Serkan Piantino

Founder & CEO, Spell · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

Serkan Piantino is the Founder and CEO at Spell. He focuses on making artificial intelligence more accessible and less mysterious to the masses.

7statements → 3claims → 1claims resolved → 3.57/5average certainty → 2.14/5average debate potential →

1 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 2 not checkable as stated how the 3 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

1 prediction · 2 assertions · 1 opinion · 2 insights · 1 disclosure · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 3 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, and 2 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Serkan argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported

Piantino: AI image identification on ImageNet has surpassed human accuracy

“We estimate humans can do this with about five percent error, so we're already better at identifying things and objects than humans.”

Serkan Piantino May 18, 2018 ▶ 17:40 Make AI Less Mysterious // Serkan Piantino, Spell (FirstMark's Data Driven)

How they sound: speaking style how? →

255 words/min while actually speaking · 58.7 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Serkan Piantino: only 1 usable question→answer exchange on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 4,580 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

What they said7 Episodes1

Everything Serkan Piantino said on the MAD Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Opinion

Piantino: The term 'AI' has become overloaded and pop-culture-ish

“I'm not a big fan of the word AI. It's kind of, has become overloaded. It's very pop culture-ish. It means different things in different contexts.”

Serkan Piantino May 18, 2018 ▶ 3:59 Make AI Less Mysterious // Serkan Piantino, Spell (FirstMark's Data Driven)

Insight

Piantino: Big tech dominates AI research due to superior compute resources

“Increasingly at a lot of the conferences and looking at the papers that were being developed, it was more and more just big tech companies like ourselves that were showing up in the literature, and it was more and more a field becoming dominated by big players…”

Serkan Piantino May 18, 2018 ▶ 2:05 Make AI Less Mysterious // Serkan Piantino, Spell (FirstMark's Data Driven)

Insight

Piantino: Expertise is the primary bottleneck restricting machine learning progress

“And my question is, what is the bottleneck? Which of these ingredients is in shortest supply? And I think it's the expertise.”

Serkan Piantino May 18, 2018 ▶ 5:26 Make AI Less Mysterious // Serkan Piantino, Spell (FirstMark's Data Driven)

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Piantino: Startups building deep learning products struggle with infrastructure

“If you have startups in your portfolio, I know we have at least one VC in the audience, so and they're trying to do something in deep learning. They're trying to build a new product with some of this technology. I think you'll find that they do struggle with i…”

Serkan Piantino May 18, 2018 ▶ 10:36 Make AI Less Mysterious // Serkan Piantino, Spell (FirstMark's Data Driven)

Prediction Not checkable as stated

Piantino: Great future products will be built using machine learning workflows

“I think a lot of the great products in the future are going to be built this way, and consequently, I think this style of software engineering is becoming mainstream and becoming this sort of differentiated tool set for software engineers and machine learning …”

Serkan Piantino May 18, 2018 ▶ 14:53 Make AI Less Mysterious // Serkan Piantino, Spell (FirstMark's Data Driven)

Assertion Supported

Piantino: AI image identification on ImageNet has surpassed human accuracy

“We estimate humans can do this with about five percent error, so we're already better at identifying things and objects than humans.”

Serkan Piantino May 18, 2018 ▶ 17:40 Make AI Less Mysterious // Serkan Piantino, Spell (FirstMark's Data Driven)

Disclosure

Piantino: Spell built custom deep learning hardware alongside public cloud support

“We have our own hardware, which we built custom purpose for doing deep learning. But we also can use resources on any of the public clouds.”

Serkan Piantino May 18, 2018 ▶ 19:29 Make AI Less Mysterious // Serkan Piantino, Spell (FirstMark's Data Driven)

Appearances (1)

Episode	Date	Speaking time
Make AI Less Mysterious // Serkan Piantino, Spell (FirstMark's Data Driven)	May 18, 2018	21m

Serkan Piantino

The record, in short

Their most notable supported claim

How they sound: speaking style how? →

Appearances (1)

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