S27:E4 - Living the Dream with AI (Rob Frelow)

April 3, 2024·48 min·1 clip

Rob Frelow spent three sleepless days building Storygraph's first AI model, and founder Nadia Odunayo said it was better than her.

Rob Frelow is all the way awake for AI. The host introduces him as co-founder and chief AI officer at The Storygraph, then gives his excitement room to breathe. He calls it living the dream, and he means the version where he falls asleep with his laptop in bed, wakes at three in the morning, and checks experiments, AI news, and Storygraph features whenever he can. The turn started with a Tesla ride. After trying autopilot in a friend's car, he went home and signed up for deep learning and machine learning. The host lingers there because plenty of people try new tech, think it is cool, and keep moving. For Rob, it tugged on something older. Seeing Wolfenstein 3D as a kid had made him want to understand computers and make video games. The Tesla brought back that same itch. He wanted to know how cameras and decisions could work together, even before he knew what he would build. The first course did not click right away. Without real-world data he cared about, the lessons felt hard to attach to anything useful. The host keeps asking about the feeling of the pivot, not just the resume version. By the end, Rob makes coding sound like work you can keep chipping away at. Compared with math problems people have spent entire lives failing to solve, programming feels solvable. That comes off as encouragement, not hype: curiosity, experiments, and a habit of troubleshooting carried him from childhood fascination to AI work at The Storygraph.

As heard by us

A personal AI career story about the Tesla ride, old programming instincts, and the obsession that pulled Rob Frelow deeper into machine learning.

Rob Frelow's AI turn starts with a ride in a friend's Tesla and the feeling that he needed to understand how a car could read its surroundings and act on them.

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Why you'd press play

A Tesla ride turns into a real entry point into AI.

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