Can a small Swiss lab out-reason trillion-parameter giants? In this episode, Aldo Podestà, founder & CEO of Giotto.ai, explains how his team reached the #1 spot on the ARC-AGI v2 leaderboard—with a ~200M-parameter system scoring 23.19% on an extremely challenging, non-memorization reasoning benchmark. Aldo traces his journey from EPFL math student to entrepreneur, the Kaggle win that sparked the company, and why Giotto spun out a successful vertical product before going 100% R&D. Aldo also talks about why the next big leaps will come from generating small programs to check answers and from better hardware.
More info:
- https://www.giotto.ai/
- https://arcprize.org/arc-agi
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1:00:05
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1:00:05
Conversation with Annie Hartley, EPFL
In this episode, Marcel talks with Annie Hartley, EPFL Professor and Director of the Laboratory for Intelligent Global Health & Humanitarian Response Technologies (LiGHT), about building trustworthy medical AI that works in the field. They cover LiGHT’s cross-institution work with EPFL and Harvard/Ariadne Labs, operational hubs in Rwanda and India, why neutrality matters in humanitarian tech, and how to evaluate models via clinician collaboration and real-world trials.
They also discuss Meditron (a medical LLM pipeline), truly open models like Apertus, and MOOVE, a massive open validation platform where experts collaborate to align medical LLMs with real-world standards.
Find out more:
LiGHT Laboratory: https://www.light-laboratory.org/
Join the MOOVE: https://jointhemoove.org/
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59:33
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59:33
Conversation about Apertus with Antoine Bosselut, Martin Jaggi and Imanol Schalg (EPFL and ETH Zurich)
In this episode, Marcel talks with Antoine Bosselut, Martin Jaggi and Imanol Schlag, the lead researchers behind Apertus, the newly released large language model. They discuss what it means to be truly open and compliant, and why Apertus is designed as much as a recipe for building transparent models as it is a model itself. The conversation explores the trade-offs between compliance and performance, the pioneering use of the Goldfish loss to curb memorization, and the importance of supporting low-resource languages like Romansh and Swiss German. They also talk about the Swiss AI Charter as a framework for aligning models with shared values, the role of students and researchers in building at scale, and how access to the Alps supercomputer made this possible.
From the messy reality of benchmarks to the opportunities for education, from the geopolitical stakes of sovereign AI to the future of multimodality and reasoning, this episode offers a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to build an open, trustworthy foundation model at scale.
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1:34:45
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1:34:45
Conversation with Andreas Goeldi, b2venture
In this episode, Marcel talks with Andreas Goeldi, partner at b2venture and longtime entrepreneur, about the current state and future trajectory of artificial intelligence. They explore the boom-and-bust cycles of technology, the overheated AI market, and the realities behind the hype. From overlapping S-curves of innovation to the rise of solopreneurs, from the challenges for universities and entry-level jobs to the geopolitical stakes of AI regulation, this conversation offers a perspective from someone who has built, scaled, and now backs companies at the forefront of AI.
Find out more:
https://www.b2venture.vc/team/andreas-goeldi
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1:08:38
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1:08:38
Conversation with Adrian Cabrera de Luis, MailMaestro
Marcel chats with Adrian Cabrera de Luis, CEO of MailMaestro, about his path from EPFL and Harvard to BCG, MIT, and launching two startups—one acquired, the other now a leader in AI tools for Microsoft. Adrian shares how “seed-strapping” keeps his company profitable, why small AI-driven teams can outpace big players, and lessons from navigating consulting, entrepreneurship, and rapid tech change.
Find out more: https://www.maestrolabs.com/
Deutschland