#170 Ricky Sun: The Real-Time Graph Database Ending AI Hallucination in Production

Ricky Sun is Founder and CEO of Ultipa, the real-time graph database he calls the world's fastest, and CTO of Aichax. In this PreVetted Podcast episode, Ricky Sun explains how a real-time graph database and explainable, white-box AI keep connected data queryable in real time and stop hallucination before enterprise AI ever reaches production. Ricky's career runs through Yahoo, Microsoft, and Dell EMC before he set out to build companies of his own. At Ultipa he built a real-time graph database designed to traverse deeply connected data in microseconds, now used across finance, fraud detection, risk, and compliance. In this conversation he breaks down what a graph database is, why it answers questions a relational database cannot, and what it actually takes to make deep graph traversal fast at scale. We dig into where a real-time graph database sits alongside the vector databases and embeddings most teams reach for first, and why Ricky prefers the phrase graph augmented intelligence to plain artificial intelligence. He makes the case for explainability and white-box AI: why today's models are so hard to reason about, and how a graph turns a black box into something you can inspect, audit, and trust. From there we get into Aichax and its blunt promise that hallucination ends here, the season-long question of why roughly 95% of enterprise AI pilots never reach production, and how graph and explainability change that math. Ricky also talks standards, from the Linked Data Benchmark Council to the ISO GQL graph query language, and shares what he has learned building deep-tech engineering teams across the US and China over two decades. About Ricky Sun:   / rickysun   https://www.ultipa.com https://aichax.ai About Federico Ramallo Founder of Density Labs, the AI Engineering Partner for the mid-market, helping US companies ship AI to production, backed by a decade of shipping software with distributed engineering teams. Author of The Invisible Distance, the operating system for engineering leaders running teams across borders. Host of The PreVetted Podcast: 150+ conversations with VPs of Engineering, CTOs, and operators on what actually works. 💼   / framallo   🌐 https://densitylabs.io ✅ https://prevetted.ai 🎙 PreVetted Podcast 🎯 https://prevetted.ai/podcast 🐦 https://x.com/PrevettedPod 🔗   / prevetted-podcast   TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 Introduction 2:30 From Yahoo, Microsoft, and Dell EMC to founding Ultipa 7:00 What a real-time graph database actually does 13:00 Real-time graph database vs vector databases for AI 19:00 Explainable white-box AI and graph augmented intelligence 26:00 Ending hallucination: inside Aichax 33:00 Why enterprise AI pilots die before production 40:00 Graph analytics for fraud, risk, and compliance in finance 46:00 Standards, ISO GQL, and the Linked Data Benchmark Council 52:00 Advice for CTOs adopting graph and explainable AI #GraphDatabase #ExplainableAI #AIinProduction