somewhat localized problem because like you're doing data science on your laptop versus now I'm just shipping off secret IP to some SaaS company or something like that.”
Clark: AI adoption faces misaligned incentives between providers and enterprise users
“So one big complication is That sometimes the incentives are misaligned. So open AI obviously wants to create the best general purpose foundational models, but an individual business may want a model that solves a very specific problem a very specific way very…”
Clark: An AI confidence gap leaves enterprise generative AI in prototypes
“We talked to a lot of firms that are terrified to cross this AI confidence gap from I've developed something that works good in, in, in theory. How do I actually scale it up in practice? And A lot of times we'll talk to individuals who say, every single time I…”
Clark: Expanding RAG datasets with historical data degrades search quality
“And so RAG has obviously become very prevalent in a wide variety of industries and people use it for a lot of different things. We've spoken with different firms that they were like, okay, well, I'm just going to continue to add more and more data to the corpu…”
Clark: Enterprises avoid high-value AI use cases due to unwieldy risk
“We see some firms attacking the low hanging fruit internal chatbots to like ask questions about HR because they're afraid to take that leap to develop the difficult problem because it's so unwieldy and there is so much risk associated with it. A lot of the mos…”
Clark: Manual hyperparameter tuning fails as machine learning pipelines expand
“Yeah, the complexity grows exponentially. And so some of the standard techniques that people do, like trying to solve this tuning problem in their head or via brute force, just completely fall flat.”
Clark: Google pays $1 million for talent with deep learning intuition
“This is why Google will pay like a million dollars for someone with 10 years of deep learning experiences is that intuition that's built up.”
Clark: Machine learning optimization intuition does not transfer across different problems
“Well, yeah, the intuition for how to configure these systems does not transfer, which is why you need to retune, re-optimize, and reconfigure these systems to make sure they're maximizing that business value.”
Clark: Data availability and engineering form the base of AI's needs hierarchy
“The data problem is the first, like, layer in Maslow's hierarchy of AI. Like, you need to actually have the data. Then you need to be able to understand the business context of what you're aiming for and Do a lot of the data engineering to make sure that you c…”
Clark: One developer today matches a researcher team from a decade ago
“A single person can do now what would have taken a team of researchers a decade ago.”
Black-box Bayesian optimization outperforms standard machine learning tuning techniques
“What we're able to do is without any domain expertise, without making any assumptions about that underlying model, outperform these standard techniques by providing this ensemble of black box Bayesian optimization strategies.”
Algorithmic trading firms use SigOpt because client data never touches its systems
“This allows us to work with some of the most secretive algorithmic trading firms in the world, where their domain expertise and their models are literally how they make their billions of dollars, but they can still use SigOpt because all we're tuning are these…”
Clark: Enterprises are moving from generative AI prototypes to centralized platforms
“One thing that we've seen that's really interesting over the last year, year and a half is people have started to shift from kind of science project prototype land where they have a bunch of individual teams trying to roll their own stack and trying to like bu…”
SigOpt fine-tunes existing client models instead of entirely replacing them
“So instead of just taking a raw data set of decades of fraud data and giving them some model to like rip and replace what they already have, we sit on top of what they have and provide this additive boost by fine tuning it.”
The other half of the tape: Scott Clark's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 5 times in 2 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Martin Casado 3Nathan Latka 2
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
the a16z Podcast 3
Top Founders 2
2018 3 mentions in 1 episode
2017 2 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Scott's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| a16zLEDGER | Co-Founder and CEO, Distributional | 2 | 20 | — | full record on the a16z Podcast → |
| TOP FOUNDERSLEDGER | Co-Founder and CEO, Distributional | 1 | 11 | 100% 2/2 | full record on Top Founders → |