The following is a conversation between Alp Uguray and Maxime Labonne.
In this episode of the Masters of Automation podcast, host Alp Uguray interviews
Maxime Labonne is an AI researcher, educator, and Head of Post Training of Liquid AI, where he focuses on advancing the field of local, on-device artificial intelligence. With a background spanning cybersecurity, optimization, and practical machine learning, Maxime is recognized for his innovative work in building efficient, specialized AI models for real-world applications. He is also passionate about education, having developed hands-on PyTorch courses to empower the next generation of AI practitioners. Through both his technical and educational efforts, Maxime is committed to making cutting-edge AI more accessible, customizable, and impactful across industries.
“My north star is simple: Make the model run on your phone. It’s cleaner for privacy, greener for the planet, and keeps AI from being locked away in somebody else’s data‑center.”
“There’s always a gap between the marketing and the benchmarks—reality is usually much uglier than the claims about giant context windows.”
“It will always outperform dumping a million tokens of noise into the context window. Despite the hot‑takes, RAG is still not dead—people keep using it because relevance wins. ”
“The other end game is the exact opposite: models running locally with high interpretability. Owning the model is powerful.”
Founder, Alp UgurayAlp Uguray is a technologist, operator, and founder of Masters of Automation, with experience across GTM at OpenAI, Solution Engineering at Snowflake, and the UiPath ecosystem as a five-time Most Valuable Professional. His work spans product, architecture, startups, and enterprise AI transformation.
https://themasters.ai