Podcast: CMU's Russ Salakhutdinov on mentoring Moonshot and xAI founders, scaling era
rsalakhu · x · 2026-10-06
On the Lab to Startup podcast, CMU ML professor and Sooth Labs CSO Russ Salakhutdinov — former Meta VP of Research and ex-Apple AI research director — discusses mentoring high-conviction students, academia vs industry, and building Sooth Labs. His students founded or joined Moonshot AI (Zhilin Yang), xAI (Jimmy Ba), Thinking Machines, Mistral, and wrote the Dropout and Adam optimizer papers. The conversation also covers AI in drug discovery, opportunities and risks ahead, and Geoffrey Hinton's views on existential risk.
Related event: CMU Professor Salakhutdinov on Mentoring Founders of Moonshot and xAI(2 posts)→
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