E181: Why Multimodal Is the Future of AI Data Workloads

Chang She is Co-Founder & CEO of LanceDB , the multimodal lakehouse platform. Their open source data format lance has over 5K stars on GitHub and is a modern columnar data format for ML and LLMs implemented in Rust. LanceDB has raised $41M from investors including Theory Ventures, CRV, and Essence VC. In this episode, we dig into: Early focus: autonomous vehicles; solved real-time analysis limits with Lance format → 9,000% performance gain. Multi-modal AI taking off (vision, audio, text); Midjourney & Runway as pioneers; audio now a major category. How they built trust through open source. Integrated workflows (data prep + search + embedding) going beyond vector DBs; education needed to show full value. Cloud/serverless launch in 2023–24 enabled seamless local-to-production use. Future bets: audio infra, robotics, spatial reasoning; vector DBs risk irrelevance if they don’t evolve.

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E181: Why Multimodal Is the Future of AI Data Workloads is an episode from The OSS Startup Podcast by Robby (MTF); Tim (Essence VC).

This episode is 00:36:31 long.

This episode was published on Sep 9, 2025.

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