In this episode of Gradient Dissent, Lukas Biewald talks with Jarek Kutylowski, CEO and founder of DeepL, an AI-powered translation company. Jarek shares DeepL’s journey from launching neural machine translation in 2017 to building custom data centers and how small teams can not only take on big players like Google Translate but win.

They dive into what makes translation so difficult for AI, why high-quality translations still require human context, and how DeepL tailors models for enterprise use cases. They also discuss the evolution of speech translation, compute infrastructure, training on curated multilingual datasets, hallucinations in models, and why DeepL avoids fine-tuning for each individual customer. It’s a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at one of the most advanced real-world applications of deep learning.

Timestamps:

[00:00:00] Introducing Jarek and DeepL’s mission

[00:01:46] Competing with Google Translate & LLMs

[00:04:14] Pretraining vs. proprietary model strategy

[00:06:47] Building GPU data centers in 2017

[00:08:09] The value of curated bilingual and monolingual data

[00:09:30] How DeepL measures translation quality

[00:12:27] Personalization and enterprise-specific tuning

[00:14:04] Why translation demand is growing

[00:16:16] ROI of incremental quality gains

[00:18:20] The role of human translators in the future

[00:22:48] Hallucinations in translation models

[00:24:05] DeepL’s work on speech translation

[00:28:22] The broader impact of global communication

[00:30:32] Handling smaller languages and language pairs

[00:32:25] Multi-language model consolidation

[00:35:28] Engineering infrastructure for large-scale inference

[00:39:23] Adapting to evolving LLM landscape & enterprise needs

In this episode of Gradient Dissent, Lukas Biewald sits down with Thomas Dohmke, CEO of GitHub, to talk about the future of software engineering in the age of AI. They discuss how GitHub Copilot was built, why agents are reshaping developer workflows, and what it takes to make tools that are not only powerful but also fun.

Thomas shares his experience leading GitHub through its $7.5B acquisition by Microsoft, the unexpected ways it accelerated innovation, and why developer happiness is crucial to productivity. They explore what still makes human engineers irreplaceable and how the next generation of developers might grow up coding alongside AI.

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In this episode of Gradient Dissent, Lukas Biewald talks with Martin Shkreli — the infamous "pharma bro" turned founder — about his path from hedge fund manager and pharma CEO to convicted felon and now software entrepreneur. Shkreli shares his side of the drug pricing controversy, reflects on his prison experience, and explains how he rebuilt his life and business after being "canceled."

They dive deep into AI and drug discovery, where Shkreli delivers a strong critique of mainstream approaches. He also talks about his latest venture in finance software, building Godel Terminal “a Vim for traders", and why he thinks the AI hype cycle is just beginning. It's a wide-ranging and candid conversation with one of the most controversial figures in tech and biotech.

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