
Helping organize @AIconference #raysummit #NLPsummit #DataAISummit ; Past: Co-Chair of @strataconf @OReillyAI @TensorFlowWorld & #SparkAISummit
San Francisco, CA
Joined December 2008
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Ben Lorica 罗瑞卡 retweeted
Excited to introduce Onyx and announce our $8M seed round led by Dimension to build a virtual immune system!
Onyx has always been a story of connection. The first connection was to my cofounder @amlakhan, a deeply curious technologist who I’ve been fortunate to call a friend for 19 years now. I've always said that working together was a cornerstone of starting Onyx, and it truly has been one of the best decisions I've ever made.
Connection is also at the heart of what Onyx does. We believe AI is key to making biological complexity tractable, ultimately transforming life sciences into an engineering discipline. But that requires the right data. AI performance compounds with context, and richer biological context comes from more connected data.
In biology, such context is often missing: molecular data, clinical history, and change over time are typically captured in isolated fragments. Onyx provides the substrate that connects them, pairing genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics with rich clinical histories. By studying these layers together in people over time, our data platform traces how real human biology changes in response to infection, inflammation, and treatment. Seeing how these trajectories differ across people brings us closer to understanding what drives disease—and to developing precision medicines that work better for real people.
Yet connecting data is only possible because of the people who have connected with our mission. Nearly a thousand members have already joined our research studies. They are more than research participants: they are difference-makers transforming how we understand some of humanity’s most complex and chronic diseases. I always say that our work is for people, but the truth is that people make our work possible. That connection comes full circle, and at Onyx, people will always come first.
Finally, as we raised our oversubscribed round, we sought more than just business partners. We wanted investors we felt a true connection to—not merely sources of capital, but co-conspirators in creating meaningful change. To that end, we feel incredibly fortunate to have joined forces with @_DimensionCap, @haystackvc, @refactor, @standard_vc, @robotventures, and many more.
Now back to building!
Today we're introducing Onyx, a research collective building a virtual immune system: a model of how real people respond to infection, inflammation, and treatment.
We're launching with an $8M seed round led by Dimension Capital.
onyx.bio/news/introducing-on…
Ben Lorica 罗瑞卡 retweeted
Great chatting with @bigdata . Felt more like a catch up with a friend! We touched on local AI, why we haven’t seen mire games using AI yet, how @StudioAtelico is approaching making it possible. And Bobium Brawlers obviously 😏
What changes when AI becomes a game mechanic instead of a cost-cutting tool? Studio Atelico CEO @w4nderlus7 explores on-device models, post-training, artist royalties, coding agents, and a new approach to AI-native games.
thedataexchange.media/piero-…
Ben Lorica 罗瑞卡 retweeted
Just published The Synthesis is Here in The American Scholar. Key points: 1) Synthiety—a social order where human society & AI are inextricably integrated. 2) Shaping synthiety requires both the Liberal Arts & tech wisdom. 3) Pragmatic proposals. #AI #LiberalArts #Synthiety
Ben Lorica 罗瑞卡 retweeted
Enterprise AI is in a wildly paradoxical state 🤔, and we’re reaching the inflection point that will resolve it. 💥
Enterprises want to differentiate with AI, yet rent the same intelligence as their competitors.
Their workflows and expertise are highly specialized, yet they rely on generic models built to be good at everything.
They worry about AI costs, yet pay premium prices for massive models where only a fraction (1%) of the intelligence is relevant to their task. 💸
And they demand control and sovereignty, yet rent the intelligence becoming core to their business.
This is not a sustainable equilibrium.
The next era of enterprise AI is specialized intelligence companies build, own, and compound. And we are at the inflection point of this transition.
That’s the bet we made when we started @oumi_ai two years ago.
Today we’re closing the loop: Oumi can now not only automatically build your specialized AI models, but also deploy them into production, learn from their production experience, and continuously improve them.
The intelligence that your business runs on, becomes your differentiator. Your compounding advantage.
The winners of the next AI era will turn their own data, expertise, and experience into specialized intelligence that nobody else can rent.
Don’t rent your AI. Build it. Own it. Compound it.
Ben Lorica 罗瑞卡 retweeted
It's the start of a new week, and a new chapter. My time at LanceDB has come to an end. I was told (after a reorg and a general change in company culture) that I'm no longer needed.
FWIW, I still really like the Lance format, and I'll be continuing to use LanceDB alongside many other tools in my open source work. I've learned a ton by digging into the internals how data systems and platforms work, and I have no shortage of ideas on what projects to work on next.
For now, I'm taking a bit of time to rest, reset and reflect. I'll be doing a lot more work with my trusty agent friends, all out in the open. Looking forward to connect with like-minded people here, too. Cheers.
github.com/prrao87
Ben Lorica 罗瑞卡 retweeted
Excited to open source cliare.sh/why-cliare.html
🆕 Measuring AI Readiness for Command Line Tools
🎗️ CLIARE is an open-source tool that measures how agent-friendly a CLI actually is. It probes the real installed binary, not your docs, and scores it across six dimensions: discoverability, valid invocation, completion without hanging, clear error messages, machine-readable output, and read-only safety.
→ gradientflow.substack.com/p/…
"𝘈𝘨𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘴 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘥 𝘰𝘧 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦 𝘢𝘯 𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘢𝘭 𝘨𝘢𝘴. 𝘐𝘧 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘮𝘢𝘬𝘦 𝘪𝘵 𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘺 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘮, 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘸𝘪𝘭𝘭 𝘦𝘹𝘱𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘰 𝘧𝘪𝘭𝘭 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘱𝘶𝘵𝘦, 𝘥𝘢𝘵𝘢, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘪𝘯𝘧𝘳𝘢𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘶𝘤𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘨𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘮."
That's what we're seeing from agents: query volumes from hundreds to 100K QPS, table counts hitting the billions, all in roughly a year.
What made LanceDB work at this scale: same interface whether you're running embedded on a laptop or querying a petabyte corpus. Agents don't care what's underneath. They just query.
Full conversation with @changhiskhan and @bigdata on The Data Exchange: youtube.com/watch?v=duoojh4C…
Ben Lorica 罗瑞卡 retweeted
An excellent interview about @lancedb, the Lacne format & agents with @changhiskhan and @bigdata.
Honestly, all the questions Ben asked were question I'd have asked as well!
Check it out over the weekend, it's a great listen, I also learned a lot! 👇🏽
youtube.com/watch?v=duoojh4C…
Ben Lorica 罗瑞卡 retweeted
If Sam Bankman-Fried did nothing illegal, he might have been the best VC in history
What SBF bought vs. what it's worth today:
• Cursor: ~$200K → ~$3B (+1,499,900%)
• Anthropic: ~$499M → $82.3B (+16,400%)
• SpaceX: ~$200M → ~$15B (+7,400%)
• Solana: ~$189M → $5.1B (+2,600%)
• Robinhood: $612.5M → $4.9B (+700%)
• Genesis Digital: $1.17B → $3.5B (+200%)
Had he done nothing wrong, he'd have an estimated worth of $114,000,000,000 today
Instead he's tweeting from Federal Correctional Institution
Ben Lorica 罗瑞卡 retweeted
Had a wonderful conversation with @bigdata on the “Open Cloud”: why it matters, and what it means with @UbicloudHQ
Umur Cubukcu (@umurc) on the Cloud Revolution That Changes Everything About Lock-in
✔️ Ubicloud offers an open-source alternative to AWS on bare metal at a third of the cost
✔️ Enterprise cloud without hyperscaler constraints
thedataexchange.media/umur-c…
Ben Lorica 罗瑞卡 retweeted
The 𝗣𝗔𝗥𝗞 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗰𝗸 is emerging as the LAMP stack of the AI era.
I had the incredible opportunity to sit down with Ben Lorica (@bigdata ), who coined the term PARK stack, to break down how modern AI infrastructure is taking shape in production.
Few people have had a clearer, longer-term view into how AI systems move from experimentation to production than Ben. He's one of the most respected thought leaders and advisors in data, AI, and AI infrastructure. He is Principal at Gradient Flow, host of The Data Exchange podcast, co-chair for several of the leading industry conferences and the former Chief Data Scientist at O’Reilly media.
In our conversation, we unpacked:
🔷 Why enterprises should move beyond API-only approaches and invest in 𝗰𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗶𝘇𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗔𝗜 𝗽𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝘀
🔷 Why the 𝗣𝗔𝗥𝗞 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗰𝗸 (PyTorch, open models, Ray, and Kubernetes) keep showing up together in production
🔷 How 𝗱𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗯𝘂𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗶𝗻𝗳𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗵𝗲𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗼𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗼𝘂𝘀 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝘂𝘁𝗲 are reshaping system design
🔷 What this shift means for 𝗔𝗜 𝗶𝗻𝗳𝗿𝗮 𝘁𝗮𝗹𝗲𝗻𝘁
.... & much more
Ben Lorica 罗瑞卡 retweeted
“Gotta get back in time” - Can’t believe it’s been 10yrs since I last sat down with @bigdata after 2015 @databricks Spark Summit keynote back when I joined @Snowflake from @GoldmanSachs. Check out our latest webinar below where we speak about @genesiscomp_ai data agents, AI super powers, the dislocation of the entry-level job market — maybe everything except time travel!
Supercharging Data Teams
✔ @matthewglickman @genesiscomp_ai on Why AI is a Capability Expander, Not a Replacement
thedataexchange.media/genesi…
Ben Lorica 罗瑞卡 retweeted
Built on @raydistributed + LanceDB, processing hundreds of terabytes datasets while only visualizing a sample of 1M (up to 2M at a time), maintaining real-time interactivity.
Check out the full LanceDB + Netflix case study: lancedb.com/blog/case-study-…
3/3
Ben Lorica 罗瑞卡 retweeted
What if we could design AI agents that don't hallucinate? 🤯
Listen in on a fascinating podcast between @prathle and @bigdata, where he reveals how on 🔝.
He shares philosophical insights about whether or not we should grant agency to machines to make decisions...Here's a sneak peek! Full video in comments!
#AI #Neo4j
Ben Lorica 罗瑞卡 retweeted
The #AI Revolution for Structured Data is HERE. 🤯
I spoke with @bigdata about Relational Foundation Models (RFMs) and why they are replacing 30-year-old ML approaches for enterprise data.
No more 6-month feature pipelines.
Instant, zero-shot predictions from your warehouse.
Up to 30% perf improvement (e.g., DoorDash's recommendations).
This is a must-listen for anyone working with tabular data and ML.
Listen to the full episode: thedataexchange.media/jure-l…
kumorfm.ai/get-started
Ben Lorica 罗瑞卡 retweeted
Great to sit down with Ben @bigdata and talk about how we're building the best Postgres for agents (and a better developer experience in general).
Fun fact: Ben ran the O'Reilly Strata conference, one of the places we initially launched @TimescaleDB.
Postgres for Agents: Fork Databases in 500ms and Let AI Agents Cook ... Safely
🎯 The first Postgres built for AI agents. Instant forks, advanced retrieval & agent training
(a conversation with @michaelfreedman and @acoustik of @TigerDatabase)
thedataexchange.media/postgr…
Ben Lorica 罗瑞卡 retweeted
Yesterday at Ray Summit, we announced a partnership between @anyscalecompute and @Azure! This brings Anyscale's managed & optimized @raydistributed experience to the Azure ecosystem. Anyscale on Azure is now in private preview and is accessible directly through the Azure Portal. We're extremely excited about this partnership!
devblogs.microsoft.com/all-t…
Ben Lorica 罗瑞卡 retweeted
Cursor just released a frontier coding model with 4x faster generation. They will be speaking at Ray Summit about their journey building a frontier coding model.
- Training on 1000s of GPUs
- Scaling 100,000s of sandboxed coding environments
- Custom training infrastructure with PyTorch and Ray
- Custom MoE kernels, expert parallelism, hybrid sharded data parallelism






















