#33: Autonomous Cars And Robots, Leapfrogging Tesla, Real World Models, AI Training Simulators, and the Future of Autonomy w/ Helm.ai CEO Vlad Voroninski

Published Mar 18, 2025, 5:30 PM

The future of autonomous driving and robotics. We cover simulating physical environments, helping car makers leapfrog Tesla, real world AI models, the economics of self driving cars, autonomous mines, and the future of autonomy.

Vlad Voroninski is CEO and co-founder of Helm.ai. An early pioneer in training AI for autonomous cars, robotics, and aviation, Vlad has been instrumental in shifting the industry toward advanced simulation and synthetic data—a radical alternative to the traditional reliance on large-scale, manually labeled training sets. Helm.ai has raised over $100M from top investors, including Freeman Group and Goodyear Ventures, and works with major automakers like Honda and Volkswagen.

Vlad Voroninski, Helm.ai's co-founder and CEO is a UC Berkeley PhD, former MIT instructor, and author of 20+ research papers on machine learning. He has been at the forefront of unsupervised learning—an approach he believes will define the future of AI. Before founding Helm.ai, Vlad was Chief Scientist at Sift Security, a machine learning cybersecurity startup that was later acquired by Netskope in 2018. After that, he set out to build Helm.ai, rethinking how AI can be trained for autonomous systems.

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