Agents @ Work: Dust.tt

The full schedule for Latent Space LIVE! at NeurIPS has been announced, featuring Best of 2024 overview talks for the AI Startup Landscape, Computer Vision, Open Models, Transformers Killers, Synthetic Data, Agents, and Scaling, and speakers from Sarah Guo of Conviction, Roboflow, AI2/Meta, Recursal/Together, HuggingFace, OpenHands and SemiAnalysis. Join us for the IRL event/Livestream! Alessio will also be holding a meetup at AWS Re:Invent in Las Vegas this Wednesday. See our new Events page for dates of AI Engineer Summit, Singapore, and World’s Fair in 2025. LAST CALL for questions for our big 2024 recap episode! Submit questions and messages on Speakpipe here for a chance to appear on the show!When we first observed that GPT Wrappers are Good, Actually, we did not even have Bolt on our radar. Since we recorded our Anthropic episode discussing building Agents with the new Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Bolt.new (by Stackblitz) has easily cleared the $8m ARR bar, repeating and accelerating its initial $4m feat.There are very many AI code generators and VS Code forks out there, but Bolt probably broke through initially because of its incredible zero shot low effort app generation:But as we explain in the pod, Bolt also emphasized deploy (Netlify)/ backend (Supabase)/ fullstack capabilities on top of Stackblitz’s existing WebContainer full-WASM-powered-developer-environment-in-the-browser tech. Since then, the team has been shipping like mad (with weekly office hours), with bugfixing, full screen, multi-device, long context, diff based edits (using speculative decoding like we covered in Inference, Fast and Slow).All of this has captured the imagination of low/no code builders like Greg Isenberg and many others on YouTube/TikTok/Reddit/X/Linkedin etc:Just as with Fireworks, our relationship with Bolt/Stackblitz goes a bit deeper than normal - swyx advised the launch and got a front row seat to this epic journey, as well as demoed it with Realtime Voice at the recent OpenAI Dev Day. So we are very proud to be the first/closest to tell the full open story of Bolt/Stackblitz!Flow Engineering + Qodo/AlphaCodium UpdateIn year 2 of the pod we have been on a roll getting former guests to return as guest cohosts (Harrison Chase, Aman Sanger, Jon Frankle), and it was a pleasure to catch Itamar Friedman back on the pod, giving us an update on all things Qodo and Testing Agents from our last catchup a year and a half ago:Qodo (they renamed in September) went viral in early January this year with AlphaCodium (paper here, code here) beating DeepMind’s AlphaCode with high efficiency:With a simple problem solving code agent:* The first step is to have the model reason about the problem. They describe it using bullet points and focus on the goal, inputs, outputs, rules, constraints, and any other relevant details.* Then, they make the model reason about the public tests and come up with an explanation of why the input leads to that particular output. * The model generates two to three potential solutions in text and ranks them in terms of correctness, simplicity, and robustness. * Then, it generates more diverse tests for the problem, covering cases not part of the original public tests. * Iteratively, pick a solution, generate the code, and run it on a few test cases. * If the tests fail, improve the code and repeat the process until the code passes every test.swyx has previously written similar thoughts on types vs tests for putting bounds on program behavior, but AlphaCodium extends this to AI generated tests and code.More recently, Itamar has also shown that AlphaCodium’s techniques also extend well to the o1 models:Making Flow Engineering a useful technique to improve code model performance on every model. This is something we see AI Engineers uniquely well positioned to do compared to ML Engineers/Researchers.Full Video PodcastLike and subscribe!Show Notes* Itamar* Qodo* First episode* Eric* Bolt* StackBlitz* Thinkster* AlphaCodium* WebContainersChapters* 00:00:00 Introductions & Updates* 00:06:01 Generic vs. Specific AI Agents* 00:07:40 Maintaining vs Creating with AI* 00:17:46 Human vs Agent Computer Interfaces* 00:20:15 Why Docker doesn't work for Bolt* 00:24:23 Creating Testing and Code Review Loops* 00:28:07 Bolt's Task Breakdown Flow* 00:31:04 AI in Complex Enterprise Environments* 00:41:43 AlphaCodium* 00:44:39 Strategies for Breaking Down Complex Tasks* 00:45:22 Building in Open Source* 00:50:35 Choosing a product as a founder* 00:59:03 Reflections on Bolt Success* 01:06:07 Building a B2C GTM* 01:18:11 AI Capabilities and Pricing Tiers* 01:20:28 What makes Bolt unique* 01:23:07 Future Growth and Product Development* 01:29:06 Competitive Landscape in AI Engineering* 01:30:01 Advice to Founders and Embracing AI* 01:32:20 Having a baby and completing an Iron ManTranscriptAlessio [00:00:00]: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO at Decibel Partners, and I'm joined by my co-host Swyx, founder of Smol.ai.Swyx [00:00:12]: Hey, and today we're still in our sort of makeshift in-between studio, but we're very delighted to have a former returning guest host, Itamar. Welcome back.Itamar [00:00:21]: Great to be here after a year or more. Yeah, a year and a half.Swyx [00:00:24]: You're one of our earliest guests on Agents. Now you're CEO co-founder of Kodo. Right. Which has just been renamed. You also raised a $40 million Series A, and we can get caught up on everything, but we're also delighted to have our new guest, Eric. Welcome.Eric [00:00:42]: Thank you. Excited to be here. Should I say Bolt or StackBlitz?Swyx [00:00:45]: Like, is it like its own company now or?Eric [00:00:47]: Yeah. Bolt's definitely bolt.new. That's the thing that we're probably the most known for, I imagine, at this point.Swyx [00:00:54]: Which is ridiculous to say because you were working at StackBlitz for so long.Eric [00:00:57]: Yeah. I mean, within a week, we were doing like double the amount of traffic. And StackBlitz had been online for seven years, and we were like, what? But anyways, yeah. So we're StackBlitz, the company behind bolt.new. If you've heard of bolt.new, that's our stuff. Yeah.Swyx [00:01:12]: Yeah.Itamar [00:01:13]: Excellent. I see, by the way, that the founder mode, you need to know to capture opportunities. So kudos on doing that, right? You're working on some technology, and then suddenly you can exploit that to a new world. Yeah.Eric [00:01:24]: Totally. And I think, well, not to jump, but 100%, I mean, a couple of months ago, we had the idea for Bolt earlier this year, but we haven't really shared this too much publicly. But we actually had tried to build it with some of those state-of-the-art models back in January, February, you can kind of imagine which, and they just weren't good enough to actually do the code generation where the code was accurate and it was fast and whatever have you without a ton of like rag, but then there was like issues with that. So we put it on the shelf and then we got kind of a sneak peek of some of the new models that have come out in the past couple of months now. And so once we saw that, once we actually saw the code gen from it, we were like, oh my God, like, okay, we can build a product around this. And so that was really the impetus of us building the thing. But with that, it was StackBlitz, the core StackBlitz product the past seven years has been an IDE for developers. So the entire user experience flow we've built up just didn't make sense. And so when we kind of went out to build Bolt, we just thought, you know, if we were inventing our product today, what would the interface look like given what is now possible with the AI code gen? And so there's definitely a lot of conversations we had internally, but you know, just kind of when we logically laid it out, we were like, yeah, I think it makes sense to just greenfield a new thing and let's see what happens. If it works great, then we'll figure it out. If it doesn't work great, then it'll get deleted at some point. So that's kind of how it actually came to be.Swyx [00:02:49]: I'll mention your background a little bit. You were also founder of Thinkster before you started StackBlitz. So both of you are second time founders. Both of you have sort of re-founded your company recently. Yours was more of a rename. I think a slightly different direction as well. And then we can talk about both. Maybe just chronologically, should we get caught up on where Kodo is first and then you know, just like what people should know since the last pod? Sure.Itamar [00:03:12]: The last pod was two months after we launched and we basically had the vision that we talked about. The idea that software development is about specification, test and code, etc. We are more on the testing part as in essence, we think that if you solve testing, you solve software development. The beautiful chart that we'll put up on screen. And testing is a really big field, like there are many dimensions, unit testing, the level of the component, how big it is, how large it is. And then there is like different type of testing, is it regression or smoke or whatever. So back then we only had like one ID extension with unit tests as in focus. One and a half year later, first ID extension supports more type of testing as context aware. We index local, local repos, but also 10,000s of repos for Fortune 500 companies. We have another agent, another tool that is called, the pure agent is the open source and the commercial one is CodoMerge. And then we have another open source called CoverAgent, which is not yet a commercial product coming very soon. It's very impressive. It could be that already people are approving automated pull requests that they don't even aware in really big open sources. So once we have enough of these, we will also launch another agent. So for the first one and a half year, what we did is grew in our offering and mostly on the side of, does this code actually works, testing, code review, et cetera. And we believe that's the critical milestone that needs to be achieved to actually have the AI engineer for enterprise software. And then like for the first year was everything bottom up, getting to 1 million installation. 2024, that was 2023, 2024 was starting to monetize, to feel like how it is to make the first buck. So we did the teams offering, it went well with a thousand of teams, et cetera. And then we started like just a few months ago to do enterprise with everything you need, which is a lot of things that discussed in the last post that was just released by Codelm. So that's how we call it at Codelm. Just opening the brackets, our company name was Codelm AI, and we renamed to Codo and we call our models Codelm. So back to my point, so we started Enterprise Motion and already have multiple Fortune 100 companies. And then with that, we raised a series of $40 million. And what's exciting about it is that enables us to develop more agents. That's our focus. I think it's very different. We're not coming very soon with an ID or something like that.Swyx [00:06:01]: You don't want to fork this code?Itamar [00:06:03]: Maybe we'll fork JetBrains or something just to be different.Swyx [00:06:08]: I noticed that, you know, I think the promise of general purpose agents has kind of died. Like everyone is doing kind of what you're doing. There's Codogen, Codomerge, and then there's a third one. What's the name of it?Itamar [00:06:17]: Yeah. Codocover. Cover. Which is like a commercial version of a cover agent. It's coming soon.Swyx [00:06:23]: Yeah. It's very similar with factory AI, also doing like droids. They all have special purpose doing things, but people don't really want general purpose agents. Right. The last time you were here, we talked about AutoGBT, the biggest thing of 2023. This year, not really relevant anymore. And I think it's mostly just because when you give me a general purpose agent, I don't know what to do with it.Eric [00:06:42]: Yeah.Itamar [00:06:43]: I totally agree with that. We're seeing it for a while and I think it will stay like that despite the computer use, et cetera, that supposedly can just replace us. You can just like prompt it to be, hey, now be a QA or be a QA person or a developer. I still think that there's a few reasons why you see like a dedicated agent. Again, I'm a bit more focused, like my head is more on complex software for big teams and enterprise, et cetera. And even think about permissions and what are the data sources and just the same way you manage permissions for users. Developers, you probably want to have dedicated guardrails and dedicated approvals for agents. I intentionally like touched a point on not many people think about. And of course, then what you can think of, like maybe there's different tools, tool use, et cetera. But just the first point by itself is a good reason why you want to have different agents.Alessio [00:07:40]: Just to compare that with Bot.new, you're almost focused on like the application is very complex and now you need better tools to kind of manage it and build on top of it. On Bot.new, it's almost like I was using it the other day. There's basically like, hey, look, I'm just trying to get started. You know, I'm not very opinionated on like how you're going to implement this. Like this is what I want to do. And you build a beautiful app with it. What people ask as the next step, you know, going back to like the general versus like specific, have you had people say, hey, you know, this is great to start, but then I want a specific Bot.new dot whatever else to do a more vertical integration and kind of like development or what's the, what do people say?Eric [00:08:18]: Yeah. I think, I think you kind of hit the, hit it head on, which is, you know, kind of the way that we've, we've kind of talked about internally is it's like people are using Bolt to go from like 0.0 to 1.0, like that's like kind of the biggest unlock that Bolt has versus most other things out there. I mean, I think that's kind of what's, what's very unique about Bolt. I think the, you know, the working on like existing enterprise applications is, I mean, it's crazy important because, you know, there's a, you look, when you look at the fortune 500, I mean, these code bases, some of these have been around for 20, 30 plus years. And so it's important to be going from, you know, 101.3 to 101.4, et cetera. I think for us, so what's been actually pretty interesting is we see there's kind of two different users for us that are coming in and it's very distinct. It's like people that are developers already. And then there's people that have never really written software and more if they have, it's been very, very minimal. And so in the first camp, what these developers are doing, like to go from zero to one, they're coming to Bolt and then they're ejecting the thing to get up or just downloading it and, you know, opening cursor, like whatever to, to, you know, keep iterating on the thing. And sometimes they'll bring it back to Bolt to like add in a huge piece of functionality or something. Right. But for the people that don't know how to code, they're actually just, they, they live in this thing. And that was one of the weird things when we launched is, you know, within a day of us being online, one of the most popular YouTube videos, and there's been a ton since, which was, you know, there's like, oh, Bolt is the cursor killer. And I originally saw the headlines and I was like, thanks for the views. I mean, I don't know. This doesn't make sense to me. That's not, that's not what we kind of thought.Swyx [00:09:44]: It's how YouTubers talk to each other. Well, everything kills everything else.Eric [00:09:47]: Totally. But what blew my mind was that there was any comparison because it's like cursor is a, is a local IDE product. But when, when we actually kind of dug into it and we, and we have people that are using our product saying this, I'm not using cursor. And I was like, what? And it turns out there are hundreds of thousands of people that we have seen that we're using cursor and we're trying to build apps with that where they're not traditional software does, but we're heavily leaning on the AI. And as you can imagine, it is very complicated, right? To do that with cursor. So when Bolt came out, they're like, wow, this thing's amazing because it kind of inverts the complexity where it's like, you know, it's not an IDE, it's, it's a, it's a chat-based sort of interface that we have. So that's kind of the split, which is rather interesting. We've had like the first startups now launch off of Bolt entirely where this, you know, tomorrow I'm doing a live stream with this guy named Paul, who he's built an entire CRM using this thing and you know, with backend, et cetera. And people have made their first money on the internet period, you know, launching this with Stripe or whatever have you. So that's, that's kind of the two main, the two main categories of folks that we see using Bolt though.Itamar [00:10:51]: I agree that I don't understand the comparison. It doesn't make sense to me. I think like we have like two type of families of tools. One is like we re-imagine the software development. I think Bolt is there and I think like a cursor is more like a evolution of what we already have. It's like taking the IDE and it's, it's amazing and it's okay, let's, let's adapt the IDE to an era where LLMs can do a lot for us. And Bolt is more like, okay, let's rethink everything totally. And I think we see a few tools there, like maybe Vercel, Veo and maybe Repl.it in that area. And then in the area of let's expedite, let's change, let's, let's progress with what we already have. You can see Cursor and Kodo, but we're different between ourselves, Cursor and Kodo, but definitely I think that comparison doesn't make sense.Alessio [00:11:42]: And just to set the context, this is not a Twitter demo. You've made 4 million of revenue in four weeks. So this is, this is actually working, you know, it's not a, what, what do you think that is? Like, there's been so many people demoing coding agents on Twitter and then it doesn't really work. And then you guys were just like, here you go, it's live, go use it, pay us for it. You know, is there anything in the development that was like interesting and maybe how that compares to building your own agents?Eric [00:12:08]: We had no idea, honestly, like we, we, we've been pretty blown away and, and things have just kind of continued to grow faster since then. We're like, oh, today is week six. So I, I kind of came back to the point you just made, right, where it's, you, you kind of outlined, it's like, there's kind of this new market of like kind of rethinking the software development and then there's heavily augmenting existing developers. I think that, you know, both of which are, you know, AI code gen being extremely good, it's allowed existing developers, it's allowing existing developers to camera out software far faster than they could have ever before, right? It's like the ultimate power tool for an existing developer. But this code gen stuff is now so good. And then, and we saw this over the past, you know, from the beginning of the year when we tried to first build, it's actually lowered the barrier to people that, that aren't traditionally software engineers. But the kind of the key thing is if you kind of think about it from, imagine you've never written software before, right? My co-founder and I, he and I grew up down the street from each other in Chicago. We learned how to code when we were 13 together and we've been building stuff ever since. And this is back in like the mid 2000s or whatever, you know, there was nothing for free to learn from online on the internet and how to code. For our 13th birthdays, we asked our parents for, you know, O'Reilly books cause you couldn't get this at the library, right? And so instead of like an Xbox, we got, you know, programming books. But the hardest part for everyone learning to code is getting an environment set up locally, you know? And so when we built StackBlitz, like kind of the key thesis, like seven years ago, the insight we had was that, Hey, it seems like the browser has a lot of new APIs like WebAssembly and service workers, et cetera, where you could actually write an operating system that ran inside the browser that could boot in milliseconds. And you, you know, basically there's this missing capability of the web. Like the web should be able to build apps for the web, right? You should be able to build the web on the web. Every other platform has that, Visual Studio for Windows, Xcode for Mac. The web has no built in primitive for this. And so just like our built in kind of like nerd instinct on this was like, that seems like a huge hole and it's, you know, it will be very valuable or like, you know, very valuable problem to solve. So if you want to set up that environments, you know, this is what we spent the past seven years doing. And the reality is existing developers have running locally. They already know how to set up that environment. So the problem isn't as acute for them. When we put Bolt online, we took that technology called WebContainer and married it with these, you know, state of the art frontier models. And the people that have the most pain with getting stuff set up locally is people that don't code. I think that's been, you know, really the big explosive reason is no one else has been trying to make dev environments work inside of a browser tab, you know, for the past if since ever, other than basically our company, largely because there wasn't an immediate demand or need. So I think we kind of find ourselves at the right place at the right time. And again, for this market of people that don't know how to write software, you would kind of expect that you should be able to do this without downloading something to your computer in the same way that, hey, I don't have to download Photoshop now to make designs because there's Figma. I don't have to download Word because there's, you know, Google Docs. They're kind of looking at this as that sort of thing, right? Which was kind of the, you know, our impetus and kind of vision from the get-go. But you know, the code gen, the AI code gen stuff that's come out has just been, you know, an order of magnitude multiplier on how magic that is, right? So that's kind of my best distillation of like, what is going on here, you know?Alessio [00:15:21]: And you can deploy too, right?Eric [00:15:22]: Yeah.Alessio [00:15:23]: Yeah.Eric [00:15:24]: And so that's, what's really cool is it's, you know, we have deployment built in with Netlify and this is actually, I think, Sean, you actually built this at Netlify when you were there. Yeah. It's one of the most brilliant integrations actually, because, you know, effectively the API that Sean built, maybe you can speak to it, but like as a provider, we can just effectively give files to Netlify without the user even logging in and they have a live website. And if they want to keep, hold onto it, they can click a link and claim it to their Netlify account. But it basically is just this really magic experience because when you come to Bolt, you say, I want a website. Like my mom, 70, 71 years old, made her first website, you know, on the internet two weeks ago, right? It was about her nursing days.Swyx [00:16:03]: Oh, that's fantastic though. It wouldn't have been made.Eric [00:16:06]: A hundred percent. Cause even in, you know, when we've had a lot of people building personal, like deeply personal stuff, like in the first week we launched this, the sales guy from the East Coast, you know, replied to a tweet of mine and he said, thank you so much for building this to your team. His daughter has a medical condition and so for her to travel, she has to like line up donors or something, you know, so ahead of time. And so he actually used Bolt to make a website to do that, to actually go and send it to folks in the region she was going to travel to ahead of time. I was really touched by it, but I also thought like, why, you know, why didn't he use like Wix or Squarespace? Right? I mean, this is, this is a solved problem, quote unquote, right? And then when I thought, I actually use Squarespace for my, for my, uh, the wedding website for my wife and I, like back in 2021, so I'm familiar, you know, it was, it was faster. I know how to code. I was like, this is faster. Right. And I thought back and I was like, there's a whole interface you have to learn how to use. And it's actually not that simple. There's like a million things you can configure in that thing. When you come to Bolt, there's a, there's a text box. You just say, I need a, I need a wedding website. Here's the date. Here's where it is. And here's a photo of me and my wife, put it somewhere relevant. It's actually the simplest way. And that's what my, when my mom came, she said, uh, I'm Pat Simons. I was a nurse in the seventies, you know, and like, here's the things I did and a website came out. So coming back to why is this such a, I think, why are we seeing this sort of growth? It's, this is the simplest interface I think maybe ever created to actually build it, a deploy a website. And then that website, my mom made, she's like, okay, this looks great. And there's, there's one button, you just click it, deploy, and it's live and you can buy a domain name, attach it to it. And you know, it's as simple as it gets, it's getting even simpler with some of the stuff we're working on. But anyways, so that's, it's, it's, uh, it's been really interesting to see some of the usage like that.Swyx [00:17:46]: I can offer my perspective. So I, you know, I probably should have disclosed a little bit that, uh, I'm a, uh, stack list investor.Alessio [00:17:53]: Canceled the episode. I know, I know. Don't play it now. Pause.Eric actually reached out to ShowMeBolt before the launch. And we, you know, we talked a lot about, like, the framing of, of what we're going to talk about how we marketed the thing, but also, like, what we're So that's what Bolt was going to need, like a whole sort of infrastructure.swyx: Netlify, I was a maintainer but I won't take claim for the anonymous upload. That's actually the origin story of Netlify. We can have Matt Billman talk about it, but that was [00:18:00] how Netlify started. You could drag and drop your zip file or folder from your desktop onto a website, it would have a live URL with no sign in.swyx: And so that was the origin story of Netlify. And it just persists to today. And it's just like it's really nice, interesting that both Bolt and CognitionDevIn and a bunch of other sort of agent type startups, they all use Netlify to deploy because of this one feature. They don't really care about the other features.swyx: But, but just because it's easy for computers to use and talk to it, like if you build an interface for computers specifically, that it's easy for them to Navigate, then they will be used in agents. And I think that's a learning that a lot of developer tools companies are having. That's my bolt launch story and now if I say all that stuff.swyx: And I just wanted to come back to, like, the Webcontainers things, right? Like, I think you put a lot of weight on the technical modes. I think you also are just like, very good at product. So you've, you've like, built a better agent than a lot of people, the rest of us, including myself, who have tried to build these things, and we didn't get as far as you did.swyx: Don't shortchange yourself on products. But I think specifically [00:19:00] on, on infra, on like the sandboxing, like this is a thing that people really want. Alessio has Bax E2B, which we'll have on at some point, talking about like the sort of the server full side. But yours is, you know, inside of the browser, serverless.swyx: It doesn't cost you anything to serve one person versus a million people. It doesn't, doesn't cost you anything. I think that's interesting. I think in theory, we should be able to like run tests because you can run the full backend. Like, you can run Git, you can run Node, you can run maybe Python someday.swyx: We talked about this. But ideally, you should be able to have a fully gentic loop, running code, seeing the errors, correcting code, and just kind of self healing, right? Like, I mean, isn't that the dream?Eric: Totally.swyx: Yeah,Eric: totally. At least in bold, we've got, we've got a good amount of that today. I mean, there's a lot more for us to do, but one of the nice things, because like in web container, you know, there's a lot of kind of stuff you go Google like, you know, turn docker container into wasm.Eric: You'll find a lot of stuff out there that will do that. The problem is it's very big, it's slow, and that ruins the experience. And so what we ended up doing is just writing an operating system from [00:20:00] scratch that was just purpose built to, you know, run in a browser tab. And the reason being is, you know, Docker 2 awesome things will give you an image that's like out 60 to 100 megabits, you know, maybe more, you know, and our, our OS, you know, kind of clocks in, I think, I think we're in like a, maybe, maybe a megabyte or less or something like that.Eric: I mean, it's, it's, you know, really, really, you know, stripped down.swyx: This is basically the task involved is I understand that it's. Mapping every single, single Linux call to some kind of web, web assembly implementation,Eric: but more or less, and, and then there's a lot of things actually, like when you're looking at a dev environment, there's a lot of things that you don't need that a traditional OS is gonna have, right?Eric: Like, you know audio drivers or you like, there's just like, there's just tons of things. Oh, yeah. Right. Yeah. That goes . Yeah. You can just kind, you can, you can kind of tos them. Or alternatively, what you can do is you can actually be the nice thing. And this is, this kind of comes back to the origins of browsers, which is, you know, they're, they're at the beginning of the web and, you know, the late nineties, there was two very different kind of visions for the web where Alan Kay vehemently [00:21:00] disagree with the idea that should be document based, which is, you know, Tim Berners Lee, you know, that, and that's kind of what ended up winning, winning was this document based kind of browsing documents on the web thing.Eric: Alan Kay, he's got this like very famous quote where he said, you know, you want web browsers to be mini operating systems. They should download little mini binaries and execute with like a little mini virtualized operating system in there. And what's kind of interesting about the history, not to geek out on this aspect, what's kind of interesting about the history is both of those folks ended up being right.Eric: Documents were actually the pragmatic way that the web worked. Was, you know, became the most ubiquitous platform in the world to the degree now that this is why WebAssembly has been invented is that we're doing, we need to do more low level things in a browser, same thing with WebGPU, et cetera. And so all these APIs, you know, to build an operating system came to the browser.Eric: And that was actually the realization we had in 2017 was, holy heck, like you can actually, you know, service workers, which were designed for allowing your app to work offline. That was the kind of the key one where it was like, wait a second, you can actually now run. Web servers within a [00:22:00] browser, like you can run a server that you open up.Eric: That's wild. Like full Node. js. Full Node. js. Like that capability. Like, I can have a URL that's programmatically controlled. By a web application itself, boom. Like the web can build the web. The primitive is there. Everyone at the time, like we talked to people that like worked on, you know Chrome and V8 and they were like, uhhhh.Eric: You know, like I don't know. But it's one of those things you just kind of have to go do it to find out. So we spent a couple of years, you know, working on it and yeah. And, and, and got to work in back in 2021 is when we kind of put the first like data of web container online. Butswyx: in partnership with Google, right?swyx: Like Google actually had to help you get over the finish line with stuff.Eric: A hundred percent, because well, you know, over the years of when we were doing the R and D on the thing. Kind of the biggest challenge, the two ways that you can kind of test how powerful and capable a platform are, the two types of applications are one, video games, right, because they're just very compute intensive, a lot of calculations that have to happen, right?Eric: The second one are IDEs, because you're talking about actually virtualizing the actual [00:23:00] runtime environment you are in to actually build apps on top of it, which requires sophisticated capabilities, a lot of access to data. You know, a good amount of compute power, right, to effectively, you know, building app in app sort of thing.Eric: So those, those are the stress tests. So if your platform is missing stuff, those are the things where you find out. Those are, those are the people building games and IDEs. They're the ones filing bugs on operating system level stuff. And for us, browser level stuff.Eric [00:23:47]: yeah, what ended up happening is we were just hammering, you know, the Chromium bug tracker, and they're like, who are these guys? Yeah. And, and they were amazing because I mean, just making Chrome DevTools be able to debug, I mean, it's, it's not, it wasn't originally built right for debugging an operating system, right? They've been phenomenal working with us and just kind of really pushing the limits, but that it's a rising tide that's kind of lifted all boats because now there's a lot of different types of applications that you can debug with Chrome Dev Tools that are running a browser that runs more reliably because just the stress testing that, that we and, you know, games that are coming to the web are kind of pushing as well, but.Itamar [00:24:23]: That's awesome. About the testing, I think like most, let's say coding assistant from different kinds will need this loop of testing. And even I would add code review to some, to some extent that you mentioned. How is testing different from code review? Code review could be, for example, PR review, like a code review that is done at the point of when you want to merge branches. But I would say that code review, for example, checks best practices, maintainability, and so on. It's not just like CI, but more than CI. And testing is like a more like checking functionality, et cetera. So it's different. We call, by the way, all of these together code integrity, but that's a different story. Just to go back to the, to the testing and specifically. Yeah. It's, it's, it's since the first slide. Yeah. We're consistent. So if we go back to the testing, I think like, it's not surprising that for us testing is important and for Bolt it's testing important, but I want to shed some light on a different perspective of it. Like let's think about autonomous driving. Those startups that are doing autonomous driving for highway and autonomous driving for the city. And I think like we saw the autonomous of the highway much faster and reaching to a level, I don't know, four or so much faster than those in the city. Now, in both cases, you need testing and quote unquote testing, you know, verifying validation that you're doing the right thing on the road and you're reading and et cetera. But it's probably like so different in the city that it could be like actually different technology. And I claim that we're seeing something similar here. So when you're building the next Wix, and if I was them, I was like looking at you and being a bit scared. That's what you're disrupting, what you just said. Then basically, I would say that, for example, the UX UI is freaking important. And because you're you're more aiming for the end user. In this case, maybe it's an end user that doesn't know how to develop for developers. It's also important. But let alone those that do not know to develop, they need a slick UI UX. And I think like that's one reason, for example, I think Cursor have like really good technology. I don't know the underlying what's under the hood, but at least what they're saying. But I think also their UX UI is great. It's a lot because they did their own ID. While if you're aiming for the city AI, suddenly like there's a lot of testing and code review technology that it's not necessarily like that important. For example, let's talk about integration tests. Probably like a lot of what you're building involved at the moment is isolated applications. Maybe the vision or the end game is maybe like having one solution for everything. It could be that eventually the highway companies will go into the city and the other way around. But at the beginning, there is a difference. And integration tests are a good example. I guess they're a bit less important. And when you think about enterprise software, they're really important. So to recap, like I think like the idea of looping and verifying your test and verifying your code in different ways, testing or code review, et cetera, seems to be important in the highway AI and the city AI, but in different ways and different like critical for the city, even more and more variety. Actually, I was looking to ask you like what kind of loops you guys are doing. For example, when I'm using Bolt and I'm enjoying it a lot, then I do see like sometimes you're trying to catch the errors and fix them. And also, I noticed that you're breaking down tasks into smaller ones and then et cetera, which is already a common notion for a year ago. But it seems like you're doing it really well. So if you're willing to share anything about it.Eric [00:28:07]: Yeah, yeah. I realized I never actually hit the punchline of what I was saying before. I mentioned the point about us kind of writing an operating system from scratch because what ended up being important about that is that to your point, it's actually a very, like compared to like a, you know, if you're like running cursor on anyone's machine, you kind of don't know what you're dealing with, with the OS you're running on. There could be an error happens. It could be like a million different things, right? There could be some config. There could be, it could be God knows what, right? The thing with WebConnect is because we wrote the entire thing from scratch. It's actually a unified image basically. And we can instrument it at any level that we think is going to be useful, which is exactly what we did when we started building Bolt is we instrumented stuff at like the process level, at the runtime level, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Stuff that would just be not impossible to do on local, but to do that in a way that works across any operating system, whatever is, I mean, would just be insanely, you know, insanely difficult to do right and reliably. And that's what you saw when you've used Bolt is that when an error actually will occur, whether it's in the build process or the actual web application itself is failing or anything kind of in between, you can actually capture those errors. And today it's a very primitive way of how we've implemented it largely because the product just didn't exist 90 days ago. So we're like, we got some work ahead of us and we got to hire some more a little bit, but basically we present and we say, Hey, this is, here's kind of the things that went wrong. There's a fix it button and then a ignore button, and then you can just hit fix it. And then we take all that telemetry through our agent, you run it through our agent and say, kind of, here's the state of the application. Here's kind of the errors that we got from Node.js or the browser or whatever, and like dah, dah, dah, dah. And it can take a crack at actually solving it. And it's actually pretty darn good at being able to do that. That's kind of been a, you know, closing the loop and having it be a reliable kind of base has seemed to be a pretty big upgrade over doing stuff locally, just because I think that's a pretty key ingredient of it. And yeah, I think breaking things down into smaller tasks, like that's, that's kind of a key part of our agent. I think like Claude did a really good job with artifacts. I think, you know, us and kind of everyone else has, has kind of taken their approach of like actually breaking out certain tasks in a certain order into, you know, kind of a concrete way. And, and so actually the core of Bolt, I know we actually made open source. So you can actually go and check out like the system prompts and et cetera, and you can run it locally and whatever have you. So anyone that's interested in this stuff, I'd highly recommend taking a look at. There's not a lot of like stuff that's like open source in this realm. It's, that was one of the fun things that we've we thought would be cool to do. And people, people seem to like it. I mean, there's a lot of forks and people adding different models and stuff. So it's been cool to see.Swyx [00:30:41]: Yeah. I'm happy to add, I added real-time voice for my opening day demo and it was really fun to hack with. So thank you for doing that. Yeah. Thank you. I'm going to steal your code.Eric [00:30:52]: Because I want that.Swyx [00:30:52]: It's funny because I built on top of the fork of Bolt.new that already has the multi LLM thing. And so you just told me you're going to merge that in. So then you're going to merge two layers of forks down into this thing. So it'll be fun.Eric [00:31:03]: Heck yeah.Alessio [00:31:04]: Just to touch on like the environment, Itamar, you maybe go into the most complicated environments that even the people that work there don't know how to run. How much of an impact does that have on your performance? Like, you know, it's most of the work you're doing actually figuring out environment and like the libraries, because I'm sure they're using outdated version of languages, they're using outdated libraries, they're using forks that have not been on the public internet before. How much of the work that you're doing is like there versus like at the LLM level?Itamar [00:31:32]: One of the reasons I was asking about, you know, what are the steps to break things down, because it really matters. Like, what's the tech stack? How complicated the software is? It's hard to figure it out when you're dealing with the real world, any environment of enterprise as a city, when I'm like, while maybe sometimes like, I think you do enable like in Bolt, like to install stuff, but it's quite a like controlled environment. And that's a good thing to do, because then you narrow down and it's easier to make things work. So definitely, there are two dimensions, I think, actually spaces. One is the fact just like installing our software without yet like doing anything, making it work, just installing it because we work with enterprise and Fortune 500, etc. Many of them want on prem solution.Swyx [00:32:22]: So you have how many deployment options?Itamar [00:32:24]: Basically, we had, we did a metric metrics, say 96 options, because, you know, they're different dimensions. Like, for example, one dimension, we connect to your code management system to your Git. So are you having like GitHub, GitLab? Subversion? Is it like on cloud or deployed on prem? Just an example. Which model agree to use its APIs or ours? Like we have our Is it TestGPT? Yeah, when we started with TestGPT, it was a huge mistake name. It was cool back then, but I don't think it's a good idea to name a model after someone else's model. Anyway, that's my opinion. So we gotSwyx [00:33:02]: I'm interested in these learnings, like things that you change your mind on.Itamar [00:33:06]: Eventually, when you're building a company, you're building a brand and you want to create your own brand. By the way, when I thought about Bolt.new, I also thought about if it's not a problem, because when I think about Bolt, I do think about like a couple of companies that are already called this way.Swyx [00:33:19]: Curse companies. You could call it Codium just to...Itamar [00:33:24]: Okay, thank you. Touche. Touche.Eric [00:33:27]: Yeah, you got to imagine the board meeting before we launched Bolt, one of our investors, you can imagine they're like, are you sure? Because from the investment side, it's kind of a famous, very notorious Bolt. And they're like, are you sure you want to go with that name? Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely.Itamar [00:33:43]: At this point, we have actually four models. There is a model for autocomplete. There's a model for the chat. There is a model dedicated for more for code review. And there is a model that is for code embedding. Actually, you might notice that there isn't a good code embedding model out there. Can you name one? Like dedicated for code?Swyx [00:34:04]: There's code indexing, and then you can do sort of like the hide for code. And then you can embed the descriptions of the code.Itamar [00:34:12]: Yeah, but you do see a lot of type of models that are dedicated for embedding and for different spaces, different fields, etc. And I'm not aware. And I know that if you go to the bedrock, try to find like there's a few code embedding models, but none of them are specialized for code.Swyx [00:34:31]: Is there a benchmark that you would tell us to pay attention to?Itamar [00:34:34]: Yeah, so it's coming. Wait for that. Anyway, we have our models. And just to go back to the 96 option of deployment. So I'm closing the brackets for us. So one is like dimensional, like what Git deployment you have, like what models do you agree to use? Dotter could be like if it's air-gapped completely, or you want VPC, and then you have Azure, GCP, and AWS, which is different. Do you use Kubernetes or do not? Because we want to exploit that. There are companies that do not do that, etc. I guess you know what I mean. So that's one thing. And considering that we are dealing with one of all four enterprises, we needed to deal with that. So you asked me about how complicated it is to solve that complex code. I said, it's just a deployment part. And then now to the software, we see a lot of different challenges. For example, some companies, they did actually a good job to build a lot of microservices. Let's not get to if it's good or not, but let's first assume that it is a good thing. A lot of microservices, each one of them has their own repo. And now you have tens of thousands of repos. And you as a developer want to develop something. And I remember me coming to a corporate for the first time. I don't know where to look at, like where to find things. So just doing a good indexing for that is like a challenge. And moreover, the regular indexing, the one that you can find, we wrote a few blogs on that. By the way, we also have some open source, different than yours, but actually three and growing. Then it doesn't work. You need to let the tech leads and the companies influence your indexing. For example, Mark with different repos with different colors. This is a high quality repo. This is a lower quality repo. This is a repo that we want to deprecate. This is a repo we want to grow, etc. And let that be part of your indexing. And only then things actually work for enterprise and they don't get to a fatigue of, oh, this is awesome. Oh, but I'm starting, it's annoying me. I think Copilot is an amazing tool, but I'm quoting others, meaning GitHub Copilot, that they see not so good retention of GitHub Copilot and enterprise. Ooh, spicy. Yeah. I saw snapshots of people and we have customers that are Copilot users as well. And also I saw research, some of them is public by the way, between 38 to 50% retention for users using Copilot and enterprise. So it's not so good. By the way, I don't think it's that bad, but it's not so good. So I think that's a reason because, yeah, it helps you auto-complete, but then, and especially if you're working on your repo alone, but if it's need that context of remote repos that you're code-based, that's hard. So to make things work, there's a lot of work on that, like giving the controllability for the tech leads, for the developer platform or developer experience department in the organization to influence how things are working. A short example, because if you have like really old legacy code, probably some of it is not so good anymore. If you just fine tune on these code base, then there is a bias to repeat those mistakes or old practices, etc. So you need, for example, as I mentioned, to influence that. For example, in Coda, you can have a markdown of best practices by the tech leads and Coda will include that and relate to that and will not offer suggestions that are not according to the best practices, just as an example. So that's just a short list of things that you need to do in order to deal with, like you mentioned, the 100.1 to 100.2 version of software. I just want to say what you're doing is extremelyEric [00:38:32]: impressive because it's very difficult. I mean, the business of Stackplus, kind of before bulk came online, we sold a version of our IDE that went on-prem. So I understand what you're saying about the difficulty of getting stuff just working on-prem. Holy heck. I mean, that is extremely hard. I guess the question I have for you is, I mean, we were just doing that with kind of Kubernetes-based stuff, but the spread of Fortune 500 companies that you're working with, how are they doing the inference for this? Are you kind of plugging into Azure's OpenAI stuff and AWS's Bedrock, you know, Cloud stuff? Or are they just like running stuff on GPUs? Like, what is that? How are these folks approaching that? Because, man, what we saw on the enterprise side, I mean, I got to imagine that that's a huge challenge. Everything you said and more, like,Itamar [00:39:15]: for example, like someone could be, and I don't think any of these is bad. Like, they made their decision. Like, for example, some people, they're, I want only AWS and VPC on AWS, no matter what. And then they, some of them, like there is a subset, I will say, I'm willing to take models only for from Bedrock and not ours. And we have a problem because there is no good code embedding model on Bedrock. And that's part of what we're doing now with AWS to solve that. We solve it in a different way. But if you are willing to run on AWS VPC, but run your run models on GPUs or inferentia, like the new version of the more coming out, then our models can run on that. But everything you said is right. Like, we see like on-prem deployment where they have their own GPUs. We see Azure where you're using OpenAI Azure. We see cases where you're running on GCP and they want OpenAI. Like this cross, like a case, although there is Gemini or even Sonnet, I think is available on GCP, just an example. So all the options, that's part of the challenge. I admit that we thought about it, but it was even more complicated. And it took us a few months to actually, that metrics that I mentioned, to start clicking each one of the blocks there. A few months is impressive. I mean,Eric [00:40:35]: honestly, just that's okay. Every one of these enterprises is, their networking is different. Just everything's different. Every single one is different. I see you understand. Yeah. So that just cannot be understated. That it is, that's extremely impressive. Hats off.Itamar [00:40:50]: It could be, by the way, like, for example, oh, we're only AWS, but our GitHub enterprise is on-prem. Oh, we forgot. So we need like a private link or whatever, like every time like that. It's not, and you do need to think about it if you want to work with an enterprise. And it's important. Like I understand like their, I respect their point of view.Swyx [00:41:10]: And this primarily impacts your architecture, your tech choices. Like you have to, you can't choose some vendors because...Itamar [00:41:15]: Yeah, definitely. To be frank, it makes us hard for a startup because it means that we want, we want everyone to enjoy all the variety of models. By the way, it was hard for us with our technology. I want to open a bracket, like a window. I guess you're familiar with our Alpha Codium, which is an open source.Eric [00:41:33]: We got to go over that. Yeah. So I'll do that quickly.Itamar [00:41:36]: Yeah. A pin in that. Yeah. Actually, we didn't have it in the last episode. So, so, okay.Swyx [00:41:41]: Okay. We'll come back to that later, but let's talk about...Itamar [00:41:43]: Yeah. So, so just like shortly, and then we can double click on Alpha Codium. But Alpha Codium is a open source tool. You can go and try it and lets you compete on CodeForce. This is a website and a competition and actually reach a master level level, like 95% with a click of a button. You don't need to do anything. And part of what we did there is taking a problem and breaking it to different, like smaller blocks. And then the models are doing a much better job. Like we all know it by now that taking small tasks and solving them, by the way, even O1, which is supposed to be able to do system two thinking like Greg from OpenAI like hinted, is doing better on these kinds of problems. But still, it's very useful to break it down for O1, despite O1 being able to think by itself. And that's what we presented like just a month ago, OpenAI released that now they are doing 93 percentile with O1 IOI left and International Olympiad of Formation. Sorry, I forgot. Exactly. I told you I forgot. And we took their O1 preview with Alpha Codium and did better. Like it just shows like, and there is a big difference between the preview and the IOI. It shows like that these models are not still system two thinkers, and there is a big difference. So maybe they're not complete system two. Yeah, they need some guidance. I call them system 1.5. We can, we can have it. I thought about it. Like, you know, I care about this philosophy stuff. And I think like we didn't see it even close to a system two thinking. I can elaborate later. But closing the brackets, like we take Alpha Codium and as our principle of thinking, we take tasks and break them down to smaller tasks. And then we want to exploit the best model to solve them. So I want to enable anyone to enjoy O1 and SONET and Gemini 1.5, etc. But at the same time, I need to develop my own models as well, because some of the Fortune 500 want to have all air gapped or whatever. So that's a challenge. Now you need to support so many models. And to some extent, I would say that the flow engineering, the breaking down to two different blocks is a necessity for us. Why? Because when you take a big block, a big problem, you need a very different prompt for each one of the models to actually work. But when you take a big problem and break it into small tasks, we can talk how we do that, then the prompt matters less. What I want to say, like all this, like as a startup trying to do different deployment, getting all the juice that you can get from models, etc. is a big problem. And one need to think about it. And one of our mitigation is that process of taking tasks and breaking them down. That's why I'm really interested to know how you guys are doing it. And part of what we do is also open source. So you can see.Swyx [00:44:39]: There's a lot in there. But yeah, flow over prompt. I do believe that that does make sense. I feel like there's a lot that both of you can sort of exchange notes on breaking down problems. And I just want you guys to just go for it. This is fun to watch.Eric [00:44:55]: Yeah. I mean, what's super interesting is the context you're working in is, because for us too with Bolt, we've started thinking because our kind of existing business line was going behind the firewall, right? We were like, how do we do this? Adding the inference aspect on, we're like, okay, how does... Because I mean, there's not a lot of prior art, right? I mean, this is all new. This is all new. So I definitely am going to have a lot of questions for you.Itamar [00:45:17]: I'm here. We're very open, by the way. We have a paper on a blog or like whatever.Swyx [00:45:22]: The Alphacodeum, GitHub, and we'll put all this in the show notes.Itamar [00:45:25]: Yeah. And even the new results of O1, we published it.Eric [00:45:29]: I love that. And I also just, I think spiritually, I like your approach of being transparent. Because I think there's a lot of hype-ium around AI stuff. And a lot of it is, it's just like, you have these companies that are just kind of keep their stuff closed source and then just max hype it, but then it's kind of nothing. And I think it kind of gives a bad rep to the incredible stuff that's actually happening here. And so I think it's stuff like what you're doing where, I mean, true merit and you're cracking open actual code for others to learn from and use. That strikes me as the right approach. And it's great to hear that you're making such incredible progress.Itamar [00:46:02]: I have something to share about the open source. Most of our tools are, we have an open source version and then a premium pro version. But it's not an easy decision to do that. I actually wanted to ask you about your strategy, but I think in your case, there is, in my opinion, relatively a good strategy where a lot of parts of open source, but then you have the deployment and the environment, which is not right if I get it correctly. And then there's a clear, almost hugging face model. Yeah, you can do that, but why should you try to deploy it yourself, deploy it with us? But in our case, and I'm not sure you're not going to hit also some competitors, and I guess you are. I wanted to ask you, for example, on some of them. In our case, one day we looked on one of our competitors that is doing code review. We're a platform. We have the code review, the testing, et cetera, spread over the ID to get. And in each agent, we have a few startups or a big incumbents that are doing only that. So we noticed one of our competitors having not only a very similar UI of our open source, but actually even our typo. And you sit there and you're kind of like, yeah, we're not that good. We don't use enough Grammarly or whatever. And we had a couple of these and we saw it there. And then it's a challenge. And I want to ask you, Bald is doing so well, and then you open source it. So I think I know what my answer was. I gave it before, but still interestingEric [00:47:29]: to hear what you think. GeoHot said back, I don't know who he was up to at this exact moment, but I think on comma AI, all that stuff's open source. And someone had asked him, why is this open source? And he's like, if you're not actually confident that you can go and crush it and build the best thing, then yeah, you should probably keep your stuff closed source. He said something akin to that. I'm probably kind of butchering it, but I thought it was kind of a really good point. And that's not to say that you should just open source everything, because for obvious reasons, there's kind of strategic things you have to kind of take in mind. But I actually think a pretty liberal approach, as liberal as you kind of can be, it can really make a lot of sense. Because that is so validating that one of your competitors is taking your stuff and they're like, yeah, let's just kind of tweak the styles. I mean, clearly, right? I think it's kind of healthy because it keeps, I'm sure back at HQ that day when you saw that, you're like, oh, all right, well, we have to grind even harder to make sure we stay ahead. And so I think it's actually a very useful, motivating thing for the teams. Because you might feel this period of comfort. I think a lot of companies will have this period of comfort where they're not feeling the competition and one day they get disrupted. So kind of putting stuff out there and letting people push it forces you to face reality soon, right? And actually feel that incrementally so you can kind of adjust course. And that's for us, the open source version of Bolt has had a lot of features people have been begging us for, like persisting chat messages and checkpoints and stuff. Within the first week, that stuff was landed in the open source versions. And they're like, why can't you ship this? It's in the open, so people have forked it. And we're like, we're trying to keep our servers and GPUs online. But it's been great because the folks in the community did a great job, kept us on our toes. And we've got to know most of these folks too at this point that have been building these things. And so it actually was very instructive. Like, okay, well, if we're going to go kind of land this, there's some UX patterns we can kind of look at and the code is open source to this stuff. What's great about these, what's not. So anyways, NetNet, I think it's awesome. I think from a competitive point of view for us, I think in particular, what's interesting is the core technology of WebContainer going. And I think that right now, there's really nothing that's kind of on par with that. And we also, we have a business of, because WebContainer runs in your browser, but to make it work, you have to install stuff from NPM. You have to make cores bypass requests, like connected databases, which all require server-side proxying or acceleration. And so we actually sell WebContainer as a service. One of the core reasons we open-sourced kind of the core components of Bolt when we launched was that we think that there's going to be a lot more of these AI, in-your-browser AI co-gen experiences, kind of like what Anthropic did with Artifacts and Clod. By the way, Artifacts uses WebContainers. Not yet. No, yeah. Should I strike that? I think that they've got their own thing at the moment, but there's been a lot of interest in WebContainers from folks doing things in that sort of realm and in the AI labs and startups and everything in between. So I think there'll be, I imagine, over the coming months, there'll be lots of things being announced to folks kind of adopting it. But yeah, I think effectively...Swyx [00:50:35]: Okay, I'll say this. If you're a large model lab and you want to build sandbox environments inside of your chat app, you should call Eric.Itamar [00:50:43]: But wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I have a question about that. I think OpenAI, they felt that people are not using their model as they would want to. So they built ChatGPT. But I would say that ChatGPT now defines OpenAI. I know they're doing a lot of business from their APIs, but still, is this how you think? Isn't Bolt.new your business now? Why don't you focus on that instead of the...Swyx [00:51:16]: What's your advice as a founder?Eric [00:51:18]: You're right. And so going into it, we, candidly, we were like, Bolt.new, this thing is super cool. We think people are stoked. We think people will be stoked. But we were like, maybe that's allowed. Best case scenario, after month one, we'd be mind blown if we added a couple hundred K of error or something. And we were like, but we think there's probably going to be an immediate huge business. Because there was some early poll on folks wanting to put WebContainer into their product offerings, kind of similar to what Bolt is doing or whatever. We were actually prepared for the inverse outcome here. But I mean, well, I guess we've seen poll on both. But I mean, what's happened with Bolt, and you're right, it's actually the same strategy as like OpenAI or Anthropic, where we have our ChatGPT to OpenAI's APIs is Bolt to WebContainer. And so we've kind of taken that same approach. And we're seeing, I guess, some of the similar results, except right now, the revenue side is extremely lopsided to Bolt.Itamar [00:52:16]: I think if you ask me what's my advice, I think you have three options. One is to focus on Bolt. The other is to focus on the WebContainer. The third is to raise one billion dollars and do them both. I'm serious. I think otherwise, you need to choose. And if you raise enough money, and I think it's big bucks, because you're going to be chased by competitors. And I think it will be challenging to do both. And maybe you can. I don't know. We do see these numbers right now, raising above $100 million, even without havingEric [00:52:49]: a product. You can see these. It's excellent advice. And I think what's been amazing, but also kind of challenging is we're trying to forecast, okay, well, where are these things going? I mean, in the initial weeks, I think us and all the investors in the company that we're sharing this with, it was like, this is cool. Okay, we added 500k. Wow, that's crazy. Wow, we're at a million now. Most things, you have this kind of the tech crunch launch of initiation and then the thing of sorrow. And if there's going to be a downtrend, it's just not coming yet. Now that we're kind of looking ahead, we're six weeks in. So now we're getting enough confidence in our convictions to go, okay, this seems to be the trend line. I'll tell you another reason whySwyx [00:53:33]: I think, where is Jasper? They actually just announced some new numbers recently. They're still surviving. They have gone down a lot. I think that the peak that I heard was a hundredItamar [00:53:42]: billion ARR. And now there's like tens of these. So I think their success was phenomenal, like what I see at Bolt. And I think if you want to keep that, probably, who am I? I'm just giving my two cents. You need to focus because you are going to see weeks, I think that you're disrupting their market. And you open sourced some of it and they have containers, I believe. And you need to fight. I can tell you that when we open source, I share with you a small competitor, but I can tell you, I have a friend who has built a billion dollar company and more. When we released Alpha Codium, he sent me a private email asking, what the f**k did you just do? Why did you release that? You should have kept it. Yeah, you released that open source. I'm thinking, build some stuff and now I can do that much more easily. I can tell you my answer and I thought that maybe you'll answer as well. Although I think Bolt is already very promising. For us, Alpha Codium 1 is like GPT 1. I agree with you. Being open and open source, etc. really helps to improve the product community, etc. But at some point, OpenAI closed their GPT 3.5 or whatever. And that was part of my answer. Alpha Codium is the agent that is compatible with GPT 1 and there is a lot to do for these agents to actually get that moment that we had with GPT 3.5, etc. as agents.Eric [00:55:11]: Yeah, I think you're dead right. And I think it just comes back to what GeoHot said. It's like, if you want to win, there's no other option than out hustling everyone else. And so I think that's kind of out hustling in the sense really meaning building the best product, building the best experiences. And so I think that's the only way kind of almost any route and open source and stuff just kind of burns the ships in a sense. And maybe that's the simplest way of saying it. You're burning the ships, but also it builds a lot of goodwill. I mean, there's tons of benefits to it. Salesforce are doing that, right?Itamar [00:55:43]: They're now going to be agent force or whatever. So you can also...Swyx [00:55:47]: We're going to try to get Mark on the podcast. And they're good friends with Salesforce. Any parting thoughts, any trends that you'reItamar [00:55:55]: super excited about? If we're talking about trends, I go back to our original podcast where we talked about the idea that the software world is built from specs, tests, and code. And I think you can see that one dimension are company startups that are rethinking the entire development environment, I think like Bolt, etc. And another dimension is where is their focus? Is it on the spec, is on the test and on the code? And I think it's interesting to see that from that view. We'll see more startup and more amazing announcements of new directions, new philosophy. So I think we'll see startup focusing, let's build everything from the spec. To some extent, I would say that Bolt is, from my understanding, you can say better, somewhere in the line between the spec and the code. Because you start, like I saw your demos, you're trying to describe things, not just in one row, because you want to look like you want it. So it's on that edge between connecting between spec and code. And you see others, I think all the IDEs, most of them are the new IDEs, or the fork are there. We are more focused from the test and to the code and to the spec, etc. So these are trends, I think we will see that. And I think another dimension to consider is, is it more for the highway AI, for the developers, maybe not even a technical person, or is it for the enterprise? And that also gives you different products. If they are aiming for different ICP, different ideal client profile, they will approach this triangle of spec and test and code. And that's how I see the world. And what I'm noticing is that we're seeing more and more of those new startups, new interfaces that are not focused on code. For example, talking more about the spec, talking more about the testing. Eventually, I think that that's where the world is going to. The code is going to be there, and there will be developers, etc. But as agent improves and capabilities of the LLMs and integrations to different parts of the development environment, we're going to see more and more focusing on the spec and the test. Basically, these two might unite, the spec and the test, because you can say that tests are runnable specs, to some extent. So that's another way to look atSwyx [00:58:23]: it. Yeah, that is literally on the slide here, runnable tests, right here. Yeah, I'm consistent.Itamar [00:58:27]: It's all consistent. Look, I talked about system one and system two more than a year ago. And now with O1, people are talking about system one. But I think we'll talk about it again, because I think they're totally, totally wrong about O1 being a system two. It is now in the hype or whatever, talking about that. But I think the agents are the ones that will take us towards system two. And the more they are aware of their environment, and aware of that sometimes they don't know what they don't know, then we'll really get to system two. But that'sSwyx [00:59:03]: a deeper discussion. It's a deeper discussion. I love the philosophy talk that we had last time as well. All right, so we're back on to Bolt, and Itamar had to leave for another interview. But we were just talking about what happened post-launch, right? And I held this emergency council of advisors for you, because we had never seen this before. And I was like, okay, I'm going to call all the smartest people I know to join this thing.Eric [00:59:27]: Which was extremely helpful. And I'm so appreciative. There's been a handful of me.Swyx [00:59:31]: You made one hire out of that.Eric [00:59:34]: Yeah, because it was like, I think I can't remember where we were at kind of ARR-wise when I had messaged you.Swyx [00:59:40]: It was like, you messaged me at like two or three. And then by the time we got everything together, it was four. And then, yeah, now it's at-Alessio [00:59:48]: Since Eric sat down five minutes.Swyx [00:59:52]: But I mean, it sounds like you accelerated, because you told me it was like 100k, 200k a day. And now it's accelerated?Eric [00:59:58]: Yeah, this past- I mean, every week has been kind of a blowout week as far as- Is it TikTok? We're digging into the degree that we can of just like where all this stuff's coming from. I mean, there's a ton of word of mouth, right? So that you can't- which you can't just like look by refer, right? So there's a ton of direct. But yeah, I mean, there's a lot of TikTok. There's a ton of YouTube. It's kind of, I think, been a sensation in the sort of like entrepreneurial, build your own SaaS, indie hacker, even developer circles. And I think, too, our team's been doing a really good job. Our folks just kind of like flipped a switch. And people were just working through the weekends or whatever to get stuff fixed. And so the product- and you'll see people say this online. Like today, there was a tweet. Someone was like, yeah, I tried this like the first week and I couldn't get whatever to work. Came back today, six weeks later, and this is ridiculous. Like this is so good, right? And so I think there's been an incredible amount of improvement to the product, to the agent, also to like the underlying models, too. Like Sonnet, they just happened to do an update with their release a couple of weeks ago. And so when we put our new agent online and the new Sonnet, we saw a huge bump in conversion just based on that. And so yeah, we've gone at that. When we were chatting, that must have been three weeks ago, maybe an average of 100K ARR per day. And this week, I will see- I've said this every week, but we'll see if it holds. The past couple of days have been like half a million of ARR per day, which is insane. I think today we've had peak traffic, just kind of set the previous- and that's kind of been every day this week. But anyways, yeah, I think things just continue to accelerate, which is kind of blowing my mind, because it's just the sheer numbers of this stuff are just mind-boggling.Alessio [01:01:40]: I think you almost suffered from the Twitter demo issues that other people had. The first time I saw Bolt, I saw the demo and I was like, oh, that's cool. I didn't go to try it because I was like, I've seen so many of these that it's like, I don't know if it's actually going to work. And then two days ago, I signed up to use it. I was building a Luma replacement. I'm done with Luma. And I was like, man, this thing really works. And I already knew you, of course. I was like, man, this thing really works. What the f**k? I was like, it's actually, I don't know if it's like the model, if it's like how you prompt it, but it's so good at coming up with the simplest thing to implement. So the Luma example, right? So first I was like, create a RSVP page for an event and it created a wedding RSVP. I don't know if it's your fault. I don't know if you bolted it. And then I was like, well, now it needs to have a way to create more events and added that. And then I was like, now it needs a way to like have an admin page to modify event. And maybe what I would have done as a developer is like, well, I'll create a different like admin view, you know, with all the events and then I'll have like the front end thing. And instead what it did is like, it created like a admin view with toggle on top and then like just a pencil button on every page to edit them in line, you know, and that was it. And I was like, yeah, that works just as well. And like for the model, that's probably the simplest way to do it because it like limits the amount of files that are there. Can you talk just more about how much of this is like the model coming out with it, how much you're prompting it to kind of like be very likeEric [01:03:04]: compressed and concise. A ton of it is the model, but I think what's interesting though, is you're kind of baseline model. If I just like, if it's kind of like try and put it into like a, you know, way, if you had to quantify, quantify, you know, the effect is obviously the model is like this sort of like 10X multiplier. You're how good the bottom line model is huge, huge swing. And then kind of what you can do on top of that, you can squeeze out three, four X kind of more. And so that's kind of where the realm of, you know, prompt engineering and multi-agent approaches, et cetera, kind of kick in. And so I think, I think with us, you know, our folks, like the guy on our side that, you know, led the web engineering, like that kind of our core technology for the past, you know, seven years here, you know, his name is Dominic Elm based out of Germany and he was one of the founding engineers of the company. You had previous to StackBlitz, he actually was doing machine learning and he basically had built a StackBlitz, like online ID for machine learning. So I think like, I kind of like Google Colab sort of thing, or like Hugging Face has their kind of version of this. Back in 2016, it wasn't as much of a market for this stuff, but he had been doing a lot of, you know, training, you know, ML models and that sort of thing. So I guess, you know, as we began, you know, kind of digging into AI stuff over the past year, he's been kind of leading that off. And so a lot of it, I really attribute to Dom's specific angle, cause he has deep understanding of our technology and how it works. Cause he's, you know, led the engineering on web container, but as you know, deep understanding of how these models work going and actually kind of writing out these you know, whether it's like the, the, the prompt engineering aspect of it or multi-agent or whatever, have you, you know, that's sort of like that much context. And, and the, and the other folks on the team are, are, you know, in the same, same sort of spot that have been working on this stuff. I think we'd be able to squeeze out a lot more than I've seen almost anything else out there, at least in the term of building web apps, at least. But I guess I think it's, I think it's kind of just because we we have more context on, on a fewer number of heads at the company. So we can kind of connect the dots of it faster, youSwyx [01:05:01]: know? Yeah. That's part of the issue with the whole raise a billion dollars thing. Like you actually run very lean and that's, that's actually been to your advantage.Eric [01:05:08]: Totally. And I think, you know, and I think we, we have to staff up because I mean, we went from, you know, call it zero customers to, you know, 20, 30,000 kind of, you know, in six weeks, we have to have certainly more customer support, customer success stuff, et cetera. But you know, also just on, on engineering we have to ramp up, but I do think that there's a, we saw this in the 2021 cycle, right? Where, you know, adding tons more people can, can, can be a thing that really hurts, you know, the company because you can, it's just harder. It's really hard to manage lots of people. Not if you're a big enough company to warrant a certain headcount, a 100%, you kind of have to do it. Right. But I think for us, it's worked just to really grow, grow the team slowly and intentionally. And so I think we're going to take the same approach here at a bit of a faster clip than we were previously. But to me, that would just be general advice to startups is like slowly intentionally as fast as you can to meet demand or whatever. Part of what I felt like you're in a unique position toSwyx [01:06:07]: talk about, but also kind of what we went through in our, in our call was I have PMF now, what is, is kind of what I've been saying. And so like, I think the first answer is hire a data scientist because we have to sort of figure out like from our data that you're now sitting on a ton of different customers and we don't really know the different customer segments. You're starting to get an idea of churn. You're starting to get an idea of like segmentation. You already had data enrichment. One of my most interesting quotes from you from that session was that because you were selling to enterprise for so long, you had already set up all that stuff and it's just like, wasn't useful for a more sort of developer bottom up centric approach.Eric [01:06:46]: Yeah. And particularly because for the first time in the company's history, we're selling primarily to almost non-developers. And so everything that we've ever, all the playbooks we had not relevant here basically. Right. So the, and you're one of one of our investors I talked with earlier this week, basically brought up a really great point, which is like, you are now a B2C company and how you operate needs to reflect that.Swyx [01:07:09]: Which is, which is what, I don't know.Eric [01:07:11]: Which is basically from an analytics perspective, like you're tracking everything. Right. And then to your point, you have, you have people kind of around the clock slicing and dicing data to understand who are these people coming in, who are the types of people you actually want to retain versus people that, you know, are just going to churn out. And that's okay. Cause they're not the actual like ICP that you're going for. Right. When you're building stuff for enterprise software, the bar is a lot lower. And then to kind of to, from the conversation before one of the biggest, and this is kind of what we found with StackBlitz, which is kind of interesting, you know, you mentioned it, it's like, it's as a startup, it's very hard to sell on-prem extremely true. But if you can do it, it's like the promised land because you know, these, these companies you know, the fortune 500s, they can write really large checks. And so when you're going and selling to them, it doesn't matter so much like on your website. Sure. You want to track the conversion to the enterprise contact form or whatever. Right. But what, what actually really matters is like the, a lot of human touch points of, Hey, we want to have a quarterly call after just getting installed this stuff. There's a whole playbook for that. And you need to hire sales engineers that can be on the ground floor and helping people install it. Then after that, you got to, okay, how do we make sure they're kind of constantly successful? Because you can't access like we can, our enterprise customer instances, we have no idea how often they're using them. Why? Because the whole point is that we can't see what they're up to for a good reason, right? Like they, they need to own their data. And so the way it's actually much, a very complicated problem of how do you have like build relationships where everyone's getting on calls, they can share kind of the telemetry that, that they can see within their instance. And you can kind of extrapolate that and make sure they're happy and successful. So that's, there's a whole art of that, of doing enterprise well, that we've gone and done and closed these folks totally unrelated to doing BC completely, completely unrelated for the most part. So anyway, so that, so that, you know, we're, as a company, we're, we're kind of reorienting, you know, our focus on, okay, going and actually really leaning in on analytics, whatever have you. And fortunately, like my co-founder and I, the art, the enterprise business of stack was, was the first time we had ever done enterprise primarily like things to the company we did before was B2C. Like we were selling people courses on how to do web development basically. Right. So a lot of the skillset that, you know, I had built up there, I able to pull that back off the shelf, dust it off, sharpen the blade. And, you know, we're doing email marketing, we're doing live streams, you know? So, so that's, it's, it's kind of cool to, you know, be shifting back to some of the, the, the, where we cut our teeth on back in the day.Alessio [01:09:35]: How did you pick the pricing? Because I had to pay.Swyx [01:09:38]: That's fantastic. You want to like slight, slightly like, yeah, you got a bit. It's like,Alessio [01:09:44]: you're running out of tokens, dude. I was like, f**k, I'm running out of tokens. It's like, I don't want to run out of tokens, but there's like five different tiers. Yeah. Right. Which are kind of like token based and capacity based. Yep. How do you kind of reconcile that? And the consumer side where maybe the consumer doesn't even really need to know what a token is, right? Like on that, like your mom probably doesn't really care what an AI token is. How did you structure it to start? How did you come up with that? And then maybe ideas that you have to like improve or like modify that.Eric [01:10:12]: Totally. Yeah. So we, so when we first launched with StackBlitz is like, we were an enterprise play, right? And so when we launched in 2017, I think we tried pricing 2018 or 2019, but like it was free for a long time. And then we had a 9𝑝𝑙𝑎𝑛𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡𝑤𝑎𝑠𝑗𝑢𝑠𝑡𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑤𝑎𝑦𝑖𝑡𝑤𝑎𝑠.𝐼𝑡𝑤𝑎𝑠,𝑖𝑡𝑤𝑎𝑠𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑑𝑜𝑓𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒𝑜𝑢𝑟,𝑜𝑢𝑟𝑑𝑜𝑙𝑙𝑎𝑟50ℎ𝑜𝑡𝑑𝑜𝑔𝑎𝑡𝐶𝑜𝑠𝑡𝑐𝑜.𝐼𝑡′𝑠𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑑𝑜𝑓𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑠,𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑠,𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑘𝑛𝑜𝑤,𝑗𝑢𝑠𝑡𝑙𝑜𝑤𝑝𝑟𝑖𝑐𝑒,𝑗𝑢𝑠𝑡,𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑘𝑛𝑜𝑤,𝑖𝑡,𝑖𝑡𝑤𝑎𝑠𝑛′𝑡𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑝𝑟𝑖𝑚𝑎𝑟𝑦𝑟𝑒𝑣𝑑𝑟𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑤𝑒𝑗𝑢𝑠𝑡𝑤𝑎𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑑𝑡𝑜,𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑘𝑛𝑜𝑤,𝑠𝑎𝑦,𝐻𝑒𝑦,𝑝𝑎𝑦𝑓𝑜𝑟𝑠𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑡𝑜𝑟𝑎𝑔𝑒𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑝𝑟𝑖𝑣𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑝𝑟𝑜𝑗𝑒𝑐𝑡𝑠𝑜𝑟𝑤ℎ𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑟.𝐴𝑛𝑑𝑠𝑜𝑤𝑒𝑤𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑡𝑜𝑙𝑎𝑢𝑛𝑐ℎ𝑏𝑜𝑙𝑡𝑎𝑔𝑎𝑖𝑛,𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒𝑜𝑢𝑟𝑒𝑥𝑝𝑒𝑐𝑡𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑤𝑎𝑠,𝐻𝑒𝑦,𝑤𝑒′𝑙𝑙𝑝𝑟𝑜𝑏𝑎𝑏𝑙𝑦𝑔𝑒𝑡𝑎𝑔𝑜𝑜𝑑𝑛𝑢𝑚𝑏𝑒𝑟𝑜𝑓𝑝𝑒𝑜𝑝𝑙𝑒𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡′𝑙𝑙𝑠𝑖𝑔𝑛𝑢𝑝𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑏𝑒𝑒𝑥𝑐𝑖𝑡𝑒𝑑𝑎𝑏𝑜𝑢𝑡𝑖𝑡.𝐴𝑛𝑑𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑘𝑛𝑜𝑤,𝑤𝑒′𝑟𝑒𝑛𝑜𝑡𝑡𝑜𝑜𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑐𝑒𝑟𝑛𝑒𝑑,𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑘𝑛𝑜𝑤,𝑤𝑒′𝑟𝑒𝑗𝑢𝑠𝑡,𝑤𝑒′𝑟𝑒𝑗𝑢𝑠𝑡𝑛𝑜𝑡,𝑤𝑒𝑤𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑢𝑛𝑝𝑟𝑒𝑝𝑎𝑟𝑒𝑑𝑓𝑜𝑟𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑡𝑠𝑢𝑛𝑎𝑚𝑖𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑡.𝐴𝑛𝑑𝑠𝑜𝑎𝑓𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑔𝑜𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑜𝑛𝑙𝑖𝑛𝑒𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑓𝑖𝑟𝑠𝑡𝑤𝑒𝑒𝑘,𝑤𝑒𝑤𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒,𝑤𝑜𝑤,𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑠𝑖𝑠𝑐𝑜𝑜𝑙.𝑇ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒′𝑠𝑎,𝐼𝑚𝑒𝑎𝑛,𝑖𝑡𝑗𝑢𝑠𝑡𝑘𝑒𝑝𝑡𝑔𝑟𝑜𝑤𝑖𝑛𝑔.𝐴𝑛𝑑𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑛𝑜𝑛𝑐𝑒𝑤𝑒ℎ𝑖𝑡𝑤𝑒𝑒𝑘𝑡𝑤𝑜,𝐼𝑚𝑒𝑎𝑛,𝑤𝑒𝑤𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑗𝑢𝑠𝑡𝑛𝑖𝑛𝑒𝑏𝑢𝑐𝑘𝑠𝑤𝑎𝑠,𝐼𝑚𝑒𝑎𝑛,𝑖𝑡′𝑠𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑐ℎ𝑒𝑎𝑝𝑒𝑠𝑡𝐴𝐼𝑐𝑜𝑑𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑐𝑎𝑛𝑔𝑒𝑡𝑚𝑎𝑦𝑏𝑒𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑛𝑐𝑜𝑝𝑖𝑙𝑜𝑡,𝑏𝑢𝑡𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒𝑤𝑒𝑤𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑟𝑢𝑛𝑏𝑦𝑠𝑢𝑝𝑝𝑜𝑟𝑡𝑡𝑖𝑐𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑠.𝐴𝑛𝑑𝐼𝑗𝑢𝑠𝑡,𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑗𝑢𝑠𝑡𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑠ℎ𝑒𝑒𝑟𝑣𝑜𝑙𝑢𝑚𝑒𝑜𝑓𝑝𝑒𝑜𝑝𝑙𝑒𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑖𝑛𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑖𝑡𝑗𝑢𝑠𝑡𝑙𝑎𝑤𝑠𝑜𝑓𝑠𝑢𝑝𝑝𝑙𝑦𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑑𝑒𝑚𝑎𝑛𝑑.𝑊𝑒𝑤𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒,𝑜𝑘𝑎𝑦,𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑠𝑖𝑠𝑛′𝑡,𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒′𝑠𝑛𝑜𝑤𝑎𝑦𝑤𝑒𝑐𝑎𝑛𝑠𝑐𝑎𝑙𝑒𝑡𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑒𝑡𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑠.𝐴𝑙𝑠𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑝𝑒𝑜𝑝𝑙𝑒𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑖𝑛𝑎𝑟𝑒𝑏𝑢𝑟𝑛𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑡ℎ𝑟𝑜𝑢𝑔ℎ𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑖𝑟𝑡𝑜𝑘𝑒𝑛𝑠𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒′𝑠𝑛𝑜𝑤𝑎𝑦𝑡𝑜𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑢𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑦𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒𝑏𝑢𝑦𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑒𝑜𝑓𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑠𝑒𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑠.𝐴𝑛𝑑𝑛𝑖𝑛𝑒𝑏𝑢𝑐𝑘𝑠𝑖𝑠𝑗𝑢𝑠𝑡,𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑐𝑎𝑛′𝑡𝑔𝑒𝑡𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡𝑚𝑢𝑐ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑓𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑛𝑐𝑒𝑜𝑢𝑡𝑜𝑓𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡.𝐴𝑛𝑑𝑠𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑒,ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒′𝑠𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡′𝑠𝑖𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑎𝑏𝑜𝑢𝑡𝑏𝑜𝑙𝑡𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑝𝑎𝑟𝑒𝑑𝑡𝑜𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒𝑠𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒𝑐𝑜𝑝𝑖𝑙𝑜𝑡𝑜𝑟𝑤ℎ𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑟.𝐴𝑛𝑑𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑠𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑑𝑜𝑓𝑡𝑖𝑒𝑑𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑠,𝑠𝑜𝑟𝑟𝑦,𝑎𝑙𝑖𝑡𝑡𝑙𝑒𝑏𝑖𝑡𝑜𝑓𝑎𝑟𝑜𝑢𝑛𝑑𝑎𝑏𝑜𝑢𝑡𝑤𝑎𝑦𝑡𝑜𝑎𝑛𝑠𝑤𝑒𝑟𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑟𝑞𝑢𝑒𝑠𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛.𝐵𝑢𝑡𝑏𝑎𝑠𝑖𝑐𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑦𝑤ℎ𝑎𝑡𝑤𝑒𝑒𝑛𝑑𝑒𝑑𝑢𝑝𝑎𝑡𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡𝑚𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡,𝑤𝑒𝑒𝑛𝑑𝑒𝑑𝑢𝑝𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑙𝑖𝑧𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑖𝑠𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡𝑤ℎ𝑒𝑛𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑢𝑠𝑒𝑐𝑜𝑝𝑖𝑙𝑜𝑡,𝑤ℎ𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑡′𝑠𝑠𝑒𝑛𝑑𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑢𝑝,𝑖𝑡𝑑𝑜𝑒𝑠𝑛′𝑡𝑝𝑟𝑜𝑣𝑖𝑑𝑒𝑎𝑙𝑜𝑡𝑜𝑓𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑥𝑡𝑜𝑓𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑟𝑐𝑜𝑑𝑒𝑏𝑎𝑠𝑒.𝑇ℎ𝑒𝑦𝑡𝑟𝑦𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑟𝑒𝑑𝑢𝑐𝑒𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑎𝑚𝑜𝑢𝑛𝑡𝑜𝑓𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑥𝑡𝑎𝑠𝑚𝑢𝑐ℎ𝑎𝑠𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑦𝑐𝑎𝑛.𝐴𝑛𝑑𝐼𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑘,𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑘𝑛𝑜𝑤,𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑜𝑟𝑖𝑔𝑖𝑛𝑠𝑜𝑓𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑠𝑠𝑡𝑢𝑓𝑓𝑖𝑠𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑦,𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑦𝑜𝑛𝑒𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑑𝑜𝑓𝑤𝑎𝑛𝑡𝑠𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑠𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒𝑙𝑜𝑤𝑝𝑟𝑖𝑐𝑒𝑝𝑜𝑖𝑛𝑡𝑤ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑖𝑡′𝑠𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑐𝑎𝑛𝑒𝑎𝑡.𝑆𝑜𝑖𝑡𝑗𝑢𝑠𝑡𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑑𝑜𝑓,𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑑𝑜𝑓𝑓𝑒𝑒𝑙𝑠𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒,𝑐𝑎𝑢𝑠𝑒𝑖𝑡′𝑠𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒,𝑖𝑡𝑎𝑙𝑚𝑜𝑠𝑡𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒𝑁𝑒𝑡𝑓𝑙𝑖𝑥,𝑖𝑡′𝑠𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒,𝐼′𝑙𝑙𝑝𝑎𝑦𝑎𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔.𝐴𝑛𝑑𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑛𝐼𝑐𝑎𝑛𝑗𝑢𝑠𝑡𝑑𝑜𝑎𝑠𝑚𝑢𝑐ℎ𝑜𝑓𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑚𝑜𝑣𝑖𝑒𝑤𝑎𝑡𝑐ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑎𝑠𝐼𝑤𝑎𝑛𝑡.𝐴𝑛𝑑𝐼𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑘,𝐼𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡,𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑑𝑜𝑓𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑎𝑙𝑖𝑡𝑦,𝑤ℎ𝑒𝑛𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑠𝑒𝑓𝑖𝑟𝑠𝑡𝐴𝐼𝑝𝑟𝑜𝑑𝑢𝑐𝑡𝑠𝑐𝑎𝑚𝑒,𝑖𝑡𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑑𝑜𝑓𝑚𝑎𝑘𝑒𝑠𝑠𝑒𝑛𝑠𝑒.𝑇ℎ𝑒𝑦′𝑟𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒,𝑜𝑘𝑎𝑦,𝑤𝑒𝑙𝑙𝑤𝑒,𝑤𝑒𝑑𝑜𝑛′𝑡𝑤𝑎𝑛𝑡𝑡𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑖𝑡.𝐶𝑎𝑢𝑠𝑒𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡𝑑𝑜𝑒𝑠𝑛′𝑡𝑓𝑒𝑒𝑙𝑔𝑜𝑜𝑑.𝑅𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡.𝐵𝑢𝑡𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑝𝑟𝑜𝑏𝑙𝑒𝑚𝑖𝑠𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑛𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑦′𝑟𝑒𝑖𝑛𝑐𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑖𝑧𝑒𝑑𝑡𝑜𝑛𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑒𝑖𝑡𝑏𝑒𝑎𝑏𝑙𝑒𝑡𝑜𝑘𝑒𝑒𝑝𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑒𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑥𝑡𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑔𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑖𝑡,𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑒𝑖𝑡𝑐𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑜.𝐴𝑛𝑑𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡′𝑠𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑚𝑎𝑔𝑖𝑐𝑜𝑓𝑤ℎ𝑎𝑡𝑤𝑒′𝑟𝑒𝑑𝑜𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ𝑏𝑜𝑙𝑑𝑖𝑠𝑤𝑒′𝑟𝑒𝑔𝑖𝑣𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑖𝑡𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑥𝑡𝑤𝑒𝑝𝑜𝑠𝑠𝑖𝑏𝑙𝑦𝑐𝑎𝑛.𝐴𝑛𝑑𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡′𝑠𝑤ℎ𝑦𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑐𝑎𝑛𝑔𝑜𝑡𝑜𝑖𝑡𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑠𝑎𝑦,𝑚𝑎𝑘𝑒𝑚𝑒𝑎𝑛𝑅𝑆𝑉𝑃𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑒.𝐴𝑛𝑑𝑖𝑡𝑑𝑜𝑒𝑠𝑛′𝑡𝑏𝑒𝑐𝑎𝑢𝑠𝑒𝑖𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑠𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑥𝑡,𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑜𝑓𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑎𝑝𝑝𝑙𝑖𝑐𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛,𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑘𝑛𝑜𝑤,𝑒𝑡𝑐𝑒𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑎,𝑒𝑡𝑐𝑒𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑎.𝐴𝑛𝑑𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡′𝑠𝑤ℎ𝑎𝑡𝑚𝑎𝑘𝑒𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑠𝑜𝑎𝑐𝑐𝑢𝑟𝑎𝑡𝑒.𝑉𝑒𝑟𝑠𝑢𝑠𝑖𝑓𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑔𝑜𝑡𝑜𝑐𝑜−𝑝𝑖𝑙𝑜𝑡𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑠𝑎𝑦𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑡,𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒′𝑙𝑙𝑏𝑒,𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑘𝑛𝑜𝑤,𝑖𝑡𝑚𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡𝑝𝑢𝑛𝑐ℎ𝑜𝑢𝑡𝑎𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑝𝑜𝑛𝑒𝑛𝑡.𝑇ℎ𝑎𝑡′𝑠𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑏𝑢𝑡𝑡𝑜𝑛𝑡𝑜𝑐𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔,𝑏𝑢𝑡𝑛𝑜𝑡𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑢𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑦𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑒𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑛𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡.𝑆𝑜𝑎𝑛𝑦𝑤𝑎𝑦,𝑠𝑜,𝑢𝑚,𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑘𝑛𝑜𝑤,𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑎𝑡𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑒𝑤ℎ𝑒𝑛𝑝𝑒𝑜𝑝𝑙𝑒ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑒𝑏𝑜𝑢𝑔ℎ𝑡𝑡ℎ𝑒9planandthatwasjustthewayitwas.Itwas,itwaskindoflikeour,ourdollar50hotdogatCostco.It′skindoflikethis,this,youknow,justlowprice,just,youknow,it,itwasn′ttheprimaryrevdriverandwejustwantedto,youknow,say,Hey,payforsomemorestorageandprivateprojectsorwhatever.Andsowewenttolaunchboltagain,likeourexpectationwas,Hey,we′llprobablygetagoodnumberofpeoplethat′llsignupandbeexcitedaboutit.Andyouknow,we′renottooconcerned,youknow,we′rejust,we′rejustnot,wewereunpreparedforthetsunamithathit.Andsoaftergoingonlinethefirstweek,wewerelike,wow,thisiscool.There′sa,Imean,itjustkeptgrowing.Andthenoncewehitweektwo,Imean,wewerejustninebuckswas,Imean,it′slikethecheapestAIcodingthingyoucangetmaybeotherthancopilot,butlikewewereoverrunbysupporttickets.AndIjust,andjustthesheervolumeofpeoplecominginanditjustlawsofsupplyanddemand.Wewerelike,okay,thisisn′t,there′snowaywecanscaletomeetthis.Alsothepeoplecominginareburningthroughtheirtokensandthere′snowaytoactuallylikebuymoreofthesethings.Andninebucksisjust,youcan′tgetthatmuchinferenceoutofthat.Andsothe,here′stheotherthingthat′sinterestingaboutboltcomparedtolikesomethinglikecopilotorwhatever.Andthiskindoftiedthis,sorry,alittlebitofaroundaboutwaytoansweryourquestion.Butbasicallywhatweendedupatthatmoment,weendeduprealizingisthatwhenyouusecopilot,whatit′ssendingup,itdoesn′tprovidealotofcontextofyourcodebase.Theytryandreducetheamountofcontextasmuchastheycan.AndIthink,youknow,theoriginsofthisstuffisthey,everyonekindofwantsthislikelowpricepointwhereit′slikeallyoucaneat.Soitjustkindof,thatkindoffeelslike,causeit′slike,italmostlikeNetflix,it′slike,I′llpayathing.AndthenIcanjustdoasmuchofthemoviewatchingasIwant.AndIthink,Ithinkthat,thatkindofmentality,whenthesefirstAIproductscame,itkindofmakessense.They′relike,okay,wellwe,wedon′twanttometerit.Causethatdoesn′tfeelgood.Right.Buttheproblemisthatthenthey′reincentivizedtonothaveitbeabletokeepthemorecontextyougiveit,themoreitcando.Andthat′sthemagicofwhatwe′redoingwithboldiswe′regivingitallthecontextwepossiblycan.Andthat′swhyyoucangotoitandsay,makemeanRSVPsite.Anditdoesn′tbecauseithascontext,theentirestateoftheapplication,youknow,etcetera,etcetera.Andthat′swhatmakesitsoaccurate.Versusifyougotoco−pilotandsaythatit,there′llbe,youknow,itmightpunchoutareactcomponent.That′sthebuttontocreatethething,butnotactuallymorethanthat.Soanyway,so,um,youknow,andatthetimewhenpeoplehaveboughtthe9 plan, they were like, I want to give you more money. I want you to buy more tokens. How do I do that? And so our team scrambled that weekend, we just turned it around and just, you know, we said, okay, well, what do we think is reasonable? And we said, okay, so let's go, you immediately double the prices of the, of the base tier, because it's just not enough what people are getting on for nine bucks. So that'll be, that seems reasonable. It's kind of in line with everyone else. And then we added 50, 100 and $200 plans. Cause we're like, that should be enough. And so, yeah, so that, that's kind of the origins of it. And, and, um, it was, it was people that use it, fall in love with that and they want to use more of it. And the problem is the inference is expensive. And so we're not actually taking, you know, to date on the, on the revenue we've done, we have not really taken a margin at all on this stuff. Cause we're just trying to put all the value back into the folks that are there using the tool and just getting the maximum amount of value out of it. But it's really key to the kind of the magic of the experience. And so the other, the other thing kind of worth mentioning is there's kind of the ARR number, but then we, you can also buy additional tokens, you know, just with usage-based billing effectively. And that's accounting for an additional 20, 30% of, of revenue that's coming to the company. People are actually using this to do their jobs. Like, you think, think about a web development agency before this thing, they're going in using Figma to make a design. They have to pay the designer. They have to like punch that out into code, kind of man. And maybe like co-pilot can help a little bit with punching out this thing that they're coming to this thing. And there's just wild stories online where it's like guy bake, local bakeries, like we need a website. He's like, okay, well, I'm going to charge you a thousand bucks. They're like, okay, that sounds great. Reasonable price. 30 minutes later, he's like, here's a deploy preview of your thing. How does that look? They're like, wow, holy crap. I'm not giving you a thousand bucks. But they did, they were, they were, they were like, this usually takes months, you know? So some of the biggest power users are people that build websites for a living because this is the, the alpha on this is insane.Alessio [01:14:26]: That's almost like the gap, right? It's like, it used to be that if I ask you before this to do a website and in 30 minutes you return to me and you give me something, I'm like, you know, you're probably just copying something else you've done before, you know, versus now it's almost like, it doesn't really matter how much time it takes you because everybody's going to be so fast with these things. It's more like the value. And that's why when you're pricing TRL, it was almost like, there's only really going to be like either 20𝑎𝑚𝑜𝑛𝑡ℎ𝑢𝑠𝑒𝑟𝑠𝑜𝑟𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒𝑎𝑡ℎ𝑜𝑢𝑠𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑑𝑜𝑙𝑙𝑎𝑟𝑠𝑎𝑚𝑜𝑛𝑡ℎ𝑢𝑠𝑒𝑟𝑠.𝑌𝑜𝑢𝑘𝑛𝑜𝑤,𝑖𝑡′𝑠𝑎𝑙𝑚𝑜𝑠𝑡𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒𝑤ℎ𝑜′𝑠𝑔𝑜𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑡𝑜𝑢𝑠𝑒𝑡ℎ𝑒20amonthusersorlikeathousanddollarsamonthusers.Youknow,it′salmostlikewho′sgoingtousethe50 a month because it's kind of like in between, between being infrequent user and being like a power user, you know? So yeah, it makes sense that you have like a big part of like on demandEric [01:15:05]: on top of that. Yeah. And on the 50, there's actually a lot of people on the one. I think it's because it's like enough to actually like for developers are using this to just kind of like punch out components or designs or whatever, kind of gets them enough for, you know, kind of in a given month or whatever. And so it's been interesting to just kind of see the, the, you know, the, the upgrades that happen, but what's been kind of cool about the product is it's, and again, I think this is kind of novel and this is, you know, us being maybe a little more transparent than we should be or something, but like, I suspect we're just, I think we're going to see a lot more of this because we're hitting an inflection point coming back to the co-pilot thing. Part of the problem before is that it didn't matter if you provided more context, the models just weren't good enough to know what to even do with it. That's not the case now. You know, just one, one, you know, story of like one of the first people, one of the power, first power users that adopted Bolt was this gal in Thailand who's a PM at a software banking company. And she had an idea for this app called viralhooks.ai, which is basically, it's a tool that if you want to make viral TikToks and stuff, it's like, what's the hook of the video to make people watch. Right. And so basically she, you know, you can go and like, see, it goes and extracts hooks from other people's videos and helps you with like, you know, AI to write your own. And she had originally put the week before Bolt launched, she put that on Upwork and you know, some, I think a developer in like Ukraine had quoted her, you know, 5,000.𝐴𝑛𝑑𝑖𝑡′𝑠𝑔𝑜𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑡𝑜𝑡𝑎𝑘𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒𝑡ℎ𝑟𝑒𝑒𝑚𝑜𝑛𝑡ℎ𝑠𝑜𝑟𝑠𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡.𝑅𝑒𝑎𝑠𝑜𝑛𝑎𝑏𝑙𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑒𝑓𝑟𝑎𝑚𝑒,𝑟𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡.𝐹𝑜𝑟𝑎𝑛𝑎𝑝𝑝𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡,𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑠𝑜𝑛𝑎𝑏𝑙𝑒𝑝𝑟𝑖𝑐𝑒.𝑇ℎ𝑒𝑤𝑒𝑒𝑘𝑎𝑓𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡𝐵𝑜𝑙𝑡𝑐𝑎𝑚𝑒𝑜𝑢𝑡,𝑠ℎ𝑒𝑏𝑜𝑢𝑔ℎ𝑡𝑡ℎ𝑒5,000.Andit′sgoingtotakelikethreemonthsorsomethinglikethat.Reasonabletimeframe,right.Foranapplikethat,reasonableprice.TheweekafterthatBoltcameout,sheboughtthe50 plan and she had the app built within a week or two. And so you're talking about like, that's it. And it's beautiful. She did an incredible job. Right. And so the numbers are wild. 5,000,𝑡ℎ𝑟𝑒𝑒𝑚𝑜𝑛𝑡ℎ𝑠𝑡𝑜5,000,threemonthsto50 and like a week. Yeah. You got to charge more. So it's, it's kind of like, so there's, there's people like when we've had a lot of people go, this pricing is insane. And we're like, well, we're not even taking really a margin at the moment on it, you know, but also, but when you, when you compare that to the price of actually going and building the cost of building quality software today, anyone who knows the price of building quality software, the alpha is obvious, right? It's a 99% cost production and five X faster, you know, delivery time, you know? So anyway, so that's, I think we're one of the first products that have actually come out kind of proving that, you know, in, in, in a revenue way to kind of underscore the point, as you can imagine, we've had, you know, kind of venture capital firms kind of reach out and kind of, you know, curious to kind of, you know, what we're up to or whatever. And so, you know, one of the most, you know, there's kind of one of the, the most notable ones or whatever reached out. So we kind of sent them, you know, you know, kind of our numbers. Actually it was the investor update, Sean, that, that I think you, you know, the, you know, the one you saw kind of gave him a snapshot of it. And they one of their analysts accidentally replied all on what we had sent them and with, with the analysis. And so on this part there, you know, one of the things they said was we haven't seen anything that's kind of eyeopening to see people going to $200 tier on this sort of thing. Haven't seen anything else like that in the space. Cause I think this is very new because of the new model capabilities, right? Where people, you know, it makes sense. Like you're willing to pay more money for this stuff. So. This is something I've talked about before in terms of matchingSwyx [01:18:11]: the dollar amount of spend to the capabilities of the AIs. The chart that I published in the past was, you know, OpenAI has like five levels of AGI-ness and level, level one is sort of like a chatbots, level two is reasoning, level three is agents, four is organizations, five is some, something super, super human. I don't remember what the exact levels are, but each, you can sort of each match each of them with like tiers. Like 20𝑖𝑠𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑐ℎ𝑎𝑡𝐺𝐵𝑇𝑡𝑖𝑒𝑟.20islikethechatGBTtier.200 is where you're at. 2,000𝑖𝑠ℎ𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑒𝑟,2,000ishigher,20,000, $200,000, right? Like you can see levels where it makes sense. I think BrightWave is also there, by the way. Like I don't know what BrightWave charges, but it's higher, right? Than a chatGBT. And like, you have to deliver more value for that, but you, you can do it now. Yep. So then why not? Everyone should do it.Eric [01:18:58]: I think we're going to see a lot more of this. I think we're going to see, I think, you know, for AI, Cogen specifically, this is the first moment where I think that there's been that moment where it goes from zero to one, where it's like, yep. The price point, you know, the value, the value is so, like what you can get out of these things is so much higher than it was, you know, three, six months ago that I think we're going to see, I think we're going to see a lot more of this. Like we might, you know, Bolt is, I think one of the first things, but yeah, I mean, it's just, to me, it's inevitable that we're going to see many more things kind of leveraging this, this sort of use case and the amount of efficiency you can get out of usingAlessio [01:19:38]: these systems. Right. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because I mean, the Bolt arbitrage would be quote the price based on the query, you know, you're selling high value tokens. Yeah. It's like, Hey, it's like your mom is like, you wouldn't charge your mom $2,000 to tell her stories, but like, you know, this person doing an app and like a product on it. Yeah. You got to pay more, you know, but it's hard right now. I understand. It's like, it's really hard to figure out how much you can push it, how much value the person will get outSwyx [01:20:04]: of the thing. Yeah. So I want to riff a little bit on like stuff like this, right? I think you nailed a lot with the design system. You know, one of the differences between open source Bolt and the one that you have is actually like you, you spend a lot of time on the design system. I think, right. Most things just look great when they come out, but I think there's also a whole backend portion that they need. Was that a challenge? Is there anything that you sort of like figuring out that you want to riff on? Yeah. So I think one of the main things,Eric [01:20:28]: I think you hit the nail on the head, which is, you know, kind of going into putting Bolt online. We originally, again, we've been selling to developers and so we were kind of like, this is a tool for prototyping and they'll download their code. But we ended up finding in the early user testing was how important the deployment story was and how, and this is something you said to me specifically, you're like backend, this needs to like backend needs to be part of this, like logging in, like off just to triple confirm you're dead right. That has been the absolute number one thing that folks coming to Bolt, you know, are looking to do is build a real app with a backend, with billing. And so one of this guy, Mauricio, he's one of our power users. He's like, there's three things that like every app that I'll ever want to build in Bolt, any of these other people in this community, you know, three things, a database, auth, and payments. So those three things, right. So that's- Admin dashboard. We can do that pretty decently, pretty decently. As in every database needs a WP admin. Yes. Yes. Correct. Totally. Totally. And so, yeah, today I think like viral hooks, for example, I think she's using Firebase for auth and database and that sort of thing. You know, so I think Firebase and Superbase, those are the two things that, that just work incredibly well. And so that's actually the point where we're at now, where, you know, right now it's, you know, folks have to still, you know, kind of go to Superbase, manually spin up a thing, come back to Bolt, but the thing that, you know, it's like that sort of processing thing with Firebase, each of those products are going to have their own little quirks that you have to, there's like kind of steps, right. And so- Boltbase. Yeah. Boltbase. Yeah. I think, yeah, I think initially we're like, okay, there should just be a way to like, for Bolt to just go and spin up these things on their behalf and just, and just, you know, both of them have APIs to do so. I'll go even further, like have like pre-warmSwyx [01:22:12]: instances that you just assign, like it's already spun up, right. So it's, so it's like kind of serverless feeling, even as like, not really, but like yeah, just pre-warm and then just kind of assign it when, whenever someone like- That's a really great point. Yeah. Just keep, keep oneEric [01:22:26]: Firebase in the hopper, basically. One, 10, 100, I don't know. More generally, this is what I feltSwyx [01:22:32]: that I wanted to do on our call, which is like, when you have PMF, yes, you want to invest some time in like understanding your customers and do a data analytics and like tighten, tighten things up in general, like tighten up the pricing, tighten up the cost and all that. But then like, you also have to work on like, what is next, like the next level and growth, like you can still inflect. Yeah. I don't know what that is, but you know, I wanted to, I wanted to keep pushing you and I don't know if I did, mostly because I was serving as facilitator on that call. That's what I think. Like, I think you got to still keep pushing the frontier and I don't know what it, what it is, but like, you know, I want to hear what you got thinking about.Eric [01:23:07]: I think there's, you know, we've addressed just a lot of the low hanging P0 stuff then, and we've actually seen, we've kind of the, you know, there's, there's key moments where it's just kind of like been going like that, which has been cool. Cause it's like, okay, well we were, we're just getting started. This is just the, this is just the fixing obvious things part. Fundamentally, I think a lot, what a lot of people are coming here to do is just, how can we just make it faster to go from idea to production? And a lot of it is like, I had, when I have to go to Firebase, Superbase, spin something up, run a migrate, you know, like add a table, but it's like the agent can do that, you know, so that stuff should be baked in. Yeah. And same thing with the deployment side. It's like right now it's going to Netlify, but people have to create a Netlify account and go and do that. Right. And so I think one of the things we're going to end up doing here is just having the hosting be baked in. And so I've been talking with Matt over at Netlify about this, cause they actually have a way to kind of white label stuff. And so, cause people are, they're just going to make a website, you know? And so it's I mean, that means also you take over domain registration. Can you imagine, right? Like a couple of months from now, you come to this thing, you're like, I want to make, I want to make an RSVP site. Right. And it's like, great. Do you, you know, do you have a name for it? Or do you want to, you know, a domain? You're like, I don't know a name. It's like, well, here's like 10 options and the.coms are able to look good. Yep. That one does. Okay. We want to buy it. Okay, great. It bought the DNS is pointed at the thing. Should we start building this? Okay. Does this look good? Yep. Okay. Am I okay to push this to prod? Yep. That looks good. You know, like that's without leaving the product.Swyx [01:24:31]: Right. So to me, like it's tomorrow was the first to actually say like you are the new Wix. I never, I personally never thought about it that way. Wix is a $10 billion company where you want to go, you know, cause you still have a choice here. From what we're hearing from the folks usingEric [01:24:43]: the product, I think I don't even think Wix is even able to solve their need, you know? But not to say that we don't want to, you know, that, that what you're saying is now we want, but, but I mean, yeah, like I think we want to solve folks problems. And I think that there's a huge gap in the market of being able to build, you know, kind of more sophisticated, high quality software like websites in a way that for someone who's a non-engineer. And so I think there's a huge market for that. And obviously, even if you're trying to build a wedding website, yeah, this is, this is easier and faster. Right. So I love it. I, you know, again, coming to the origins of why Albert, my co-founder and I are doing this is we've always just loved building stuff on the web. It's like this, I, this is the tool from what, even when stack was just the IDE interface to the technology, it's like, this is the thing we wish we had when we were 13 years old, you know? And with Bolt, oh my God, if this is the thing I wish we had when we were 13 years old, I'm so glad that my daughter's going to have this thing, you know? So anyways, yeah, I think it makes me pretty, pretty stoked that people are going to be able to actually build amazing web applications that can do really sophisticated things, you know? So yes, I think the short answer is heck yeah. I mean, yeah, that sort of market and totally right up our alley. One other angle that I wanted to pursue wasSwyx [01:25:53]: also the other languages. You know, you're very JavaScript centric. We've talked about Python forever. Ruby maybe, is that important? You know, like the previous generation of site builders were mostly Ruby shops and some PHP. Do we want to capture that or are we just like, you know, always been on JavaScript and just let JavaScript take over the world? You know, I think, I thinkEric [01:26:14]: we're, we're, we're certainly with great interest interested in other languages and we have like minimal support of Python and some C++ stuff in web container that you can like run or whatever. I think especially with the, with the stuff we're seeing though, it's the languages is kind of ancillary to the, to the, to the thing. Well, there's the ecosystem of like,Swyx [01:26:31]: I want to end up with a code base that I can hire humans on to do the stuff that Bolt cannot do.Eric [01:26:36]: Yeah, true. And I think, I think in that sense, like the, the, the JavaScript Node.js ecosystem is huge and well-established. So it's like, I think it'd be certainly be able to get people to work on this stuff. And I think the only thing that would be missing is it's like, are you building web apps that where a lot of the functionality is only in libraries that are in Python or something. Right. And I think just kind of seeing the applications that are being built here at, you know, I think that'd be like data science and like ML and that sort of thing. And so that's, we're not seeing a lot of that stuff, you know? And then, but I think that's like, we're like kind of a more generic approach is like what Repl.it's doing where they're spinning up real VMs. You can kind of run anything. And I think they started off with like doing Python service. I actually haven't tried their, their, you know, their new agent stuff that's based on.Swyx [01:27:15]: Repl.it agent. Yeah. We're close friends. Repl.it has the database, the sort of live hosting, everything integrated that you're going to want to build. And you're, I think you're on a collision course with them, to be honest.Eric [01:27:29]: We'll see. Cause I'm curious, you're not the first person to say that. I'm curious to see how it shakes out. Cause I think the challenge is focus. You know, when you are, what's kind of the end goal that you're shooting? Yeah, Repl.it's firmly for developers.Swyx [01:27:45]: You're positioning it for non-developers like that. That's legit.Eric [01:27:48]: Yeah. And even getting, even if focusing on a language or an ecosystem as well, because again, the problem is that these things can just break in a million ways. And so part of the, a lot of the work in making the experience better, like how do you get, like how make it, someone get an idea into the fingertips and live on prod, right? There's so much stuff in between there. And a lot of it is just errors that happen and how do you handle those? And a lot of that comes down to having a giant database of common errors that you can maybe even fine tune stuff on at some point, right? So doing that on, on one ecosystem, you can move a lot faster than if you're trying to support a lot of different languages. However, it's a, to the point of, if you're kind of targeting developers, they may not need that level of kind of streamline, you know, thing. I think that's kind of where I see the main divergence is that we are unabashedly focused on this ecosystem of, for building web apps. Got it. Yeah. You support it forever. Yeah. And so I'm very curious to see how, just how it all shakes out. Cause it's, I think what they're doing is actually, I mean, I'm very curious to see what Microsoft does because if anyone is good at giving out VMs, tying it to a coder and putting AI in it, it's Sia. He's got a cloud. He's got VS code. They've got code spaces. They've they're in open AI. Now they've got Anthropic and Copilot. I mean, I must imagine, I must imagine that they're cooking stuff overSwyx [01:29:06]: there, you know? We'll make sure to ask him. We have many friends from Microsoft listening to theAlessio [01:29:11]: pod. So just to wrap, I don't know, is there anything else Bolt related? I just have one personal question before we wrap the pod. Maybe like just advice, like now that you'veSwyx [01:29:20]: been through this journey, right? Advice to your former self. Oh, okay. Yeah. At which point? Advice yourself, like thinking about, there are many founders out there with a business where they're like, they're working really hard at it. It's interesting, but it's not an AI business. Yeah. And you kind of took the plunge to invest in this and it worked out for you. Maybe a lot of people are like, okay, like, you know, this guy got lucky. Obviously there's a little bit of luck in everything, but like, how do you improve your chances? Like, would you say, go for it? Would you say everyone should go for it? How would you advise someone who was in your shoes and thinking about, you know, maybe I should have a second product. Maybe I should take this, this experiment or maybe it doesn't work out. Like what is, what's the calculus here?Eric [01:30:01]: Yeah. We were deeply skeptical going. I remember the conversation you and I had, you know, I was like this, I think there's something here. At that point we had built some amount, but I had waited a long time to give you the call. I said, this is your moment. Well, it was. So I remember specifically at the beginning of the conversation with Sean, he and I sat down at a coffee shop and, and, and SF, and, and so I was kind of giving him the pitch of like, you know, I think we have, I think that I can't remember the exact framing. I said, but it's, it's, it was obvious that Sean had heard a lot of people say this exact thing to him over the past year or two, which is like, Hey man, we've gotten AI play. Like this is our thing plus AI equals this, this could be crazy. And Sean, I get, you gave me this like skeptical look and then, and I was like, I really think so. And kind of here's why. Right. And and I think, I think that's, it's actually, I think it's, that is internally having, being skeptical of just kind of going and jumping on hype trains is, is good. Cause it's like, I think you, you know, your focus and your time and what you're putting your weight into is the most important thing when you're a founder. I think for us, like we actually, again, like I had mentioned at the beginning of this, you know, we had tried bold and didn't see the results and that was like a two week sprint and we rolled it back. Right. This, this isn't viable at this point, but then when, you know, once we, once we saw real tangible results of, you know, some of the new stuff, right. Okay. That, that changes. Thanks. And I think a lot of it is, is two is going and finding that out for yourself and then going and talking to the smartest people, you know, with more domain knowledge on that stuff than you have and going, here's kind of what we found. Does this track? So when Sean and I met and he, and he, and you know, we keep, he and I kind of, he saw it, we talked through it and he said, this is your moment. I specifically remember that. Cause I, I walked away from that and I was like, holy s**t, this, this is it. Like this, you know, like Sean's Sean's at the intersection of web and AI and as like, it, you know, has one of the best perspectives on this stuff of, of anyone I know that put a huge wind in our sales, honestly, of just like, okay, let's, let's go and really, let's go and double down here because you know, we had conviction before, but having someone who's in the space independently kind of verify meant a lot, you know, so it makes me uncomfortable, but thank you. I get it. I mean, and I waited, I waited until I was pretty darn sure it was not going to be a waste of time toAlessio [01:32:12]: cool. Well, that's all I have. Yeah. And then on the personal side, you had a baby in April, you ran an Ironman in October. Now it's November.Swyx [01:32:20]: He did Ironman while launching ball. I was trying to schedule the call for him and he was like, Nope, I'm sorry. I'm swimming. I was like, Hey, I'm on the swimming session. For those who don't know, actually, I did not know. I don't even know the distance of an Ironman. 13 hours. Your time was 12, 12, 12, 12, 15, 12, 15.Eric [01:32:41]: Give me my minutes. No, no, I, it's, it can, it can completely depends on, you know, the course and just the, the, the person or whatever, right. And, but yeah, I mean, it's,Swyx [01:32:51]: it's 2.4 cam open water, 2.4 mile open water swim, a hundred KM, a hundred mile, a hundred KMEric [01:32:58]: cycle. I think it's like, I think it's 112 mile a bike and then marathon. Yeah. Full 26.2 mile marathon. Yeah. It was why. Yeah. And you weren't, you were not like a super endurance athlete before, right? Like let's like make this clear. Yeah. Kind of a wild, a wild thing. So I, you know, back when I did, we, we had our daughter in April and at that time we were, the future of the company was, you know, we're, we're figuring out what are we going to do here at that time. It was, it was pro just prior to bolt kind of getting kicked into, you know, the rebirth of it with the new models and stuff. And so I knew that it was going to be, you know, having, having a child is, you know, if you talk to anyone that's done that you're, you don't have a lot of sleep. It's it's, you know, there's a lot of, you know, to, to, to be a great parent is, is a ton of work. And then also being a startup CEO where there's a lot of uncertainty or whatever the way I've always found, like when I have to go and you kind of knock it out of the park and all aspects of my life is, is going, yeah, just to, to make it all aspects of my life. And so I was, I just won. Yeah. I woke up one day, I was like, all right, I'm going to do an Ironman this year and I burned the ships, bought the, it's cost a thousand bucks to do. These didn't know that. And, you know, just started, I'd never ran a marathon at that point. And so I think it was like 45 or 60 days after that, I ran a marathon. My brother-in-law, he's, that was even more insane two weeks before the marathon. I was like, Hey, you want to run a marathon in two weeks? He's like, sure. And, and just did it with me. He did not an endurance athlete either. Right. But anyway, so yeah, so I was training, ended up getting a coach who's usually go, you're kind of online. He's up in Marin. Great guy was on the U S Olympic team for triathlons. And when I told him, okay, I'm going to, I'm doing Ironman, California in three months, he was like, are you insane? You know, like, what are you, you know, you'd ask for my opinion, but like, I just want you to know, I don't think this is a good idea. I think, you know, like you shouldn't do this, et cetera. And I ended up doing it, you know, I ended up getting it done. And so he was like, okay, like that's pretty bad. But what makes you, what makes you ignore expert advice here? LikeSwyx [01:34:59]: most sane people would be, would be like, okay, I mean, you know what you're doing? Like,Eric [01:35:03]: I'll maybe wait a year. I think, and this is, this is kind of the, and the being a founder, right. It's, it's all about like, if you, like I mentioned earlier, it's like when we talk to people that worked on browser engines, they're like, you can't, you can't build what you're talking about. I think the job of a founder is, is to, is to solicit that advice. And, and what my coach actually said, he was right about certain things. There are certain areas where I was under indexed on, like, I was not, you know, spending nearly enough time on my bike, for example. Like after that, I was on my bike six hours a day on the weekends. That's a lot of time to spend in the saddle. Just like, just kind of, you know, and that was like, you know, for a couple of months leading up to it, he was right on, on certain aspects of it. And, but I kind of had to look internally and go, okay, like, what is he kind of missing about who I am and like, what I kind of know I'm capable of at this point. I mean, it was a nail biter. I mean, going into the thing, you know, it's, you get in, this is the same thing with launching bolt. It's like, or, or launching anything you get launch day, race day, you kind of go in, you're like, all right, here we go. Like we're going to, we're going to find out, we're going to find out, you know, how based in reality I was about all the decisions that led to this moment. And so I was going and doing the Ironman in like six months. Most people spend, you know, the, the folks he trains, usually it's, you know, one to two years on this stuff before you do try and do a full, you know, it's like going and kind of doing in that sort of timeframe. It's, it's, it's very similar to the same sort of skill set of going and building products. You have to really kind of look at the base reality and go make your own assessment onAlessio [01:36:24]: it. Right. So cool. Great. Sorry to wrap. Thank you so much here. Thanks for your time. Get full access to Latent Space at www.latent.space/subscribe

We have announced our first speaker, friend of the show Dylan Patel, and topic slates for Latent Space LIVE! at NeurIPS. Sign up for IRL/Livestream and to debate!We are still taking questions for our next big recap episode! Submit questions and messages on Speakpipe here for a chance to appear on the show!The vibe shift we observed in July - in favor of Claude 3.5 Sonnet, first introduced in June — has been remarkably long lived and persistent, surviving multiple subsequent updates of 4o, o1 and Gemini versions, for Anthropic’s Claude to end 2024 as the preferred model for AI Engineers and even being the exclusive choice for new code agents like bolt.new (our next guest on the pod!), which unlocked so much performance from Claude Sonnet that it went from $0 to $4m ARR in 4 weeks when it launched last month.Anthropic has now raised an additional $4b from Amazon and made an incredibly well received update of Claude 3.5 Sonnet (and Haiku), making significant improvements in performance over its predecessors:Solving SWE-BenchAs part of the October Sonnet release, Anthropic teased a blink-and-you’ll miss it result:The updated Claude 3.5 Sonnet shows wide-ranging improvements on industry benchmarks, with particularly strong gains in agentic coding and tool use tasks. On coding, it improves performance on SWE-bench Verified from 33.4% to 49.0%, scoring higher than all publicly available models—including reasoning models like OpenAI o1-preview and specialized systems designed for agentic coding. It also improves performance on TAU-bench, an agentic tool use task, from 62.6% to 69.2% in the retail domain, and from 36.0% to 46.0% in the more challenging airline domain. The new Claude 3.5 Sonnet offers these advancements at the same price and speed as its predecessor.This was followed up by a blogpost a week later from today’s guest, Erik Schluntz, the engineer who implemented and scored this SOTA result using a simple, non-overengineered version of the SWE-Agent framework (you can see the submissions here). We have previously covered the SWE-Bench story extensively:* Speaking with SWEBench/SWEAgent authors at ICLR* Speaking with Cosine Genie, the previous SOTA (43.8%) on SWEBench Verified (with brief update at DevDay 2024)* Speaking with Shunyu Yao on SWEBench and the ReAct paradigm driving SWE-AgentOne of the notable inclusions in this blogpost are the tools that Erik decided to give Claude, e.g. the “Edit Tool”:The tools teased in the SWEBench submission/blogpost were then polished up and released with Computer Use…And you can also see even more computer use tools given in the new Model Context Protocol servers:Claude Computer UseBecause it is one of the best received AI releases of the year, we recommend watching the 2 minute Computer Use intro (and related demos) in its entirety:Eric also worked on Claude’s function calling, tool use, and computer use APIs, so we discuss that in the episode.Erik [00:53:39]: With computer use, just give the thing a browser that's logged into what you want to integrate with, and it's going to work immediately. And I see that reduction in friction as being incredibly exciting. Imagine a customer support team where, okay, hey, you got this customer support bot, but you need to go integrate it with all these things. And you don't have any engineers on your customer support team. But if you can just give the thing a browser that's logged into your systems that you need it to have access to, now, suddenly, in one day, you could be up and rolling with a fully integrated customer service bot that could go do all the actions you care about. So I think that's the most exciting thing for me about computer use, is reducing that friction of integrations to almost zero.As you’ll see, this is very top of mind for Erik as a former Robotics founder who’s company basically used robots to interface with human physical systems like elevators.Full Video episodePlease like and subscribe!Show Notes* Eric Schluntz* “Raising the bar on SWE-Bench Verified”* Cobalt Robotics* SWE-Bench* SWE-Bench Verified* Human Eval & other benchmarks* Anthropic Workbench* Aider* Cursor* Fireworks AI* E2B* Amanda Askell* Toyota Research* Physical Intelligence (Pi)* Chelsea Finn* Josh Albrecht* Eric Jang* 1X* Dust* Cosine Episode* Bolt* Adept Episode* TauBench* LMSys EpisodeTimestamps* [00:00:00] Introductions* [00:03:39] What is SWE-Bench?* [00:12:22] SWE-Bench vs HumanEval vs others* [00:15:21] SWE-Agent architecture and runtime* [00:21:18] Do you need code indexing?* [00:24:50] Giving the agent tools* [00:27:47] Sandboxing for coding agents* [00:29:16] Why not write tests?* [00:30:31] Redesigning engineering tools for LLMs* [00:35:53] Multi-agent systems* [00:37:52] Why XML so good?* [00:42:57] Thoughts on agent frameworks* [00:45:12] How many turns can an agent do?* [00:47:12] Using multiple model types* [00:51:40] Computer use and agent use cases* [00:59:04] State of AI robotics* [01:04:24] Robotics in manufacturing* [01:05:01] Hardware challenges in robotics* [01:09:21] Is self-driving a good business?TranscriptAlessio [00:00:00]: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO at Decibel Partners. And today we're in the new studio with my usual co-host, Shawn from Smol AI.Swyx [00:00:14]: Hey, and today we're very blessed to have Erik Schluntz from Anthropic with us. Welcome.Erik [00:00:19]: Hi, thanks very much. I'm Erik Schluntz. I'm a member of technical staff at Anthropic, working on tool use, computer use, and Swebench.Swyx [00:00:27]: Yeah. Well, how did you get into just the whole AI journey? I think you spent some time at SpaceX as well? Yeah. And robotics. Yeah. There's a lot of overlap between like the robotics people and the AI people, and maybe like there's some interlap or interest between language models for robots right now. Maybe just a little bit of background on how you got to where you are. Yeah, sure.Erik [00:00:50]: I was at SpaceX a long time ago, but before joining Anthropic, I was the CTO and co-founder of Cobalt Robotics. We built security and inspection robots. These are sort of five foot tall robots that would patrol through an office building or a warehouse looking for anything out of the ordinary. Very friendly, no tasers or anything. We would just sort of call a remote operator if we saw anything. We have about 100 of those out in the world, and had a team of about 100. We actually got acquired about six months ago, but I had left Cobalt about a year ago now, because I was starting to get a lot more excited about AI. I had been writing a lot of my code with things like Copilot, and I was like, wow, this is actually really cool. If you had told me 10 years ago that AI would be writing a lot of my code, I would say, hey, I think that's AGI. And so I kind of realized that we had passed this level, like, wow, this is actually really useful for engineering work. That got me a lot more excited about AI and learning about large language models. So I ended up taking a sabbatical and then doing a lot of reading and research myself and decided, hey, I want to go be at the core of this and joined Anthropic.Alessio [00:01:53]: And why Anthropic? Did you consider other labs? Did you consider maybe some of the robotics companies?Erik [00:02:00]: So I think at the time I was a little burnt out of robotics, and so also for the rest of this, any sort of negative things I say about robotics or hardware is coming from a place of burnout, and I reserve my right to change my opinion in a few years. Yeah, I looked around, but ultimately I knew a lot of people that I really trusted and I thought were incredibly smart at Anthropic, and I think that was the big deciding factor to come there. I was like, hey, this team's amazing. They're not just brilliant, but sort of like the most nice and kind people that I know, and so I just felt like I could be a really good culture fit. And ultimately, I do care a lot about AI safety and making sure that I don't want to build something that's used for bad purposes, and I felt like the best chance of that was joining Anthropic.Alessio [00:02:39]: And from the outside, these labs kind of look like huge organizations that have these obscureSwyx [00:02:44]: ways to organize.Alessio [00:02:45]: How did you get, you joined Anthropic, did you already know you were going to work on of the stuff you publish or you kind of join and then you figure out where you land? I think people are always curious to learn more.Erik [00:02:57]: Yeah, I've been very happy that Anthropic is very bottoms up and sort of very sort of receptive to whatever your interests are. And so I joined sort of being very transparent of like, hey, I'm most excited about code generation and AI that can actually go out and sort of touch the world or sort of help people build things. And, you know, those weren't my initial initial projects. I also came in and said, hey, I want to do the most valuable possible thing for this company and help Anthropic succeed. And, you know, like, let me find the balance of those. So I was working on lots of things at the beginning, you know, function calling, tool use. And then sort of as it became more and more relevant, I was like, oh, hey, like, let's it's time to go work on encoding agents and sort of started looking at SWE-Bench as sort of a really good benchmark for that.Swyx [00:03:39]: So let's get right into SWE-Bench. That's one of the many claims to fame. I feel like there's just been a series of releases related with Cloud 3.5 Sonnet around about two or three months ago, 3.5 Sonnet came out and it was it was a step ahead in terms of a lot of people immediately fell in love with it for coding. And then last month you released a new updated version of Cloud Sonnet. We're not going to talk about the training for that because that's still confidential. But I think Anthropic's done a really good job, like applying the model to different things. So you took the lead on SWE-Bench, but then also we're going to talk a little bit about computer use later on. So maybe just give us a context about why you looked at SWE-Bench Verified and you actually came up with a whole system for building agents that would maximally use the model well. Yeah.Erik [00:04:28]: So I'm on a sub team called Product Research. And basically the idea of product research is to really understand what end customers care about and want in the models and then work to try to make that happen. So we're not focused on sort of these more abstract general benchmarks like math problems or MMLU, but we really care about finding the things that are really valuable and making sure the models are great at those. And so because I've been interested in coding agents, I knew that this would be a really valuable thing. And I knew there were a lot of startups and our customers trying to build coding agents with our models. And so I said, hey, this is going to be a really good benchmark to be able to measure that and do well on it. And I wasn't the first person at Anthropic to find SWE-Bench, and there are lots of people that already knew about it and had done some internal efforts on it. It fell to me to sort of both implement the benchmark, which is very tricky, and then also to sort of make sure we had an agent and basically like a reference agent, maybe I'd call it, that could do very well on it. Ultimately, we want to provide how we implemented that reference agent so that people can build their own agents on top of our system and get sort of the most out of it as possible. So with this blog post we released on SWE-Bench, we released the exact tools and the prompt that we gave the model to be able to do well.Swyx [00:05:46]: For people who don't know, who maybe haven't dived into SWE-Bench, I think the general perception is they're like tasks that a software engineer could do. I feel like that's an inaccurate description because it is basically, one, it's a subset of like 12 repos. It's everything they could find that every issue with like a matching commit that could be tested. So that's not every commit. And then SWE-Bench verified is further manually filtered by OpenAI. Is that an accurate description and anything you'd change about that? Yes.Erik [00:06:14]: SWE-Bench is, it certainly is a subset of all tasks. It's first of all, it's only Python repos, so already fairly limited there. And it's just 12 of these popular open source repos. And yes, it's only ones where there were tests that passed at the beginning and also new tests that were introduced that test the new feature that's added. So it is, I think, a very limited subset of real engineering tasks. But I think it's also very valuable because even though it's a subset, it is true engineering tasks. And I think a lot of other benchmarks are really kind of these much more artificial setups of even if they're related to coding, they're more like coding interview style questions or puzzles that I think are very different from day-to-day what you end up doing. I don't know how frequently you all get to use recursion in your day-to-day job, but whenever I do, it's like a treat. And I think it's almost comical, and a lot of people joke about this in the industry, is how different interview questions are.Swyx [00:07:13]: Dynamic programming. Yeah, exactly.Erik [00:07:15]: Like, you code. From the day-to-day job. But I think one of the most interesting things about SWE-Bench is that all these other benchmarks are usually just isolated puzzles, and you're starting from scratch. Whereas SWE-Bench, you're starting in the context of an entire repository. And so it adds this entirely new dimension to the problem of finding the relevant files. And this is a huge part of real engineering, is it's actually pretty rare that you're starting something totally greenfield. You need to go and figure out where in a codebase you're going to make a change and understand how your work is going to interact with the rest of the systems. And I think SWE-Bench does a really good job of presenting that problem.Alessio [00:07:51]: Why do we still use human eval? It's like 92%, I think. I don't even know if you can actually get to 100% because some of the data is not actuallySwyx [00:07:59]: solvable.Alessio [00:08:00]: Do you see benchmarks like that, they should just get sunsetted? Because when you look at the model releases, it's like, oh, it's like 92% instead of like 89%, 90% on human eval versus, you know, SWE-Bench verified is you have 49%, right? Which is like, before 45% was state of the art, but maybe like six months ago it was like 30%, something like that. So is that a benchmark that you think is going to replace human eval, or do you think they're just going to run in parallel?Erik [00:08:27]: I think there's still need for sort of many different varied evals. Like sometimes you do really care about just sort of greenfield code generation. And so I don't think that everything needs to go to sort of an agentic setup.Swyx [00:08:39]: It would be very expensive to implement.Erik [00:08:41]: The other thing I was going to say is that SWE-Bench is certainly hard to implement and expensive to run because each task, you have to parse, you know, a lot of the repo to understand where to put your code. And a lot of times you take many tries of writing code, running it, editing it. It can use a lot of tokens compared to something like human eval. So I think there's definitely a space for these more traditional coding evals that are sort of easy to implement, quick to run, and do get you some signal. Maybe hopefully there's just sort of harder versions of human eval that get created.Alessio [00:09:14]: How do we get SWE-Bench verified to 92%? Do you think that's something where it's like line of sight to it, or it's like, you know, we need a whole lot of things to go right? Yeah, yeah.Erik [00:09:23]: And actually, maybe I'll start with SWE-Bench versus SWE-Bench verified, which is I think something I missed earlier. So SWE-Bench is, as we described, this big set of tasks that were scraped.Swyx [00:09:33]: Like 12,000 or something?Erik [00:09:34]: Yeah, I think it's 2,000 in the final set. But a lot of those, even though a human did them, they're actually impossible given the information that comes with the task. The most classic example of this is the test looks for a very specific error string. You know, like assert message equals error, something, something, something. And unless you know that's exactly what you're looking for, there's no way the model is going to write that exact same error message, and so the tests are going to fail. So SWE-Bench verified was actually made in partnership with OpenAI, and they hired humans to go review all these tasks and pick out a subset to try to remove any obstacle like this that would make the tasks impossible. So in theory, all of these tasks should be fully doable by the model. And they also had humans grade how difficult they thought the problems would be. Between less than 15 minutes, I think 15 minutes to an hour, an hour to four hours, and greater than four hours. So that's kind of this interesting sort of how big the problem is as well. To get to SWE-Bench verified to 90%, actually, maybe I'll also start off with some of the remaining failures that I see when running our model on SWE-Bench. I'd say the biggest cases are the model sort of operates at the wrong level of abstraction. And what I mean by that is the model puts in maybe a smaller band-aid when really the task is asking for a bigger refactor. And some of those, you know, is the model's fault, but a lot of times if you're just sort of seeing the GitHub issue, it's not exactly clear which way you should do. So even though these tasks are possible, there's still some ambiguity in how the tasks are described. That being said, I think in general, language models frequently will produce a smaller diff when possible, rather than trying to do a big refactor. I think another area, at least the agent we created, didn't have any multimodal abilities, even though our models are very good at vision. So I think that's just a missed opportunity. And if I read through some of the traces, there's some funny things where, especially the tasks on matplotlib, which is a graphing library, the test script will save an image and the model will just say, okay, it looks great, you know, without looking at it. So there's certainly extra juice to squeeze there of just making sure the model really understands all the sides of the input that it's given, including multimodal. But yeah, I think like getting to 92%. So this is something that I have not looked at, but I'm very curious about. I want someone to look at, like, what is the union of all of the different tasks that have been solved by at least one attempt at SWE-Bench Verified. There's a ton of submissions to the benchmark, and so I'd be really curious to see how many of those 500 tasks at least someone has solved. And I think, you know, there's probably a bunch that none of the attempts have ever solved. And I think it'd be interesting to look at those and say, hey, is there some problem with these? Like, are these impossible? Or are they just really hard and only a human could do them?Swyx [00:12:22]: Yeah, like specifically, is there a category of problems that are still unreachable by any LLM agent? Yeah, yeah. And I think there definitely are.Erik [00:12:28]: The question is, are those fairly inaccessible or are they just impossible because of the descriptions? But I think certainly some of the tasks, especially the ones that the human graders reviewed as like taking longer than four hours are extremely difficult. I think we got a few of them right, but not very many at all in the benchmark.Swyx [00:12:49]: And did those take less than four hours?Erik [00:12:51]: They certainly did less than, yeah, than four hours.Swyx [00:12:54]: Is there a correlation of length of time with like human estimated time? You know what I mean? Or do we have sort of more of X paradox type situations where it's something super easy for a model, but hard for a human?Erik [00:13:06]: I actually haven't done the stats on that, but I think that'd be really interesting to see of like how many tokens does it take and how is that correlated with difficulty? What is the likelihood of success with difficulty? I think actually a really interesting thing that I saw, one of my coworkers who was also working on this named Simon, he was focusing just specifically on the very hard problems, the ones that are said to take longer than four hours. And he ended up sort of creating a much more detailed prompt than I used. And he got a higher score on the most difficult subset of problems, but a lower score overall on the whole benchmark. And the prompt that I made, which is sort of much more simple and bare bones, got a higher score on the overall benchmark, but lower score on the really hard problems. And I think some of that is the really detailed prompt made the model sort of overcomplicate a lot of the easy problems, because honestly, a lot of the suite bench problems, they really do just ask for a bandaid where it's like, hey, this crashes if this is none, and really all you need to do is put a check if none. And so sometimes trying to make the model think really deeply, it'll think in circles and overcomplicate something, which certainly human engineers are capable of as well. But I think there's some interesting thing of the best prompt for hard problems might not be the best prompt for easy problems.Alessio [00:14:19]: How do we fix that? Are you supposed to fix it at the model level? How do I know what prompt I'm supposed to use?Swyx [00:14:25]: Yeah.Erik [00:14:26]: And I'll say this was a very small effect size, and so I think this isn't worth obsessing over. I would say that as people are building systems around agents, I think the more you can separate out the different kinds of work the agent needs to do, the better you can tailor a prompt for that task. And I think that also creates a lot of like, for instance, if you were trying to make an agent that could both solve hard programming tasks, and it could just write quick test files for something that someone else had already made, the best way to do those two tasks might be very different prompts. I see a lot of people build systems where they first sort of have a classification, and then route the problem to two different prompts. And that's sort of a very effective thing, because one, it makes the two different prompts much simpler and smaller, and it means you can have someone work on one of the prompts without any risk of affecting the other tasks. So it creates like a nice separation of concerns. Yeah.Alessio [00:15:21]: And the other model behavior thing you mentioned, they prefer to generate like shorter diffs. Why is that? Like, is there a way? I think that's maybe like the lazy model question that people have is like, why are you not just generating the whole code instead of telling me to implement it?Swyx [00:15:36]: Are you saving tokens? Yeah, exactly. It's like conspiracy theory. Yeah. Yeah.Erik [00:15:41]: Yeah. So there's two different things there. One is like the, I'd say maybe like doing the easier solution rather than the hard solution. And I'd say the second one, I think what you're talking about is like the lazy model is like when the model says like dot, dot, dot, code remains the same.Swyx [00:15:52]: Code goes here. Yeah. I'm like, thanks, dude.Erik [00:15:55]: But honestly, like that just comes as like people on the internet will do stuff like that. And like, dude, if you're talking to a friend and you ask them like to give you some example code, they would definitely do that. They're not going to reroll the whole thing. And so I think that's just a matter of like, you know, sometimes you actually do just, just want like the relevant changes. And so I think it's, this is something where a lot of times like, you know, the models aren't good at mind reading of like which one you want. So I think that like the more explicit you can be in prompting to say, Hey, you know, give me the entire thing, no, no elisions versus just give me the relevant changes. And that's something, you know, we want to make the models always better at following those kinds of instructions.Swyx [00:16:32]: I'll drop a couple of references here. We're recording this like a day after Dario, Lex Friedman just dropped his five hour pod with Dario and Amanda and the rest of the crew. And Dario actually made this interesting observation that like, we actually don't want, we complain about models being too chatty in text and then not chatty enough in code. And so like getting that right is kind of a awkward bar because, you know, you, you don't want it to yap in its responses, but then you also want it to be complete in, in code. And then sometimes it's not complete. Sometimes you just want it to diff, which is something that Enthopic has also released with a, you know, like the, the fast edit stuff that you guys did. And then the other thing I wanted to also double back on is the prompting stuff. You said, you said it was a small effect, but it was a noticeable effect in terms of like picking a prompt. I think we'll go into suite agent in a little bit, but I kind of reject the fact that, you know, you need to choose one prompt and like have your whole performance be predicated on that one prompt. I think something that Enthopic has done really well is meta prompting, prompting for a prompt. And so why can't you just develop a meta prompt for, for all the other prompts? And you know, if it's a simple task, make a simple prompt, if it's a hard task, make a hard prompt. Obviously I'm probably hand-waving a little bit, but I will definitely ask people to try the Enthopic Workbench meta prompting system if they haven't tried it yet. I went to the Build Day recently at Enthopic HQ, and it's the closest I've felt to an AGI, like learning how to operate itself that, yeah, it's, it's, it's really magical.Erik [00:17:57]: Yeah, no, Claude is great at writing prompts for Claude.Swyx [00:18:00]: Right, so meta prompting. Yeah, yeah.Erik [00:18:02]: The way I think about this is that humans, even like very smart humans still use sort of checklists and use sort of scaffolding for themselves. Surgeons will still have checklists, even though they're incredible experts. And certainly, you know, a very senior engineer needs less structure than a junior engineer, but there still is some of that structure that you want to keep. And so I always try to anthropomorphize the models and try to think about for a human sort of what is the equivalent. And that's sort of, you know, how I think about these things is how much instruction would you give a human with the same task? And do you, would you need to give them a lot of instruction or a little bit of instruction?Alessio [00:18:36]: Let's talk about the agent architecture maybe. So first, runtime, you let it run until it thinks it's done or it reaches 200k context window.Swyx [00:18:45]: How did you come up? What's up with that?Erik [00:18:47]: Yeah.Swyx [00:18:48]: Yeah.Erik [00:18:49]: I mean, this, so I'd say that a lot of previous agent work built sort of these very hard coded and rigid workflows where the model is sort of pushed through certain flows of steps. And I think to some extent, you know, that's needed with smaller models and models that are less smart. But one of the things that we really wanted to explore was like, let's really give Claude the reins here and not force Claude to do anything, but let Claude decide, you know, how it should approach the problem, what steps it should do. And so really, you know, what we did is like the most extreme version of this is just give it some tools that it can call and it's able to keep calling the tools, keep thinking, and then yeah, keep doing that until it thinks it's done. And that's sort of the most, the most minimal agent framework that we came up with. And I think that works very well. I think especially the new Sonnet 3.5 is very, very good at self-correction, has a lot of like grit. Claude will try things that fail and then try, you know, come back and sort of try different approaches. And I think that's something that you didn't see in a lot of previous models. Some of the existing agent frameworks that I looked at, they had whole systems built to try to detect loops and see, oh, is the model doing the same thing, you know, more than three times, then we have to pull it out. And I think like the smarter the models are, the less you need that kind of extra scaffolding. So yeah, just giving the model tools and letting it keep sample and call tools until it thinks it's done was the most minimal framework that we could think of. And so that's what we did.Alessio [00:20:18]: So you're not pruning like bad paths from the context. If it tries to do something, it fails. You just burn all these tokens.Swyx [00:20:25]: Yes.Erik [00:20:26]: I would say the downside of this is that this is sort of a very token expensive way to doSwyx [00:20:29]: this. But still, it's very common to prune bad paths because models get stuck. Yeah.Erik [00:20:35]: But I'd say that, yeah, 3.5 is not getting stuck as much as previous models. And so, yeah, we wanted to at least just try the most minimal thing. Now, I would say that, you know, this is definitely an area of future research, especially if we talk about these problems that are going to take a human more than four hours. Those might be things where we're going to need to go prune bad paths to let the model be able to accomplish this task within 200k tokens. So certainly I think there's like future research to be done in that area, but it's not necessary to do well on these benchmarks.Swyx [00:21:06]: Another thing I always have questions about on context window things, there's a mini cottage industry of code indexers that have sprung up for large code bases, like the ones in SweetBench. You didn't need them? We didn't.Erik [00:21:18]: And I think I'd say there's like two reasons for this. One is like SweetBench specific and the other is a more general thing. The more general thing is that I think Sonnet is very good at what we call agentic search. And what this basically means is letting the model decide how to search for something. It gets the results and then it can decide, should it keep searching or is it done? Does it have everything it needs? So if you read through a lot of the traces of the SweetBench, the model is calling tools to view directories, list out things, view files. And it will do a few of those until it feels like it's found the file where the bug is. And then it will start working on that file. And I think like, again, this is all, everything we did was about just giving Claude the full reins. So there's no hard-coded system. There's no search system that you're relying on getting the correct files into context. This just totally lets Claude do it.Swyx [00:22:11]: Or embedding things into a vector database. Exactly. Oops. No, no.Erik [00:22:17]: This is very, very token expensive. And so certainly, and it also takes many, many turns. And so certainly if you want to do something in a single turn, you need to do RAG and just push stuff into the first prompt.Alessio [00:22:28]: And just to make it clear, it's using the Bash tool, basically doing LS, looking at files and then doing CAD for the following context. It can do that.Erik [00:22:35]: But it's file editing tool also has a command in it called view that can view a directory. It's very similar to LS, but it just sort of has some nice sort of quality of life improvements. So I think it'll only do an LS sort of two directories deep so that the model doesn't get overwhelmed if it does this on a huge file. I would say actually we did more engineering of the tools than the overall prompt. But the one other thing I want to say about this agentic search is that for SWE-Bench specifically, a lot of the tasks are bug reports, which means they have a stack trace in them. And that means right in that first prompt, it tells you where to go. And so I think this is a very easy case for the model to find the right files versus if you're using this as a general coding assistant where there isn't a stack trace or you're asking it to insert a new feature, I think there it's much harder to know which files to look at. And that might be an area where you would need to do more of this exhaustive search where an agentic search would take way too long.Swyx [00:23:33]: As someone who spent the last few years in the JS world, it'd be interesting to see SWE-Bench JS because these stack traces are useless because of so much virtualization that we do. So they're very, very disconnected with where the code problems are actually appearing.Erik [00:23:50]: That makes me feel better about my limited front-end experience, as I've always struggled with that problem.Swyx [00:23:55]: It's not your fault. We've gotten ourselves into a very, very complicated situation. And I'm not sure it's entirely needed. But if you talk to our friends at Vercel, they will say it is.Erik [00:24:04]: I will say SWE-Bench just released SWE-Bench Multimodal, which I believe is either entirely JavaScript or largely JavaScript. And it's entirely things that have visual components of them.Swyx [00:24:15]: Are you going to tackle that? We will see.Erik [00:24:17]: I think it's on the list and there's interest, but no guarantees yet.Swyx [00:24:20]: Just as a side note, it occurs to me that every model lab, including Enthopic, but the others as well, you should have your own SWE-Bench, whatever your bug tracker tool. This is a general methodology that you can use to track progress, I guess.Erik [00:24:34]: Yeah, sort of running on our own internal code base.Swyx [00:24:36]: Yeah, that's a fun idea.Alessio [00:24:37]: Since you spend so much time on the tool design, so you have this edit tool that can make changes and whatnot. Any learnings from that that you wish the AI IDEs would take in? Is there some special way to look at files, feed them in?Erik [00:24:50]: I would say the core of that tool is string replace. And so we did a few different experiments with different ways to specify how to edit a file. And string replace, basically, the model has to write out the existing version of the string and then a new version, and that just gets swapped in. We found that to be the most reliable way to do these edits. Other things that we tried were having the model directly write a diff, having the model fully regenerate files. That one is actually the most accurate, but it takes so many tokens, and if you're in a very big file, it's cost prohibitive. There's basically a lot of different ways to represent the same task. And they actually have pretty big differences in terms of model accuracy. I think Eider, they have a really good blog where they explore some of these different methods for editing files, and they post results about them, which I think is interesting. But I think this is a really good example of the broader idea that you need to iterate on tools rather than just a prompt. And I think a lot of people, when they make tools for an LLM, they kind of treat it like they're just writing an API for a computer, and it's sort of very minimal. It's sort of just the bare bones of what you'd need, and honestly, it's so hard for the models to use those. Again, I come back to anthropomorphizing these models. Imagine you're a developer, and you just read this for the very first time, and you're trying to use it. You can do so much better than just sort of the bare API spec of what you'd often see. Include examples in the description. Include really detailed explanations of how things work. And I think that, again, also think about what is the easiest way for the model to represent the change that it wants to make. For file editing, as an example, writing a diff is actually... Let's take the most extreme example. You want the model to literally write a patch file. I think patch files have at the very beginning numbers of how many total lines change. That means before the model has actually written the edit, it needs to decide how many numbers or how many lines are going to change.Swyx [00:26:52]: Don't quote me on that.Erik [00:26:54]: I think it's something like that, but I don't know if that's exactly the diff format. But you can certainly have formats that are much easier to express without messing up than others. And I like to think about how much human effort goes into designing human interfaces for things. It's incredible. This is entirely what FrontEnd is about, is creating better interfaces to kind of do the same things. And I think that same amount of attention and effort needs to go into creating agent computer interfaces.Swyx [00:27:19]: It's a topic we've discussed, ACI or whatever that looks like. I would also shout out that I think you released some of these toolings as part of computer use as well. And people really liked it. It's all open source if people want to check it out. I'm curious if there's an environment element that complements the tools. So how do you... Do you have a sandbox? Is it just Docker? Because that can be slow or resource intensive. Do you have anything else that you would recommend?Erik [00:27:47]: I don't think I can talk about sort of public details or about private details about how we implement our sandboxing. But obviously, we need to have sort of safe, secure, and fast sandboxes for training for the models to be able to practice writing code and working in an environment.Swyx [00:28:03]: I'm aware of a few startups working on agent sandboxing. E2B is a close friend of ours that Alessio has led around in, but also I think there's others where they're focusing on snapshotting memory so that it can do time travel for debugging. Computer use where you can control the mouse or keyboard or something like that. Whereas here, I think that the kinds of tools that we offer are very, very limited to coding agent work cases like bash, edit, you know, stuff like that. Yeah.Erik [00:28:30]: I think the computer use demo that we released is an extension of that. It has the same bash and edit tools, but it also has the computer tool that lets it get screenshots and move the mouse and keyboard. Yeah. So I definitely think there's sort of more general tools there. And again, the tools we released as part of SweetBench were, I'd say they're very specific for like editing files and doing bash, but at the same time, that's actually very general if you think about it. Like anything that you would do on a command line or like editing files, you can do with those tools. And so we do want those tools to feel like any sort of computer terminal work could be done with those same tools rather than making tools that were like very specific for SweetBench like run tests as its own tool, for instance. Yeah.Swyx [00:29:15]: You had a question about tests.Alessio [00:29:16]: Yeah, exactly. I saw there's no test writer tool. Is it because it generates the code and then you're running it against SweetBench anyway, so it doesn't really need to write the test or?Swyx [00:29:26]: Yeah.Erik [00:29:27]: So this is one of the interesting things about SweetBench is that the tests that the model's output is graded on are hidden from it. That's basically so that the model can't cheat by looking at the tests and writing the exact solution. And I'd say typically the model, the first thing it does is it usually writes a little script to reproduce the error. And again, most SweetBench tasks are like, hey, here's a bug that I found. I run this and I get this error. So the first thing the model does is try to reproduce that. So it's kind of been rerunning that script as a mini test. But yeah, sometimes the model will like accidentally introduce a bug that breaks some other tests and it doesn't know about that.Alessio [00:30:05]: And should we be redesigning any tools? We kind of talked about this and like having more examples, but I'm thinking even things of like Q as a query parameter in many APIs, it's like easier for the model to like re-query than read the Q. I'm sure it learned the Q by this point, but like, is there anything you've seen like building this where it's like, hey, if I were to redesign some CLI tools, some API tool, I would like change the way structure to make it better for LLMs?Erik [00:30:31]: I don't think I've thought enough about that off the top of my head, but certainly like just making everything more human friendly, like having like more detailed documentation and examples. I think examples are really good in things like descriptions, like so many, like just using the Linux command line, like how many times I do like dash dash help or look at the man page or something. It's like, just give me one example of like how I actually use this. Like I don't want to go read through a hundred flags. Just give me the most common example. But again, so you know, things that would be useful for a human, I think are also very useful for a model.Swyx [00:31:03]: Yeah. I mean, there's one thing that you cannot give to code agents that is useful for human is this access to the internet. I wonder how to design that in, because one of the issues that I also had with just the idea of a suite bench is that you can't do follow up questions. You can't like look around for similar implementations. These are all things that I do when I try to fix code and we don't do that. It's not, it wouldn't be fair, like it'd be too easy to cheat, but then also it's kind of not being fair to these agents because they're not operating in a real world situation. Like if I had a real world agent, of course I'm giving it access to the internet because I'm not trying to pass a benchmark. I don't have a question in there more, more just like, I feel like the most obvious tool access to the internet is not being used.Erik [00:31:47]: I think that that's really important for humans, but honestly the models have so much general knowledge from pre-training that it's, it's like less important for them. I feel like versioning, you know, if you're working on a newer thing that was like, they came after the knowledge cutoff, then yes, I think that's very important. I think actually this, this is like a broader problem that there is a divergence between Sweebench and like what customers will actually care about who are working on a coding agent for real use. And I think one of those there is like internet access and being able to like, how do you pull in outside information? I think another one is like, if you have a real coding agent, you don't want to have it start on a task and like spin its wheels for hours because you gave it a bad prompt. You want it to come back immediately and ask follow up questions and like really make sure it has a very detailed understanding of what to do, then go off for a few hours and do work. So I think that like real tasks are going to be much more interactive with the agent rather than this kind of like one shot system. And right now there's no benchmark that, that measures that. And maybe I think it'd be interesting to have some benchmark that is more interactive. I don't know if you're familiar with TauBench, but it's a, it's a customer service benchmark where there's basically one LLM that's playing the user or the customer that's getting support and another LLM that's playing the support agent and they interact and try to resolve the issue.Swyx [00:33:08]: Yeah. We talked to the LMSIS guys. Awesome. And they also did MTBench for people listening along. So maybe we need MTSWE-Bench. Sure. Yeah.Erik [00:33:16]: So maybe, you know, you could have something where like before the SWE-Bench task starts, you have like a few back and forths with kind of like the, the author who can answer follow up questions about what they want the task to do. And of course you'd need to do that where it doesn't cheat and like just get the exact, the exact thing out of the human or out of the sort of user. But I think that would be a really interesting thing to see. If you look at sort of existing agent work, like a Repl.it's coding agent, I think one of the really great UX things they do is like first having the agent create a plan and then having the human approve that plan or give feedback. I think for agents in general, like having a planning step at the beginning, one, just having that plan will improve performance on the downstream task just because it's kind of like a bigger chain of thought, but also it's just such a better UX. It's way easier for a human to iterate on a plan with a model rather than iterating on the full task that sort of has a much slower time through each loop. If the human has approved this implementation plan, I think it makes the end result a lot more sort of auditable and trustable. So I think there's a lot of things sort of outside of SweetBench that will be very important for real agent usage in the world. Yeah.Swyx [00:34:27]: I will say also, there's a couple of comments on names that you dropped. Copilot also does the plan stage before it writes code. I feel like those approaches have generally been less Twitter successful because it's not prompt to code, it's prompt plan code. You know, so there's a little bit of friction in there, but it's not much. Like it's, it actually, it's, it, you get a lot for what it's worth. I also like the way that Devin does it, where you can sort of edit the plan as it goes along. And then the other thing with Repl.it, we had a, we hosted a sort of dev day pregame with Repl.it and they also commented about multi-agents. So like having two agents kind of bounce off of each other. I think it's a similar approach to what you're talking about with kind of the few shot example, just as in the prompts of clarifying what the agent wants. But typically I think this would be implemented as a tool calling another agent, like a sub-agent I don't know if you explored that, do you like that idea?Erik [00:35:20]: I haven't explored this enough, but I've definitely heard of people having good success with this. Of almost like basically having a few different sort of personas of agents, even if they're all the same LLM. I think this is one thing with multi-agent that a lot of people will kind of get confused by is they think it has to be different models behind each thing. But really it's sort of usually the same, the same model with different prompts. And yet having one, having them have different personas to kind of bring different sort of thoughts and priorities to the table. I've seen that work very well and sort of create a much more thorough and thought outSwyx [00:35:53]: response.Erik [00:35:53]: I think the downside is just that it adds a lot of complexity and it adds a lot of extra tokens. So I think it depends what you care about. If you want a plan that's very thorough and detailed, I think it's great. If you want a really quick, just like write this function, you know, you probably don't want to do that and have like a bunch of different calls before it does this.Alessio [00:36:11]: And just talking about the prompt, why are XML tags so good in Cloud? I think initially people were like, oh, maybe you're just getting lucky with XML. But I saw obviously you use them in your own agent prompts, so they must work. And why is it so model specific to your family?Erik [00:36:26]: Yeah, I think that there's, again, I'm not sure how much I can say, but I think there's historical reasons that internally we've preferred XML. I think also the one broader thing I'll say is that if you look at certain kinds of outputs, there is overhead to outputting in JSON. If you're trying to output code in JSON, there's a lot of extra escaping that needs to be done, and that actually hurts model performance across the board. Versus if you're in just a single XML tag, there's none of that sort of escaping thatSwyx [00:36:58]: needs to happen.Erik [00:36:58]: That being said, I haven't tried having it write HTML and XML, which maybe then you start running into weird escaping things there. I'm not sure. But yeah, I'd say that's some historical reasons, and there's less overhead of escaping.Swyx [00:37:12]: I use XML in other models as well, and it's just a really nice way to make sure that the thing that ends is tied to the thing that starts. That's the only way to do code fences where you're pretty sure example one start, example one end, that is one cohesive unit.Alessio [00:37:30]: Because the braces are nondescriptive. Yeah, exactly.Swyx [00:37:33]: That would be my simple reason. XML is good for everyone, not just Cloud. Cloud was just the first one to popularize it, I think.Erik [00:37:39]: I do definitely prefer to read XML than read JSON.Alessio [00:37:43]: Any other details that are maybe underappreciated? I know, for example, you had the absolute paths versus relative. Any other fun nuggets?Erik [00:37:52]: I think that's a good sort of anecdote to mention about iterating on tools. Like I said, spend time prompt engineering your tools, and don't just write the prompt, but write the tool, and then actually give it to the model and read a bunch of transcripts about how the model tries to use the tool. I think by doing that, you will find areas where the model misunderstands a tool or makes mistakes, and then basically change the tool to make it foolproof. There's this Japanese term, pokayoke, about making tools mistake-proof. You know, the classic idea is you can have a plug that can fit either way, and that's dangerous, or you can make it asymmetric so that it can't fit this way, it has to go like this, and that's a better tool because you can't use it the wrong way. So for this example of absolute paths, one of the things that we saw while testing these tools is, oh, if the model has done CD and moved to a different directory, it would often get confused when trying to use the tool because it's now in a different directory, and so the paths aren't lining up. So we said, oh, well, let's just force the tool to always require an absolute path, and then that's easy for the model to understand. It knows sort of where it is. It knows where the files are. And then once we have it always giving absolute paths, it never messes up even, like, no matter where it is because it just, if you're using an absolute path, it doesn't matter whereSwyx [00:39:13]: you are.Erik [00:39:13]: So iterations like that, you know, let us make the tool foolproof for the model. I'd say there's other categories of things where we see, oh, if the model, you know, opens vim, like, you know, it's never going to return. And so the tool is stuck.Swyx [00:39:28]: Did it get stuck? Yeah. Get out of vim. What?Erik [00:39:31]: Well, because the tool is, like, it just text in, text out. It's not interactive. So it's not like the model doesn't know how to get out of vim. It's that the way that the tool is, like, hooked up to the computer is not interactive. Yes, I mean, there is the meme of no one knows how to get out of vim. You know, basically, we just added instructions in the tool of, like, hey, don't launch commands that don't return.Swyx [00:39:54]: Yeah, like, don't launch vim.Erik [00:39:55]: Don't launch whatever. If you do need to do something, you know, put an ampersand after it to launch it in the background. And so, like, just, you know, putting kind of instructions like that just right in the description for the tool really helps the model. And I think, like, that's an underutilized space of prompt engineering, where, like, people might try to do that in the overall prompt, but just put that in the tool itself so the model knows that it's, like, for this tool, this is what's relevant.Swyx [00:40:20]: You said you worked on the function calling and tool use before you actually started this vBench work, right? Was there any surprises? Because you basically went from creator of that API to user of that API. Any surprises or changes you would make now that you have extensively dog-fooded in a state-of-the-art agent?Erik [00:40:39]: I want us to make, like, maybe, like, a little bit less verbose SDK. I think some way, like, right now, it just takes, I think we sort of force people to do the best practices of writing out sort of these full JSON schemas, but it would be really nice if you could just pass in a Python function as a tool. I think that could be something nice.Swyx [00:40:58]: I think that there's a lot of, like, Python- There's helper libraries. ... structure, you know. I don't know if there's anyone else that is specializing for Anthropic. Maybe Jeremy Howard's and Simon Willis's stuff. They all have Cloud-specific stuff that they are working on. Cloudette. Cloudette, exactly. I also wanted to spend a little bit of time with SuiteAgent. It seems like a very general framework. Like, is there a reason you picked it apart from it's the same authors as vBench, or?Erik [00:41:21]: The main thing we wanted to go with was the same authors as vBench, so it just felt sort of like the safest, most neutral option. And it was, you know, very high quality. It was very easy to modify, to work with. I would say it also actually, their underlying framework is sort of this, it's like, youSwyx [00:41:39]: know, think, act, observe.Erik [00:41:40]: That they kind of go through this loop, which is like a little bit more hard-coded than what we wanted to do, but it's still very close. That's still very general. So it felt like a good match as sort of the starting point for our agent. And we had already sort of worked with and talked with the SWE-Bench people directly, so it felt nice to just have, you know, we already know the authors. This will be easy to work with.Swyx [00:42:00]: I'll share a little bit of like, this all seems disconnected, but once you figure out the people and where they go to school, it all makes sense. So it's all Princeton. Yeah, the SWE-Bench and SuiteAgent.Erik [00:42:11]: It's a group out of Princeton.Swyx [00:42:12]: Yeah, and we had Shun Yu on the pod, and he came up with the React paradigm, and that's think, act, observe. That's all React. So they're all friends. Yep, yeah, exactly.Erik [00:42:22]: And you know, if you actually read our traces of our submission, you can actually see like think, act, observe in our logs. And we just didn't even change the printing code. So it's like doing still function calls under the hood, and the model can do sort of multiple function calls in a row without thinking in between if it wants to. But yeah, so a lot of similarities and a lot of things we inherited from SuiteAgent just as a starting point for the framework.Alessio [00:42:47]: Any thoughts about other agent frameworks? I think there's, you know, the whole gamut from very simple to like very complex.Swyx [00:42:53]: Autogen, CooEI, LandGraph. Yeah, yeah.Erik [00:42:56]: I think I haven't explored a lot of them in detail. I would say with agent frameworks in general, they can certainly save you some like boilerplate. But I think there's actually this like downside of making agents too easy, where you end up very quickly like building a much more complex system than you need. And suddenly, you know, instead of having one prompt, you have five agents that are talking to each other and doing a dialogue. And it's like, because the framework made that 10 lines to do, you end up building something that's way too complex. So I think I would actually caution people to like try to start without these frameworks if you can, because you'll be closer to the raw prompts and be able to sort of directly understand what's going on. I think a lot of times these frameworks also, by trying to make everything feel really magical, you end up sort of really hiding what the actual prompt and output of the model is, and that can make it much harder to debug. So certainly these things have a place, and I think they do really help at getting rid of boilerplate, but they come with this cost of obfuscating what's really happening and making it too easy to very quickly add a lot of complexity. So yeah, I would recommend people to like try it from scratch, and it's like not that bad.Alessio [00:44:08]: Would you rather have like a framework of tools? Do you almost see like, hey, it's maybe easier to get tools that are already well curated, like the ones that you build, if I had an easy way to get the best tool from you, andSwyx [00:44:21]: like you maintain the definition?Alessio [00:44:22]: Or yeah, any thoughts on how you want to formalize tool sharing?Erik [00:44:26]: Yeah, I think that's something that we're certainly interested in exploring, and I think there is space for sort of these general tools that will be very broadly applicable. But at the same time, most people that are building on these, they do have much more specific things that they're trying to do. You know, I think that might be useful for hobbyists and demos, but the ultimate end applications are going to be bespoke. And so we just want to make sure that the model's great at any tool that it uses. But certainly something we're exploring.Alessio [00:44:52]: So everything bespoke, no frameworks, no anything.Swyx [00:44:55]: Just for now, for now.Erik [00:44:56]: Yeah, I would say that like the best thing I've seen is people building up from like, build some good util functions, and then you can use those as building blocks. Yeah, yeah.Alessio [00:45:05]: I have a utils folder, or like all these scripts. My framework is like def, call, and tropic. And then I just put all the defaults.Swyx [00:45:12]: Yeah, exactly. There's a startup hidden in every utils folder, you know? No, totally not. Like, if you use it enough, like it's a startup, you know? At some point. I'm kind of curious, is there a maximum length of turns that it took? Like, what was the longest run? I actually don't.Erik [00:45:27]: I mean, it had basically infinite turns until it ran into a 200k context. I should have looked this up. I don't know. And so for some of those failed cases where it eventually ran out of context, I mean, it was over 100 turns. I'm trying to remember like the longest successful run, but I think it was definitely over 100 turns that some of the times.Swyx [00:45:48]: Which is not that much. It's a coffee break. Yeah.Erik [00:45:52]: But certainly, you know, these things can be a lot of turns. And I think that's because some of these things are really hard, where it's going to take, you know, many tries to do it. And if you think about like, think about a task that takes a human four hours to do. Think about how many different files you read, and like times you edit a file in four hours. That's a lot more than 100.Alessio [00:46:10]: How many times you open Twitter because you get distracted. But if you had a lot more compute, what's kind of like the return on the extra compute now? So like, you know, if you had thousands of turns or like whatever, like how much better would it get?Erik [00:46:23]: Yeah, this I don't know. And I think this is, I think sort of one of the open areas of research in general with agents is memory and sort of how do you have something that can do work beyond its context length where you're just purely appending. So you mentioned earlier things like pruning bad paths. I think there's a lot of interesting work around there. Can you just roll back but summarize, hey, don't go down this path? There be dragons. Yeah, I think that's very interesting that you could have something that that uses way more tokens without ever using at a time more than 200k. So I think that's very interesting. I think the biggest thing is like, can you make the model sort of losslessly summarize what it's learned from trying different approaches and bring things back? I think that's sort of the big challenge.Swyx [00:47:11]: What about different models?Alessio [00:47:12]: So you have Haiku, which is like, you know, cheaper. So you're like, well, what if I have a Haiku to do a lot of these smaller things and then put it back up?Erik [00:47:20]: I think Cursor might have said that they actually have a separate model for file editing.Swyx [00:47:25]: I'm trying to remember.Erik [00:47:25]: I think they were on maybe the Lex Fridman podcast where they said they have a bigger model, like write what the code should be and then a different model, like apply it. So I think there's a lot of interesting room for stuff like that. Yeah, fast supply.Swyx [00:47:37]: We actually did a pod with Fireworks that they worked with on. It's speculative decoding.Erik [00:47:41]: But I think there's also really interesting things about like, you know, paring down input tokens as well, especially sometimes the models trying to read like a 10,000 line file. That's a lot of tokens. And most of it is actually not going to be relevant. I think it'd be really interesting to like delegate that to Haiku. Haiku read this file and just pull out the most relevant functions. And then, you know, Sonnet reads just those and you save 90% on tokens. I think there's a lot of really interesting room for things like that. And again, we were just trying to do sort of the simplest, most minimal thing and show that it works. I'm really hoping that people, sort of the agent community builds things like that on top of our models. That's, again, why we released these tools. We're not going to go and do lots more submissions to SWE-Bench and try to prompt engineer this and build a bigger system. We want people to like the ecosystem to do that on top of our models. But yeah, so I think that's a really interesting one.Swyx [00:48:32]: It turns out, I think you did do 3.5 Haiku with your tools and it scored a 40.6. Yes.Erik [00:48:38]: So it did very well. It itself is actually very smart, which is great. But we haven't done any experiments with this combination of the two models. But yeah, I think that's one of the exciting things is that how well Haiku 3.5 did on SWE-Bench shows that sort of even our smallest, fastest model is very good at sort of thinking agentically and working on hard problems. Like it's not just sort of for writing simple text anymore.Alessio [00:49:02]: And I know you're not going to talk about it, but like Sonnet is not even supposed to be the best model, you know? Like Opus, it's kind of like we left it at three back in the corner intro. At some point, I'm sure the new Opus will come out. And if you had Opus Plus on it, that sounds very, very good.Swyx [00:49:19]: There's a run with SuiteAgent plus Opus, but that's the official SWE-Bench guys doing it.Erik [00:49:24]: That was the older, you know, 3.0.Swyx [00:49:25]: You didn't do yours. Yeah. Okay. Did you want to? I mean, you could just change the model name.Erik [00:49:31]: I think we didn't submit it, but I think we included it in our model card.Swyx [00:49:35]: Okay.Erik [00:49:35]: We included the score as a comparison. Yeah.Swyx [00:49:38]: Yeah.Erik [00:49:38]: And Sonnet and Haiku, actually, I think the new ones, they both outperformed the original Opus. Yeah. I did see that.Swyx [00:49:44]: Yeah. It's a little bit hard to find. Yeah.Erik [00:49:47]: It's not an exciting score, so we didn't feel like they need to submit it to the benchmark.Swyx [00:49:52]: We can cut over to computer use if we're okay with moving on to topics on this, if anything else. I think we're good.Erik [00:49:58]: I'm trying to think if there's anything else SWE-Bench related.Swyx [00:50:02]: It doesn't have to be also just specifically SWE-Bench, but just your thoughts on building agents, because you are one of the few people that have reached this leaderboard on building a coding agent. This is the state of the art. It's surprisingly not that hard to reach with some good principles. Right. There's obviously a ton of low-hanging fruit that we covered. Your thoughts on if you were to build a coding agent startup, what next?Erik [00:50:24]: I think the really interesting question for me, for all the startups out there, is this kind of divergence between the benchmarks and what real customers will want. So I'm curious, maybe the next time you have a coding agent startup on the podcast, you should ask them that. What are the differences that they're starting to make? Tomorrow.Swyx [00:50:40]: Oh, perfect, perfect. Yeah.Erik [00:50:41]: I'm actually very curious what they will see, because I also have seen, I feel like it's slowed down a little bit if I don't see the startups submitting to SWE-Bench that much anymore.Swyx [00:50:52]: Because of the traces, the trace. So we had Cosign on, they had a 50-something on full, on SWE-Bench full, which is the hardest one, and they were rejected because they didn't want to submit their traces. Yep. IP, you know? Yeah, that makes sense, that makes sense. Actually, tomorrow we're talking to Bolt, which is a cloud customer. You guys actually published a case study with them. I assume you weren't involved with that, but they were very happy with Cloud. Cool. One of the biggest launches of the year. Yeah, totally. We actually happened to be sitting in Adept's former office. My take on this is Anthropic shipped Adept as a feature. It's still a beta feature, but yes. What was it like when you tried it for the first time? Was it obvious that Cloud had reached that stage where you could do computer use? It was somewhat of a surprise to me.Erik [00:51:40]: I had been on vacation, and I came back, and everyone's like, computer use works. So it was this very exciting moment. After the first go to Google, I think I tried to have it play Minecraft or something, and it actually installed and opened Minecraft.Swyx [00:51:54]: I was like, wow, this is pretty cool.Erik [00:51:55]: So I was like, wow, yeah, this thing can actually use a computer. And certainly, it is still beta. There's certain things that it's not very good at yet. But I'm really excited, I think, most broadly, not just for new things that weren't possible before, but as a much lower friction way to implement tool use. One anecdote from my days at Cobalt Robotics, we wanted our robots to be able to ride elevators, to go between floors and fully cover a building. The first way that we did this was doing API integrations with the elevator companies. Some of them actually had APIs. We could send a request, and it would move the elevator. Each new company we did took six months to do,Swyx [00:52:37]: because they were very slow.Erik [00:52:39]: They didn't really care.Swyx [00:52:40]: Or an elevator, not an API.Erik [00:52:42]: Even installing, once we had it with the company, they would have to literally go install an API box on the elevator that we wanted to use, and that would sometimes take six months.Swyx [00:52:51]: So very slow.Erik [00:52:52]: And eventually, we're like, okay, this is slowing down all of our customer deployments. And I was like, what if we just add an arm to the robot? And I added this little arm that could literally go and press the elevator buttons, and we use computer vision to do this. And we could deploy that in a single day, and have the robot being able to use the elevators. At the same time, it was slower than the API. It wasn't quite as reliable. Sometimes it would miss, and it would have to try to press it again.Swyx [00:53:20]: But it would get there.Erik [00:53:20]: But it was slower and a little bit less reliable. And I kind of see this as an analogy to computer use, of anything you can do with computer use today, you could probably write tool use and integrate it with APIs.Swyx [00:53:33]: It's up to the language model.Erik [00:53:34]: But that's going to take a bunch of software engineering to write those integrations.Swyx [00:53:38]: You have to do all this stuff.Erik [00:53:39]: With computer use, just give the thing a browser that's logged into what you want to integrate with, and it's going to work immediately. And I see that reduction in friction as being incredibly exciting. Imagine a customer support team where, okay, hey, you got this customer support bot, but you need to go integrate it with all these things. And you don't have any engineers on your customer support team. But if you can just give the thing a browser that's logged into your systems that you need it to have access to, now, suddenly, in one day, you could be up and rolling with a fully integrated customer service bot that could go do all the actions you care about. So I think that's the most exciting thing for me about computer use, is reducing that friction of integrations to almost zero.Alessio [00:54:20]: Or farming on World of Warcraft.Swyx [00:54:23]: Yes, or that.Erik [00:54:23]: Just go computer use.Alessio [00:54:25]: Very high-value use cases.Swyx [00:54:27]: I always say about this, this is the oldest question in robotics or self-driving, which is, do you drive by vision or do you have special tools? And vision is the universal tool to claim all tools. There's trade-offs, but there's situations in which that will come. But this week's podcast, the one that we just put out, had Stan Polu from Dust saying that he doesn't see a future where it's the significant workhorse. I think there could be a separation between maybe the high-volume use cases. You want APIs. And then the long tail, you want computer use. I totally agree. Right?Erik [00:55:00]: Or you'll start, you'll prototype something with computer use. And then, hey, this is working. Customers have adopted this feature. OK, let's go turn it into an API. And it'll be faster and use less tokens.Swyx [00:55:11]: I'd be interested to see a computer use agent replace itself by figuring out the API and then just dropping out of the equation altogether.Erik [00:55:20]: Yeah, that's really fun, actually.Swyx [00:55:22]: If I was running an RPA company, you would have the RPA scripting. RPA, for people listening, is robotic process automation, where you would script things that always show up in sequence. So you don't have an LLM in the loop. And so basically what you need to do is train an LLM to code that script. And then you can naturally hand off from computer use to non-computer use.Erik [00:55:43]: Or have some way to turn Claude's actions of computer use into a saved script that you can then run repeatedly.Swyx [00:55:49]: Yeah, it'd be interesting to record that.Alessio [00:55:50]: Why did you decide to not ship any sandbox harness for computer use? It's kind of like, hey, peace.Swyx [00:55:58]: Run at your own risk. It's Docker, right?Erik [00:55:59]: No, no, we launched it with, I think, a VM or Docker, a Docker as system.Alessio [00:56:03]: But it's not for your actual computer, right? The Docker instance runs in the Docker. It's not for...Swyx [00:56:10]: Yeah, it runs its own browser.Erik [00:56:13]: I mean, the main reason for that, one, is sort of security. We don't want... The model can do anything. So we wanted to give it a sandbox, not have people do their own computer. At least sort of for our default experience. We really care about providing a nice sort of... Making the default safe, I think, is the best way for us to do it. And I mean, very quickly, people made modifications to let you run it on your own desktop. And that's fine.Swyx [00:56:37]: Someone else can do that.Erik [00:56:37]: But we don't want that to be the official, anthropic thing to run. I would say also, from a product perspective, right now, because this is sort of still in beta, I think a lot of the most useful use cases are... Like, a sandbox is actually what you want. You want something where, hey, it can't mess up anything in here. It only has what I gave it. Also, if it's using your computer, you know, you can't use your computer at the same time. I think you actually want it to have its own screen. It's like you and a person pair programming, but only on one laptop versus you have two laptops.Swyx [00:57:07]: Everyone should totally have a side laptop where the computer uses... Cloud is just doing its thing. Yeah, yeah.Erik [00:57:11]: I think it's such a better experience. Unless there's something very explicit you want it to do for you on your own computer.Swyx [00:57:17]: It becomes like you're sort of shelling into a remote machine and, you know, maybe checking in on it every now and then. Like, I have fond memories of... Half our audience is going to be too young to remember this, but Citrix desktop experience, like, you were sort of remote into a machine that someone else was operating. And for a long time, that would be how you did, like, enterprise computing. Yeah, yeah. It's coming back. Any other implications of computer use? You know, is it a fun demo or is it, like, the future of Anthropic? I'm very excited about it.Erik [00:57:50]: I think that, like, there's a lot of sort of very repetitive work that, like, computer use will be great for. I think I've seen some examples of people build, like, coding agents that then also, like, test the front end that they made. So I think it's very cool to, like, use computer use to be able to close the loop on a lot of things that right now just a terminal-based agent can't do. So I think that's very exciting.Swyx [00:58:11]: It's kind of like end-to-end testing. Exactly. Yeah, yeah.Erik [00:58:14]: The end sort of front-end and web testing is something I'm very excited about.Swyx [00:58:18]: Yeah, I've seen Amanda also talking... This would be Amanda Askell, the head of Cloud Character. She goes on a lunch break and it generates, you know, research ideas for her. Giving it a name like computer use is very practical. It's like you're supposed to do things, but maybe sometimes it's not about doing things, it's about thinking. And thinking... In the process of thinking, you're using the computer. In some way that's, you know, solving SweetBench, like, you should be allowed to use the internet or you should be allowed to use a computer to solve it and use your vision and use whatever. Like, we're just sort of shackling it with all these restrictions just because we want to play nice for a benchmark. But really, you know, a full AI will be able to do all these things. To think. Yeah, we'll definitely be able to. To reason. To Google and search for things.Erik [00:58:58]: Yeah, yeah. Pull down inspiration.Alessio [00:59:00]: Can we just do a... before we wrap, a robotics corner?Swyx [00:59:03]: Oh, yeah, yeah.Alessio [00:59:04]: People are always curious, especially with somebody that is not trying to hype their own company. What's the state of AI robotics? Under-hyped, over-hyped?Erik [00:59:12]: Yeah, and I'll say, like, these are my opinions, not Anthropic's. And again, coming from a place of a burned-out robotics founder, so take everything with a grain of salt. I would say on the positives, like, there is really sort of incredible progress that's happened in the last five years that I think will be a big unlock for robotics. The first is just general purpose language models. I mean, there was an old saying in robotics that if to fully describe your task is harder than to just do the task, you can never automate it. Because, like, it's going to take more effort to even tell the robot how to do this thing than to me just do it itself. LLM solved that. I no longer need to go exhaustively program in every little thing I could do. The thing just has common sense. And it's going to know, how do I make a Reuben sandwich? I'm not going to have to go program that in. Whereas before, like, the idea of even, like, a cooking thing, it's like, oh god, like, we're gonna have the team of engineers that are hard coding recipes for the long tail of anything. It would be a disaster. So I think that's one thing, is that bringing common sense really is, like, solves this huge problem of describing tasks. The second big innovation has been diffusion models for path planning. A lot of this work came out of Toyota Research. There's a lot of startups now that are working on this, like Physical Intelligence Pi, Chelsea Finn's startup out of Stanford. And the basic idea here is using a little bit of the, I'd say maybe more inspiration from diffusion rather than diffusion models themselves. But they're a way to basically learn an end-to-end sort of motion control. Whereas previously, all of robotics motion control was sort of very hard-coded. You either, you know, you're programming in explicit motions, or you're programming in an explicit goal and using an optimization library to find the shortest path to it. This is now something where you just give it a bunch of demonstrations. And again, just like using learning, it's basically like learning from these examples. What does it mean to go pick up a cup? And doing these in a way just like diffusion models, where they are somewhat conditioned by text, you can have the same model learn many different tasks. And then the hope is that these start to generalize. That if you've trained it on picking up coffee cups and picking up books, then when I say pick up the backpack, it knows how to do that too. Even though you've never trained it on that. That's kind of the holy grail here, is that you train it on 500 different tasks, and then that's enough to really get it to generalize to do anything you would need. I think that's like still a big TBD. And these people are working, have like measured some degree of generalization. But at the end of the day, it's also like LLMs. Like, you know, do you really care about the thing, being able to do something that no one has ever shown in training data? People for like a home robot, there's going to be like a hundred things that people really wanted to do. And you can just make sure it has good training for those things. What you do care about then is like generalization within a task of, oh, I've never seen this particular coffee mug before. Can I still pick it up? And those, the models do seem very good at. So these kind of are the two big things that are going for robotics right now, is LLMs for common sense and diffusion-inspired path planning algorithms. I think this is very promising, but I think there's a lot of hype. And I think where we are right now is where self-driving cars were 10 years ago. I think we have very cool demos that work. I mean, 10 years ago, you had videos of people driving a car on the highway, driving a car, you know, on a street with a safety driver. But it's really taken a long time to go from there to, I took a Waymo here today. And even Waymo is only in SF and a few other cities. And I think it takes a long time for these things to actually get everywhere and to get all the edge cases covered. I think that for robotics, the limiting factor is going to be reliability, that these models are really good at doing these demos of doing laundry or doing dishes. If they only work 99% of the time, that sounds good, but that's actually really annoying. Humans are really good at these tasks. Imagine if one out of every 100 dishes, it washed, it breaks. You would not want that robot in your house, or you certainly wouldn't want that in your factory if one of every 100 boxes that it moves, it drops and breaks things inside it. So I think for these things to really be useful, they're going to have to hit a very, very high level of reliability, just like self-driving cars. And I don't know how hard it's going to be for these models to move from the 95% reliability to 99.9. I think that's going to be the big thing. And I think also, I'm a little skeptical of how good the unit economics of these things will be. These robots are going to be very expensive to build. And if you're just trying to replace labor, like a one-for-one purchase, it kind of sets an upper cap about how much you can charge. And so it seems like it's not that great a business. I'm also worried about that for the self-driving car industry.Alessio [01:04:05]: Do you see most of the applications actually taking some of the older, especially manufacturing machinery, which needs to be very precise? Even if it's off by just a few millimeters, it cannot screw up the whole thing and be able to adjust at the edge? Or do you think the net new use cases may be more interesting?Erik [01:04:24]: I think it'd be very hard to replace a lot of those traditional manufacturing robots because everything relies on that precision. If you have a model that can, again, only get there 99% of the time, you don't want 1% of your cars to have the weld in the wrong spot. That's going to be a disaster. And a lot of manufacturing is all about getting rid of as much variance and uncertainty asSwyx [01:04:47]: possible.Erik [01:04:47]: Yeah.Swyx [01:04:48]: And what about the hardware?Alessio [01:04:49]: A lot of my friends that work in robotics, one of their big issues is sometimes you just have a servo that fails, and it takes a bunch of time to fix that.Swyx [01:04:57]: Is that holding back things?Alessio [01:04:58]: Or is the software still, anyway, not that ready?Swyx [01:05:01]: I think both.Erik [01:05:01]: I think there's been a lot more progress in the software in the last few years. And I think a lot of the humanoid robot companies now are really trying to build amazing hardware. Hardware is just so hard. It's something where you build your first robot, and it works. You're like, great. Then you build 10 of them. Five of them work. Three of them work half the time. Two of them don't work. And you built them all the same, and you don't know why. And it's just like the real world has this level of detail and differences that softwareSwyx [01:05:28]: doesn't have.Erik [01:05:29]: Imagine if every for loop you wrote, some of them just didn't work. Some of them were slower than others. How do you deal with that? Imagine if every binary that you shipped to a customer, each of those four loops was aSwyx [01:05:41]: little different.Erik [01:05:41]: It becomes just so hard to scale and maintain quality of these things. And I think that's what makes hardware really hard. It's not building one of something, but repeatedly building something and making it work reliably. Where again, you'll buy a batch of 100 motors, and each of those motors will behave a little bit differently to the same input command.Swyx [01:06:01]: This is your lived experience at Cobalt.Erik [01:06:03]: And robotics is all about how do you build something that's robust despite these differences.Swyx [01:06:08]: We can't get the tolerance of motors down to-Erik [01:06:10]: It's just everything.Swyx [01:06:13]: It's actually everything.Alessio [01:06:14]: Yeah.Erik [01:06:15]: No, I mean, one of my horror stories was that at Cobalt, this was many years ago, we had a thermal camera on the robot that had a USB connection to the computer inside, which is, first of all, is a big mistake. You're not supposed to use a USB. It is not a reliable protocol. It's designed that if there's mistakes, the user can just unplug it and plug it back in. I see. And so typically things that are USB, they're not designed to the same level of very high reliability you need. Again, because they assume someone will just unplug it and replug it back in. You just say someone sometime.Swyx [01:06:46]: I heard this too, and I didn't listen to it.Erik [01:06:47]: I really wish I had before. Anyway, at a certain point, a bunch of these thermal cameras started failing, and we couldn't figure out why. And I asked everyone on the team, like, hey, what's changed? Did the software change around this? Did the hardware design change around this? And I was investigating all this stuff, looking at kernel logs of what's happening with thisSwyx [01:07:07]: thing.Erik [01:07:07]: And finally, the procurement person was like, oh, yeah, well, I found this new vendor for USB cables last summer.Swyx [01:07:14]: And I'm like, what?Erik [01:07:15]: You switched which vendor were buying USB cables? I'm like, yeah, it's the same exact cable. It's just a dollar cheaper. And it turns out this was the problem. This new cable had slightly worse resistance or slightly worse EMI interference. And it worked most of the time. But 1% of the time, these cameras would fail, and we'd need to reboot a big part of the system. And it was all just because the same exact spec, these two different USB cables, slightly different. And so these are the kind of things you deal with with hardware.Swyx [01:07:45]: For listeners, we had an episode with Josh Albrecht in BU where he talked about buying tens of thousands of GPUs. And just some of them will just not do math. Yeah, that's the same thing. You run some tests to find the bad batch, and then you return it to sender because they just, GPUs won't do math, right? Yeah, yeah, this is the thing.Erik [01:08:05]: The real world has this level of detail. Eric Jang, he did AI at Google.Swyx [01:08:11]: Yeah, 1X. Yeah, and then joined 1X.Erik [01:08:13]: I see him post on Twitter occasionally of complaints about hardware and supply chain. And we know each other, and we joke occasionally. I went from robotics into AI, and he went from AI into robotics.Swyx [01:08:26]: I mean, look, very, very promising. The time of the real world is unlimited, right? But just also a lot harder. And yeah, I do think something I also tell people about for why working software agents is they're infinitely clonable. Yeah, they always work the same way. Mostly, unless you're using Python. And yeah, I mean, this is the whole thesis. I'm also interested, you dropped a little bit of alpha there. I don't want to make sure we don't lose it. Like, you're kind of skeptical about self-driving as a business. So I want to double click on this a little bit, because I mean, I think that shouldn't be taken away. We do have some public Waymo numbers. Read from Waymo is pretty public with their stats. They're exceeding 100 Waymo trips a week. If you assume a 25𝑟𝑖𝑑𝑒𝑎𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑎𝑔𝑒,𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡′𝑠25rideaverage,that′s130 million revenue run rate. At some point, they will recoup their investment, right? Like, what are we talking about here? Way to skepticism.Erik [01:09:21]: I think, and again, I'm not an expert. I don't know their financials. I would say the thing I'm worried about is compared to an Uber, I don't know how much an Uber driver takes home a year, but call that the revenue that a Waymo is going to be making in that same year. Those cars are expensive. It's not about if you can hit profitability, it's about your cash conversion cycles. Is building one Waymo, how cheap can you make that compared to how much you're earning as the equivalent of what an Uber driver would take home? Because remember, an Uber driver, you're not getting that whole revenue. You think about, for the Uber driver, the cost of the car, the depreciation of the car. I'm not convinced how much profit Waymo can actually make per car.Swyx [01:10:02]: That's, I think, my skepticism.Alessio [01:10:02]: Well, they need to pre-assess the run Waymo because the Class C is like $110 grand, somethingSwyx [01:10:09]: like that, plus the LiDAR. That's many years of, yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly, exactly. Anything else?Alessio [01:10:14]: Parting thoughts? Call to action? Rants?Swyx [01:10:18]: The floor is yours.Erik [01:10:19]: I'm very excited to see a lot more LLM agents out there in the world doing things. And I think they'll be, the biggest limiting thing will start to become, do people trust the output of these agents? And how do you trust the output of an agent that did five hours of work for you and is coming back with something? And if you can't find some way to trust that agent's work, it kind of wasn't valuable at all. So I think that's going to be a really important thing, is not just doing the work, but doing the work in a trustable, auditable way where you can also explain to the human, hey, here's exactly how this works and why and how I came to it. I think that's going to be really important.Swyx [01:10:54]: Thank you so much. Yeah, thanks. This was great. Get full access to Latent Space at www.latent.space/subscribe

We have a full slate of upcoming events: AI Engineer London, AWS Re:Invent in Las Vegas, and now Latent Space LIVE! at NeurIPS in Vancouver and online. Sign up to join and speak!We are still taking questions for our next big recap episode! Submit questions and messages on Speakpipe here for a chance to appear on the show!We try to stay close to the inference providers as part of our coverage, as our podcasts with Together AI and Replicate will attest: However one of the most notable pull quotes from our very well received Braintrust episode was his opinion that open source model adoption has NOT gone very well and is actually declining in relative market share terms (it is of course increasing in absolute terms):Today’s guest, Lin Qiao, would wholly disagree. Her team of Pytorch/GPU experts are wholly dedicated toward helping you serve and finetune the full stack of open source models from Meta and others, across all modalities (Text, Audio, Image, Embedding, Vision-understanding), helping customers like Cursor and Hubspot scale up open source model inference both rapidly and affordably.Fireworks has emerged after its successive funding rounds with top tier VCs as one of the leaders of the Compound AI movement, a term first coined by the Databricks/Mosaic gang at Berkeley AI and adapted as “Composite AI” by Gartner:Replicating o1We are the first podcast to discuss Fireworks’ f1, their proprietary replication of OpenAI’s o1. This has become a surprisingly hot area of competition in the past week as both Nous Forge and Deepseek r1 have launched competitive models.Full Video PodcastLike and subscribe!Timestamps* 00:00:00 Introductions* 00:02:08 Pre-history of Fireworks and PyTorch at Meta* 00:09:49 Product Strategy: From Framework to Model Library* 00:13:01 Compound AI Concept and Industry Dynamics* 00:20:07 Fireworks' Distributed Inference Engine* 00:22:58 OSS Model Support and Competitive Strategy* 00:29:46 Declarative System Approach in AI* 00:31:00 Can OSS replicate o1?* 00:36:51 Fireworks f1* 00:41:03 Collaboration with Cursor and Speculative Decoding* 00:46:44 Fireworks quantization (and drama around it)* 00:49:38 Pricing Strategy* 00:51:51 Underrated Features of Fireworks Platform* 00:55:17 HiringTranscriptAlessio [00:00:00]: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, partner at CTO at Danceable Partners, and I'm joined by my co-host, Swyx founder, Osmalayar.Swyx [00:00:11]: Hey, and today we're in a very special studio inside the Fireworks office with Lin Qiang, CEO of Fireworks. Welcome. Yeah.Lin [00:00:20]: Oh, you should welcome us.Swyx [00:00:21]: Yeah, welcome. Yeah, thanks for having us. It's unusual to be in the home of a startup, but it's also, I think our relationship is a bit unusual compared to all our normal guests. Definitely.Lin [00:00:34]: Yeah. I'm super excited to talk about very interesting topics in that space with both of you.Swyx [00:00:41]: You just celebrated your two-year anniversary yesterday.Lin [00:00:43]: Yeah, it's quite a crazy journey. We circle around and share all the crazy stories across these two years, and it has been super fun. All the way from we experienced Silicon Valley bank run to we delete some data that shouldn't be deleted operationally. We went through a massive scale where we actually are busy getting capacity to, yeah, we learned to kind of work with it as a team with a lot of brilliant people across different places to join a company. It has really been a fun journey.Alessio [00:01:24]: When you started, did you think the technical stuff will be harder or the bank run and then the people side? I think there's a lot of amazing researchers that want to do companies and it's like the hardest thing is going to be building the product and then you have all these different other things. So, were you surprised by what has been your experience the most?Lin [00:01:42]: Yeah, to be honest with you, my focus has always been on the product side and then after the product goes to market. And I didn't realize the rest has been so complicated, operating a company and so on. But because I don't think about it, I just kind of manage it. So it's done. I think I just somehow don't think about it too much and solve whatever problem coming our way and it worked.Swyx [00:02:08]: So let's, I guess, let's start at the pre-history, the initial history of Fireworks. You ran the PyTorch team at Meta for a number of years and we previously had Sumit Chintal on and I think we were just all very interested in the history of GenEI. Maybe not that many people know how deeply involved Faire and Meta were prior to the current GenEI revolution.Lin [00:02:35]: My background is deep in distributed system, database management system. And I joined Meta from the data side and I saw this tremendous amount of data growth, which cost a lot of money and we're analyzing what's going on. And it's clear that AI is driving all this data generation. So it's a very interesting time because when I joined Meta, Meta is going through ramping down mobile-first, finishing the mobile-first transition and then starting AI-first. And there's a fundamental reason about that sequence because mobile-first gave a full range of user engagement that has never existed before. And all this user engagement generated a lot of data and this data power AI. So then the whole entire industry is also going through, falling through this same transition. When I see, oh, okay, this AI is powering all this data generation and look at where's our AI stack. There's no software, there's no hardware, there's no people, there's no team. I want to dive up there and help this movement. So when I started, it's very interesting industry landscape. There are a lot of AI frameworks. It's a kind of proliferation of AI frameworks happening in the industry. But all the AI frameworks focus on production and they use a very certain way of defining the graph of neural network and then use that to drive the model iteration and productionization. And PyTorch is completely different. So they could also assume that he was the user of his product. And he basically says, researchers face so much pain using existing AI frameworks, this is really hard to use and I'm going to do something different for myself. And that's the origin story of PyTorch. PyTorch actually started as the framework for researchers. They don't care about production at all. And as they grow in terms of adoption, so the interesting part of AI is research is the top of our normal production. There are so many researchers across academic, across industry, they innovate and they put their results out there in open source and that power the downstream productionization. So it's brilliant for MATA to establish PyTorch as a strategy to drive massive adoption in open source because MATA internally is a PyTorch shop. So it creates a flying wheel effect. So that's kind of a strategy behind PyTorch. But when I took on PyTorch, it's kind of at Caspo, MATA established PyTorch as the framework for both research and production. So no one has done that before. And we have to kind of rethink how to architect PyTorch so we can really sustain production workload, the stability, reliability, low latency, all this production concern was never a concern before. Now it's a concern. And we actually have to adjust its design and make it work for both sides. And that took us five years because MATA has so many AI use cases, all the way from ranking recommendation as powering the business top line or as ranking newsfeed, video ranking to site integrity detect bad content automatically using AI to all kinds of effects, translation, image classification, object detection, all this. And also across AI running on the server side, on mobile phones, on AI VR devices, the wide spectrum. So by the time we actually basically managed to support AI across ubiquitous everywhere across MATA. But interestingly, through open source engagement, we work with a lot of companies. It is clear to us like this industry is starting to take on AI first transition. And of course, MATA's hyperscale always go ahead of industry. And it feels like when we start this AI journey at MATA, there's no software, no hardware, no team. For many companies we engage with through PyTorch, we feel the pain. That's the genesis why we feel like, hey, if we create fireworks and support industry going through this transition, it will be a huge amount of impact. Of course, the problem that the industry is facing will not be the same as MATA. MATA is so big, right? So it's kind of skewed towards extreme scale and extreme optimization in the industry will be different. But we feel like we have the technical chop and we've seen a lot. We'll look to kind of drive that. So yeah, so that's how we started.Swyx [00:06:58]: When you and I chatted about the origins of fireworks, it was originally envisioned more as a PyTorch platform, and then later became much more focused on generative AI. Is that fair to say? What was the customer discovery here?Lin [00:07:13]: Right. So I would say our initial blueprint is we should build a PyTorch cloud because a PyTorch library and there's no SaaS platform to enable AI workloads.Swyx [00:07:26]: Even in 2022, it's interesting.Lin [00:07:28]: I would not say absolutely no, but cloud providers have some of those, but it's not first class citizen, right? At 2022, there's still like TensorFlow is massively in production. And this is all pre-gen AI, and PyTorch is kind of getting more and more adoption. But there's no PyTorch-first SaaS platform existing. At the same time, we are also a very pragmatic set of people. We really want to make sure from the get-go, we get really, really close to customers. We understand their use case, we understand their pain points, we understand the value we deliver to them. So we want to take a different approach instead of building a horizontal PyTorch cloud. We want to build a verticalized platform first. And then we talk with many customers. And interestingly, we started the company in September 2022, and in October, November, the OpenAI announced ChatGPT. And then boom, when we talked with many customers, they were like, can you help us work on the JNS aspect? So of course, there are some open source models. It's not as good at that time, but people are already putting a lot of attention there. Then we decided that if we're going to pick a vertical, we're going to pick JNI. The other reason is all JNI models are PyTorch models. So that's another reason. We believe that because of the nature of JNI, it's going to generate a lot of human consumable content. It will drive a lot of consumer, customer-developer-facing application and product innovation. Guaranteed. We're just at the beginning of this. Our prediction is for those kind of applications, the inference is much more important than training because inference scale is proportional to the up-limit award population. And training scale is proportional to the number of researchers. Of course, each training round could be very expensive. Although PyTorch supports both inference and training, we decided to laser focus on inference. So yeah, so that's how we got started. And we launched our public platform August last year. When we launched, it was a single product. It's a distributed inference engine with a simple API, open AI compatible API with many models. We started with LM and then we added a lot of models. Fast forward to now, we are a full platform with multiple product lines. So we love to kind of dive deep into what we offer. But that's a very fun journey in the past two years.Alessio [00:09:49]: What was the transition from you start to focus on PyTorch and people want to understand the framework, get it live. And now say maybe most people that use you don't even really know much about PyTorch at all. You know, they're just trying to consume a model. From a product perspective, like what were some of the decisions early on? Like right in October, November, you were just like, hey, most people just care about the model, not about the framework. We're going to make it super easy or was it more a gradual transition to the model librarySwyx [00:10:16]: you have today?Lin [00:10:17]: Yeah. So our product decision is all based on who is our ICP. And one thing I want to acknowledge here is the generic technology is disruptive. It's very different from AI before GNI. So it's a clear leap forward. Because before GNI, the companies that want to invest in AI, they have to train from scratch. There's no other way. There's no foundation model. It doesn't exist. So that means then to start a team, first hire a team who is capable of crunch data. There's a lot of data to crunch, right? Because training from scratch, you have to prepare a lot of data. And then they need to have GPUs to train, and then you start to manage GPUs. So then it becomes a very complex project. It takes a long time and not many companies can afford it, actually. And the GNI is a very different game right now, because it is a foundation model. So you don't have to train anymore. That makes AI much more accessible as a technology. As an app developer or product manager, even, not a developer, they can interact with GNI models directly. So our goal is to make AI accessible to all app developers and product engineers. That's our goal. So then getting them into the building model doesn't make any sense anymore with this new technology. And then building easy, accessible APIs is the most important. Early on, when we got started, we decided we're going to be open AI compatible. It's just kind of very easy for developers to adopt this new technology, and we will manage the underlying complexity of serving all these models.Swyx [00:11:56]: Yeah, open AI has become the standard. Even as we're recording today, Gemini announced that they have open AI compatible APIs. Interesting. So we just need to drop it all in line, and then we have everyone popping in line.Lin [00:12:09]: That's interesting, because we are working very closely with Meta as one of the partners. Meta, of course, is kind of very generous to donate many very, very strong open source models, expecting more to come. But also they have announced LamaStack, which is basically standardized, the upper level stack built on top of Lama models. So they don't just want to give out models and you figure out what the upper stack is. They instead want to build a community around the stack and build a new standard. I think there's an interesting dynamics in play in the industry right now, when it's more standardized across open AI, because they are kind of creating the top of the funnel, or standardized across Lama, because this is the most used open source model. So I think it's a lot of fun working at this time.Swyx [00:13:01]: I've been a little bit more doubtful on LamaStack, I think you've been more positive. Basically it's just like the meta version of whatever Hugging Face offers, you know, or TensorRT, or BLM, or whatever the open source opportunity is. But to me, it's not clear that just because Meta open sources Lama, that the rest of LamaStack will be adopted. And it's not clear why I should adopt it. So I don't know if you agree.Lin [00:13:27]: It's very early right now. That's why I kind of work very closely with them and give them feedback. The feedback to the meta team is very important. So then they can use that to continue to improve the model and also improve the higher level I think the success of LamaStack heavily depends on the community adoption. And there's no way around it. And I know the meta team would like to kind of work with a broader set of community. But it's very early.Swyx [00:13:52]: One thing that after your Series B, so you raced for Benchmark, and then Sequoia. I remember being close to you for at least your Series B announcements, you started betting heavily on this term of Compound AI. It's not a term that we've covered very much in the podcast, but I think it's definitely getting a lot of adoption from Databricks and Berkeley people and all that. What's your take on Compound AI? Why is it resonating with people?Lin [00:14:16]: Right. So let me give a little bit of context why we even consider that space.Swyx [00:14:22]: Because like pre-Series B, there was no message, and now it's like on your landing page.Lin [00:14:27]: So it's kind of very organic evolution from when we first launched our public platform, we are a single product. We are a distributed inference engine, where we do a lot of innovation, customized KUDA kernels, raw kernel kernels, running on different kinds of hardware, and build distributed disaggregated execution, inference execution, build all kinds of caching. So that is one. So that's kind of one product line, is the fast, most cost-efficient inference platform. Because we wrote PyTorch code, we know we basically have a special PyTorch build for that, together with a custom kernel we wrote. And then we worked with many more customers, we realized, oh, the distributed inference engine, our design is one size fits all. We want to have this inference endpoint, then everyone come in, and no matter what kind of form and shape or workload they have, it will just work for them. So that's great. But the reality is, we realized all customers have different kinds of use cases. The use cases come in all different forms and shapes. And the end result is the data distribution in their inference workload doesn't align with the data distribution in the training data for the model. It's a given, actually. If you think about it, because researchers have to guesstimate what is important, what's not important in preparing data for training. So because of that misalignment, then we leave a lot of quality, latency, cost improvement on the table. So then we're saying, OK, we want to heavily invest in a customization engine. And we actually announced it called FHIR Optimizer. So FHIR Optimizer basically helps users navigate a three-dimensional optimization space across quality, latency, and cost. So it's a three-dimensional curve. And even for one company, for different use cases, they want to land in different spots. So we automate that process for our customers. It's very simple. You have your inference workload. You inject into the optimizer along with the objective function. And then we spit out inference deployment config and the model setup. So it's your customized setup. So that is a completely different product. So that product thinking is one size fits all. And now on top of that, we provide a huge variety of state-of-the-art models, hundreds of them, varying from text to large state-of-the-art English models. That's where we started. And as we talk with many customers, we realize, oh, audio and text are very, very close. Many of our customers start to build assistants, all kinds of assistants using text. And they immediately want to add audio, audio in, audio out. So we support transcription, translation, speech synthesis, text, audio alignment, all different kinds of audio features. It's a big announcement. You should have heard by the time this is out. And the other areas of vision and text are very close with each other. Because a lot of information doesn't live in plain text. A lot of information lives in multimedia format, images, PDFs, screenshots, and many other different formats. So oftentimes to solve a problem, we need to put the vision model first to extract information and then use language model to process and then send out results. So vision is important. We also support vision model, various different kinds of vision models specialized in processing different kinds of source and extraction. And we're also going to have another announcement of a new API endpoint we'll support for people to upload various different kinds of multimedia content and then get the extract very accurate information out and feed that into LM. And of course, we support embedding because embedding is very important for semantic search, for RAG, and all this. And in addition to that, we also support text-to-image, image generation models, text-to-image, image-to-image, and we're adding text-to-video as well in our portfolio. So it's a very comprehensive set of model catalog that built on top of File Optimizer and Distributed Inference Engine. But then we talk with more customers, they solve business use case, and then we realize one model is not sufficient to solve their problem. And it's very clear because one is the model hallucinates. Many customers, when they onboard this JNI journey, they thought this is magical. JNI is going to solve all my problems magically. But then they realize, oh, this model hallucinates. It hallucinates because it's not deterministic, it's probabilistic. So it's designed to always give you an answer, but based on probabilities, so it hallucinates. And that's actually sometimes a feature for creative writing, for example. Sometimes it's a bug because, hey, you don't want to give misinformation. And different models also have different specialties. To solve a problem, you want to ask different special models to kind of decompose your task into multiple small tasks, narrow tasks, and then have an expert model solve that task really well. And of course, the model doesn't have all the information. It has limited knowledge because the training data is finite, not infinite. So the model oftentimes doesn't have real-time information. It doesn't know any proprietary information within the enterprise. It's clear that in order to really build a compiling application on top of JNI, we need a compound AI system. Compound AI system basically is going to have multiple models across modalities, along with APIs, whether it's public APIs, internal proprietary APIs, storage systems, database systems, knowledge to work together to deliver the best answer.Swyx [00:20:07]: Are you going to offer a vector database?Lin [00:20:09]: We actually heavily partner with several big vector database providers. Which is your favorite? They are all great in different ways. But it's public information, like MongoDB is our investor. And we have been working closely with them for a while.Alessio [00:20:26]: When you say distributed inference engine, what do you mean exactly? Because when I hear your explanation, it's almost like you're centralizing a lot of the decisions through the Fireworks platform on the quality and whatnot. What do you mean distributed? It's like you have GPUs in a lot of different clusters, so you're sharding the inference across the same model.Lin [00:20:45]: So first of all, we run across multiple GPUs. But the way we distribute across multiple GPUs is unique. We don't distribute the whole model monolithically across multiple GPUs. We chop them into pieces and scale them completely differently based on what's the bottleneck. We also are distributed across regions. We have been running in North America, EMEA, and Asia. We have regional affinity to applications because latency is extremely important. We are also doing global load balancing because a lot of applications there, they quickly scale to global population. And then at that scale, different content wakes up at a different time. And you want to kind of load balancing across. So all the way, and we also have, we manage various different kinds of hardware skew from different hardware vendors. And different hardware design is best for different types of workload, whether it's long context, short context, long generation. So all these different types of workload is best fitted for different kinds of hardware skew. And then we can even distribute across different hardware for a workload. So the distribution actually is all around in the full stack.Swyx [00:22:02]: At some point, we'll show on the YouTube, the image that Ray, I think, has been working on with all the different modalities that you offer. To me, it's basically you offer the open source version of everything that OpenAI typically offers. I don't think there is. Actually, if you do text to video, you will be a superset of what OpenAI offers because they don't have Sora. Is that Mochi, by the way? Mochi. Mochi, right?Lin [00:22:27]: Mochi. And there are a few others. I will say, the interesting thing is, I think we're betting on the open source community is going to proliferate. This is literally what we're seeing. And there's amazing video generation companies. There is amazing audio companies. Like cross-border, the innovation is off the chart, and we are building on top of that. I think that's the advantage we have compared with a closed source company.Swyx [00:22:58]: I think I want to restate the value proposition of Fireworks for people who are comparing you versus a raw GPU provider like a RunPod or Lambda or anything like those, which is like you create the developer experience layer and you also make it easily scalable or serverless or as an endpoint. And then, I think for some models, you have custom kernels, but not all models.Lin [00:23:25]: Almost for all models. For all large language models, all your models, and the VRMs. Almost for all models we serve.Swyx [00:23:35]: And so that is called Fire Attention. I don't remember the speed numbers, but apparently much better than VLM, especially on a concurrency basis.Lin [00:23:44]: So Fire Attention is specific mostly for language models, but for other modalities, we'll also have a customized kernel.Swyx [00:23:51]: And I think the typical challenge for people is understanding that has value, and then there are other people who are also offering open-source models. Your mode is your ability to offer a good experience for all these customers. But if your existence is entirely reliant on people releasing nice open-source models, other people can also do the same thing.Lin [00:24:14]: So I would say we build on top of open-source model foundation. So that's the kind of foundation we build on top of. But we look at the value prop from the lens of application developers and product engineers. So they want to create new UX. So what's happening in the industry right now is people are thinking about a completely new way of designing products. And I'm talking to so many founders, it's just mind-blowing. They help me understand existing way of doing PowerPoint, existing way of coding, existing way of managing customer service. It's actually putting a box in our head. For example, PowerPoint. So PowerPoint generation is we always need to think about how to fit into my storytelling into this format of slide one after another. And I'm going to juggle through design together with what story to tell. But the most important thing is what's our storytelling lines, right? And why don't we create a space that is not limited to any format? And those kind of new product UX design combined with automated content generation through Gen AI is the new thing that many founders are doing. What are the challenges they're facing? Let's go from there. One is, again, because a lot of products built on top of Gen AI, they are consumer-personal developer facing, and they require interactive experience. It's just a kind of product experience we all get used to. And our desire is to actually get faster and faster interaction. Otherwise, nobody wants to spend time, right? And then that requires low latency. And the other thing is the nature of consumer-personal developer facing is your audience is very big. You want to scale up to product market fit quickly. But if you lose money at a small scale, you're going to bankrupt quickly. So it's actually a big contrast. I actually have product market fit, but when I scale, I scale out of my business. So that's kind of a very funny way to think about it. So then having low latency and low cost is essential for those new applications and products to survive and really become a generation company. So that's the design point for our distributed inference engine and the file optimizer. File optimizer, you can think about that as a feedback loop. The more you feed your inference workload to our inference engine, the more we help you improve quality, lower latency further, lower your cost. It basically becomes better. And we automate that because we don't want you as an app developer or product engineer to think about how to figure out all these low-level details. It's impossible because you're not trained to do that at all. You should kind of keep your focus on the product innovation. And then the compound AI, we actually feel a lot of pain as the app developers, engineers, there are so many models. Every week, there's at least a new model coming out.Swyx [00:27:09]: Tencent had a giant model this week. Yeah, yeah.Lin [00:27:13]: I saw that. I saw that.Swyx [00:27:15]: It's like $500 billion.Lin [00:27:18]: So they're like, should I keep chasing this or should I forget about it? And which model should I pick to solve what kind of sub-problem? How do I even decompose my problem into those smaller problems and fit the model into it? I have no idea. And then there are two ways to think about this design. I think I talked about that in the past. One is imperative, as in you figure out how to do it. You give developer tools to dictate how to do it. Or you build a declarative system where a developer tells what they want to do, not how. So these are completely two different designs. So the analogy I want to draw is, in the data world, the database management system is a declarative system because people use database, use SQL. SQL is a way you say, what do you want to extract out of a database? What kind of result do you want? But you don't figure out which node is going to, how many nodes you're going to run on top of, how you redefine your disk, which index you use, which project. You don't need to worry about any of those. And database management system will figure out, generate a new best plan, and execute on that. So database is declarative. And it makes it super easy. You just learn SQL, which is learn a semantic meaning of SQL, and you can use it. Imperative side is there are a lot of ETL pipelines. And people design this DAG system with triggers, with actions, and you dictate exactly what to do. And if it fails, then how to recover. So that's an imperative system. We have seen a range of systems in the ecosystem go different ways. I think there's value of both. There's value of both. I don't think one is going to subsume the other. But we are leaning more into the philosophy of the declarative system. Because from the lens of app developer and product engineer, that would be easiest for them to integrate.Swyx [00:29:07]: I understand that's also why PyTorch won as well, right? This is one of the reasons. Ease of use.Lin [00:29:14]: Focus on ease of use, and then let the system take on the hard challenges and complexities. So we follow, we extend that thinking into current system design. So another announcement is we will also announce our next declarative system is going to appear as a model that has extremely high quality. And this model is inspired by Owen's announcement for OpenAI. You should see that by the time we announce this or soon.Alessio [00:29:46]: Trained by you.Lin [00:29:47]: Yes.Alessio [00:29:48]: Is this the first model that you trained? It's not the first.Lin [00:29:52]: We actually have trained a model called FireFunction. It's a function calling model. It's our first step into compound AI system. Because function calling model can dispatch a request into multiple APIs. We have pre-baked set of APIs the model learned. You can also add additional APIs through the configuration to let model dispatch accordingly. So we have a very high quality function calling model that's already released. We have actually three versions. The latest version is very high quality. But now we take a further step that you don't even need to use function calling model. You use our new model we're going to release. It will solve a lot of problems approaching very high OpenAI quality. So I'm very excited about that.Swyx [00:30:41]: Do you have any benchmarks yet?Lin [00:30:43]: We have a benchmark. We're going to release it hopefully next week. We just put our model to LMSYS and people are guessing. Is this the next Gemini model or a MADIS model? People are guessing. That's very interesting. We're watching the Reddit discussion right now.Swyx [00:31:00]: I have to ask more questions about this. When OpenAI released o1, a lot of people asked about whether or not it's a single model or whether it's a chain of models. Noam and basically everyone on the Strawberry team was very insistent that what they did for reinforcement learning, chain of thought, cannot be replicated by a whole bunch of open source model calls. Do you think that that is wrong? Have you done the same amount of work on RL as they have or was it a different direction?Lin [00:31:29]: I think they take a very specific approach where the caliber of team is very high. So I do think they are the domain expert in doing the things they are doing. I don't think there's only one way to achieve the same goal. We're on the same direction in the sense that the quality scaling law is shifting from training to inference. For that, I fully agree with them. But we're taking a completely different approach to the problem. All of that is because, of course, we didn't train the model from scratch. All of that is because we built on the show of giants. The current model available we have access to is getting better and better. The future trend is the gap between the open source model and the co-source model. It's just going to shrink to the point there's not much difference. And then we're on the same level field. That's why I think our early investment in inference and all the work we do around balancing across quality, latency, and cost pay off because we have accumulated a lot of experience and that empowers us to release this new model that is approaching open-ended quality.Alessio [00:32:39]: I guess the question is, what do you think the gap to catch up will be? Because I think everybody agrees with open source models eventually will catch up. And I think with 4, then with Lama 3.2, 3.1, 4.5b, we close the gap. And then 0.1 just reopened the gap so much and it's unclear. Obviously, you're saying your model will have...Swyx [00:32:57]: We're closing that gap.Alessio [00:32:58]: But you think in the future, it's going to be months?Lin [00:33:02]: So here's the thing that's happened. There's public benchmark. It is what it is. But in reality, open source models in certain dimensions are already on par or beat closed source models. So for example, in the coding space, open source models are really, really good. And in function calling, file function is also really, really good. So it's all a matter of whether you build one model to solve all the problems and you want to be the best of solving all the problems, or in the open source domain, it's going to specialize. All these different model builders specialize in certain narrow area. And it's logical that they can be really, really good in that very narrow area. And that's our prediction is with specialization, there will be a lot of expert models really, really good and even better than one-size-fits-all closed source models.Swyx [00:33:55]: I think this is the core debate that I am still not 100% either way on in terms of compound AI versus normal AI. Because you're basically fighting the bitter lesson.Lin [00:34:09]: Look at the human society, right? We specialize. And you feel really good about someone specializing doing something really well, right? And that's how our way evolved from ancient times. We're all journalists. We do everything. Now we heavily specialize in different domains. So my prediction is in the AI model space, it will happen also. Except for the bitter lesson.Swyx [00:34:30]: You get short-term gains by having specialists, domain specialists, and then someone just needs to train like a 10x bigger model on 10x more inference, 10x more data, 10x more model perhaps, whatever the current scaling law is. And then it supersedes all the individual models because of some generalized intelligence slash world knowledge. I think that is the core insight of the GPTs, the GPT-123 networks. Right.Lin [00:34:56]: But the training scaling law is because you have an increasing amount of data to train from. And you can do a lot of compute. So I think on the data side, we're approaching the limit. And the only data to increase that is synthetic generated data. And then there's like what is the secret sauce there, right? Because if you have a very good large model, you can generate very good synthetic data and then continue to improve quality. So that's why I think in OpenAI, they are shifting from the training scaling law intoSwyx [00:35:25]: inference scaling law.Lin [00:35:25]: And it's the test time and all this. So I definitely believe that's the future direction. And that's where we are really good at, doing inference.Swyx [00:35:34]: A couple of questions on that. Are you planning to share your reasoning choices?Lin [00:35:39]: That's a very good question. We are still debating.Swyx [00:35:43]: Yeah.Lin [00:35:45]: We're still debating.Swyx [00:35:46]: I would say, for example, it's interesting that, for example, SweetBench. If you want to be considered for ranking, you have to submit your reasoning choices. And that has actually disqualified some of our past guests. Cosign was doing well on SweetBench, but they didn't want to leak those results. So that's why you don't see O1 preview on SweetBench, because they don't submit their reasoning choices. And obviously, it's IP. But also, if you're going to be more open, then that's one way to be more open. So your model is not going to be open source, right? It's going to be an endpoint that you provide. Okay, cool. And then pricing, also the same as OpenAI, just kind of based on...Lin [00:36:25]: Yeah, this is... I don't have, actually, information. Everything is going so fast, we haven't even thought about that yet. Yeah, I should be more prepared.Swyx [00:36:33]: I mean, this is live. You know, it's nice to just talk about it as it goes live. Any other things that you want feedback on or you're thinking through? It's kind of nice to just talk about something when it's not decided yet. About this new model. It's going to be exciting. It's going to generate a lot of buzz. Right.Lin [00:36:51]: I'm very excited to see how people are going to use this model. So there's already a Reddit discussion about it. And people are asking very deep, mathematical questions. And since the model got it right, surprising. And internally, we're also asking the model to generate what is AGI. And it generates a very complicated DAG thinking process. So we're having a lot of fun testing this internally. But I'm more curious, how will people use it? What kind of application they're going to try and test on it? And that's where we really like to hear feedback from the community. And also feedback to us. What works out well? What doesn't work out well? What works out well, but surprising them? And what kind of thing they think we should improve on? And those kind of feedback will be tremendously helpful.Swyx [00:37:44]: Yeah. So I've been a production user of Preview and Mini since launch. I would say they're very, very obvious jobs in quality. So much so that they made clods on it. And they made the previous state-of-the-art look bad. It's really that stark, that difference. The number one thing, just feedback or feature requests, is people want control on the budget. Because right now, in 0.1, it kind of decides its own thinking budget. But sometimes you know how hard the problem is. And you want to actually tell the model, spend two minutes on this. Or spend some dollar amount. Maybe it's time you miss dollars. I don't know what the budget is. That makes a lot of sense.Lin [00:38:27]: So we actually thought about that requirement. And it should be, at some point, we need to support that. Not initially. But that makes a lot of sense.Swyx [00:38:38]: Okay. So that was a fascinating overview of just the things that you're working on. First of all, I realized that... I don't know if I've ever given you this feedback. But I think you guys are one of the reasons I agreed to advise you. Because I think when you first met me, I was kind of dubious. I was like... Who are you? There's Replicate. There's Together. There's Laptop. There's a whole bunch of other players. You're in very, very competitive fields. Like, why will you win? And the reason I actually changed my mind was I saw you guys shipping. I think your surface area is very big. The team is not that big. No. We're only 40 people. Yeah. And now here you are trying to compete with OpenAI and everyone else. What is the secret?Lin [00:39:21]: I think the team. The team is the secret.Swyx [00:39:23]: Oh boy. So there's no thing I can just copy. You just... No.Lin [00:39:30]: I think we all come from a very aligned culture. Because most of our team came from meta.Swyx [00:39:38]: Yeah.Lin [00:39:38]: And many startups. So we really believe in results. One is result. And second is customer. We're very customer obsessed. And we don't want to drive adoption for the sake of adoption. We really want to make sure we understand we are delivering a lot of business values to the customer. And we really value their feedback. So we would wake up midnight and deploy some model for them. Shuffle some capacity for them. And yeah, over the weekend, no brainer.Swyx [00:40:15]: So yeah.Lin [00:40:15]: So that's just how we work as a team. And the caliber of the team is really, really high as well. So as plug-in, we're hiring. We're expanding very, very fast. So if we are passionate about working on the most cutting-edge technology in the general space, come talk with us. Yeah.Swyx [00:40:38]: Let's talk a little bit about that customer journey. I think one of your more famous customers is Cursor. We were the first podcast to have Cursor on. And then obviously since then, they have blown up. Cause and effect are not related. But you guys especially worked on a fast supply model where you were one of the first people to work on speculative decoding in a production setting. Maybe just talk about what was the behind the scenes of working with Cursor?Lin [00:41:03]: I will say Cursor is a very, very unique team. I think the unique part is the team has very high technical caliber. There's no question about it. But they have decided, although many companies building coding co-pilot, they will say, I'm going to build a whole entire stack because I can. And they are unique in the sense they seek partnership. Not because they cannot. They're fully capable, but they know where to focus. That to me is amazing. And of course, they want to find a bypass partner. So we spent some time working together. They are pushing us very aggressively because for them to deliver high caliber product experience, they need the latency. They need the interactive, but also high quality at the same time. So actually, we expanded our product feature quite a lot as we support Cursor. And they are growing so fast. And we massively scaled quickly across multiple regions. And we developed a pretty high intense inference stack, almost like similar to what we do for Meta. I think that's a very, very interesting engagement. And through that, there's a lot of trust being built. They realize, hey, this is a team they can really partner with. And they can go big with. That comes back to, hey, we're really customer obsessed. And all the engineers working with them, there's just enormous amount of time syncing together with them and discussing. And we're not big on meetings, but we are like stack channel always on. Yeah, so you almost feel like working as one team. So I think that's really highlighted.Swyx [00:42:38]: Yeah. For those who don't know, so basically Cursor is a VS Code fork. But most of the time, people will be using closed models. Like I actually use a lot of SONET. So you're not involved there, right? It's not like you host SONET or you have any partnership with it. You're involved where Cursor is small, or like their house brand models are concerned, right?Lin [00:42:58]: I don't know what I can say, but the things they haven't said.Swyx [00:43:04]: Very obviously, the drop down is 4.0, but in Cursor, right? So I assume that the Cursor side is the Fireworks side. And then the other side, they're calling out the other. Just kind of curious. And then, do you see any more opportunity on the... You know, I think you made a big splash with 1,000 tokens per second. That was because of speculative decoding. Is there more to push there?Lin [00:43:25]: We push a lot. Actually, when I mentioned Fire Optimizer, right? So as in, we have a unique automation stack that is one size fits one. We actually deployed to Cursor earlier on. Basically optimized for their specific workload. And that's a lot of juice to extract out of there. And we see success in that product. It actually can be widely adopted. So that's why we started a separate product line called Fire Optimizer. So speculative decoding is just one approach. And speculative decoding here is not static. We actually wrote a blog post about it. There's so many different ways to do speculative decoding. You can pair a small model with a large model in the same model family. Or you can have equal pads and so on. There are different trade-offs which approach you take. It really depends on your workload. And then with your workload, we can align the Eagle heads or Medusa heads or a small big model pair much better to extract the best latency reduction. So all of that is part of the Fire Optimizer offering.Alessio [00:44:23]: I know you mentioned some of the other inference providers. I think the other question that people always have is around benchmarks. So you get different performance on different platforms. How should people think about... People are like, hey, Lama 3.2 is X on MMLU. But maybe using speculative decoding, you go down a different path. Maybe some providers run a quantized model. How should people think about how much they should care about how you're actually running the model? What's the delta between all the magic that you do and what a raw model...Lin [00:44:57]: Okay, so there are two big development cycles. One is experimentation, where they need fast iteration. They don't want to think about quality, and they just want to experiment with product experience and so on. So that's one. And then it looks good, and they want to post-product market with scaling. And the quality is really important. And latency and all the other things are becoming important. During the experimentation phase, it's just pick a good model. Don't worry about anything else. Make sure you even generate the right solution to your product. And that's the focus. And then post-product market fit, then that's kind of the three-dimensional optimization curve start to kick in across quality, latency, cost, where you should land. And to me, it's purely a product decision. To many products, if you choose a lower quality, but better speed and lower cost, but it doesn't make a difference to the product experience, then you should do it. So that's why I think inference is part of the validation. The validation doesn't stop at offline eval. The validation will go through A-B testing, through inference. And that's where we offer various different configurations for you to test which is the best setting. So this is the traditional product evaluation. So product evaluation should also include your new model versions and different model setup into the consideration.Swyx [00:46:22]: I want to specifically talk about what happens a few months ago with some of your major competitors. I mean, all of this is public. What is your take on what happens? And maybe you want to set the record straight on how Fireworks does quantization because I think a lot of people may have outdated perceptions or they didn't read the clarification post on your approach to quantization.Lin [00:46:44]: First of all, it's always a surprise to us that without any notice, we got called out.Swyx [00:46:51]: Specifically by name, which is normally not what...Lin [00:46:54]: Yeah, in a public post. And have certain interpretation of our quality. So I was really surprised. And it's not a good way to compete, right? We want to compete fairly. And oftentimes when one vendor gives out results, the interpretation of another vendor is always extremely biased. So we actually refrain ourselves to do any of those. And we happily partner with third parties to do the most fair evaluation. So we're very surprised. And we don't think that's a good way to figure out the competition landscape. So then we react. I think when it comes to quantization, the interpretation, we wrote actually a very thorough blog post. Because again, no one says it's all. We have various different quantization schemes. We can quantize very different parts of the model from ways to activation to cross-TPU communication. They can use different quantization schemes or consistent across the board. And again, it's a trade-off. It's a trade-off across this three-dimensional quality, latency, and cost. And for our customer, we actually let them find the best optimized point. And we have a very thorough evaluation process to pick that point. But for self-serve, there's only one point to pick. There's no customization available. So of course, it depends on what we talk with many customers. We have to pick one point. And I think the end result, like AA published, later on AA published a quality measure. And we actually looked really good. So that's why what I mean is, I will leave the evaluation of quality or performance to third party and work with them to find the most fair benchmark. And I think that's a good approach, a methodology. But I'm not a part of an approach of calling out specific namesSwyx [00:48:55]: and critique other competitors in a very biased way. Databases happens as well. I think you're the more politically correct one. And then Dima is the more... Something like this. It's you on Twitter.Lin [00:49:11]: It's like the Russian... We partner. We play different roles.Swyx [00:49:20]: Another one that I wanted to... I'm just the last one on the competition side. There's a perception of price wars in hosting open source models. And we talked about the competitiveness in the market. Do you aim to make margin on open source models? Oh, absolutely, yes.Lin [00:49:38]: So, but I think it really... When we think about pricing, it's really need to coordinate with the value we're delivering. If the value is limited, or there are a lot of people delivering the same value, there's no differentiation. There's only one way to go. It's going down. So through competition. If I take a big step back, there is pricing from... We're more compared with close model providers, APIs, right? The close model provider, their cost structure is even more interesting because we don't bear any training costs. And we focus on inference optimization, and that's kind of where we continue to add a lot of product value. So that's how we think about product. But for the close source API provider, model provider, they bear a lot of training costs. And they need to amortize the training costs into the inference. So that created very interesting dynamics of, yeah, if we match pricing there, and I think how they are going to make money is very, very interesting.Swyx [00:50:37]: So for listeners, opening eyes 2024, $4 billion in revenue, $3 billion in compute training, $2 billion in compute inference, $1 billion in research compute amortization, and $700 million in salaries. So that is like...Swyx [00:50:59]: I mean, a lot of R&D.Lin [00:51:01]: Yeah, so I think matter is basically like, make it zero. So that's a very, very interesting dynamics we're operating within. But coming back to inference, so we are, again, as I mentioned, our product is, we are a platform. We're not just a single model as a service provider as many other inference providers, like they're providing a single model. We have our optimizer to highly customize towards your inference workload. We have a compound AI system where significantly simplify your interaction to high quality and low latency, low cost. So those are all very different from other providers.Alessio [00:51:38]: What do people not know about the work that you do? I guess like people are like, okay, Fireworks, you run model very quickly. You have the function model. Is there any kind of like underrated part of Fireworks that more people should try?Lin [00:51:51]: Yeah, actually, one user post on x.com, he mentioned, oh, actually, Fireworks can allow me to upload the LoRa adapter to the service model at the same cost and use it at same cost. Nobody has provided that. That's because we have a very special, like we rolled out multi-LoRa last year, actually. And we actually have this function for a long time. And many people has been using it, but it's not well known that, oh, if you find your model, you don't need to use on demand. If you find your model is LoRa, you can upload your LoRa adapter and we deploy it as if it's a new model. And then you use, you get your endpoint and you can use that directly, but at the same cost as the base model. So I'm happy that user is marketing it for us. He discovered that feature, but we have that for last year. So I think to feedback to me is, we have a lot of very, very good features, as Sean just mentioned. I'm the advisor to the company,Swyx [00:52:57]: and I didn't know that you had speculative decoding released.Lin [00:53:02]: We have prompt catching way back last year also. We have many, yeah. So I think that is one of the underrated feature. And if they're developers, you are using our self-serve platform, please try it out.Swyx [00:53:16]: The LoRa thing is interesting because I think you also, the reason people add additional costs to it, it's not because they feel like charging people. Normally in normal LoRa serving setups, there is a cost to dedicating, loading those weights and dedicating a machine to that inference. How come you can't avoid it?Lin [00:53:36]: Yeah, so this is kind of our technique called multi-LoRa. So we basically have many LoRa adapters share the same base model. And basically we significantly reduce the memory footprint of serving. And the one base model can sustain a hundred to a thousand LoRa adapters. And then basically all these different LoRa adapters can share the same, like direct the same traffic to the same base model where base model is dominating the cost. So that's how we advertise that way. And that's how we can manage the tokens per dollar, million token pricing, the same as base model.Swyx [00:54:13]: Awesome. Is there anything that you think you want to request from the community or you're looking for model-wise or tooling-wise that you think like someone should be working on in this?Lin [00:54:23]: Yeah, so we really want to get a lot of feedback from the application developers who are starting to build on JNN or on the already adopted or starting about thinking about new use cases and so on to try out Fireworks first. And let us know what works out really well for you and what is your wishlist and what sucks, right? So what is not working out for you and we would like to continue to improve. And for our new product launches, typically we want to launch to a small group of people. Usually we launch on our Discord first to have a set of people use that first. So please join our Discord channel. We have a lot of communication going on there. Again, you can also give us feedback. We'll have a starting office hour for you to directly talk with our DevRel and engineers to exchange more long notes.Alessio [00:55:17]: And you're hiring across the board?Lin [00:55:18]: We're hiring across the board. We're hiring front-end engineers, infrastructure cloud, infrastructure engineers, back-end system optimization engineers, applied researchers, like researchers who have done post-training, who have done a lot of fine-tuning and so on.Swyx [00:55:34]: That's it. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Get full access to Latent Space at www.latent.space/subscribe

Alessio will be at AWS re:Invent next week and hosting a casual coffee meetup on Wednesday, RSVP here! And subscribe to our calendar for our Singapore, NeurIPS, and all upcoming meetups!We are still taking questions for our next big recap episode! Submit questions and messages on Speakpipe here for a chance to appear on the show!If you've been following the AI agents space, you have heard of Lindy AI; while founder Flo Crivello is hesitant to call it "blowing up," when folks like Andrew Wilkinson start obsessing over your product, you're definitely onto something.In our latest episode, Flo walked us through Lindy's evolution from late 2022 to now, revealing some design choices about agent platform design that go against conventional wisdom in the space.The Great Reset: From Text Fields to RailsRemember late 2022? Everyone was "LLM-pilled," believing that if you just gave a language model enough context and tools, it could do anything. Lindy 1.0 followed this pattern:* Big prompt field ✅* Bunch of tools ✅* Prayer to the LLM gods ✅Fast forward to today, and Lindy 2.0 looks radically different. As Flo put it (~17:00 in the episode): "The more you can put your agent on rails, one, the more reliable it's going to be, obviously, but two, it's also going to be easier to use for the user."Instead of a giant, intimidating text field, users now build workflows visually:* Trigger (e.g., "Zendesk ticket received")* Required actions (e.g., "Check knowledge base")* Response generationThis isn't just a UI change - it's a fundamental rethinking of how to make AI agents reliable. As Swyx noted during our discussion: "Put Shoggoth in a box and make it a very small, minimal viable box. Everything else should be traditional if-this-then-that software."The Surprising Truth About Model LimitationsHere's something that might shock folks building in the space: with Claude 3.5 Sonnet, the model is no longer the bottleneck. Flo's exact words (~31:00): "It is actually shocking the extent to which the model is no longer the limit. It was the limit a year ago. It was too expensive. The context window was too small."Some context: Lindy started when context windows were 4K tokens. Today, their system prompt alone is larger than that. But what's really interesting is what this means for platform builders:* Raw capabilities aren't the constraint anymore* Integration quality matters more than model performance* User experience and workflow design are the new bottlenecksThe Search Engine Parallel: Why Horizontal Platforms Might WinOne of the spiciest takes from our conversation was Flo's thesis on horizontal vs. vertical agent platforms. He draws a fascinating parallel to search engines (~56:00):"I find it surprising the extent to which a horizontal search engine has won... You go through Google to search Reddit. You go through Google to search Wikipedia... search in each vertical has more in common with search than it does with each vertical."His argument: agent platforms might follow the same pattern because:* Agents across verticals share more commonalities than differences* There's value in having agents that can work together under one roof* The R&D cost of getting agents right is better amortized across use casesThis might explain why we're seeing early vertical AI companies starting to expand horizontally. The core agent capabilities - reliability, context management, tool integration - are universal needs.What This Means for BuildersIf you're building in the AI agents space, here are the key takeaways:* Constrain First: Rather than maximizing capabilities, focus on reliable execution within narrow bounds* Integration Quality Matters: With model capabilities plateauing, your competitive advantage lies in how well you integrate with existing tools* Memory Management is Key: Flo revealed they actively prune agent memories - even with larger context windows, not all memories are useful* Design for Discovery: Lindy's visual workflow builder shows how important interface design is for adoptionThe Meta LayerThere's a broader lesson here about AI product development. Just as Lindy evolved from "give the LLM everything" to "constrain intelligently," we might see similar evolution across the AI tooling space. The winners might not be those with the most powerful models, but those who best understand how to package AI capabilities in ways that solve real problems reliably.Full Video PodcastFlo’s talk at AI Engineer SummitChapters* 00:00:00 Introductions * 00:04:05 AI engineering and deterministic software * 00:08:36 Lindys demo* 00:13:21 Memory management in AI agents * 00:18:48 Hierarchy and collaboration between Lindys * 00:21:19 Vertical vs. horizontal AI tools * 00:24:03 Community and user engagement strategies * 00:26:16 Rickrolling incident with Lindy * 00:28:12 Evals and quality control in AI systems * 00:31:52 Model capabilities and their impact on Lindy * 00:39:27 Competition and market positioning * 00:42:40 Relationship between Factorio and business strategy * 00:44:05 Remote work vs. in-person collaboration * 00:49:03 Europe vs US Tech* 00:58:59 Testing the Overton window and free speech * 01:04:20 Balancing AI safety concerns with business innovation Show Notes* Lindy.ai* Rick Rolling* Flo on X* TeamFlow* Andrew Wilkinson* Dust* Poolside.ai* SB1047* Gathertown* Sid Sijbrandij* Matt Mullenweg* Factorio* Seeing Like a StateTranscriptAlessio [00:00:00]: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO at Decibel Partners, and I'm joined by my co-host Swyx, founder of Smol.ai.Swyx [00:00:12]: Hey, and today we're joined in the studio by Florent Crivello. Welcome.Flo [00:00:15]: Hey, yeah, thanks for having me.Swyx [00:00:17]: Also known as Altimore. I always wanted to ask, what is Altimore?Flo [00:00:21]: It was the name of my character when I was playing Dungeons & Dragons. Always. I was like 11 years old.Swyx [00:00:26]: What was your classes?Flo [00:00:27]: I was an elf. I was a magician elf.Swyx [00:00:30]: Well, you're still spinning magic. Right now, you're a solo founder and CEO of Lindy.ai. What is Lindy?Flo [00:00:36]: Yeah, we are a no-code platform letting you build your own AI agents easily. So you can think of we are to LangChain as Airtable is to MySQL. Like you can just pin up AI agents super easily by clicking around and no code required. You don't have to be an engineer and you can automate business workflows that you simply could not automate before in a few minutes.Swyx [00:00:55]: You've been in our orbit a few times. I think you spoke at our Latent Space anniversary. You spoke at my summit, the first summit, which was a really good keynote. And most recently, like we actually already scheduled this podcast before this happened. But Andrew Wilkinson was like, I'm obsessed by Lindy. He's just created a whole bunch of agents. So basically, why are you blowing up?Flo [00:01:16]: Well, thank you. I think we are having a little bit of a moment. I think it's a bit premature to say we're blowing up. But why are things going well? We revamped the product majorly. We called it Lindy 2.0. I would say we started working on that six months ago. We've actually not really announced it yet. It's just, I guess, I guess that's what we're doing now. And so we've basically been cooking for the last six months, like really rebuilding the product from scratch. I think I'll list you, actually, the last time you tried the product, it was still Lindy 1.0. Oh, yeah. If you log in now, the platform looks very different. There's like a ton more features. And I think one realization that we made, and I think a lot of folks in the agent space made the same realization, is that there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. I think many people, when they started working on agents, they were very LLM peeled and chat GPT peeled, right? They got ahead of themselves in a way, and us included, and they thought that agents were actually, and LLMs were actually more advanced than they actually were. And so the first version of Lindy was like just a giant prompt and a bunch of tools. And then the realization we had was like, hey, actually, the more you can put your agent on Rails, one, the more reliable it's going to be, obviously, but two, it's also going to be easier to use for the user, because you can really, as a user, you get, instead of just getting this big, giant, intimidating text field, and you type words in there, and you have no idea if you're typing the right word or not, here you can really click and select step by step, and tell your agent what to do, and really give as narrow or as wide a guardrail as you want for your agent. We started working on that. We called it Lindy on Rails about six months ago, and we started putting it into the hands of users over the last, I would say, two months or so, and I think things really started going pretty well at that point. The agent is way more reliable, way easier to set up, and we're already seeing a ton of new use cases pop up.Swyx [00:03:00]: Yeah, just a quick follow-up on that. You launched the first Lindy in November last year, and you were already talking about having a DSL, right? I remember having this discussion with you, and you were like, it's just much more reliable. Is this still the DSL under the hood? Is this a UI-level change, or is it a bigger rewrite?Flo [00:03:17]: No, it is a much bigger rewrite. I'll give you a concrete example. Suppose you want to have an agent that observes your Zendesk tickets, and it's like, hey, every time you receive a Zendesk ticket, I want you to check my knowledge base, so it's like a RAG module and whatnot, and then answer the ticket. The way it used to work with Lindy before was, you would type the prompt asking it to do that. You check my knowledge base, and so on and so forth. The problem with doing that is that it can always go wrong. You're praying the LLM gods that they will actually invoke your knowledge base, but I don't want to ask it. I want it to always, 100% of the time, consult the knowledge base after it receives a Zendesk ticket. And so with Lindy, you can actually have the trigger, which is Zendesk ticket received, have the knowledge base consult, which is always there, and then have the agent. So you can really set up your agent any way you want like that.Swyx [00:04:05]: This is something I think about for AI engineering as well, which is the big labs want you to hand over everything in the prompts, and only code of English, and then the smaller brains, the GPU pours, always want to write more code to make things more deterministic and reliable and controllable. One way I put it is put Shoggoth in a box and make it a very small, the minimal viable box. Everything else should be traditional, if this, then that software.Flo [00:04:29]: I love that characterization, put the Shoggoth in the box. Yeah, we talk about using as much AI as necessary and as little as possible.Alessio [00:04:37]: And what was the choosing between kind of like this drag and drop, low code, whatever, super code-driven, maybe like the Lang chains, auto-GPT of the world, and maybe the flip side of it, which you don't really do, it's like just text to agent, it's like build the workflow for me. Like what have you learned actually putting this in front of users and figuring out how much do they actually want to add it versus like how much, you know, kind of like Ruby on Rails instead of Lindy on Rails, it's kind of like, you know, defaults over configuration.Flo [00:05:06]: I actually used to dislike when people said, oh, text is not a great interface. I was like, ah, this is such a mid-take, I think text is awesome. And I've actually come around, I actually sort of agree now that text is really not great. I think for people like you and me, because we sort of have a mental model, okay, when I type a prompt into this text box, this is what it's going to do, it's going to map it to this kind of data structure under the hood and so forth. I guess it's a little bit blackmailing towards humans. You jump on these calls with humans and you're like, here's a text box, this is going to set up an agent for you, do it. And then they type words like, I want you to help me put order in my inbox. Oh, actually, this is a good one. This is actually a good one. What's a bad one? I would say 60 or 70% of the prompts that people type don't mean anything. Me as a human, as AGI, I don't understand what they mean. I don't know what they mean. It is actually, I think whenever you can have a GUI, it is better than to have just a pure text interface.Alessio [00:05:58]: And then how do you decide how much to expose? So even with the tools, you have Slack, you have Google Calendar, you have Gmail. Should people by default just turn over access to everything and then you help them figure out what to use? I think that's the question. When I tried to set up Slack, it was like, hey, give me access to all channels and everything, which for the average person probably makes sense because you don't want to re-prompt them every time you add new channels. But at the same time, for maybe the more sophisticated enterprise use cases, people are like, hey, I want to really limit what you have access to. How do you kind of thread that balance?Flo [00:06:35]: The general philosophy is we ask for the least amount of permissions needed at any given moment. I don't think Slack, I could be mistaken, but I don't think Slack lets you request permissions for just one channel. But for example, for Google, obviously there are hundreds of scopes that you could require for Google. There's a lot of scopes. And sometimes it's actually painful to set up your Lindy because you're going to have to ask Google and add scopes five or six times. We've had sessions like this. But that's what we do because, for example, the Lindy email drafter, she's going to ask you for your authorization once for, I need to be able to read your email so I can draft a reply, and then another time for I need to be able to write a draft for them. We just try to do it very incrementally like that.Alessio [00:07:15]: Do you think OAuth is just overall going to change? I think maybe before it was like, hey, we need to set up OAuth that humans only want to kind of do once. So we try to jam-pack things all at once versus what if you could on-demand get different permissions every time from different parts? Do you ever think about designing things knowing that maybe AI will use it instead of humans will use it? Yeah, for sure.Flo [00:07:37]: One pattern we've started to see is people provisioning accounts for their AI agents. And so, in particular, Google Workspace accounts. So, for example, Lindy can be used as a scheduling assistant. So you can just CC her to your emails when you're trying to find time with someone. And just like a human assistant, she's going to go back and forth and offer other abilities and so forth. Very often, people don't want the other party to know that it's an AI. So it's actually funny. They introduce delays. They ask the agent to wait before replying, so it's not too obvious that it's an AI. And they provision an account on Google Suite, which costs them like $10 a month or something like that. So we're seeing that pattern more and more. I think that does the job for now. I'm not optimistic on us actually patching OAuth. Because I agree with you, ultimately, we would want to patch OAuth because the new account thing is kind of a clutch. It's really a hack. You would want to patch OAuth to have more granular access control and really be able to put your sugar in the box. I'm not optimistic on us doing that before AGI, I think. That's a very close timeline.Swyx [00:08:36]: I'm mindful of talking about a thing without showing it. And we already have the setup to show it. Why don't we jump into a screen share? For listeners, you can jump on the YouTube and like and subscribe. But also, let's have a look at how you show off Lindy. Yeah, absolutely.Flo [00:08:51]: I'll give an example of a very simple Lindy and then I'll graduate to a much more complicated one. A super simple Lindy that I have is, I unfortunately bought some investment properties in the south of France. It was a really, really bad idea. And I put them on a Holydew, which is like the French Airbnb, if you will. And so I received these emails from time to time telling me like, oh, hey, you made 200 bucks. Someone booked your place. When I receive these emails, I want to log this reservation in a spreadsheet. Doing this without an AI agent or without AI in general is a pain in the butt because you must write an HTML parser for this email. And so it's just hard. You may not be able to do it and it's going to break the moment the email changes. By contrast, the way it works with Lindy, it's really simple. It's two steps. It's like, okay, I receive an email. If it is a reservation confirmation, I have this filter here. Then I append a row to this spreadsheet. And so this is where you can see the AI part where the way this action is configured here, you see these purple fields on the right. Each of these fields is a prompt. And so I can say, okay, you extract from the email the day the reservation begins on. You extract the amount of the reservation. You extract the number of travelers of the reservation. And now you can see when I look at the task history of this Lindy, it's really simple. It's like, okay, you do this and boom, appending this row to this spreadsheet. And this is the information extracted. So effectively, this node here, this append row node is a mini agent. It can see everything that just happened. It has context over the task and it's appending the row. And then it's going to send a reply to the thread. That's a very simple example of an agent.Swyx [00:10:34]: A quick follow-up question on this one while we're still on this page. Is that one call? Is that a structured output call? Yeah. Okay, nice. Yeah.Flo [00:10:41]: And you can see here for every node, you can configure which model you want to power the node. Here I use cloud. For this, I use GPT-4 Turbo. Much more complex example, my meeting recorder. It looks very complex because I've added to it over time, but at a high level, it's really simple. It's like when a meeting begins, you record the meeting. And after the meeting, you send me a summary and you send me coaching notes. So I receive, like my Lindy is constantly coaching me. And so you can see here in the prompt of the coaching notes, I've told it, hey, you know, was I unnecessarily confrontational at any point? I'm French, so I have to watch out for that. Or not confrontational enough. Should I have double-clicked on any issue, right? So I can really give it exactly the kind of coaching that I'm expecting. And then the interesting thing here is, like, you can see the agent here, after it sent me these coaching notes, moves on. And it does a bunch of other stuff. So it goes on Slack. It disseminates the notes on Slack. It does a bunch of other stuff. But it's actually able to backtrack and resume the automation at the coaching notes email if I responded to that email. So I'll give a super concrete example. This is an actual coaching feedback that I received from Lindy. She was like, hey, this was a sales call I had with a customer. And she was like, I found your explanation of Lindy too technical. And I was able to follow up and just ask a follow-up question in the thread here. And I was like, why did you find too technical about my explanation? And Lindy restored the context. And so she basically picked up the automation back up here in the tree. And she has all of the context of everything that happened, including the meeting in which I was. So she was like, oh, you used the words deterministic and context window and agent state. And that concept exists at every level for every channel and every action that Lindy takes. So another example here is, I mentioned she also disseminates the notes on Slack. So this was a meeting where I was not, right? So this was a teammate. He's an indie meeting recorder, posts the meeting notes in this customer discovery channel on Slack. So you can see, okay, this is the onboarding call we had. This was the use case. Look at the questions. How do I make Lindy slower? How do I add delays to make Lindy slower? And I was able, in the Slack thread, to ask follow-up questions like, oh, what did we answer to these questions? And it's really handy because I know I can have this sort of interactive Q&A with these meetings. It means that very often now, I don't go to meetings anymore. I just send my Lindy. And instead of going to like a 60-minute meeting, I have like a five-minute chat with my Lindy afterwards. And she just replied. She was like, well, this is what we replied to this customer. And I can just be like, okay, good job, Jack. Like, no notes about your answers. So that's the kind of use cases people have with Lindy. It's a lot of like, there's a lot of sales automations, customer support automations, and a lot of this, which is basically personal assistance automations, like meeting scheduling and so forth.Alessio [00:13:21]: Yeah, and I think the question that people might have is memory. So as you get coaching, how does it track whether or not you're improving? You know, if these are like mistakes you made in the past, like, how do you think about that?Flo [00:13:31]: Yeah, we have a memory module. So I'll show you my meeting scheduler, Lindy, which has a lot of memories because by now I've used her for so long. And so every time I talk to her, she saves a memory. If I tell her, you screwed up, please don't do this. So you can see here, oh, it's got a double memory here. This is the meeting link I have, or this is the address of the office. If I tell someone to meet me at home, this is the address of my place. This is the code. I guess we'll have to edit that out. This is not the code of my place. No dogs. Yeah, so Lindy can just manage her own memory and decide when she's remembering things between executions. Okay.Swyx [00:14:11]: I mean, I'm just going to take the opportunity to ask you, since you are the creator of this thing, how come there's so few memories, right? Like, if you've been using this for two years, there should be thousands of thousands of things. That is a good question.Flo [00:14:22]: Agents still get confused if they have too many memories, to my point earlier about that. So I just am out of a call with a member of the Lama team at Meta, and we were chatting about Lindy, and we were going into the system prompt that we sent to Lindy, and all of that stuff. And he was amazed, and he was like, it's a miracle that it's working, guys. He was like, this kind of system prompt, this does not exist, either pre-training or post-training. These models were never trained to do this kind of stuff. It's a miracle that they can be agents at all. And so what I do, I actually prune the memories. You know, it's actually something I've gotten into the habit of doing from back when we had GPT 3.5, being Lindy agents. I suspect it's probably not as necessary in the Cloud 3.5 Sunette days, but I prune the memories. Yeah, okay.Swyx [00:15:05]: The reason is because I have another assistant that also is recording and trying to come up with facts about me. It comes up with a lot of trivial, useless facts that I... So I spend most of my time pruning. Actually, it's not super useful. I'd much rather have high-quality facts that it accepts. Or maybe I was even thinking, were you ever tempted to add a wake word to only memorize this when I say memorize this? And otherwise, don't even bother.Flo [00:15:30]: I have a Lindy that does this. So this is my inbox processor, Lindy. It's kind of beefy because there's a lot of different emails. But somewhere in here,Swyx [00:15:38]: there is a rule where I'm like,Flo [00:15:39]: aha, I can email my inbox processor, Lindy. It's really handy. So she has her own email address. And so when I process my email inbox, I sometimes forward an email to her. And it's a newsletter, or it's like a cold outreach from a recruiter that I don't care about, or anything like that. And I can give her a rule. And I can be like, hey, this email I want you to archive, moving forward. Or I want you to alert me on Slack when I have this kind of email. It's really important. And so you can see here, the prompt is, if I give you a rule about a kind of email, like archive emails from X, save it as a new memory. And I give it to the memory saving skill. And yeah.Swyx [00:16:13]: One thing that just occurred to me, so I'm a big fan of virtual mailboxes. I recommend that everybody have a virtual mailbox. You could set up a physical mail receive thing for Lindy. And so then Lindy can process your physical mail.Flo [00:16:26]: That's actually a good idea. I actually already have something like that. I use like health class mail. Yeah. So yeah, most likely, I can process my physical mail. Yeah.Swyx [00:16:35]: And then the other product's idea I have, looking at this thing, is people want to brag about the complexity of their Lindys. So this would be like a 65 point Lindy, right?Flo [00:16:43]: What's a 65 point?Swyx [00:16:44]: Complexity counting. Like how many nodes, how many things, how many conditions, right? Yeah.Flo [00:16:49]: This is not the most complex one. I have another one. This designer recruiter here is kind of beefy as well. Right, right, right. So I'm just saying,Swyx [00:16:56]: let people brag. Let people be super users. Oh, right.Flo [00:16:59]: Give them a score. Give them a score.Swyx [00:17:01]: Then they'll just be like, okay, how high can you make this score?Flo [00:17:04]: Yeah, that's a good point. And I think that's, again, the beauty of this on-rails phenomenon. It's like, think of the equivalent, the prompt equivalent of this Lindy here, for example, that we're looking at. It'd be monstrous. And the odds that it gets it right are so low. But here, because we're really holding the agent's hand step by step by step, it's actually super reliable. Yeah.Swyx [00:17:22]: And is it all structured output-based? Yeah. As far as possible? Basically. Like, there's no non-structured output?Flo [00:17:27]: There is. So, for example, here, this AI agent step, right, or this send message step, sometimes it gets to... That's just plain text.Swyx [00:17:35]: That's right.Flo [00:17:36]: Yeah. So I'll give you an example. Maybe it's TMI. I'm having blood pressure issues these days. And so this Lindy here, I give it my blood pressure readings, and it updates a log that I have of my blood pressure that it sends to my doctor.Swyx [00:17:49]: Oh, so every Lindy comes with a to-do list?Flo [00:17:52]: Yeah. Every Lindy has its own task history. Huh. Yeah. And so you can see here, this is my main Lindy, my personal assistant, and I've told it, where is this? There is a point where I'm like, if I am giving you a health-related fact, right here, I'm giving you health information, so then you update this log that I have in this Google Doc, and then you send me a message. And you can see, I've actually not configured this send message node. I haven't told it what to send me a message for. Right? And you can see, it's actually lecturing me. It's like, I'm giving it my blood pressure ratings. It's like, hey, it's a bit high. Here are some lifestyle changes you may want to consider.Alessio [00:18:27]: I think maybe this is the most confusing or new thing for people. So even I use Lindy and I didn't even know you could have multiple workflows in one Lindy. I think the mental model is kind of like the Zapier workflows. It starts and it ends. It doesn't choose between. How do you think about what's a Lindy versus what's a sub-function of a Lindy? Like, what's the hierarchy?Flo [00:18:48]: Yeah. Frankly, I think the line is a little arbitrary. It's kind of like when you code, like when do you start to create a new class versus when do you overload your current class. I think of it in terms of like jobs to be done and I think of it in terms of who is the Lindy serving. This Lindy is serving me personally. It's really my day-to-day Lindy. I give it a bunch of stuff, like very easy tasks. And so this is just the Lindy I go to. Sometimes when a task is really more specialized, so for example, I have this like summarizer Lindy or this designer recruiter Lindy. These tasks are really beefy. I wouldn't want to add this to my main Lindy, so I just created a separate Lindy for it. Or when it's a Lindy that serves another constituency, like our customer support Lindy, I don't want to add that to my personal assistant Lindy. These are two very different Lindys.Alessio [00:19:31]: And you can call a Lindy from within another Lindy. That's right. You can kind of chain them together.Flo [00:19:36]: Lindys can work together, absolutely.Swyx [00:19:38]: A couple more things for the video portion. I noticed you have a podcast follower. We have to ask about that. What is that?Flo [00:19:46]: So this one wakes me up every... So wakes herself up every week. And she sends me... So she woke up yesterday, actually. And she searches for Lenny's podcast. And she looks for like the latest episode on YouTube. And once she finds it, she transcribes the video and then she sends me the summary by email. I don't listen to podcasts as much anymore. I just like read these summaries. Yeah.Alessio [00:20:09]: We should make a latent space Lindy. Marketplace.Swyx [00:20:12]: Yeah. And then you have a whole bunch of connectors. I saw the list briefly. Any interesting one? Complicated one that you're proud of? Anything that you want to just share? Connector stories.Flo [00:20:23]: So many of our workflows are about meeting scheduling. So we had to build some very open unity tools around meeting scheduling. So for example, one that is surprisingly hard is this find available times action. You would not believe... This is like a thousand lines of code or something. It's just a very beefy action. And you can pass it a bunch of parameters about how long is the meeting? When does it start? When does it end? What are the meetings? The weekdays in which I meet? How many time slots do you return? What's the buffer between my meetings? It's just a very, very, very complex action. I really like our GitHub action. So we have a Lindy PR reviewer. And it's really handy because anytime any bug happens... So the Lindy reads our guidelines on Google Docs. By now, the guidelines are like 40 pages long or something. And so every time any new kind of bug happens, we just go to the guideline and we add the lines. Like, hey, this has happened before. Please watch out for this category of bugs. And it's saving us so much time every day.Alessio [00:21:19]: There's companies doing PR reviews. Where does a Lindy start? When does a company start? Or maybe how do you think about the complexity of these tasks when it's going to be worth having kind of like a vertical standalone company versus just like, hey, a Lindy is going to do a good job 99% of the time?Flo [00:21:34]: That's a good question. We think about this one all the time. I can't say that we've really come up with a very crisp articulation of when do you want to use a vertical tool versus when do you want to use a horizontal tool. I think of it as very similar to the internet. I find it surprising the extent to which a horizontal search engine has won. But I think that Google, right? But I think the even more surprising fact is that the horizontal search engine has won in almost every vertical, right? You go through Google to search Reddit. You go through Google to search Wikipedia. I think maybe the biggest exception is e-commerce. Like you go to Amazon to search e-commerce, but otherwise you go through Google. And I think that the reason for that is because search in each vertical has more in common with search than it does with each vertical. And search is so expensive to get right. Like Google is a big company that it makes a lot of sense to aggregate all of these different use cases and to spread your R&D budget across all of these different use cases. I have a thesis, which is, it's a really cool thesis for Lindy, is that the same thing is true for agents. I think that by and large, in a lot of verticals, agents in each vertical have more in common with agents than they do with each vertical. I also think there are benefits in having a single agent platform because that way your agents can work together. They're all like under one roof. That way you only learn one platform and so you can create agents for everything that you want. And you don't have to like pay for like a bunch of different platforms and so forth. So I think ultimately, it is actually going to shake out in a way that is similar to search in that search is everywhere on the internet. Every website has a search box, right? So there's going to be a lot of vertical agents for everything. I think AI is going to completely penetrate every category of software. But then I also think there are going to be a few very, very, very big horizontal agents that serve a lot of functions for people.Swyx [00:23:14]: That is actually one of the questions that we had about the agent stuff. So I guess we can transition away from the screen and I'll just ask the follow-up, which is, that is a hot topic. You're basically saying that the current VC obsession of the day, which is vertical AI enabled SaaS, is mostly not going to work out. And then there are going to be some super giant horizontal SaaS.Flo [00:23:34]: Oh, no, I'm not saying it's either or. Like SaaS today, vertical SaaS is huge and there's also a lot of horizontal platforms. If you look at like Airtable or Notion, basically the entire no-code space is very horizontal. I mean, Loom and Zoom and Slack, there's a lot of very horizontal tools out there. Okay.Swyx [00:23:49]: I was just trying to get a reaction out of you for hot takes. Trying to get a hot take.Flo [00:23:54]: No, I also think it is natural for the vertical solutions to emerge first because it's just easier to build. It's just much, much, much harder to build something horizontal. Cool.Swyx [00:24:03]: Some more Lindy-specific questions. So we covered most of the top use cases and you have an academy. That was nice to see. I also see some other people doing it for you for free. So like Ben Spites is doing it and then there's some other guy who's also doing like lessons. Yeah. Which is kind of nice, right? Yeah, absolutely. You don't have to do any of that.Flo [00:24:20]: Oh, we've been seeing it more and more on like LinkedIn and Twitter, like people posting their Lindys and so forth.Swyx [00:24:24]: I think that's the flywheel that you built the platform where creators see value in allying themselves to you. And so then, you know, your incentive is to make them successful so that they can make other people successful and then it just drives more and more engagement. Like it's earned media. Like you don't have to do anything.Flo [00:24:39]: Yeah, yeah. I mean, community is everything.Swyx [00:24:41]: Are you doing anything special there? Any big wins?Flo [00:24:44]: We have a Slack community that's pretty active. I can't say we've invested much more than that so far.Swyx [00:24:49]: I would say from having, so I have some involvement in the no-code community. I would say that Webflow going very hard after no-code as a category got them a lot more allies than just the people using Webflow. So it helps you to grow the community beyond just Lindy. And I don't know what this is called. Maybe it's just no-code again. Maybe you want to call it something different. But there's definitely an appetite for this and you are one of a broad category, right? Like just before you, we had Dust and, you know, they're also kind of going after a similar market. Zapier obviously is not going to try to also compete with you. Yeah. There's no question there. It's just like a reaction about community. Like I think a lot about community. Lanespace is growing the community of AI engineers. And I think you have a slightly different audience of, I don't know what.Flo [00:25:33]: Yeah. I think the no-code tinkerers is the community. Yeah. It is going to be the same sort of community as what Webflow, Zapier, Airtable, Notion to some extent.Swyx [00:25:43]: Yeah. The framing can be different if you were, so I think tinkerers has this connotation of not serious or like small. And if you framed it to like no-code EA, we're exclusively only for CEOs with a certain budget, then you just have, you tap into a different budget.Flo [00:25:58]: That's true. The problem with EA is like, the CEO has no willingness to actually tinker and play with the platform.Swyx [00:26:05]: Maybe Andrew's doing that. Like a lot of your biggest advocates are CEOs, right?Flo [00:26:09]: A solopreneur, you know, small business owners, I think Andrew is an exception. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, he is.Swyx [00:26:14]: He's an exception in many ways. Yep.Alessio [00:26:16]: Just before we wrap on the use cases, is Rick rolling your customers? Like a officially supported use case or maybe tell that story?Flo [00:26:24]: It's one of the main jobs to be done, really. Yeah, we woke up recently, so we have a Lindy obviously doing our customer support and we do check after the Lindy. And so we caught this email exchange where someone was asking Lindy for video tutorials. And at the time, actually, we did not have video tutorials. We do now on the Lindy Academy. And Lindy responded to the email. It's like, oh, absolutely, here's a link. And we were like, what? Like, what kind of link did you send? And so we clicked on the link and it was a recall. We actually reacted fast enough that the customer had not yet opened the email. And so we reacted immediately. Like, oh, hey, actually, sorry, this is the right link. And so the customer never reacted to the first link. And so, yeah, I tweeted about that. It went surprisingly viral. And I checked afterwards in the logs. We did like a database query and we found, I think, like three or four other instances of it having happened before.Swyx [00:27:12]: That's surprisingly low.Flo [00:27:13]: It is low. And we fixed it across the board by just adding a line to the system prompt that's like, hey, don't recall people, please don't recall.Swyx [00:27:21]: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, so, you know, you can explain it retroactively, right? Like, that YouTube slug has been pasted in so many different corpuses that obviously it learned to hallucinate that.Alessio [00:27:31]: And it pretended to be so many things. That's the thing.Swyx [00:27:34]: I wouldn't be surprised if that takes one token. Like, there's this one slug in the tokenizer and it's just one token.Flo [00:27:41]: That's the idea of a YouTube video.Swyx [00:27:43]: Because it's used so much, right? And you have to basically get it exactly correct. It's probably not. That's a long speech.Flo [00:27:52]: It would have been so good.Alessio [00:27:55]: So this is just a jump maybe into evals from here. How could you possibly come up for an eval that says, make sure my AI does not recall my customer? I feel like when people are writing evals, that's not something that they come up with. So how do you think about evals when it's such like an open-ended problem space?Flo [00:28:12]: Yeah, it is tough. We built quite a bit of infrastructure for us to create evals in one click from any conversation history. So we can point to a conversation and we can be like, in one click we can turn it into effectively a unit test. It's like, this is a good conversation. This is how you're supposed to handle things like this. Or if it's a negative example, then we modify a little bit the conversation after generating the eval. So it's very easy for us to spin up this kind of eval.Alessio [00:28:36]: Do you use an off-the-shelf tool which is like Brain Trust on the podcast? Or did you just build your own?Flo [00:28:41]: We unfortunately built our own. We're most likely going to switch to Brain Trust. Well, when we built it, there was nothing. Like there was no eval tool, frankly. I mean, we started this project at the end of 2022. It was like, it was very, very, very early. I wouldn't recommend it to build your own eval tool. There's better solutions out there and our eval tool breaks all the time and it's a nightmare to maintain. And that's not something we want to be spending our time on.Swyx [00:29:04]: I was going to ask that basically because I think my first conversations with you about Lindy was that you had a strong opinion that everyone should build their own tools. And you were very proud of your evals. You're kind of showing off to me like how many evals you were running, right?Flo [00:29:16]: Yeah, I think that was before all of these tools came around. I think the ecosystem has matured a fair bit.Swyx [00:29:21]: What is one thing that Brain Trust has nailed that you always struggled to do?Flo [00:29:25]: We're not using them yet, so I couldn't tell. But from what I've gathered from the conversations I've had, like they're doing what we do with our eval tool, but better.Swyx [00:29:33]: And like they do it, but also like 60 other companies do it, right? So I don't know how to shop apart from brand. Word of mouth.Flo [00:29:41]: Same here.Swyx [00:29:42]: Yeah, like evals or Lindys, there's two kinds of evals, right? Like in some way, you don't have to eval your system as much because you've constrained the language model so much. And you can rely on open AI to guarantee that the structured outputs are going to be good, right? We had Michelle sit where you sit and she explained exactly how they do constraint grammar sampling and all that good stuff. So actually, I think it's more important for your customers to eval their Lindys than you evaling your Lindy platform because you just built the platform. You don't actually need to eval that much.Flo [00:30:14]: Yeah. In an ideal world, our customers don't need to care about this. And I think the bar is not like, look, it needs to be at 100%. I think the bar is it needs to be better than a human. And for most use cases we serve today, it is better than a human, especially if you put it on Rails.Swyx [00:30:30]: Is there a limiting factor of Lindy at the business? Like, is it adding new connectors? Is it adding new node types? Like how do you prioritize what is the most impactful to your company?Flo [00:30:41]: Yeah. The raw capabilities for sure are a big limit. It is actually shocking the extent to which the model is no longer the limit. It was the limit a year ago. It was too expensive. The context window was too small. It's kind of insane that we started building this when the context windows were like 4,000 tokens. Like today, our system prompt is more than 4,000 tokens. So yeah, the model is actually very much not a limit anymore. It almost gives me pause because I'm like, I want the model to be a limit. And so no, the integrations are ones, the core capabilities are ones. So for example, we are investing in a system that's basically, I call it like the, it's a J hack. Give me these names, like the poor man's RLHF. So you can turn on a toggle on any step of your Lindy workflow to be like, ask me for confirmation before you actually execute this step. So it's like, hey, I receive an email, you send a reply, ask me for confirmation before actually sending it. And so today you see the email that's about to get sent and you can either approve, deny, or change it and then approve. And we are making it so that when you make a change, we are then saving this change that you're making or embedding it in the vector database. And then we are retrieving these examples for future tasks and injecting them into the context window. So that's the kind of capability that makes a huge difference for users. That's the bottleneck today. It's really like good old engineering and product work.Swyx [00:31:52]: I assume you're hiring. We'll do a call for hiring at the end.Alessio [00:31:54]: Any other comments on the model side? When did you start feeling like the model was not a bottleneck anymore? Was it 4.0? Was it 3.5? 3.5.Flo [00:32:04]: 3.5 Sonnet, definitely. I think 4.0 is overhyped, frankly. We don't use 4.0. I don't think it's good for agentic behavior. Yeah, 3.5 Sonnet is when I started feeling that. And then with prompt caching with 3.5 Sonnet, like that fills the cost, cut the cost again. Just cut it in half. Yeah.Swyx [00:32:21]: Your prompts are... Some of the problems with agentic uses is that your prompts are kind of dynamic, right? Like from caching to work, you need the front prefix portion to be stable.Flo [00:32:32]: Yes, but we have this append-only ledger paradigm. So every node keeps appending to that ledger and every filled node inherits all the context built up by all the previous nodes. And so we can just decide, like, hey, every X thousand nodes, we trigger prompt caching again.Swyx [00:32:47]: Oh, so you do it like programmatically, not all the time.Flo [00:32:50]: No, sorry. Anthropic manages that for us. But basically, it's like, because we keep appending to the prompt, the prompt caching works pretty well.Alessio [00:32:57]: We have this small podcaster tool that I built for the podcast and I rewrote all of our prompts because I noticed, you know, I was inputting stuff early on. I wonder how much more money OpenAN and Anthropic are making just because people don't rewrite their prompts to be like static at the top and like dynamic at the bottom.Flo [00:33:13]: I think that's the remarkable thing about what we're having right now. It's insane that these companies are routinely cutting their costs by two, four, five. Like, they basically just apply constraints. They want people to take advantage of these innovations. Very good.Swyx [00:33:25]: Do you have any other competitive commentary? Commentary? Dust, WordWare, Gumloop, Zapier? If not, we can move on.Flo [00:33:31]: No comment.Alessio [00:33:32]: I think the market is,Flo [00:33:33]: look, I mean, AGI is coming. All right, that's what I'm talking about.Swyx [00:33:38]: I think you're helping. Like, you're paving the road to AGI.Flo [00:33:41]: I'm playing my small role. I'm adding my small brick to this giant, giant, giant castle. Yeah, look, when it's here, we are going to, this entire category of software is going to create, it's going to sound like an exaggeration, but it is a fact it is going to create trillions of dollars of value in a few years, right? It's going to, for the first time, we're actually having software directly replace human labor. I see it every day in sales calls. It's like, Lindy is today replacing, like, we talk to even small teams. It's like, oh, like, stop, this is a 12-people team here. I guess we'll set up this Lindy for one or two days, and then we'll have to decide what to do with this 12-people team. And so, yeah. To me, there's this immense uncapped market opportunity. It's just such a huge ocean, and there's like three sharks in the ocean. I'm focused on the ocean more than on the sharks.Swyx [00:34:25]: So we're moving on to hot topics, like, kind of broadening out from Lindy, but obviously informed by Lindy. What are the high-order bits of good agent design?Flo [00:34:31]: The model, the model, the model, the model. I think people fail to truly, and me included, they fail to truly internalize the bitter lesson. So for the listeners out there who don't know about it, it's basically like, you just scale the model. Like, GPUs go brr, it's all that matters. I think it also holds for the cognitive architecture. I used to be very cognitive architecture-filled, and I was like, ah, and I was like a critic, and I was like a generator, and all this, and then it's just like, GPUs go brr, like, just like let the model do its job. I think we're seeing it a little bit right now with O1. I'm seeing some tweets that say that the new 3.5 SONNET is as good as O1, but with none of all the crazy...Swyx [00:35:09]: It beats O1 on some measures. On some reasoning tasks. On AIME, it's still a lot lower. Like, it's like 14 on AIME versus O1, it's like 83.Flo [00:35:17]: Got it. Right. But even O1 is still the model. Yeah.Swyx [00:35:22]: Like, there's no cognitive architecture on top of it.Flo [00:35:23]: You can just wait for O1 to get better.Alessio [00:35:25]: And so, as a founder, how do you think about that, right? Because now, knowing this, wouldn't you just wait to start Lindy? You know, you start Lindy, it's like 4K context, the models are not that good. It's like, but you're still kind of like going along and building and just like waiting for the models to get better. How do you today decide, again, what to build next, knowing that, hey, the models are going to get better, so maybe we just shouldn't focus on improving our prompt design and all that stuff and just build the connectors instead or whatever? Yeah.Flo [00:35:51]: I mean, that's exactly what we do. Like, all day, we always ask ourselves, oh, when we have a feature idea or a feature request, we ask ourselves, like, is this the kind of thing that just gets better while we sleep because models get better? I'm reminded, again, when we started this in 2022, we spent a lot of time because we had to around context pruning because 4,000 tokens is really nothing. You really can't do anything with 4,000 tokens. All that work was throwaway work. Like, now it's like it was for nothing, right? Now we just assume that infinite context windows are going to be here in a year or something, a year and a half, and infinitely cheap as well, and dynamic compute is going to be here. Like, we just assume all of these things are going to happen, and so we really focus, our job to be done in the industry is to provide the input and output to the model. I really compare it all the time to the PC and the CPU, right? Apple is busy all day. They're not like a CPU wrapper. They have a lot to build, but they don't, well, now actually they do build the CPU as well, but leaving that aside, they're busy building a laptop. It's just a lot of work to build these things. It's interesting because, like,Swyx [00:36:45]: for example, another person that we're close to, Mihaly from Repl.it, he often says that the biggest jump for him was having a multi-agent approach, like the critique thing that you just said that you don't need, and I wonder when, in what situations you do need that and what situations you don't. Obviously, the simple answer is for coding, it helps, and you're not coding, except for, are you still generating code? In Indy? Yeah.Flo [00:37:09]: No, we do. Oh, right. No, no, no, the cognitive architecture changed. We don't, yeah.Swyx [00:37:13]: Yeah, okay. For you, you're one shot, and you chain tools together, and that's it. And if the user really wantsFlo [00:37:18]: to have this kind of critique thing, you can also edit the prompt, you're welcome to. I have some of my Lindys, I've told them, like, hey, be careful, think step by step about what you're about to do, but that gives you a little bump for some use cases, but, yeah.Alessio [00:37:30]: What about unexpected model releases? So, Anthropic released computer use today. Yeah. I don't know if many people were expecting computer use to come out today. Do these things make you rethink how to design, like, your roadmap and things like that, or are you just like, hey, look, whatever, that's just, like, a small thing in their, like, AGI pursuit, that, like, maybe they're not even going to support, and, like, it's still better for us to build our own integrations into systems and things like that. Because maybe people will say, hey, look, why am I building all these API integrationsFlo [00:38:02]: when I can just do computer use and never go to the product? Yeah. No, I mean, we did take into account computer use. We were talking about this a year ago or something, like, we've been talking about it as part of our roadmap. It's been clear to us that it was coming, My philosophy about it is anything that can be done with an API must be done by an API or should be done by an API for a very long time. I think it is dangerous to be overly cavalier about improvements of model capabilities. I'm reminded of iOS versus Android. Android was built on the JVM. There was a garbage collector, and I can only assume that the conversation that went down in the engineering meeting room was, oh, who cares about the garbage collector? Anyway, Moore's law is here, and so that's all going to go to zero eventually. Sure, but in the meantime, you are operating on a 400 MHz CPU. It was like the first CPU on the iPhone 1, and it's really slow, and the garbage collector is introducing a tremendous overhead on top of that, especially a memory overhead. For the longest time, and it's really only been recently that Android caught up to iOS in terms of how smooth the interactions were, but for the longest time, Android phones were significantly slowerSwyx [00:39:07]: and laggierFlo [00:39:08]: and just not feeling as good as iOS devices. Look, when you're talking about modules and magnitude of differences in terms of performance and reliability, which is what we are talking about when we're talking about API use versus computer use, then you can't ignore that, right? And so I think we're going to be in an API use world for a while.Swyx [00:39:27]: O1 doesn't have API use today. It will have it at some point, and it's on the roadmap. There is a future in which OpenAI goes much harder after your business, your market, than it is today. Like, ChatGPT, it's its own business. All they need to do is add tools to the ChatGPT, and now they're suddenly competing with you. And by the way, they have a GPT store where a bunch of people have already configured their tools to fit with them. Is that a concern?Flo [00:39:56]: I think even the GPT store, in a way, like the way they architect it, for example, their plug-in systems are actually grateful because we can also use the plug-ins. It's very open. Now, again, I think it's going to be such a huge market. I think there's going to be a lot of different jobs to be done. I know they have a huge enterprise offering and stuff, but today, ChatGPT is a consumer app. And so, the sort of flow detail I showed you, this sort of workflow, this sort of use cases that we're going after, which is like, we're doing a lot of lead generation and lead outreach and all of that stuff. That's not something like meeting recording, like Lindy Today right now joins your Zoom meetings and takes notes, all of that stuff.Swyx [00:40:34]: I don't see that so farFlo [00:40:35]: on the OpenAI roadmap.Swyx [00:40:36]: Yeah, but they do have an enterprise team that we talk to You're hiring GMs?Flo [00:40:42]: We did.Swyx [00:40:43]: It's a fascinating way to build a business, right? Like, what should you, as CEO, be in charge of? And what should you basically hireFlo [00:40:52]: a mini CEO to do? Yeah, that's a good question. I think that's also something we're figuring out. The GM thing was inspired from my days at Uber, where we hired one GM per city or per major geo area. We had like all GMs, regional GMs and so forth. And yeah, Lindy is so horizontal that we thought it made sense to hire GMs to own each vertical and the go-to market of the vertical and the customization of the Lindy templates for these verticals and so forth. What should I own as a CEO? I mean, the canonical reply here is always going to be, you know, you own the fundraising, you own the culture, you own the... What's the rest of the canonical reply? The culture, the fundraising.Swyx [00:41:29]: I don't know,Flo [00:41:30]: products. Even that, eventually, you do have to hand out. Yes, the vision, the culture, and the foundation. Well, you've done your job as a CEO. In practice, obviously, yeah, I mean, all day, I do a lot of product work still and I want to keep doing product work for as long as possible.Swyx [00:41:48]: Obviously, like you're recording and managing the team. Yeah.Flo [00:41:52]: That one feels like the most automatable part of the job, the recruiting stuff.Swyx [00:41:56]: Well, yeah. You saw myFlo [00:41:59]: design your recruiter here. Relationship between Factorio and building Lindy. We actually very often talk about how the business of the future is like a game of Factorio. Yeah. So, in the instance, it's like Slack and you've got like 5,000 Lindys in the sidebar and your job is to somehow manage your 5,000 Lindys. And it's going to be very similar to company building because you're going to look for like the highest leverage way to understand what's going on in your AI company and understand what levels do you have to make impact in that company. So, I think it's going to be very similar to like a human company except it's going to go infinitely faster. Today, in a human company, you could have a meeting with your team and you're like, oh, I'm going to build a facility and, you know, now it's like, okay,Swyx [00:42:40]: boom, I'm going to spin up 50 designers. Yeah. Like, actually, it's more important that you can clone an existing designer that you know works because the hiring process, you cannot clone someone because every new person you bring in is going to have their own tweaksFlo [00:42:54]: and you don't want that. Yeah.Swyx [00:42:56]: That's true. You want an army of mindless dronesFlo [00:42:59]: that all work the same way.Swyx [00:43:00]: The reason I bring this, bring Factorio up as well is one, Factorio Space just came out. Apparently, a whole bunch of people stopped working. I tried out Factorio. I never really got that much into it. But the other thing was, you had a tweet recently about how the sort of intentional top-down design was not as effective as just build. Yeah. Just ship.Flo [00:43:21]: I think people read a little bit too much into that tweet. It went weirdly viral. I was like, I did not intend it as a giant statement online.Swyx [00:43:28]: I mean, you notice you have a pattern with this, right? Like, you've done this for eight years now.Flo [00:43:33]: You should know. I legit was just hearing an interesting story about the Factorio game I had. And everybody was like, oh my God, so deep. I guess this explains everything about life and companies. There is something to be said, certainly, about focusing on the constraint. And I think it is Patrick Collison who said, people underestimate the extent to which moonshots are just one pragmatic step taken after the other. And I think as long as you have some inductive bias about, like, some loose idea about where you want to go, I think it makes sense to follow a sort of greedy search along that path. I think planning and organizing is important. And having older is important.Swyx [00:44:05]: I'm wrestling with that. There's two ways I encountered it recently. One with Lindy. When I tried out one of your automation templates and one of them was quite big and I just didn't understand it, right? So, like, it was not as useful to me as a small one that I can just plug in and see all of. And then the other one was me using Cursor. I was very excited about O1 and I just up frontFlo [00:44:27]: stuffed everythingSwyx [00:44:28]: I wanted to do into my prompt and expected O1 to do everything. And it got itself into a huge jumbled mess and it was stuck. It was really... There was no amount... I wasted, like, two hours on just, like, trying to get out of that hole. So I threw away the code base, started small, switched to Clouds on it and build up something working and just add it over time and it just worked. And to me, that was the factorial sentiment, right? Maybe I'm one of those fanboys that's just, like, obsessing over the depth of something that you just randomly tweeted out. But I think it's true for company building, for Lindy building, for coding.Flo [00:45:02]: I don't know. I think it's fair and I think, like, you and I talked about there's the Tuft & Metal principle and there's this other... Yes, I love that. There's the... I forgot the name of this other blog post but it's basically about this book Seeing Like a State that talks about the need for legibility and people who optimize the system for its legibility and anytime you make a system... So legible is basically more understandable. Anytime you make a system more understandable from the top down, it performs less well from the bottom up. And it's fine but you should at least make this trade-off with your eyes wide open. You should know, I am sacrificing performance for understandability, for legibility. And in this case, for you, it makes sense. It's like you are actually optimizing for legibility. You do want to understand your code base but in some other cases it may not make sense. Sometimes it's better to leave the system alone and let it be its glorious, chaotic, organic self and just trust that it's going to perform well even though you don't understand it completely.Swyx [00:45:55]: It does remind me of a common managerial issue or dilemma which you experienced in the small scale of Lindy where, you know, do you want to organize your company by functional sections or by products or, you know, whatever the opposite of functional is. And you tried it one way and it was more legible to you as CEO but actually it stopped working at the small level. Yeah.Flo [00:46:17]: I mean, one very small example, again, at a small scale is we used to have everything on Notion. And for me, as founder, it was awesome because everything was there. The roadmap was there. The tasks were there. The postmortems were there. And so, the postmortem was linkedSwyx [00:46:31]: to its task.Flo [00:46:32]: It was optimized for you. Exactly. And so, I had this, like, one pane of glass and everything was on Notion. And then the team, one day,Swyx [00:46:39]: came to me with pitchforksFlo [00:46:40]: and they really wanted to implement Linear. And I had to bite my fist so hard. I was like, fine, do it. Implement Linear. Because I was like, at the end of the day, the team needs to be able to self-organize and pick their own tools.Alessio [00:46:51]: Yeah. But it did make the company slightly less legible for me. Another big change you had was going away from remote work, every other month. The discussion comes up again. What was that discussion like? How did your feelings change? Was there kind of like a threshold of employees and team size where you felt like, okay, maybe that worked. Now it doesn't work anymore. And how are you thinking about the futureFlo [00:47:12]: as you scale the team? Yeah. So, for context, I used to have a business called TeamFlow. The business was about building a virtual office for remote teams. And so, being remote was not merely something we did. It was, I was banging the remote drum super hard and helping companies to go remote. And so, frankly, in a way, it's a bit embarrassing for me to do a 180 like that. But I guess, when the facts changed, I changed my mind. What happened? Well, I think at first, like everyone else, we went remote by necessity. It was like COVID and you've got to go remote. And on paper, the gains of remote are enormous. In particular, from a founder's standpoint, being able to hire from anywhere is huge. Saving on rent is huge. Saving on commute is huge for everyone and so forth. But then, look, we're all here. It's like, it is really making it much harder to work together. And I spent three years of my youth trying to build a solution for this. And my conclusion is, at least we couldn't figure it out and no one else could. Zoom didn't figure it out. We had like a bunch of competitors. Like, Gathertown was one of the bigger ones. We had dozens and dozens of competitors. No one figured it out. I don't know that software can actually solve this problem. The reality of it is, everyone just wants to get off the darn Zoom call. And it's not a good feeling to be in your home office if you're even going to have a home office all day. It's harder to build culture. It's harder to get in sync. I think software is peculiar because it's like an iceberg. It's like the vast majority of it is submerged underwater. And so, the quality of the software that you ship is a function of the alignment of your mental models about what is below that waterline. Can you actually get in sync about what it is exactly fundamentally that we're building? What is the soul of our product? And it is so much harder to get in sync about that when you're remote. And then you waste time in a thousand ways because people are offline and you can't get a hold of them or you can't share your screen. It's just like you feel like you're walking in molasses all day. And eventually, I was like, okay, this is it. We're not going to do this anymore.Swyx [00:49:03]: Yeah. I think that is the current builder San Francisco consensus here. Yeah. But I still have a big... One of my big heroes as a CEO is Sid Subban from GitLab.Flo [00:49:14]: Mm-hmm.Swyx [00:49:15]: Matt MullenwegFlo [00:49:16]: used to be a hero.Swyx [00:49:17]: But these people run thousand-person remote businesses. The main idea is that at some company size, your company is remote anyway. Yeah. Because if you go from one building to two buildings, congrats, you're now remote from the other building. If you want to go from one city office to two city offices, they're remote from each other.Flo [00:49:35]: But the teams are co-located. Every time anyone talks about remote success stories, they always talk about this real force. Yeah. It's always GitLab and WordPress and Zapier. Zapier. It used to be Envision. And I will point out that in every one of these examples, you have a co-located counterfactual that is sometimes orders of magnitude bigger. Look, I like Matt Mullenweg a lot, but WordPress is a commercial failure. They run 60% of the internet and they're like a fraction of the size of even Substack. Right?Swyx [00:50:05]: They're trying to get more money.Flo [00:50:07]: Yeah, that's my point, right? Look, GitLab is much smaller than GitHub. Envision, you know, is no more. And Figma, like, completely took off. And Figma was like very in-person. So, I think if you're optimizing for productivity, if you really know, hey, this is a support ticket, right, and I want to have my support ticket for a buck 50 per support ticket and next year I want it for a buck 20, then sure, send your support ticket team to offshore, like the Philippines or whatever, and just optimize for cost. If you're optimizing for cost, absolutely be remote. If you're optimizing for creativity, which I think that software and product building is a creative endeavor, if you're optimizing for creativity, it's kind of like you have to be in person and hear the music to do that.Swyx [00:50:52]: Yeah. Maybe the line is that all jobs that can be remote should be AI or Lindy's and all jobs that are not remote are in person. Like, there's a very,Flo [00:51:04]: very clear separation of jobs. Sure. Well, I think over the long term,Swyx [00:51:09]: every job is going to be AI anyway. It would be curious to break down what you think is creativity in coding and in product defining and how to express that for sure. You're definitely what I call a temperature zero use case of LLMs. You want it to be reliable, predictable, small. And then there's other use cases of LLMs that are more for creativity and engines. Right? I haven't checked, but I'm pretty sure no one uses Lindy for brainstorming. Actually,Flo [00:51:36]: probably they do. I use Lindy for brainstormingSwyx [00:51:38]: a lot, actually. Yeah, yeah. But you want to have something that's anti-fragile to hallucination. Hallucinations are good.Flo [00:51:45]: By creativity, I mean, is it about direction or magnitude? If it is about direction, like decide what to do, then it's a creative endeavor. If it is about magnitude and just do it as fast as possible, as cheap as possible, then it's magnitude. And so sometimes, you know, software companies are not necessarily creative. Sometimes you know what you're doing. And I'll say that it's going to come across the wrong way, but linear. I look up to a huge amount, like such amazing product builders, but they know what they're building. They're building a I don't mean to throw shade at them. Like, good for them.Swyx [00:52:20]: I think they're aware that they're not like They recently got s**t for saying that they have work-life balance on their job description.Flo [00:52:26]: They're like, what do you mean by this? We're building a new kind of product that no one's ever built before. And so we're just scratching our heads all day trying to get in sync about like, what exactly is itSwyx [00:52:37]: that we're building? What does it consist of? Inherently creative struggle. Yeah. Dare we ask about San Francisco? And there's a whole bunch of tough stuff in here. Probably the biggest one I would just congratulate you on is becoming American, right? Very French, but your heart was sort of in the U.S. You eventually found your way here. What are your takes for founders? A few years ago, you wrote this post on Go West, young man. And now you've basically completed that journey, right? You're now here and up to the point where you're kind of mystified by how Europe has been so decel.Flo [00:53:11]: In a way, though, I feel vindicated because I was making the prediction that Europe was over 14 years ago or something like that. I think it's been a walking corpse for a long time. I think it is only now becoming obvious that it is paying the consequences of its policies from 10, 20, 30 years ago. I think at this point, I wish I could rewrite the Go West, young man article but really even more extreme. I think at this point, if you are in tech, especially in AI, but if you're in tech and you're not in San Francisco, you either lack judgment or you lack ambition. It's funny, I recently told that to someone and they were like, oh, not everyone wants to be like a unicorn founder. And I was like, like I said, judgment or ambition. It's fine to not have ambition. It's fine to want to prioritize other things than your company in life or your career in life. That's perfectly okay. But know that that's the trade-off you're making. If you prioritize your career, you've got to be here.Alessio [00:54:03]: As a fellow European escapist, I grew up in Rome.Flo [00:54:05]: Yeah, how do you feel?Swyx [00:54:06]: We never talk about your feelings about Europe.Alessio [00:54:08]: Yeah, I've been in the U.S. now six years. Well, I started my first company in Europe 10 years ago, something like that. Yeah, you can tell nobody really wants to do much. And then you're like, okay. It's funny, I was looking back through some old tweets and I was sending all these tweets to Marc Andreessen like 15 years ago like trying to like learn more about why are you guys putting money in these things that most people here would say you're like crazy to like even back. And eventually, you know, I started doing venture six, five years ago. And I think just like so many people in Europe reach out and ask, hey, can you like talk to our team and they just cannot comprehend like the risk appetite that people have here. It's just like so foreign to people, at least in Italy and like in some parts of Europe. I'm sure there's some great founders in Europe, but like the average European founders, like why would I leave my job at the post office to go work on the startup that could change everything and become very successful but might go out of business instead in the U.S. You have like, you know, we host a hackathon and it's like 400 people and it's like, where can I go work that it's like no job security, you know? It's just like completely different and there's no incentives from the government to change that. There's no way you can like change such a deep-rooted culture of like, you know, going and wine and April spritzFlo [00:55:27]: and all of thatAlessio [00:55:28]: early in the afternoon.Flo [00:55:29]: So, I don't really know how it's going to change.Alessio [00:55:32]: It's quality of life. Yeah, totally. That's why I left. The quality is so high that I left. But again, I think it's better to move here and just, if you want to do this job and do this, you should be here. If you don't want to, that's fine.Flo [00:55:47]: But like,Alessio [00:55:48]: don't copium. Don't be like, oh no, you can also be successful doing this and knees or like whatever. No, probably not, you know? So,Flo [00:55:59]: yeah,Alessio [00:56:00]: I've already done my N400Flo [00:56:01]: so I should get my U.S. citizenship interview soon. Yeah. And I think to be fair, I think what's happening right now to Europe and they've said no to capitalism. They've decided to say no to capitalism a long time ago. They've like completely over-regulated. Taxation is much too high and so forth. But I also think some of this is a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy or it's a self-perpetuating phenomenon because, look, to your point, like once there is a network effect that's just so incredibly powerful, they can't be broken, really. And we tried with San Francisco. I tried with San Francisco. Like during COVID,Swyx [00:56:35]: there was a movement of people moving to Miami.Flo [00:56:38]: How did that pan out? You can't break the network effect,Swyx [00:56:41]: you know? It's so annoying because first principles wise, tech should not be here. Like tech should be in Miami because it's just a better city.Flo [00:56:48]: San Francisco does not want tech to be here.Swyx [00:56:50]: San Francisco hates tech.Flo [00:56:51]: 100%.Swyx [00:56:52]: This is the thing I actually wrote down.Alessio [00:56:54]: San Francisco hates tech. It is true. I think the people that are in San Francisco that were here before, tech hated it and then there's kind of like this passed down thing. But I would say people in Miami would hate it too if there were too much of it. You know? The Mickey Beach crowd would also not gel.Swyx [00:57:08]: They're just rich enough and chill enough to not care.Flo [00:57:10]: Yeah, I think so too.Swyx [00:57:11]: They're like, oh, crypto kids.Flo [00:57:13]: Okay, cool. Yeah. Miami celebrates success which is one thingSwyx [00:57:17]: I loved about it.Flo [00:57:18]: A little bit too much.Swyx [00:57:19]: Maybe the last thing I'll mention, I just wanted a little bit of EUAC talk. I think that's good. I'll maybe carve out that I think the UK has done really well. That's an argument for the UK not being part of Europe is that, you know, the AI institutions there at least have done very well. Right?Flo [00:57:34]: Sure. I think a lot of Britain is in the gutter. Yeah, exactly.Swyx [00:57:38]: They've been stagnating at best. And then France has a few wins.Flo [00:57:41]: Who?Swyx [00:57:42]: Mistral.Flo [00:57:43]: Who uses Mistral?Swyx [00:57:44]: Hugging face.Flo [00:57:45]: A few wins.Swyx [00:57:46]: I'm just saying. They disappointed their first AI minister. You know the meme with the guyFlo [00:57:51]: who's celebrating with his trophy and then he's like, no, that's France. Right? To me, that's France. It's like, aha, look, we've got Mistral! It's like champagne! It's like maybe 1% of market share. And by the way, and it's not a critic of them, it's a critic of France and of Europe. And by the way, I think I've heard that the Mistral guys were moving to the US. They're opening an office here. They're opening an office here. But, I mean,Swyx [00:58:15]: they're very French, right?Flo [00:58:16]: Right.Swyx [00:58:17]: You can't really avoid it. There's one interesting counter move which is Jason Warner and ISOCAT moving to Paris for poolside. I don't know. It remains to be seen how that move is going. Maybe the last thing I'll say, you know, that's the Europe talk. We try not to do politics so much, but you're here. One thing that you do a lot is you test your overturned windows. Right? Like far more than any founder I know. You know it's not your job. Someone, for sure, you're just indulging. But also, I think you consciously test. And I just want to see what drives you there and why do you keep doing it? Because you treat very spicy stuff, especially for like the San Francisco sort of liberal dynasty.Flo [00:58:59]: I don't know because I assume you're referring to I posted something about pronouns and how nonsense...Swyx [00:59:05]: Just in general. I don't want you to focus on any particular thing unless you want to.Flo [00:59:09]: You know, well, that tweet in particular, when I was tweeting it, I was like, oh, this is kind of spicy. Should I do this? And then I just did it. And I received zero pushback.Swyx [00:59:20]: And the tweet was actuallyFlo [00:59:21]: pretty successful and I received a lot of people reaching out like, oh my God, so true. I think it's coming from a few different places. One, life is more fun this way. Like I don't feel like if everyone always self-censors, you never know what everyone, what anyone thinks. And so it's becoming like a self-perpetuating thing. It's like a public lies, private truth sort of phenomenon. Or like, you know, there's this phenomenon called the preference cascade. It's like, there's this joke. It's like, oh, there's only one communist left in USSR. The problem is no one knows which one it is. So everyone pretends to be communist because everyone else pretends to be communist. And so I think there's a role to be played when you have a boss who's going to fire me. It's like, look, if I don't speak up and if founders don't speak up, I'm like, why? What are you afraid of? Right? Like, there's really not that much downside. And I think there'sSwyx [01:00:14]: something to be said about standing up for what you think is right and being real and owning your opinions. I think there's a correlation there between having that level of independence for your political beliefs and free speech or whatever and the wayFlo [01:00:27]: that you think about business too. But I think there's such a powerful insight at its core, which is groupthink is real and pervasive and really problematic. Like, your brain constantly shuts down because you're not even thinking in your other way or you're not thinking. You just look around you and you decide to adopt the same beliefs as people around you. And everyone thinksSwyx [01:00:48]: they're immuneFlo [01:00:49]: and everyone elseSwyx [01:00:50]: is doing itFlo [01:00:51]: except themselves. I'm a special snowflake. I have free will. That's right. And so I actually make it a point to look for, and then I think about it and I'm like, do I believe this thing? And very often the answer is yes. And then I just say it. And so I think the AI safety is an example of that. Like, at some point, Marc Andreessen blocked me on Twitter and it hurt, frankly. I really look up to Marc AndreessenSwyx [01:01:13]: and I knew he would block me. It means you're successful on Twitter.Flo [01:01:17]: It's just the right message. Marc Andreessen was really my booster initially on Twitter. He really made my account. And I was like, look, I'm really concerned about AI safety. It is an unpopular viewSwyx [01:01:27]: among my peers. I remember, you were one of the few that actually came out in support of the bill.Flo [01:01:32]: I came out in support of SB1047 a year and a half ago. I put like some tweet storms about how I was really concerned. And yeah, I was blocked by a bunch of AI safety people and I don't like it, but you know, it's funny, maybe it's my French education. But look, in France, World War II is very present in people's minds and the phenomenon of people collaborating with the Nazis and there's always this sort of debate that people have like at dinner and it's like, ah, would you really have resisted during World War II? And everybody is always saying, oh yeah, we totally have resisted. It's like, yeah, but no. The reality of it is 95% of the country did not resist and most of it actually collaborated actively with the Nazis. And so 95% of y'all are wrong. You would actually have collaborated, right? I've always told myself I will stand up for what I think is right because some people got attacked and the way I was brought up is if someone gets attacked before you, you get involved. It doesn't matter, you get involved and you help the person, right? And so, look, I'm not pretending we're nowhere near a World War II phenomenon but I'm like, exactly because we are nowhere nearAlessio [01:02:45]: this kind of phenomenon. The stakes are so low and if you're not going to stand upFlo [01:02:49]: for what you think is right when the stakes are so low,Swyx [01:02:52]: are you going to stand up when it matters? There's an inconsistency in your statements because you simultaneously believe that AGI is very soon and you also say stakes are low. You can't believe both are real.Flo [01:03:03]: Well, why does AGI make the stakes of speaking up higher?Swyx [01:03:06]: Sorry, the stakes of safety.Flo [01:03:08]: Oh yeah, no, the stakes of AISwyx [01:03:11]: are like physical safety?Flo [01:03:12]: No, AI safety. Oh no, the stakes of AI safety couldn't be higher.Swyx [01:03:17]: I meant the stakesFlo [01:03:18]: of speaking up aboutAlessio [01:03:19]: pronouns or whatever. How do you figure out who's real and who isn't? Because there was a manifesto for responsible AI that hundreds of VCs and people signed and I don't think anybody actually thinks about it anymore.Flo [01:03:30]: Was that the pause letter?Swyx [01:03:31]: The six-month pause?Flo [01:03:32]: No,Alessio [01:03:33]: there was something else that I think general catalyst and some fun sign. And then there's maybe the anthropic case which is like, hey, we're leaving open AI because you guys don't take security seriously and then it's like, hey, what if we gave AI access to a whole computerFlo [01:03:49]: to just go do things?Alessio [01:03:50]: How do you reconcile like, okay, I mean, you could say the same thing about Lindy. It's like, if you're worried about AI safety, why are you building AI? Right? That's kind of like the extreme thinking. How do you internally decide between participation and talking about it and saying, hey, I think this is important but I'm still going to build towards that and building actually makes it safer because I'm involved versus just being like anti. I think this is unsafe but then not do anything about it and just kind of remove yourselfFlo [01:04:20]: from the whole thing. What I think about our own involvement here is I'm acutely concerned about the risks at the model layer and I'm simultaneously very excited about the upside. Like, for the record, my PDoom, insofar as I can quantify it, which I cannot, but if I had to, like my vibe is like 10% or something like that and so there's like a 90% chance that we live in like a pure utopia. Right? And that's awesome. Right? So like, let's go after utopia. Right? Let's talk about the 10% chance that we live in a utopia where there's no disease and it's like a post-scarcity world. I think that utopia is going to happen through, like again, I'm bringing my little contribution to the movement. I think it would be silly to say no to the upside because you're concerned about the downside. At the same time, we want to be concerned about the downside. I know that it's very self-serving to say, oh, you know, like the downside doesn't exist at my layer, it exists at like the model layer. But truly, look at Lindy, look at the Apple building. I struggle to see exactly how it would like get up if I'm concerned about the model layer.Swyx [01:05:21]: Okay. Well, this kind of discussion can go on for hours. It is still daylight, so not the best time for it. But I really appreciate you spending the time. Any other last calls to actions or thoughts that you feel like you want to get off your chest?Flo [01:05:33]: AGI is coming.Flo [01:05:37]: Are you hiringAlessio [01:05:38]: for any roles? We are.Flo [01:05:40]: Oh yeah, I guess that should be the...Swyx [01:05:43]: Don't bother.Flo [01:05:44]: No, can you stop saying AGI is coming and just talk about it? We are also hiring yeah, we are hiring designers and engineers right now. Yeah. So hit me up at flo.lindy.aiAlessio [01:05:55]: And then go talk to my Lindy. You're not actually going to read it.Flo [01:05:58]: Actually, I have wonderedSwyx [01:05:59]: how many times when I talk to you, I'm talking to a bot. Part of that is I don't have to know, right?Flo [01:06:05]: That's right. Well, it's actually doubly confusing because we also have a teammateSwyx [01:06:09]: whose name is Lindy. Yes, I was wondering when I met her, I was like, wait, did you hire her first?Flo [01:06:14]: Marketing is fun. No, she was an inspiration after we named the company both after her. Oh, okay.Swyx [01:06:19]: Interesting. Yeah, wonderful. I'll comment on the design piece just because I think that there are a lot of AI companies that very much focus on the functionality and the models and the capabilities and the benchmark. But I think that increasingly I'm seeing people differentiate with design and people want to use beautiful products and people who can figure that out and integrate the AI into their human lives. You know, design at the limit. One, at the lowest level is to make this look pretty, make this look like Stripe or Linear's homepage. That's design. But at the highest level of design it is make this integrate seamlessly into my life. Intuitive, beautiful, inspirational maybe even. And I think that companies that, you know, this is kind of like a blog post I've been thinking about, companies that emphasize design actually are going to win more than companies that don't. Yeah,Flo [01:07:06]: I love Steve Jobs' quote and I'm going to butcher it. It's something like, design is the expression of the soul of a man-made product through successive layers of design. Jesus. Right? He was good. He was cooking. He was cooking on that one. He was cooking. It starts with the soul of the product which is why I was saying it is so important to reach alignment about that soul of the product, right? It's like an onion, like you peel the onion in those layers, right? And you design an entire journey just like the user experiencing your product chronologically all the way from the beginning of like the awareness stage I think it is also the job of the designer to design that part of the experience. It's like, okay, design is immensely important. Okay.Alessio [01:07:46]: Lovely. Yeah.Flo [01:07:48]: Thanks for coming on, Flo. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. Get full access to Latent Space at www.latent.space/subscribe

We are recording our next big recap episode and taking questions! Submit questions and messages on Speakpipe here for a chance to appear on the show!Also subscribe to our calendar for our Singapore, NeurIPS, and all upcoming meetups!In our first ever episode with Logan Kilpatrick we called out the two hottest LLM frameworks at the time: LangChain and Dust. We’ve had Harrison from LangChain on twice (as a guest and as a co-host), and we’ve now finally come full circle as Stanislas from Dust joined us in the studio.After stints at Oracle and Stripe, Stan had joined OpenAI to work on mathematical reasoning capabilities. He describes his time at OpenAI as "the PhD I always wanted to do" while acknowledging the challenges of research work: "You're digging into a field all day long for weeks and weeks, and you find something, you get super excited for 12 seconds. And at the 13 seconds, you're like, 'oh, yeah, that was obvious.' And you go back to digging." This experience, combined with early access to GPT-4's capabilities, shaped his decision to start Dust: "If we believe in AGI and if we believe the timelines might not be too long, it's actually the last train leaving the station to start a company. After that, it's going to be computers all the way down."The History of DustDust's journey can be broken down into three phases:* Developer Framework (2022): Initially positioned as a competitor to LangChain, Dust started as a developer tooling platform. While both were open source, their approaches differed – LangChain focused on broad community adoption and integration as a pure developer experience, while Dust emphasized UI-driven development and better observability that wasn’t just `print` statements.* Browser Extension (Early 2023): The company pivoted to building XP1, a browser extension that could interact with web content. This experiment helped validate user interaction patterns with AI, even while using less capable models than GPT-4.* Enterprise Platform (Current): Today, Dust has evolved into an infrastructure platform for deploying AI agents within companies, with impressive metrics like 88% daily active users in some deployments.The Case for Being HorizontalThe big discussion for early stage companies today is whether or not to be horizontal or vertical. Since models are so good at general tasks, a lot of companies are building vertical products that take care of a workflow end-to-end in order to offer more value and becoming more of “Services as Software”. Dust on the other hand is a platform for the users to build their own experiences, which has had a few advantages:* Maximum Penetration: Dust reports 60-70% weekly active users across entire companies, demonstrating the potential reach of horizontal solutions rather than selling into a single team.* Emergent Use Cases: By allowing non-technical users to create agents, Dust enables use cases to emerge organically from actual business needs rather than prescribed solutions.* Infrastructure Value: The platform approach creates lasting value through maintained integrations and connections, similar to how Stripe's value lies in maintaining payment infrastructure. Rather than relying on third-party integration providers, Dust maintains its own connections to ensure proper handling of different data types and structures.The Vertical ChallengeHowever, this approach comes with trade-offs:* Harder Go-to-Market: As Stan talked about: "We spike at penetration... but it makes our go-to-market much harder. Vertical solutions have a go-to-market that is much easier because they're like, 'oh, I'm going to solve the lawyer stuff.'"* Complex Infrastructure: Building a horizontal platform requires maintaining numerous integrations and handling diverse data types appropriately – from structured Salesforce data to unstructured Notion pages. As you scale integrations, the cost of maintaining them also scales. * Product Surface Complexity: Creating an interface that's both powerful and accessible to non-technical users requires careful design decisions, down to avoiding technical terms like "system prompt" in favor of "instructions." The Future of AI PlatformsStan initially predicted we'd see the first billion-dollar single-person company in 2023 (a prediction later echoed by Sam Altman), but he's now more focused on a different milestone: billion-dollar companies with engineering teams of just 20 people, enabled by AI assistance.This vision aligns with Dust's horizontal platform approach – building the infrastructure that allows small teams to achieve outsized impact through AI augmentation. Rather than replacing entire job functions (the vertical approach), they're betting on augmenting existing workflows across organizations.Full YouTube EpisodeChapters* 00:00:00 Introductions* 00:04:33 Joining OpenAI from Paris* 00:09:54 Research evolution and compute allocation at OpenAI* 00:13:12 Working with Ilya Sutskever and OpenAI's vision* 00:15:51 Leaving OpenAI to start Dust* 00:18:15 Early focus on browser extension and WebGPT-like functionality* 00:20:20 Dust as the infrastructure for agents* 00:24:03 Challenges of building with early AI models* 00:28:17 LLMs and Workflow Automation* 00:35:28 Building dependency graphs of agents* 00:37:34 Simulating API endpoints* 00:40:41 State of AI models* 00:43:19 Running evals* 00:46:36 Challenges in building AI agents infra* 00:49:21 Buy vs. build decisions for infrastructure components* 00:51:02 Future of SaaS and AI's Impact on Software* 00:53:07 The single employee $1B company race* 00:56:32 Horizontal vs. vertical approaches to AI agentsTranscriptAlessio [00:00:00]: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO at Decibel Partners, and I'm joined by my co-host Swyx, founder of Smol.ai.Swyx [00:00:11]: Hey, and today we're in a studio with Stanislas, welcome.Stan [00:00:14]: Thank you very much for having me.Swyx [00:00:16]: Visiting from Paris.Stan [00:00:17]: Paris.Swyx [00:00:18]: And you have had a very distinguished career. It's very hard to summarize, but you went to college in both Ecopolytechnique and Stanford, and then you worked in a number of places, Oracle, Totems, Stripe, and then OpenAI pre-ChatGPT. We'll talk, we'll spend a little bit of time about that. About two years ago, you left OpenAI to start Dust. I think you were one of the first OpenAI alum founders.Stan [00:00:40]: Yeah, I think it was about at the same time as the Adept guys, so that first wave.Swyx [00:00:46]: Yeah, and people really loved our David episode. We love a few sort of OpenAI stories, you know, for back in the day, like we're talking about pre-recording. Probably the statute of limitations on some of those stories has expired, so you can talk a little bit more freely without them coming after you. But maybe we'll just talk about, like, what was your journey into AI? You know, you were at Stripe for almost five years, there are a lot of Stripe alums going into OpenAI. I think the Stripe culture has come into OpenAI quite a bit.Stan [00:01:11]: Yeah, so I think the buses of Stripe people really started flowing in, I guess, after ChatGPT. But, yeah, my journey into AI is a... I mean, Greg Brockman. Yeah, yeah. From Greg, of course. And Daniela, actually, back in the days, Daniela Amodei.Swyx [00:01:27]: Yes, she was COO, I mean, she is COO, yeah. She had a pretty high job at OpenAI at the time, yeah, for sure.Stan [00:01:34]: My journey started as anybody else, you're fascinated with computer science and you want to make them think, it's awesome, but it doesn't work. I mean, it was a long time ago, it was like maybe 16, so it was 25 years ago. Then the first big exposure to AI would be at Stanford, and I'm going to, like, disclose a whole lamb, because at the time it was a class taught by Andrew Ng, and there was no deep learning. It was half features for vision and a star algorithm. So it was fun. But it was the early days of deep learning. At the time, I think a few years after, it was the first project at Google. But you know, that cat face or the human face trained from many images. I went to, hesitated doing a PhD, more in systems, eventually decided to go into getting a job. Went at Oracle, started a company, did a gazillion mistakes, got acquired by Stripe, worked with Greg Buckman there. And at the end of Stripe, I started interesting myself in AI again, felt like it was the time, you had the Atari games, you had the self-driving craziness at the time. And I started exploring projects, it felt like the Atari games were incredible, but there were still games. And I was looking into exploring projects that would have an impact on the world. And so I decided to explore three things, self-driving cars, cybersecurity and AI, and math and AI. It's like I sing it by a decreasing order of impact on the world, I guess.Swyx [00:03:01]: Discovering new math would be very foundational.Stan [00:03:03]: It is extremely foundational, but it's not as direct as driving people around.Swyx [00:03:07]: Sorry, you're doing this at Stripe, you're like thinking about your next move.Stan [00:03:09]: No, it was at Stripe, kind of a bit of time where I started exploring. I did a bunch of work with friends on trying to get RC cars to drive autonomously. Almost started a company in France or Europe about self-driving trucks. We decided to not go for it because it was probably very operational. And I think the idea of the company, of the team wasn't there. And also I realized that if I wake up a day and because of a bug I wrote, I killed a family, it would be a bad experience. And so I just decided like, no, that's just too crazy. And then I explored cybersecurity with a friend. We're trying to apply transformers to cut fuzzing. So cut fuzzing, you have kind of an algorithm that goes really fast and tries to mutate the inputs of a library to find bugs. And we tried to apply a transformer to that and do reinforcement learning with the signal of how much you propagate within the binary. Didn't work at all because the transformers are so slow compared to evolutionary algorithms that it kind of didn't work. Then I started interested in math and AI and started working on SAT solving with AI. And at the same time, OpenAI was kind of starting the reasoning team that were tackling that project as well. I was in touch with Greg and eventually got in touch with Ilya and finally found my way to OpenAI. I don't know how much you want to dig into that. The way to find your way to OpenAI when you're in Paris was kind of an interesting adventure as well.Swyx [00:04:33]: Please. And I want to note, this was a two-month journey. You did all this in two months.Stan [00:04:38]: The search.Swyx [00:04:40]: Your search for your next thing, because you left in July 2019 and then you joined OpenAI in September.Stan [00:04:45]: I'm going to be ashamed to say that.Swyx [00:04:47]: You were searching before. I was searching before.Stan [00:04:49]: I mean, it's normal. No, the truth is that I moved back to Paris through Stripe and I just felt the hardship of being remote from your team nine hours away. And so it kind of freed a bit of time for me to start the exploration before. Sorry, Patrick. Sorry, John.Swyx [00:05:05]: Hopefully they're listening. So you joined OpenAI from Paris and from like, obviously you had worked with Greg, but notStan [00:05:13]: anyone else. No. Yeah. So I had worked with Greg, but not Ilya, but I had started chatting with Ilya and Ilya was kind of excited because he knew that I was a good engineer through Greg, I presume, but I was not a trained researcher, didn't do a PhD, never did research. And I started chatting and he was excited all the way to the point where he was like, hey, come pass interviews, it's going to be fun. I think he didn't care where I was, he just wanted to try working together. So I go to SF, go through the interview process, get an offer. And so I get Bob McGrew on the phone for the first time, he's like, hey, Stan, it's awesome. You've got an offer. When are you coming to SF? I'm like, hey, it's awesome. I'm not coming to the SF. I'm based in Paris and we just moved. He was like, hey, it's awesome. Well, you don't have an offer anymore. Oh, my God. No, it wasn't as hard as that. But that's basically the idea. And it took me like maybe a couple more time to keep chatting and they eventually decided to try a contractor set up. And that's how I kind of started working at OpenAI, officially as a contractor, but in practice really felt like being an employee.Swyx [00:06:14]: What did you work on?Stan [00:06:15]: So it was solely focused on math and AI. And in particular in the application, so the study of the larger grid models, mathematical reasoning capabilities, and in particular in the context of formal mathematics. The motivation was simple, transformers are very creative, but yet they do mistakes. Formal math systems are of the ability to verify a proof and the tactics they can use to solve problems are very mechanical, so you miss the creativity. And so the idea was to try to explore both together. You would get the creativity of the LLMs and the kind of verification capabilities of the formal system. A formal system, just to give a little bit of context, is a system in which a proof is a program and the formal system is a type system, a type system that is so evolved that you can verify the program. If the type checks, it means that the program is correct.Swyx [00:07:06]: Is the verification much faster than actually executing the program?Stan [00:07:12]: Verification is instantaneous, basically. So the truth is that what you code in involves tactics that may involve computation to search for solutions. So it's not instantaneous. You do have to do the computation to expand the tactics into the actual proof. The verification of the proof at the very low level is instantaneous.Swyx [00:07:32]: How quickly do you run into like, you know, halting problem PNP type things, like impossibilities where you're just like that?Stan [00:07:39]: I mean, you don't run into it at the time. It was really trying to solve very easy problems. So I think the... Can you give an example of easy? Yeah, so that's the mass benchmark that everybody knows today. The Dan Hendricks one. The Dan Hendricks one, yeah. And I think it was the low end part of the mass benchmark at the time, because that mass benchmark includes AMC problems, AMC 8, AMC 10, 12. So these are the easy ones. Then AIME problems, somewhat harder, and some IMO problems, like Crazy Arm.Swyx [00:08:07]: For our listeners, we covered this in our Benchmarks 101 episode. AMC is literally the grade of like high school, grade 8, grade 10, grade 12. So you can solve this. Just briefly to mention this, because I don't think we'll touch on this again. There's a bit of work with like Lean, and then with, you know, more recently with DeepMind doing like scoring like silver on the IMO. Any commentary on like how math has evolved from your early work to today?Stan [00:08:34]: I mean, that result is mind blowing. I mean, from my perspective, spent three years on that. At the same time, Guillaume Lampe in Paris, we were both in Paris, actually. He was at FAIR, was working on some problems. We were pushing the boundaries, and the goal was the IMO. And we cracked a few problems here and there. But the idea of getting a medal at an IMO was like just remote. So this is an impressive result. And we can, I think the DeepMind team just did a good job of scaling. I think there's nothing too magical in their approach, even if it hasn't been published. There's a Dan Silver talk from seven days ago where it goes a little bit into more details. It feels like there's nothing magical there. It's really applying reinforcement learning and scaling up the amount of data that can generate through autoformalization. So we can dig into what autoformalization means if you want.Alessio [00:09:26]: Let's talk about the tail end, maybe, of the OpenAI. So you joined, and you're like, I'm going to work on math and do all of these things. I saw on one of your blog posts, you mentioned you fine-tuned over 10,000 models at OpenAI using 10 million A100 hours. How did the research evolve from the GPD 2, and then getting closer to DaVinci 003? And then you left just before ChatGPD was released, but tell people a bit more about the research path that took you there.Stan [00:09:54]: I can give you my perspective of it. I think at OpenAI, there's always been a large chunk of the compute that was reserved to train the GPTs, which makes sense. So it was pre-entropic splits. Most of the compute was going to a product called Nest, which was basically GPT-3. And then you had a bunch of, let's say, remote, not core research teams that were trying to explore maybe more specific problems or maybe the algorithm part of it. The interesting part, I don't know if it was where your question was going, is that in those labs, you're managing researchers. So by definition, you shouldn't be managing them. But in that space, there's a managing tool that is great, which is compute allocation. Basically by managing the compute allocation, you can message the team of where you think the priority should go. And so it was really a question of, you were free as a researcher to work on whatever you wanted. But if it was not aligned with OpenAI mission, and that's fair, you wouldn't get the compute allocation. As it happens, solving math was very much aligned with the direction of OpenAI. And so I was lucky to generally get the compute I needed to make good progress.Swyx [00:11:06]: What do you need to show as incremental results to get funded for further results?Stan [00:11:12]: It's an imperfect process because there's a bit of a... If you're working on math and AI, obviously there's kind of a prior that it's going to be aligned with the company. So it's much easier than to go into something much more risky, much riskier, I guess. You have to show incremental progress, I guess. It's like you ask for a certain amount of compute and you deliver a few weeks after and you demonstrate that you have a progress. Progress might be a positive result. Progress might be a strong negative result. And a strong negative result is actually often much harder to get or much more interesting than a positive result. And then it generally goes into, as any organization, you would have people finding your project or any other project cool and fancy. And so you would have that kind of phase of growing up compute allocation for it all the way to a point. And then maybe you reach an apex and then maybe you go back mostly to zero and restart the process because you're going in a different direction or something else. That's how I felt. Explore, exploit. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. It's a reinforcement learning approach.Swyx [00:12:14]: Classic PhD student search process.Alessio [00:12:17]: And you were reporting to Ilya, like the results you were kind of bringing back to him or like what's the structure? It's almost like when you're doing such cutting edge research, you need to report to somebody who is actually really smart to understand that the direction is right.Stan [00:12:29]: So we had a reasoning team, which was working on reasoning, obviously, and so math in general. And that team had a manager, but Ilya was extremely involved in the team as an advisor, I guess. Since he brought me in OpenAI, I was lucky to mostly during the first years to have kind of a direct access to him. He would really coach me as a trainee researcher, I guess, with good engineering skills. And Ilya, I think at OpenAI, he was the one showing the North Star, right? He was his job and I think he really enjoyed it and he did it super well, was going through the teams and saying, this is where we should be going and trying to, you know, flock the different teams together towards an objective.Swyx [00:13:12]: I would say like the public perception of him is that he was the strongest believer in scaling. Oh, yeah. Obviously, he has always pursued the compression thesis. You have worked with him personally, what does the public not know about how he works?Stan [00:13:26]: I think he's really focused on building the vision and communicating the vision within the company, which was extremely useful. I was personally surprised that he spent so much time, you know, working on communicating that vision and getting the teams to work together versus...Swyx [00:13:40]: To be specific, vision is AGI? Oh, yeah.Stan [00:13:42]: Vision is like, yeah, it's the belief in compression and scanning computes. I remember when I started working on the Reasoning team, the excitement was really about scaling the compute around Reasoning and that was really the belief we wanted to ingrain in the team. And that's what has been useful to the team and with the DeepMind results shows that it was the right approach with the success of GPT-4 and stuff shows that it was the right approach.Swyx [00:14:06]: Was it according to the neural scaling laws, the Kaplan paper that was published?Stan [00:14:12]: I think it was before that, because those ones came with GPT-3, basically at the time of GPT-3 being released or being ready internally. But before that, there really was a strong belief in scale. I think it was just the belief that the transformer was a generic enough architecture that you could learn anything. And that was just a question of scaling.Alessio [00:14:33]: Any other fun stories you want to tell? Sam Altman, Greg, you know, anything.Stan [00:14:37]: Weirdly, I didn't work that much with Greg when I was at OpenAI. He had always been mostly focused on training the GPTs and rightfully so. One thing about Sam Altman, he really impressed me because when I joined, he had joined not that long ago and it felt like he was kind of a very high level CEO. And I was mind blown by how deep he was able to go into the subjects within a year or something, all the way to a situation where when I was having lunch by year two, I was at OpenAI with him. He would just quite know deeply what I was doing. With no ML background. Yeah, with no ML background, but I didn't have any either, so I guess that explains why. But I think it's a question about, you don't necessarily need to understand the very technicalities of how things are done, but you need to understand what's the goal and what's being done and what are the recent results and all of that in you. And we could have kind of a very productive discussion. And that really impressed me, given the size at the time of OpenAI, which was not negligible.Swyx [00:15:44]: Yeah. I mean, you've been a, you were a founder before, you're a founder now, and you've seen Sam as a founder. How has he affected you as a founder?Stan [00:15:51]: I think having that capability of changing the scale of your attention in the company, because most of the time you operate at a very high level, but being able to go deep down and being in the known of what's happening on the ground is something that I feel is really enlightening. That's not a place in which I ever was as a founder, because first company, we went all the way to 10 people. Current company, there's 25 of us. So the high level, the sky and the ground are pretty much at the same place. No, you're being too humble.Swyx [00:16:21]: I mean, Stripe was also like a huge rocket ship.Stan [00:16:23]: Stripe, I was a founder. So I was, like at OpenAI, I was really happy being on the ground, pushing the machine, making it work. Yeah.Swyx [00:16:31]: Last OpenAI question. The Anthropic split you mentioned, you were around for that. Very dramatic. David also left around that time, you left. This year, we've also had a similar management shakeup, let's just call it. Can you compare what it was like going through that split during that time? And then like, does that have any similarities now? Like, are we going to see a new Anthropic emerge from these folks that just left?Stan [00:16:54]: That I really, really don't know. At the time, the split was pretty surprising because they had been trying GPT-3, it was a success. And to be completely transparent, I wasn't in the weeds of the splits. What I understood of it is that there was a disagreement of the commercialization of that technology. I think the focal point of that disagreement was the fact that we started working on the API and wanted to make those models available through an API. Is that really the core disagreement? I don't know.Swyx [00:17:25]: Was it safety?Stan [00:17:26]: Was it commercialization?Swyx [00:17:27]: Or did they just want to start a company?Stan [00:17:28]: Exactly. Exactly. That I don't know. But I think what I was surprised of is how quickly OpenAI recovered at the time. And I think it's just because we were mostly a research org and the mission was so clear that some divergence in some teams, some people leave, the mission is still there. We have the compute. We have a site. So it just keeps going.Swyx [00:17:50]: Very deep bench. Like just a lot of talent. Yeah.Alessio [00:17:53]: So that was the OpenAI part of the history. Exactly. So then you leave OpenAI in September 2022. And I would say in Silicon Valley, the two hottest companies at the time were you and Lanktrain. What was that start like and why did you decide to start with a more developer focused kind of like an AI engineer tool rather than going back into some more research and something else?Stan [00:18:15]: Yeah. First, I'm not a trained researcher. So going through OpenAI was really kind of the PhD I always wanted to do. But research is hard. You're digging into a field all day long for weeks and weeks and weeks, and you find something, you get super excited for 12 seconds. And at the 13 seconds, you're like, oh, yeah, that was obvious. And you go back to digging. I'm not a trained, like formally trained researcher, and it wasn't kind of a necessarily an ambition of me of creating, of having a research career. And I felt the hardness of it. I enjoyed a lot of like that a ton. But at the time, I decided that I wanted to go back to something more productive. And the other fun motivation was like, I mean, if we believe in AGI and if we believe the timelines might not be too long, it's actually the last train leaving the station to start a company. After that, it's going to be computers all the way down. And so that was kind of the true motivation for like trying to go there. So that's kind of the core motivation at the beginning of personally. And the motivation for starting a company was pretty simple. I had seen GPT-4 internally at the time, it was September 2022. So it was pre-GPT, but GPT-4 was ready since, I mean, I'd been ready for a few months internally. I was like, okay, that's obvious, the capabilities are there to create an insane amount of value to the world. And yet the deployment is not there yet. The revenue of OpenAI at the time were ridiculously small compared to what it is today. So the thesis was, there's probably a lot to be done at the product level to unlock the usage.Alessio [00:19:49]: Yeah. Let's talk a bit more about the form factor, maybe. I think one of the first successes you had was kind of like the WebGPT-like thing, like using the models to traverse the web and like summarize things. And the browser was really the interface. Why did you start with the browser? Like what was it important? And then you built XP1, which was kind of like the browser extension.Stan [00:20:09]: So the starting point at the time was, if you wanted to talk about LLMs, it was still a rather small community, a community of mostly researchers and to some extent, very early adopters, very early engineers. It was almost inconceivable to just build a product and go sell it to the enterprise, though at the time there was a few companies doing that. The one on marketing, I don't remember its name, Jasper. But so the natural first intention, the first, first, first intention was to go to the developers and try to create tooling for them to create product on top of those models. And so that's what Dust was originally. It was quite different than Lanchain, and Lanchain just beat the s**t out of us, which is great. It's a choice.Swyx [00:20:53]: You were cloud, in closed source. They were open source.Stan [00:20:56]: Yeah. So technically we were open source and we still are open source, but I think that doesn't really matter. I had the strong belief from my research time that you cannot create an LLM-based workflow on just one example. Basically, if you just have one example, you overfit. So as you develop your interaction, your orchestration around the LLM, you need a dozen examples. Obviously, if you're running a dozen examples on a multi-step workflow, you start paralyzing stuff. And if you do that in the console, you just have like a messy stream of tokens going out and it's very hard to observe what's going there. And so the idea was to go with an UI so that you could kind of introspect easily the output of each interaction with the model and dig into there through an UI, which is-Swyx [00:21:42]: Was that open source? I actually didn't come across it.Stan [00:21:44]: Oh yeah, it wasn't. I mean, Dust is entirely open source even today. We're not going for an open source-Swyx [00:21:48]: If it matters, I didn't know that.Stan [00:21:49]: No, no, no, no, no. The reason why is because we're not open source because we're not doing an open source strategy. It's not an open source go-to-market at all. We're open source because we can and it's fun.Swyx [00:21:59]: Open source is marketing. You have all the downsides of open source, which is like people can clone you.Stan [00:22:03]: But I think that downside is a big fallacy. Okay. Yes, anybody can clone Dust today, but the value of Dust is not the current state. The value of Dust is the number of eyeballs and hands of developers that are creating to it in the future. And so yes, anybody can clone it today, but that wouldn't change anything. There is some value in being open source. In a discussion with the security team, you can be extremely transparent and just show the code. When you have discussion with users and there's a bug or a feature missing, you can just point to the issue, show the pull request, show the, show the, exactly, oh, PR welcome. That doesn't happen that much, but you can show the progress if the person that you're chatting with is a little bit technical, they really enjoy seeing the pull request advancing and seeing all the way to deploy. And then the downsides are mostly around security. You never want to do security by obfuscation. But the truth is that your vector of attack is facilitated by you being open source. But at the same time, it's a good thing because if you're doing anything like a bug bountying or stuff like that, you just give much more tools to the bug bountiers so that their output is much better. So there's many, many, many trade-offs. I don't believe in the value of the code base per se. I think it's really the people that are on the code base that have the value and go to market and the product and all of those things that are around the code base. Obviously, that's not true for every code base. If you're working on a very secret kernel to accelerate the inference of LLMs, I would buy that you don't want to be open source. But for product stuff, I really think there's very little risk. Yeah.Alessio [00:23:39]: I signed up for XP1, I was looking, January 2023. I think at the time you were on DaVinci 003. Given that you had seen GPD 4, how did you feel having to push a product out that was using this model that was so inferior? And you're like, please, just use it today. I promise it's going to get better. Just overall, as a founder, how do you build something that maybe doesn't quite work with the model today, but you're just expecting the new model to be better?Stan [00:24:03]: Yeah, so actually, XP1 was even on a smaller one that was the post-GDPT release, small version, so it was... Ada, Babbage... No, no, no, not that far away. But it was the small version of GDPT, basically. I don't remember its name. Yes, you have a frustration there. But at the same time, I think XP1 was designed, was an experiment, but was designed as a way to be useful at the current capability of the model. If you just want to extract data from a LinkedIn page, that model was just fine. If you want to summarize an article on a newspaper, that model was just fine. And so it was really a question of trying to find a product that works with the current capability, knowing that you will always have tailwinds as models get better and faster and cheaper. So that was kind of a... There's a bit of a frustration because you know what's out there and you know that you don't have access to it yet. It's also interesting to try to find a product that works with the current capability.Alessio [00:24:55]: And we highlighted XP1 in our anatomy of autonomy post in April of last year, which was, you know, where are all the agents, right? So now we spent 30 minutes getting to what you're building now. So you basically had a developer framework, then you had a browser extension, then you had all these things, and then you kind of got to where Dust is today. So maybe just give people an overview of what Dust is today and the courtesies behind it. Yeah, of course.Stan [00:25:20]: So Dust, we really want to build the infrastructure so that companies can deploy agents within their teams. We are horizontal by nature because we strongly believe in the emergence of use cases from the people having access to creating an agent that don't need to be developers. They have to be thinkers. They have to be curious. But anybody can create an agent that will solve an operational thing that they're doing in their day-to-day job. And to make those agents useful, there's two focus, which is interesting. The first one is an infrastructure focus. You have to build the pipes so that the agent has access to the data. You have to build the pipes such that the agents can take action, can access the web, et cetera. So that's really an infrastructure play. Maintaining connections to Notion, Slack, GitHub, all of them is a lot of work. It is boring work, boring infrastructure work, but that's something that we know is extremely valuable in the same way that Stripe is extremely valuable because it maintains the pipes. And we have that dual focus because we're also building the product for people to use it. And there it's fascinating because everything started from the conversational interface, obviously, which is a great starting point. But we're only scratching the surface, right? I think we are at the pong level of LLM productization. And we haven't invented the C3. We haven't invented Counter-Strike. We haven't invented Cyberpunk 2077. So this is really our mission is to really create the product that lets people equip themselves to just get away all the work that can be automated or assisted by LLMs.Alessio [00:26:57]: And can you just comment on different takes that people had? So maybe the most open is like auto-GPT. It's just kind of like just trying to do anything. It's like it's all magic. There's no way for you to do anything. Then you had the ADAPT, you know, we had David on the podcast. They're very like super hands-on with each individual customer to build super tailored. How do you decide where to draw the line between this is magic? This is exposed to you, especially in a market where most people don't know how to build with AI at all. So if you expect them to do the thing, they're probably not going to do it. Yeah, exactly.Stan [00:27:29]: So the auto-GPT approach obviously is extremely exciting, but we know that the agentic capability of models are not quite there yet. It just gets lost. So we're starting, we're starting where it works. Same with the XP one. And where it works is pretty simple. It's like simple workflows that involve a couple tools where you don't even need to have the model decide which tools it's used in the sense of you just want people to put it in the instructions. It's like take that page, do that search, pick up that document, do the work that I want in the format I want, and give me the results. There's no smartness there, right? In terms of orchestrating the tools, it's mostly using English for people to program a workflow where you don't have the constraint of having compatible API between the two.Swyx [00:28:17]: That kind of personal automation, would you say it's kind of like an LLM Zapier type ofStan [00:28:22]: thing?Swyx [00:28:22]: Like if this, then that, and then, you know, do this, then this. You're programming with English?Stan [00:28:28]: So you're programming with English. So you're just saying, oh, do this and then that. You can even create some form of APIs. You say, when I give you the command X, do this. When I give you the command Y, do this. And you describe the workflow. But you don't have to create boxes and create the workflow explicitly. It just needs to describe what are the tasks supposed to be and make the tool available to the agent. The tool can be a semantic search. The tool can be querying into a structured database. The tool can be searching on the web. And obviously, the interesting tools that we're only starting to scratch are actually creating external actions like reimbursing something on Stripe, sending an email, clicking on a button in the admin or something like that.Swyx [00:29:11]: Do you maintain all these integrations?Stan [00:29:13]: Today, we maintain most of the integrations. We do always have an escape hatch for people to kind of custom integrate. But the reality is that the reality of the market today is that people just want it to work, right? And so it's mostly us maintaining the integration. As an example, a very good source of information that is tricky to productize is Salesforce. Because Salesforce is basically a database and a UI. And they do the f**k they want with it. And so every company has different models and stuff like that. So right now, we don't support it natively. And the type of support or real native support will be slightly more complex than just osing into it, like is the case with Slack as an example. Because it's probably going to be, oh, you want to connect your Salesforce to us? Give us the SQL. That's the Salesforce QL language. Give us the queries you want us to run on it and inject in the context of dust. So that's interesting how not only integrations are cool, and some of them require a bit of work on the user. And for some of them that are really valuable to our users, but we don't support yet, they can just build them internally and push the data to us.Swyx [00:30:18]: I think I understand the Salesforce thing. But let me just clarify, are you using browser automation because there's no API for something?Stan [00:30:24]: No, no, no, no. In that case, so we do have browser automation for all the use cases and apply the public web. But for most of the integration with the internal system of the company, it really runs through API.Swyx [00:30:35]: Haven't you felt the pull to RPA, browser automation, that kind of stuff?Stan [00:30:39]: I mean, what I've been saying for a long time, maybe I'm wrong, is that if the future is that you're going to stand in front of a computer and looking at an agent clicking on stuff, then I'll hit my computer. And my computer is a big Lenovo. It's black. Doesn't sound good at all compared to a Mac. And if the APIs are there, we should use them. There is going to be a long tail of stuff that don't have APIs, but as the world is moving forward, that's disappearing. So the core API value in the past has really been, oh, this old 90s product doesn't have an API. So I need to use the UI to automate. I think for most of the ICP companies, the companies that ICP for us, the scale ups that are between 500 and 5,000 people, tech companies, most of the SaaS they use have APIs. Now there's an interesting question for the open web, because there are stuff that you want to do that involve websites that don't necessarily have APIs. And the current state of web integration from, which is us and OpenAI and Anthropic, I don't even know if they have web navigation, but I don't think so. The current state of affair is really, really broken because you have what? You have basically search and headless browsing. But headless browsing, I think everybody's doing basically body.innertext and fill that into the model, right?Swyx [00:31:56]: MARK MIRCHANDANI There's parsers into Markdown and stuff.Stan [00:31:58]: FRANCESC CAMPOY I'm super excited by the companies that are exploring the capability of rendering a web page into a way that is compatible for a model, being able to maintain the selector. So that's basically the place where to click in the page through that process, expose the actions to the model, have the model select an action in a way that is compatible with model, which is not a big page of a full DOM that is very noisy, and then being able to decompress that back to the original page and take the action. And that's something that is really exciting and that will kind of change the level of things that agents can do on the web. That I feel exciting, but I also feel that the bulk of the useful stuff that you can do within the company can be done through API. The data can be retrieved by API. The actions can be taken through API.Swyx [00:32:44]: For listeners, I'll note that you're basically completely disagreeing with David Wan. FRANCESC CAMPOY Exactly, exactly. I've seen it since it's summer. ADEPT is where it is, and Dust is where it is. So Dust is still standing.Alessio [00:32:55]: Can we just quickly comment on function calling? You mentioned you don't need the models to be that smart to actually pick the tools. Have you seen the models not be good enough? Or is it just like, you just don't want to put the complexity in there? Like, is there any room for improvement left in function calling? Or do you feel you usually consistently get always the right response, the right parametersStan [00:33:13]: and all of that?Alessio [00:33:13]: FRANCESC CAMPOY So that's a tricky product question.Stan [00:33:15]: Because if the instructions are good and precise, then you don't have any issue, because it's scripted for you. And the model will just look at the scripts and just follow and say, oh, he's probably talking about that action, and I'm going to use it. And the parameters are kind of abused from the state of the conversation. I'll just go with it. If you provide a very high level, kind of an auto-GPT-esque level in the instructions and provide 16 different tools to your model, yes, we're seeing the models in that state making mistakes. And there is obviously some progress can be made on the capabilities. But the interesting part is that there is already so much work that can assist, augment, accelerate by just going with pretty simply scripted for actions agents. What I'm excited about by pushing our users to create rather simple agents is that once you have those working really well, you can create meta agents that use the agents as actions. And all of a sudden, you can kind of have a hierarchy of responsibility that will probably get you almost to the point of the auto-GPT value. It requires the construction of intermediary artifacts, but you're probably going to be able to achieve something great. I'll give you some example. We have our incidents are shared in Slack in a specific channel, or shipped are shared in Slack. We have a weekly meeting where we have a table about incidents and shipped stuff. We're not writing that weekly meeting table anymore. We have an assistant that just go find the right data on Slack and create the table for us. And that assistant works perfectly. It's trivially simple, right? Take one week of data from that channel and just create the table. And then we have in that weekly meeting, obviously some graphs and reporting about our financials and our progress and our ARR. And we've created assistants to generate those graphs directly. And those assistants works great. By creating those assistants that cover those small parts of that weekly meeting, slowly we're getting to in a world where we'll have a weekly meeting assistance. We'll just call it. You don't need to prompt it. You don't need to say anything. It's going to run those different assistants and get that notion page just ready. And by doing that, if you get there, and that's an objective for us to us using Dust, get there, you're saving an hour of company time every time you run it. Yeah.Alessio [00:35:28]: That's my pet topic of NPM for agents. How do you build dependency graphs of agents? And how do you share them? Because why do I have to rebuild some of the smaller levels of what you built already?Swyx [00:35:40]: I have a quick follow-up question on agents managing other agents. It's a topic of a lot of research, both from Microsoft and even in startups. What you've discovered best practice for, let's say like a manager agent controlling a bunch of small agents. It's two-way communication. I don't know if there should be a protocol format.Stan [00:35:59]: To be completely honest, the state we are at right now is creating the simple agents. So we haven't even explored yet the meta agents. We know it's there. We know it's going to be valuable. We know it's going to be awesome. But we're starting there because it's the simplest place to start. And it's also what the market understands. If you go to a company, random SaaS B2B company, not necessarily specialized in AI, and you take an operational team and you tell them, build some tooling for yourself, they'll understand the small agents. If you tell them, build AutoGP, they'll be like, Auto what?Swyx [00:36:31]: And I noticed that in your language, you're very much focused on non-technical users. You don't really mention API here. You mention instruction instead of system prompt, right? That's very conscious.Stan [00:36:41]: Yeah, it's very conscious. It's a mark of our designer, Ed, who kind of pushed us to create a friendly product. I was knee-deep into AI when I started, obviously. And my co-founder, Gabriel, was a Stripe as well. We started a company together that got acquired by Stripe 15 years ago. It was at Alain, a healthcare company in Paris. After that, it was a little bit less so knee-deep in AI, but really focused on product. And I didn't realize how important it is to make that technology not scary to end users. It didn't feel scary to me, but it was really seen by Ed, our designer, that it was feeling scary to the users. And so we were very proactive and very deliberate about creating a brand that feels not too scary and creating a wording and a language, as you say, that really tried to communicate the fact that it's going to be fine. It's going to be easy. You're going to make it.Alessio [00:37:34]: And another big point that David had about ADAPT is we need to build an environment for the agents to act. And then if you have the environment, you can simulate what they do. How's that different when you're interacting with APIs and you're kind of touching systems that you cannot really simulate? If you call it the Salesforce API, you're just calling it.Stan [00:37:52]: So I think that goes back to the DNA of the companies that are very different. ADAPT, I think, was a product company with a very strong research DNA, and they were still doing research. One of their goals was building a model. And that's why they raised a large amount of money, et cetera. We are 100% deliberately a product company. We don't do research. We don't train models. We don't even run GPUs. We're using the models that exist, and we try to push the product boundary as far as possible with the existing models. So that creates an issue. Indeed, so to answer your question, when you're interacting in the real world, well, you cannot simulate, so you cannot improve the models. Even improving your instructions is complicated for a builder. The hope is that you can use models to evaluate the conversations so that you can get at least feedback and you could get contradictive information about the performance of the assistance. But if you take actual trace of interaction of humans with those agents, it is even for us humans extremely hard to decide whether it was a productive interaction or a really bad interaction. You don't know why the person left. You don't know if they left happy or not. So being extremely, extremely, extremely pragmatic here, it becomes a product issue. We have to build a product that identifies the end users to provide feedback so that as a first step, the person that is building the agent can iterate on it. As a second step, maybe later when we start training model and post-training, et cetera, we can optimize around that for each of those companies. Yeah.Alessio [00:39:17]: Do you see in the future products offering kind of like a simulation environment, the same way all SaaS now kind of offers APIs to build programmatically? Like in cybersecurity, there are a lot of companies working on building simulative environments so that then you can use agents like Red Team, but I haven't really seen that.Stan [00:39:34]: Yeah, no, me neither. That's a super interesting question. I think it's really going to depend on how much, because you need to simulate to generate data, you need to train data to train models. And the question at the end is, are we going to be training models or are we just going to be using frontier models as they are? On that question, I don't have a strong opinion. It might be the case that we'll be training models because in all of those AI first products, the model is so close to the product surface that as you get big and you want to really own your product, you're going to have to own the model as well. Owning the model doesn't mean doing the pre-training, that would be crazy. But at least having an internal post-training realignment loop, it makes a lot of sense. And so if we see many companies going towards that all the time, then there might be incentives for the SaaS's of the world to provide assistance in getting there. But at the same time, there's a tension because those SaaS, they don't want to be interacted by agents, they want the human to click on the button. Yeah, they got to sell seats. Exactly.Swyx [00:40:41]: Just a quick question on models. I'm sure you've used many, probably not just OpenAI. Would you characterize some models as better than others? Do you use any open source models? What have been the trends in models over the last two years?Stan [00:40:53]: We've seen over the past two years kind of a bit of a race in between models. And at times, it's the OpenAI model that is the best. At times, it's the Anthropic models that is the best. Our take on that is that we are agnostic and we let our users pick their model. Oh, they choose? Yeah, so when you create an assistant or an agent, you can just say, oh, I'm going to run it on GP4, GP4 Turbo, or...Swyx [00:41:16]: Don't you think for the non-technical user, that is actually an abstraction that you should take away from them?Stan [00:41:20]: We have a sane default. So we move the default to the latest model that is cool. And we have a sane default, and it's actually not very visible. In our flow to create an agent, you would have to go in advance and go pick your model. So this is something that the technical person will care about. But that's something that obviously is a bit too complicated for the...Swyx [00:41:40]: And do you care most about function calling or instruction following or something else?Stan [00:41:44]: I think we care most for function calling because you want to... There's nothing worse than a function call, including incorrect parameters or being a bit off because it just drives the whole interaction off.Swyx [00:41:56]: Yeah, so got the Berkeley function calling.Stan [00:42:00]: These days, it's funny how the comparison between GP4O and GP4 Turbo is still up in the air on function calling. I personally don't have proof, but I know many people, and I'm probably part of them, to think that GP4 Turbo is still better than GP4O on function calling. Wow. We'll see what comes out of the O1 class if it ever gets function calling. And Cloud 3.5 Summit is great as well. They kind of innovated in an interesting way, which was never quite publicized. But it's that they have that kind of chain of thought step whenever you use a Cloud model or Summit model with function calling. That chain of thought step doesn't exist when you just interact with it just for answering questions. But when you use function calling, you get that step, and it really helps getting better function calling.Swyx [00:42:43]: Yeah, we actually just recorded a podcast with the Berkeley team that runs that leaderboard this week. So they just released V3.Stan [00:42:49]: Yeah.Swyx [00:42:49]: It was V1 like two months ago, and then they V2, V3. Turbo is on top.Stan [00:42:53]: Turbo is on top. Turbo is over 4.0.Swyx [00:42:54]: And then the third place is XLAM from Salesforce, which is a large action model they've been trying to popularize.Stan [00:43:01]: Yep.Swyx [00:43:01]: O1 Mini is actually on here, I think. O1 Mini is number 11.Stan [00:43:05]: But arguably, O1 Mini has been in a line for that. Yeah.Alessio [00:43:09]: Do you use leaderboards? Do you have your own evals? I mean, this is kind of intuitive, right? Like using the older model is better. I think most people just upgrade. Yeah. What's the eval process like?Stan [00:43:19]: It's funny because I've been doing research for three years, and we have bigger stuff to cook. When you're deploying in a company, one thing where we really spike is that when we manage to activate the company, we have a crazy penetration. The highest penetration we have is 88% daily active users within the entire employee of the company. The kind of average penetration and activation we have in our current enterprise customers is something like more like 60% to 70% weekly active. So we basically have the entire company interacting with us. And when you're there, there is so many stuff that matters most than getting evals, getting the best model. Because there is so many places where you can create products or do stuff that will give you the 80% with the work you do. Whereas deciding if it's GPT-4 or GPT-4 Turbo or et cetera, you know, it'll just give you the 5% improvement. But the reality is that you want to focus on the places where you can really change the direction or change the interaction more drastically. But that's something that we'll have to do eventually because we still want to be serious people.Swyx [00:44:24]: It's funny because in some ways, the model labs are competing for you, right? You don't have to do any effort. You just switch model and then it'll grow. What are you really limited by? Is it additional sources?Stan [00:44:36]: It's not models, right?Swyx [00:44:37]: You're not really limited by quality of model.Stan [00:44:40]: Right now, we are limited by the infrastructure part, which is the ability to connect easily for users to all the data they need to do the job they want to do.Swyx [00:44:51]: Because you maintain all your own stuff.Stan [00:44:53]: You know, there are companies out thereSwyx [00:44:54]: that are starting to provide integrations as a service, right? I used to work in an integrations company. Yeah, I know.Stan [00:44:59]: It's just that there is some intricacies about how you chunk stuff and how you process information from one platform to the other. If you look at the end of the spectrum, you could think of, you could say, oh, I'm going to support AirByte and AirByte has- I used to work at AirByte.Swyx [00:45:12]: Oh, really?Stan [00:45:13]: That makes sense.Swyx [00:45:14]: They're the French founders as well.Stan [00:45:15]: I know Jean very well. I'm seeing him today. And the reality is that if you look at Notion, AirByte does the job of taking Notion and putting it in a structured way. But that's the way it is not really usable to actually make it available to models in a useful way. Because you get all the blocks, details, et cetera, which is useful for many use cases.Swyx [00:45:35]: It's also for data scientists and not for AI.Stan [00:45:38]: The reality of Notion is that sometimes you have a- so when you have a page, there's a lot of structure in it and you want to capture the structure and chunk the information in a way that respects that structure. In Notion, you have databases. Sometimes those databases are real tabular data. Sometimes those databases are full of text. You want to get the distinction and understand that this database should be considered like text information, whereas this other one is actually quantitative information. And to really get a very high quality interaction with that piece of information, I haven't found a solution that will work without us owning the connection end-to-end.Swyx [00:46:15]: That's why I don't invest in, there's Composio, there's All Hands from Graham Newbig. There's all these other companies that are like, we will do the integrations for you. You just, we have the open source community. We'll do off the shelf. But then you are so specific in your needs that you want to own it.Swyx [00:46:28]: Yeah, exactly.Stan [00:46:29]: You can talk to Michel about that.Swyx [00:46:30]: You know, he wants to put the AI in there, but you know. Yeah, I will. I will.Stan [00:46:35]: Cool. What are we missing?Alessio [00:46:36]: You know, what are like the things that are like sneakily hard that you're tackling that maybe people don't even realize they're like really hard?Stan [00:46:43]: The real parts as we kind of touch base throughout the conversation is really building the infra that works for those agents because it's a tenuous walk. It's an evergreen piece of work because you always have an extra integration that will be useful to a non-negligible set of your users. I'm super excited about is that there's so many interactions that shouldn't be conversational interactions and that could be very useful. Basically, know that we have the firehose of information of those companies and there's not going to be that many companies that capture the firehose of information. When you have the firehose of information, you can do a ton of stuff with models that are just not accelerating people, but giving them superhuman capability, even with the current model capability because you can just sift through much more information. An example is documentation repair. If I have the firehose of Slack messages and new Notion pages, if somebody says, I own that page, I want to be updated when there is a piece of information that should update that page, this is not possible. You get an email saying, oh, look at that Slack message. It says the opposite of what you have in that paragraph. Maybe you want to update or just ping that person. I think there is a lot to be explored on the product layer in terms of what it means to interact productively with those models. And that's a problem that's extremely hard and extremely exciting.Swyx [00:48:00]: One thing you keep mentioning about infra work, obviously, Dust is building that infra and serving that in a very consumer-friendly way. You always talk about infra being additional sources, additional connectors. That is very important. But I'm also interested in the vertical infra. There is an orchestrator underlying all these things where you're doing asynchronous work. For example, the simplest one is a cron job. You just schedule things. But also, for if this and that, you have to wait for something to be executed and proceed to the next task. I used to work on an orchestrator as well, Temporal.Stan [00:48:31]: We used Temporal. Oh, you used Temporal? Yeah. Oh, how was the experience?Swyx [00:48:34]: I need the NPS.Stan [00:48:36]: We're doing a self-discovery call now.Swyx [00:48:39]: But you can also complain to me because I don't work there anymore.Stan [00:48:42]: No, we love Temporal. There's some edges that are a bit rough, surprisingly rough. And you would say, why is it so complicated?Swyx [00:48:49]: It's always versioning.Stan [00:48:50]: Yeah, stuff like that. But we really love it. And we use it for exactly what you said, like managing the entire set of stuff that needs to happen so that in semi-real time, we get all the updates from Slack or Notion or GitHub into the system. And whenever we see that piece of information goes through, maybe trigger workflows to run agents because they need to provide alerts to users and stuff like that. And Temporal is great. Love it.Swyx [00:49:17]: You haven't evaluated others. You don't want to build your own. You're happy with...Stan [00:49:21]: Oh, no, we're not in the business of replacing Temporal. And Temporal is so... I mean, it is or any other competitive product. They're very general. If it's there, there's an interesting theory about buy versus build. I think in that case, when you're a high-growth company, your buy-build trade-off is very much on the side of buy. Because if you have the capability, you're just going to be saving time, you can focus on your core competency, etc. And it's funny because we're seeing, we're starting to see the post-high-growth company, post-SKF company, going back on that trade-off, interestingly. So that's the cloud news about removing Zendesk and Salesforce. Do you believe that, by the way?Alessio [00:49:56]: Yeah, I did a podcast with them.Stan [00:49:58]: Oh, yeah?Alessio [00:49:58]: It's true.Swyx [00:49:59]: No, no, I know.Stan [00:50:00]: Of course they say it's true,Swyx [00:50:00]: but also how well is it going to go?Stan [00:50:02]: So I'm not talking about deflecting the customer traffic. I'm talking about building AI on top of Salesforce and Zendesk, basically, if I understand correctly. And all of a sudden, your product surface becomes much smaller because you're interacting with an AI system that will take some actions. And so all of a sudden, you don't need the product layer anymore. And you realize that, oh, those things are just databases that I pay a hundred times the price, right? Because you're a post-SKF company and you have tech capabilities, you are incentivized to reduce your costs and you have the capability to do so. And then it makes sense to just scratch the SaaS away. So it's interesting that we might see kind of a bad time for SaaS in post-hyper-growth tech companies. So it's still a big market, but it's not that big because if you're not a tech company, you don't have the capabilities to reduce that cost. If you're a high-growth company, always going to be buying because you go faster with that. But that's an interesting new space, new category of companies that might remove some SaaS. Yeah, Alessio's firmSwyx [00:51:02]: has an interesting thesis on the future of SaaS in AI.Alessio [00:51:05]: Service as a software, we call it. It's basically like, well, the most extreme is like, why is there any software at all? You know, ideally, it's all a labor interface where you're asking somebody to do something for you, whether that's a person, an AI agent or whatnot.Stan [00:51:17]: Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. I have to ask.Swyx [00:51:19]: Are you paying for Temporal Cloud or are you self-hosting?Stan [00:51:22]: Oh, no, no, we're paying, we're paying. Oh, okay, interesting.Swyx [00:51:24]: We're paying way too much.Stan [00:51:26]: It's crazy expensive, but it makes us-Swyx [00:51:28]: That's why as a shareholder, I like to hear that. It makes us go faster,Stan [00:51:31]: so we're happy to pay.Swyx [00:51:33]: Other things in the infrastack, I just want a list for other founders to think about. Ops, API gateway, evals, you know, anything interesting there that you build or buy?Stan [00:51:41]: I mean, there's always an interesting question. We've been building a lot around the interface between models and because Dust, the original version, was an orchestration platform and we basically provide a unified interface to every model providers.Swyx [00:51:56]: That's what I call gateway.Stan [00:51:57]: That we add because Dust was that and so we continued building upon and we own it. But that's an interesting question was in you, you want to build that or buy it?Swyx [00:52:06]: Yeah, I always say light LLM is the current open source consensus.Stan [00:52:09]: Exactly, yeah. There's an interesting question there.Swyx [00:52:12]: Ops, Datadog, just tracking.Stan [00:52:14]: Oh yeah, so Datadog is an obvious... What are the mistakes that I regret? I started as pure JavaScript, not TypeScript, and I think you want to, if you're wondering, oh, I want to go fast, I'll do a little bit of JavaScript. No, don't, just start with TypeScript. I see, okay.Swyx [00:52:30]: So interesting, you are a research engineer that came out of OpenAI that bet on TypeScript.Stan [00:52:36]: Well, the reality is that if you're building a product, you're going to be doing a lot of JavaScript, right? And Next, we're using Next as an example. It's a great platform. And our internal service is actually not built in Python either, it's built in Rust.Swyx [00:52:50]: That's another fascinating choice. The Next.js story is interesting because Next.js is obviously the king of the world in JavaScript land, but recently ChachiBT just rewrote from Next.js to Remix. We are going to be having them on to talk about the big rewrite. That is like the biggest news in front-end world in a while.Stan [00:53:06]: All right, just to wrap,Alessio [00:53:07]: in 2023, you predicted the first billion dollar company with just one person running it, and you said that's basically like a sign of AGI, once we get there. And you said it had already been started. Any 2024 updates on the take?Stan [00:53:20]: That quote was probably independently invented it, but Sam Altman stole it from me eventually. But anyway, it's a good quote. So I hypothesized it was maybe already being started, but if it's a uniperson company, it would probably grow really fast, and so we should probably see it already. I guess we're going to have to wait for it a little bit. And I think it's because the dust of the world don't exist. And so you don't have that thing that lets you run those, just do anything with models. But one thing that is exciting is maybe that we're going to be able to scale a team much further than before. All generations of company might be the first billion dollar companies with engineering teams of 20 people. That would be so exciting as well. That would be so great. You know, you don't have the management hurdle, you're just 20 focused people with a lot of assistance from machines to achieve your job. That would be great. And that I believe in a bit more. Yeah.Alessio [00:54:14]: I've written a post called Maximum Enterprise Utilization, kind of like you have MFU for GPUs, but it's basically like so many people are focused on, oh, it's going to like displace jobs and whatnot. But I'm like, there's so much work that people don't do because they don't have the people. And maybe the question is that you just don't scale to that size, you know, to begin with. And maybe everybody will use Dust and Dust is only going to be 20 people and then people using Dust will be two people.Swyx [00:54:39]: So my hot take is, I actually know what vertical they'll be in. They'll be content creators and podcasters.Alessio [00:54:44]: There's already two of us, so we're a max capacity.Swyx [00:54:47]: Most people would regard Jimmy Donaldson, like Mr. Beast as a billionaire, but his team is, he's got about like 200 people. So he's not a single person company. The closer one actually is Joe Rogan, where he basically just has like a guy. Hey, Jamie, put it on the screen. But Joe, I don't think, he sold his future for 250 million to Spotify. So he's not going to hit that billionaire status. The non-consensus one, it will be the Hawkswagirl.Swyx [00:55:12]: Anyway, but like you want creators who are empowered by a bunch of agents, Dust agents to do all this stuff because then ultimately it's just the brand, the curation. What is the role of the human then? What is that one person supposed to do if you have all these agents?Stan [00:55:28]: That's a good question. I mean, I think it was, I think it was Pinterest or Dropbox founder at the time was when you're CEO, you mostly have an editorial position. You're here to say yes and no to the things you are supposed to do.Swyx [00:55:42]: Okay, so I make a daily AI newsletter where I just, it's 99% AI generated, but I serve the role as the editor. Like I write commentary. I choose between four options.Stan [00:55:53]: You decide what goes in and goes out. And ultimately, as you said, you build up your brand through those many decisions.Swyx [00:56:00]: You should pursue creators.Stan [00:56:03]: And you've made a, I think you've made a, you've have an upcoming podcast with Notebook NLM, which has been doing a crazy stuff. That is exciting.Swyx [00:56:09]: They were just in here yesterday. I'll tell you one agent that we need. If you want to pursue the creator market, the one agent that we haven't paid for is our video editor agent. So if you want, you need to, you know, wrap FFmpeg in a GPT.Alessio [00:56:24]: Awesome. This was great. Anything we missed? Any final kind of like call to action hiring? It's like, obviously people should buy the product.Stan [00:56:32]: And no, I think we didn't dive into the vertical versus horizontal approach to AI agents. We mentioned a few things. We spike at penetration and that's just awesome because we carry the tool that the entire company has and use. So we create a ton of value, but it makes our go-to-market much harder. Vertical solutions have a go-to-market that is much easier because they're like, oh, I'm going to solve the lawyer stuff. But the potential within the company after that is limited. So there's really a nice tension there. We are true believers of the horizontal approach and we'll see how that plays out. But I think it's an interesting thing to think about when as a founder or as a technical person working with agents, what do you want to solve? Do you want to solve something general or do you want to solve something specific? And it has a lot of impact on eventually what type of company you're going to build.Swyx [00:57:21]: Yeah, I'll provide you my response on that. So I've gone the other way. I've gone products over platform. And it's basically your sense on the products drives your platform development. In other words, if you're trying to be as many things to as many people as possible, we're just trying to be one thing. We build our brand in one specific niche. And in future, if we want to choose to spin off platforms for other things, we can because we have that brand. So for example, Perplexity, we went for products in search, right? But then we also have Perplexity Labs that like here's the info that we use for search and whatever.Stan [00:57:51]: The counter argument to that is that you always have lateral movement within companies, but if you're Zendesk, you're not going to be Zendesk- Serving web services.Swyx [00:58:03]: There are a few, you know, there's success stories on both sides, but there's Amazon and Amazon web services, right? And sorry by platform,Stan [00:58:08]: I don't really mean the platform as the platform platform. I mean like the product that is useful to everybody within the company. And I'll take on that is that there is so many operations within the company. Some of them have been extremely rationalized by the markets, like salespeople, like support has been extremely rationalized. And so you can probably create very powerful vertical product around that. But there is so many operations that make up a company that are specific to the company that you need a product to help people get assisted on those operations. And that's kind of the bet we have. Excellent.Alessio [00:58:40]: Awesome, man. Thanks again for the time. Thank you very much for having me.Stan [00:58:42]: It was so much fun. Yeah, great discussion.Swyx [00:58:44]: Thank you.Stan [00:58:46]: Thank you. Get full access to Latent Space at www.latent.space/subscribe

Apologies for lower audio quality; we lost recordings and had to use backup tracks. Our guests today are Anastasios Angelopoulos and Wei-Lin Chiang, leads of Chatbot Arena, fka LMSYS, the crowdsourced AI evaluation platform developed by the LMSys student club at Berkeley, which became the de facto standard for comparing language models. Arena Elo is often more cited than MMLU scores to many folks, and they have attracted >1,000,000 people to cast votes since its launch, leading top model trainers to cite them over their own formal academic benchmarks:The Limits of Static BenchmarksWe’ve done two benchmarks episodes: Benchmarks 101 and Benchmarks 201. One issue we’ve always brought up with static benchmarks is that 1) many are getting saturated, with models scoring almost perfectly on them 2) they often don’t reflect production use cases, making it hard for developers and users to use them as guidance. The fundamental challenge in AI evaluation isn't technical - it's philosophical. How do you measure something that increasingly resembles human intelligence? Rather than trying to define intelligence upfront, Arena let users interact naturally with models and collect comparative feedback. It's messy and subjective, but that's precisely the point - it captures the full spectrum of what people actually care about when using AI.The Pareto Frontier of Cost vs IntelligenceBecause the Elo scores are remarkably stable over time, we can put all the chat models on a map against their respective cost to gain a view of at least 3 orders of magnitude of model sizes/costs and observe the remarkable shift in intelligence per dollar over the past year:This frontier stood remarkably firm through the recent releases of o1-preview and price cuts of Gemini 1.5:The Statistics of SubjectivityIn our Benchmarks 201 episode, Clémentine Fourrier from HuggingFace thought this design choice was one of shortcomings of arenas: they aren’t reproducible. You don’t know who ranked what and what exactly the outcome was at the time of ranking. That same person might rank the same pair of outputs differently on a different day, or might ask harder questions to better models compared to smaller ones, making it imbalanced. Another argument that people have brought up is confirmation bias. We know humans prefer longer responses and are swayed by formatting - Rob Mulla from Dreadnode had found some interesting data on this in May:The approach LMArena is taking is to use logistic regression to decompose human preferences into constituent factors. As Anastasios explains: "We can say what components of style contribute to human preference and how they contribute." By adding these style components as parameters, they can mathematically "suck out" their influence and isolate the core model capabilities.This extends beyond just style - they can control for any measurable factor: "What if I want to look at the cost adjusted performance? Parameter count? We can ex post facto measure that." This is one of the most interesting things about Arena: You have a data generation engine which you can clean and turn into leaderboards later. If you wanted to create a leaderboard for poetry writing, you could get existing data from Arena, normalize it by identifying these style components. Whether or not it’s possible to really understand WHAT bias the voters have, that’s a different question.Private EvalsOne of the most delicate challenges LMSYS faces is maintaining trust while collaborating with AI labs. The concern is that labs could game the system by testing multiple variants privately and only releasing the best performer. This was brought up when 4o-mini released and it ranked as the second best model on the leaderboard:But this fear misunderstands how Arena works. Unlike static benchmarks where selection bias is a major issue, Arena's live nature means any initial bias gets washed out by ongoing evaluation. As Anastasios explains: "In the long run, there's way more fresh data than there is data that was used to compare these five models." The other big question is WHAT model is actually being tested; as people often talk about on X / Discord, the same endpoint will randomly feel “nerfed” like it happened for “Claude European summer” and corresponding conspiracy theories:It’s hard to keep track of these performance changes in Arena as these changes (if real…?) are not observable.The Future of EvaluationThe team's latest work on RouteLLM points to an interesting future where evaluation becomes more granular and task-specific. But they maintain that even simple routing strategies can be powerful - like directing complex queries to larger models while handling simple tasks with smaller ones.Arena is now going to expand beyond text into multimodal evaluation and specialized domains like code execution and red teaming. But their core insight remains: the best way to evaluate intelligence isn't to simplify it into metrics, but to embrace its complexity and find rigorous ways to analyze it. To go after this vision, they are spinning out Arena from LMSys, which will stay as an academia-driven group at Berkeley.Full Video PodcastChapters* 00:00:00 - Introductions* 00:01:16 - Origin and development of Chatbot Arena* 00:05:41 - Static benchmarks vs. Arenas* 00:09:03 - Community building* 00:13:32 - Biases in human preference evaluation* 00:18:27 - Style Control and Model Categories* 00:26:06 - Impact of o1* 00:29:15 - Collaborating with AI labs* 00:34:51 - RouteLLM and router models* 00:38:09 - Future of LMSys / ArenaShow Notes* Anastasios Angelopoulos* Anastasios' NeurIPS Paper Conformal Risk Control* Wei-Lin Chiang* Chatbot Arena* LMSys* MTBench* ShareGPT dataset* Stanford's Alpaca project* LLMRouter* E2B* DreadnodeTranscriptAlessio [00:00:00]: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space podcast. This is Alessio, Partner and CTO in Residence at Decibel Partners, and I'm joined by my co-host Swyx, founder of Smol.ai.Swyx [00:00:14]: Hey, and today we're very happy and excited to welcome Anastasios and Wei Lin from LMSys. Welcome guys.Wei Lin [00:00:21]: Hey, how's it going? Nice to see you.Anastasios [00:00:23]: Thanks for having us.Swyx [00:00:24]: Anastasios, I actually saw you, I think at last year's NeurIPS. You were presenting a paper, which I don't really super understand, but it was some theory paper about how your method was very dominating over other sort of search methods. I don't remember what it was, but I remember that you were a very confident speaker.Anastasios [00:00:40]: Oh, I totally remember you. Didn't ever connect that, but yes, that's definitely true. Yeah. Nice to see you again.Swyx [00:00:46]: Yeah. I was frantically looking for the name of your paper and I couldn't find it. Basically I had to cut it because I didn't understand it.Anastasios [00:00:51]: Is this conformal PID control or was this the online control?Wei Lin [00:00:55]: Blast from the past, man.Swyx [00:00:57]: Blast from the past. It's always interesting how NeurIPS and all these academic conferences are sort of six months behind what people are actually doing, but conformal risk control, I would recommend people check it out. I have the recording. I just never published it just because I was like, I don't understand this enough to explain it.Anastasios [00:01:14]: People won't be interested.Wei Lin [00:01:15]: It's all good.Swyx [00:01:16]: But ELO scores, ELO scores are very easy to understand. You guys are responsible for the biggest revolution in language model benchmarking in the last few years. Maybe you guys want to introduce yourselves and maybe tell a little bit of the brief history of LMSysWei Lin [00:01:32]: Hey, I'm Wei Lin. I'm a fifth year PhD student at UC Berkeley, working on Chatbot Arena these days, doing crowdsourcing AI benchmarking.Anastasios [00:01:43]: I'm Anastasios. I'm a sixth year PhD student here at Berkeley. I did most of my PhD on like theoretical statistics and sort of foundations of model evaluation and testing. And now I'm working 150% on this Chatbot Arena stuff. It's great.Alessio [00:02:00]: And what was the origin of it? How did you come up with the idea? How did you get people to buy in? And then maybe what were one or two of the pivotal moments early on that kind of made it the standard for these things?Wei Lin [00:02:12]: Yeah, yeah. Chatbot Arena project was started last year in April, May, around that. Before that, we were basically experimenting in a lab how to fine tune a chatbot open source based on the Llama 1 model that I released. At that time, Lama 1 was like a base model and people didn't really know how to fine tune it. So we were doing some explorations. We were inspired by Stanford's Alpaca project. So we basically, yeah, grow a data set from the internet, which is called ShareGPT data set, which is like a dialogue data set between user and chat GPT conversation. It turns out to be like pretty high quality data, dialogue data. So we fine tune on it and then we train it and release the model called V2. And people were very excited about it because it kind of like demonstrate open way model can reach this conversation capability similar to chat GPT. And then we basically release the model with and also build a demo website for the model. People were very excited about it. But during the development, the biggest challenge to us at the time was like, how do we even evaluate it? How do we even argue this model we trained is better than others? And then what's the gap between this open source model that other proprietary offering? At that time, it was like GPT-4 was just announced and it's like Cloud One. What's the difference between them? And then after that, like every week, there's a new model being fine tuned, released. So even until still now, right? And then we have that demo website for V2 now. And then we thought like, okay, maybe we can add a few more of the model as well, like API model as well. And then we quickly realized that people need a tool to compare between different models. So we have like a side by side UI implemented on the website to that people choose, you know, compare. And we quickly realized that maybe we can do something like, like a battle on top of ECLMs, like just anonymize it, anonymize the identity, and that people vote which one is better. So the community decides which one is better, not us, not us arguing, you know, our model is better or what. And that turns out to be like, people are very excited about this idea. And then we tweet, we launch, and that's, yeah, that's April, May. And then it was like first two, three weeks, like just a few hundred thousand views tweet on our launch tweets. And then we have regularly double update weekly, beginning at a time, adding new model GPT-4 as well. So it was like, that was the, you know, the initial.Anastasios [00:04:58]: Another pivotal moment, just to jump in, would be private models, like the GPT, I'm a little,Wei Lin [00:05:04]: I'm a little chatty. That was this year. That was this year.Anastasios [00:05:07]: Huge.Wei Lin [00:05:08]: That was also huge.Alessio [00:05:09]: In the beginning, I saw the initial release was May 3rd of the beta board. On April 6, we did a benchmarks 101 episode for a podcast, just kind of talking about, you know, how so much of the data is like in the pre-training corpus and blah, blah, blah. And like the benchmarks are really not what we need to evaluate whether or not a model is good. Why did you not make a benchmark? Maybe at the time, you know, it was just like, Hey, let's just put together a whole bunch of data again, run a, make a score that seems much easier than coming out with a whole website where like users need to vote. Any thoughts behind that?Wei Lin [00:05:41]: I think it's more like fundamentally, we don't know how to automate this kind of benchmarks when it's more like, you know, conversational, multi-turn, and more open-ended task that may not come with a ground truth. So let's say if you ask a model to help you write an email for you for whatever purpose, there's no ground truth. How do you score them? Or write a story or a creative story or many other things like how we use ChatterBee these days. It's more open-ended. You know, we need human in the loop to give us feedback, which one is better. And I think nuance here is like, sometimes it's also hard for human to give the absolute rating. So that's why we have this kind of pairwise comparison, easier for people to choose which one is better. So from that, we use these pairwise comparison, those to calculate the leaderboard. Yeah. You can add more about this methodology.Anastasios [00:06:40]: Yeah. I think the point is that, and you guys probably also talked about this at some point, but static benchmarks are intrinsically, to some extent, unable to measure generative model performance. And the reason is because you cannot pre-annotate all the outputs of a generative model. You change the model, it's like the distribution of your data is changing. New labels to deal with that. New labels are great automated labeling, right? Which is why people are pursuing both. And yeah, static benchmarks, they allow you to zoom in to particular types of information like factuality, historical facts. We can build the best benchmark of historical facts, and we will then know that the model is great at historical facts. But ultimately, that's not the only axis, right? And we can build 50 of them, and we can evaluate 50 axes. But it's just so, the problem of generative model evaluation is just so expansive, and it's so subjective, that it's just maybe non-intrinsically impossible, but at least we don't see a way. We didn't see a way of encoding that into a fixed benchmark.Wei Lin [00:07:47]: But on the other hand, I think there's a challenge where this kind of online dynamic benchmark is more expensive than static benchmark, offline benchmark, where people still need it. Like when they build models, they need static benchmark to track where they are.Anastasios [00:08:03]: It's not like our benchmark is uniformly better than all other benchmarks, right? It just measures a different kind of performance that has proved to be useful.Swyx [00:08:14]: You guys also published MTBench as well, which is a static version, let's say, of Chatbot Arena, right? That people can actually use in their development of models.Wei Lin [00:08:25]: Right. I think one of the reasons we still do this static benchmark, we still wanted to explore, experiment whether we can automate this, because people, eventually, model developers need it to fast iterate their model. So that's why we explored LM as a judge, and ArenaHard, trying to filter, select high-quality data we collected from Chatbot Arena, the high-quality subset, and use that as a question and then automate the judge pipeline, so that people can quickly get high-quality signal, benchmark signals, using this online benchmark.Swyx [00:09:03]: As a community builder, I'm curious about just the initial early days. Obviously when you offer effectively free A-B testing inference for people, people will come and use your arena. What do you think were the key unlocks for you? Was it funding for this arena? Was it marketing? When people came in, do you see a noticeable skew in the data? Which obviously now you have enough data sets, you can separate things out, like coding and hard prompts, but in the early days, it was just all sorts of things.Anastasios [00:09:31]: Yeah, maybe one thing to establish at first is that our philosophy has always been to maximize organic use. I think that really does speak to your point, which is, yeah, why do people come? They came to use free LLM inference, right? And also, a lot of users just come to the website to use direct chat, because you can chat with the model for free. And then you could think about it like, hey, let's just be kind of like more on the selfish or conservative or protectionist side and say, no, we're only giving credits for people that battle or so on and so forth. Strategy wouldn't work, right? Because what we're trying to build is like a big funnel, a big funnel that can direct people. And some people are passionate and interested and they battle. And yes, the distribution of the people that do that is different. It's like, as you're pointing out, it's like, that's not as they're enthusiastic.Wei Lin [00:10:24]: They're early adopters of this technology.Anastasios [00:10:27]: Or they like games, you know, people like this. And we've run a couple of surveys that indicate this as well, of our user base.Wei Lin [00:10:36]: We do see a lot of developers come to the site asking polling questions, 20-30%. Yeah, 20-30%.Anastasios [00:10:42]: It's obviously not reflective of the general population, but it's reflective of some corner of the world of people that really care. And to some extent, maybe that's all right, because those are like the power users. And you know, we're not trying to claim that we represent the world, right? We represent the people that come and vote.Swyx [00:11:02]: Did you have to do anything marketing-wise? Was anything effective? Did you struggle at all? Was it success from day one?Wei Lin [00:11:09]: At some point, almost done. Okay. Because as you can imagine, this leaderboard depends on community engagement participation. If no one comes to vote tomorrow, then no leaderboard.Anastasios [00:11:23]: So we had some period of time when the number of users was just, after the initial launch, it went lower. Yeah. And, you know, at some point, it did not look promising. Actually, I joined the project a couple months in to do the statistical aspects, right? As you can imagine, that's how it kind of hooked into my previous work. At that time, it wasn't like, you know, it definitely wasn't clear that this was like going to be the eval or something. It was just like, oh, this is a cool project. Like Wayland seems awesome, you know, and that's it.Wei Lin [00:11:56]: Definitely. There's in the beginning, because people don't know us, people don't know what this is for. So we had a hard time. But I think we were lucky enough that we have some initial momentum. And as well as the competition between model providers just becoming, you know, became very intense. Intense. And then that makes the eval onto us, right? Because always number one is number one.Anastasios [00:12:23]: There's also an element of trust. Our main priority in everything we do is trust. We want to make sure we're doing everything like all the I's are dotted and the T's are crossed and nobody gets unfair treatment and people can see from our profiles and from our previous work and from whatever, you know, we're trustworthy people. We're not like trying to make a buck and we're not trying to become famous off of this or that. It's just, we're trying to provide a great public leaderboard community venture project.Wei Lin [00:12:51]: Yeah.Swyx [00:12:52]: Yes. I mean, you are kind of famous now, you know, that's fine. Just to dive in more into biases and, you know, some of this is like statistical control. The classic one for human preference evaluation is humans demonstrably prefer longer contexts or longer outputs, which is actually something that we don't necessarily want. You guys, I think maybe two months ago put out some length control studies. Apart from that, there are just other documented biases. Like, I'd just be interested in your review of what you've learned about biases and maybe a little bit about how you've controlled for them.Anastasios [00:13:32]: At a very high level, yeah. Humans are biased. Totally agree. Like in various ways. It's not clear whether that's good or bad, you know, we try not to make value judgments about these things. We just try to describe them as they are. And our approach is always as follows. We collect organic data and then we take that data and we mine it to get whatever insights we can get. And, you know, we have many millions of data points that we can now use to extract insights from. Now, one of those insights is to ask the question, what is the effect of style, right? You have a bunch of data, you have votes, people are voting either which way. We have all the conversations. We can say what components of style contribute to human preference and how do they contribute? Now, that's an important question. Why is that an important question? It's important because some people want to see which model would be better if the lengths of the responses were the same, were to be the same, right? People want to see the causal effect of the model's identity controlled for length or controlled for markdown, number of headers, bulleted lists, is the text bold? Some people don't, they just don't care about that. The idea is not to impose the judgment that this is not important, but rather to say ex post facto, can we analyze our data in a way that decouples all the different factors that go into human preference? Now, the way we do this is via statistical regression. That is to say the arena score that we show on our leaderboard is a particular type of linear model, right? It's a linear model that takes, it's a logistic regression that takes model identities and fits them against human preference, right? So it regresses human preference against model identity. What you get at the end of that logistic regression is a parameter vector of coefficients. And when the coefficient is large, it tells you that GPT 4.0 or whatever, very large coefficient, that means it's strong. And that's exactly what we report in the table. It's just the predictive effect of the model identity on the vote. The other thing that you can do is you can take that vector, let's say we have M models, that is an M dimensional vector of coefficients. What you can do is you say, hey, I also want to understand what the effect of length is. So I'll add another entry to that vector, which is trying to predict the vote, right? That tells me the difference in length between two model responses. So we have that for all of our data. We can compute it ex post facto. We added it into the regression and we look at that predictive effect. And then the idea, and this is formally true under certain conditions, not always verifiable ones, but the idea is that adding that extra coefficient to this vector will kind of suck out the predictive power of length and put it into that M plus first coefficient and quote, unquote, de-bias the rest so that the effect of length is not included. And that's what we do in style control. Now we don't just do it for M plus one. We have, you know, five, six different style components that have to do with markdown headers and bulleted lists and so on that we add here. Now, where is this going? You guys see the idea. It's a general methodology. If you have something that's sort of like a nuisance parameter, something that exists and provides predictive value, but you really don't want to estimate that. You want to remove its effect. In causal inference, these things are called like confounders often. What you can do is you can model the effect. You can put them into your model and try to adjust for them. So another one of those things might be cost. You know, what if I want to look at the cost adjusted performance of my model, which models are punching above their weight, parameter count, which models are punching above their weight in terms of parameter count, we can ex post facto measure that. We can do it without introducing anything that compromises the organic nature of theWei Lin [00:17:17]: data that we collect.Anastasios [00:17:18]: Hopefully that answers the question.Wei Lin [00:17:20]: It does.Swyx [00:17:21]: So I guess with a background in econometrics, this is super familiar.Anastasios [00:17:25]: You're probably better at this than me for sure.Swyx [00:17:27]: Well, I mean, so I used to be, you know, a quantitative trader and so, you know, controlling for multiple effects on stock price is effectively the job. So it's interesting. Obviously the problem is proving causation, which is hard, but you don't have to do that.Anastasios [00:17:45]: Yes. Yes, that's right. And causal inference is a hard problem and it goes beyond statistics, right? It's like you have to build the right causal model and so on and so forth. But we think that this is a good first step and we're sort of looking forward to learning from more people. You know, there's some good people at Berkeley that work on causal inference for the learning from them on like, what are the really most contemporary techniques that we can use in order to estimate true causal effects if possible.Swyx [00:18:10]: Maybe we could take a step through the other categories. So style control is a category. It is not a default. I have thought that when you wrote that blog post, actually, I thought it would be the new default because it seems like the most obvious thing to control for. But you also have other categories, you have coding, you have hard prompts. We consider that.Anastasios [00:18:27]: We're still actively considering it. It's just, you know, once you make that step, once you take that step, you're introducing your opinion and I'm not, you know, why should our opinion be the one? That's kind of a community choice. We could put it to a vote.Wei Lin [00:18:39]: We could pass.Anastasios [00:18:40]: Yeah, maybe do a poll. Maybe do a poll.Swyx [00:18:42]: I don't know. No opinion is an opinion.Wei Lin [00:18:44]: You know what I mean?Swyx [00:18:45]: Yeah.Wei Lin [00:18:46]: There's no neutral choice here.Swyx [00:18:47]: Yeah. You have all these others. You have instruction following too. What are your favorite categories that you like to talk about? Maybe you tell a little bit of the stories, tell a little bit of like the hard choices that you had to make.Wei Lin [00:18:57]: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think the, uh, initially the reason why we want to add these new categories is essentially to answer some of the questions from our community, which is we won't have a single leaderboard for everything. So these models behave very differently in different domains. Let's say this model is trend for coding, this model trend for more technical questions and so on. On the other hand, to answer people's question about like, okay, what if all these low quality, you know, because we crowdsource data from the internet, there will be noise. So how do we de-noise? How do we filter out these low quality data effectively? So that was like, you know, some questions we want to answer. So basically we spent a few months, like really diving into these questions to understand how do we filter all these data because these are like medias of data points. And then if you want to re-label yourself, it's possible, but we need to kind of like to automate this kind of data classification pipeline for us to effectively categorize them to different categories, say coding, math, structure, and also harder problems. So that was like, the hope is when we slice the data into these meaningful categories to give people more like better signals, more direct signals, and that's also to clarify what we are actually measuring for, because I think that's the core part of the benchmark. That was the initial motivation. Does that make sense?Anastasios [00:20:27]: Yeah. Also, I'll just say, this does like get back to the point that the philosophy is to like mine organic, to take organic data and then mine it x plus factor.Alessio [00:20:35]: Is the data cage-free too, or just organic?Anastasios [00:20:39]: It's cage-free.Wei Lin [00:20:40]: No GMO. Yeah. And all of these efforts are like open source, like we open source all of the data cleaning pipeline, filtering pipeline. Yeah.Swyx [00:20:50]: I love the notebooks you guys publish. Actually really good just for learning statistics.Wei Lin [00:20:54]: Yeah. I'll share this insights with everyone.Alessio [00:20:59]: I agree on the initial premise of, Hey, writing an email, writing a story, there's like no ground truth. But I think as you move into like coding and like red teaming, some of these things, there's like kind of like skill levels. So I'm curious how you think about the distribution of skill of the users. Like maybe the top 1% of red teamers is just not participating in the arena. So how do you guys think about adjusting for it? And like feels like this where there's kind of like big differences between the average and the top. Yeah.Anastasios [00:21:29]: Red teaming, of course, red teaming is quite challenging. So, okay. Moving back. There's definitely like some tasks that are not as subjective that like pairwise human preference feedback is not the only signal that you would want to measure. And to some extent, maybe it's useful, but it may be more useful if you give people better tools. For example, it'd be great if we could execute code with an arena, be fantastic.Wei Lin [00:21:52]: We want to do it.Anastasios [00:21:53]: There's also this idea of constructing a user leaderboard. What does that mean? That means some users are better than others. And how do we measure that? How do we quantify that? Hard in chatbot arena, but where it is easier is in red teaming, because in red teaming, there's an explicit game. You're trying to break the model, you either win or you lose. So what you can do is you can say, Hey, what's really happening here is that the models and humans are playing a game against one another. And then you can use the same sort of Bradley Terry methodology with some, some extensions that we came up with in one of you can read one of our recent blog posts for, for the sort of theoretical extensions. You can attribute like strength back to individual players and jointly attribute strength to like the models that are in this jailbreaking game, along with the target tasks, like what types of jailbreaks you want.Wei Lin [00:22:44]: So yeah.Anastasios [00:22:45]: And I think that this is, this is a hugely important and interesting avenue that we want to continue researching. We have some initial ideas, but you know, all thoughts are welcome.Wei Lin [00:22:54]: Yeah.Alessio [00:22:55]: So first of all, on the code execution, the E2B guys, I'm sure they'll be happy to helpWei Lin [00:22:59]: you.Alessio [00:23:00]: I'll please set that up. They're big fans. We're investors in a company called Dreadnought, which we do a lot in AI red teaming. I think to me, the most interesting thing has been, how do you do sure? Like the model jailbreak is one side. We also had Nicola Scarlini from DeepMind on the podcast, and he was talking about, for example, like, you know, context stealing and like a weight stealing. So there's kind of like a lot more that goes around it. I'm curious just how you think about the model and then maybe like the broader system, even with Red Team Arena, you're just focused on like jailbreaking of the model, right? You're not doing kind of like any testing on the more system level thing of the model where like, maybe you can get the training data back, you're going to exfiltrate some of the layers and the weights and things like that.Wei Lin [00:23:43]: So right now, as you can see, the Red Team Arena is at a very early stage and we are still exploring what could be the potential new games we can introduce to the platform. So the idea is still the same, right? And we build a community driven project platform for people. They can have fun with this website, for sure. That's one thing, and then help everyone to test these models. So one of the aspects you mentioned is stealing secrets, stealing training sets. That could be one, you know, it could be designed as a game. Say, can you still use their credential, you know, we hide, maybe we can hide the credential into system prompts and so on. So there are like a few potential ideas we want to explore for sure. Do you want to add more?Anastasios [00:24:28]: I think that this is great. This idea is a great one. There's a lot of great ideas in the Red Teaming space. You know, I'm not personally like a Red Teamer. I don't like go around and Red Team models, but there are people that do that and they're awesome. They're super skilled. When I think about the Red Team arena, I think those are really the people that we're building it for. Like, we want to make them excited and happy, build tools that they like. And just like chatbot arena, we'll trust that this will end up being useful for the world. And all these people are, you know, I won't say all these people in this community are actually good hearted, right? They're not doing it because they want to like see the world burn. They're doing it because they like, think it's fun and cool. And yeah. Okay. Maybe they want to see, maybe they want a little bit.Wei Lin [00:25:13]: I don't know. Majority.Anastasios [00:25:15]: Yeah.Wei Lin [00:25:16]: You know what I'm saying.Anastasios [00:25:17]: So, you know, trying to figure out how to serve them best, I think, I don't know where that fits. I just, I'm not expressing. And give them credits, right?Wei Lin [00:25:24]: And give them credit.Anastasios [00:25:25]: Yeah. Yeah. So I'm not trying to express any particular value judgment here as to whether that's the right next step. It's just, that's sort of the way that I think we would think about it.Swyx [00:25:35]: Yeah. We also talked to Sander Schulhoff of the HackerPrompt competition, and he's pretty interested in Red Teaming at scale. Let's just call it that. You guys maybe want to talk with him.Wei Lin [00:25:45]: Oh, nice.Swyx [00:25:46]: We wanted to cover a little, a few topical things and then go into the other stuff that your group is doing. You know, you're not just running Chatbot Arena. We can also talk about the new website and your future plans, but I just wanted to briefly focus on O1. It is the hottest, latest model. Obviously, you guys already have it on the leaderboard. What is the impact of O1 on your evals?Wei Lin [00:26:06]: Made our interface slower.Anastasios [00:26:07]: It made it slower.Swyx [00:26:08]: Yeah.Wei Lin [00:26:10]: Because it needs like 30, 60 seconds, sometimes even more to, the latency is like higher. So that's one. Sure. But I think we observe very interesting things from this model as well. Like we observe like significant improvement in certain categories, like more technical or math. Yeah.Anastasios [00:26:32]: I think actually like one takeaway that was encouraging is that I think a lot of people before the O1 release were thinking, oh, like this benchmark is saturated. And why were they thinking that? They were thinking that because there was a bunch of models that were kind of at the same level. They were just kind of like incrementally competing and it sort of wasn't immediately obvious that any of them were any better. Nobody, including any individual person, it's hard to tell. But what O1 did is it was, it's clearly a better model for certain tasks. I mean, I used it for like proving some theorems and you know, there's some theorems that like only I know because I still do a little bit of theory. Right. So it's like, I can go in there and ask like, oh, how would you prove this exact thing? Which I can tell you has never been in the public domain. It'll do it. It's like, what?Wei Lin [00:27:19]: Okay.Anastasios [00:27:20]: So there's this model and it crushed the benchmark. You know, it's just like really like a big gap. And what that's telling us is that it's not saturated yet. It's still measuring some signal. That was encouraging. The point, the takeaway is that the benchmark is comparative. There's no absolute number. There's no maximum ELO. It's just like, if you're better than the rest, then you win. I think that was actually quite helpful to us.Swyx [00:27:46]: I think people were criticizing, I saw some of the academics criticizing it as not apples to apples. Right. Like, because it can take more time to reason, it's basically doing some search, doing some chain of thought that if you actually let the other models do that same thing, they might do better.Wei Lin [00:28:03]: Absolutely.Anastasios [00:28:04]: To be clear, none of the leaderboard currently is apples to apples because you have like Gemini Flash, you have, you know, all sorts of tiny models like Lama 8B, like 8B and 405B are not apples to apples.Wei Lin [00:28:19]: Totally agree. They have different latencies.Anastasios [00:28:21]: Different latencies.Wei Lin [00:28:22]: Control for latency. Yeah.Anastasios [00:28:24]: Latency control. That's another thing. We can do style control, but latency control. You know, things like this are important if you want to understand the trade-offs involved in using AI.Swyx [00:28:34]: O1 is a developing story. We still haven't seen the full model yet, but it's definitely a very exciting new paradigm. I think one community controversy I just wanted to give you guys space to address is the collaboration between you and the large model labs. People have been suspicious, let's just say, about how they choose to A-B test on you. I'll state the argument and let you respond, which is basically they run like five anonymous models and basically argmax their Elo on LMSYS or chatbot arena, and they release the best one. Right? What has been your end of the controversy? How have you decided to clarify your policy going forward?Wei Lin [00:29:15]: On a high level, I think our goal here is to build a fast eval for everyone, and including everyone in the community can see the data board and understand, compare the models. More importantly, I think we want to build the best eval also for model builders, like all these frontier labs building models. They're also internally facing a challenge, which is how do they eval the model? That's the reason why we want to partner with all the frontier lab people, and then to help them testing. That's one of the... We want to solve this technical challenge, which is eval. Yeah.Anastasios [00:29:54]: I mean, ideally, it benefits everyone, right?Wei Lin [00:29:56]: Yeah.Anastasios [00:29:57]: And people also are interested in seeing the leading edge of the models. People in the community seem to like that. Oh, there's a new model up. Is this strawberry? People are excited. People are interested. Yeah. And then there's this question that you bring up of, is it actually causing harm?Wei Lin [00:30:15]: Right?Anastasios [00:30:16]: Is it causing harm to the benchmark that we are allowing this private testing to happen? Maybe stepping back, why do you have that instinct? The reason why you and others in the community have that instinct is because when you look at something like a benchmark, like an image net, a static benchmark, what happens is that if I give you a million different models that are all slightly different, and I pick the best one, there's something called selection bias that plays in, which is that the performance of the winning model is overstated. This is also sometimes called the winner's curse. And that's because statistical fluctuations in the evaluation, they're driving which model gets selected as the top. So this selection bias can be a problem. Now there's a couple of things that make this benchmark slightly different. So first of all, the selection bias that you include when you're only testing five models is normally empirically small.Wei Lin [00:31:12]: And that's why we have these confidence intervals constructed.Anastasios [00:31:16]: That's right. Yeah. Our confidence intervals are actually not multiplicity adjusted. One thing that we could do immediately tomorrow in order to address this concern is if a model provider is testing five models and they want to release one, and we're constructing the models at level one minus alpha, we can just construct the intervals instead at level one minus alpha divided by five. That's called Bonferroni correction. What that'll tell you is that the final performance of the model, the interval that gets constructed, is actually formally correct. We don't do that right now, partially because we know from simulations that the amount of selection bias you incur with these five things is just not huge. It's not huge in comparison to the variability that you get from just regular human voters. So that's one thing. But then the second thing is the benchmark is live, right? So what ends up happening is it'll be a small magnitude, but even if you suffer from the winner's curse after testing these five models, what'll happen is that over time, because we're getting new data, it'll get adjusted down. So if there's any bias that gets introduced at that stage, in the long run, it actually doesn't matter. Because asymptotically, basically in the long run, there's way more fresh data than there is data that was used to compare these five models against these private models.Swyx [00:32:35]: The announcement effect is only just the first phase and it has a long tail.Anastasios [00:32:39]: Yeah, that's right. And it sort of like automatically corrects itself for this selection adjustment.Swyx [00:32:45]: Every month, I do a little chart of LMSys Elo versus cost, just to track the price per dollar, the amount of like, how much money do I have to pay for one incremental point in ELO? And so I actually observe an interesting stability in most of the Elo numbers, except for some of them. For example, GPT-4-O August has fallen from 12.90𝑡𝑜12.90to12.60 over the past few months. And it's surprising.Wei Lin [00:33:11]: You're saying like a new version of GPT-4-O versus the version in May?Swyx [00:33:17]: There was May. May is $12.85. I could have made some data entry error, but it'd be interesting to track these things over time. Anyway, I observed like numbers go up, numbers go down. It's remarkably stable. Gotcha.Anastasios [00:33:28]: So there are two different track points and the Elo has fallen.Wei Lin [00:33:31]: Yes.Swyx [00:33:32]: And sometimes ELOs rise as well. I think a core rose from 1,200𝑡𝑜1,200to1,230. And that's one of the things, by the way, the community is always suspicious about, like, hey, did this same endpoint get dumber after release? Right? It's such a meme.Anastasios [00:33:45]: That's funny. But those are different endpoints, right?Wei Lin [00:33:47]: Yeah, those are different API endpoints, I think. For GPT-4-O, August and May. But if it's for like, you know, endpoint versions we fixed, usually we observe small variation after release.Anastasios [00:34:04]: I mean, you can quantify the variations that you would expect in an ELO. That's a close form number that you can calculate. So if the variations are larger than we would expect, then that indicates that we shouldWei Lin [00:34:17]: look into that. For sure.Anastasios [00:34:19]: That's important for us to know. So maybe you should send us a reply. Yeah, please.Wei Lin [00:34:22]: I'll send you some data. Yeah.Alessio [00:34:24]: And I know we only got a few minutes before we wrap, but there are two things I would definitely love to talk about. One is route LLM. So talking about models, maybe getting dumber over time, blah, blah, blah. Are routers actually helpful in your experience? And Sean pointed out that MOEs are technically routers too. So how do you kind of think about the router being part of the model versus routing different models? And yeah, overall learnings from building it?Wei Lin [00:34:51]: Yeah. So route LLM is a project we released a few months ago, I think. And our goal was to basically understand, can we use the preference data we collect to route model based on the question, conditional on the questions, because we will make assumption that some model are good at math, some model are good at coding, things like that. So we found it somewhat useful. For sure, this is like ongoing effort. Our first phase with this project is pretty much like open source, the framework that we develop. So for anyone interested in this problem, they can use the framework, and then they can train their own router model, and then to do evaluation to benchmark. So that's our goal, the reason why we released this framework. And I think there are a couple of future stuff we are thinking. One is, can we just scale this, do even more data, even more preference data, and then train a reward model, train like a router model, better router model. Another thing is, release a benchmark, because right now, currently, there seems to be, one of the end point when we developed this project was like, there's just no good benchmark for a router. So that will be another thing we think could be a useful contribution to community. And there's still, for sure, methodology, new methodology we can use.Swyx [00:36:18]: I think my fundamental philosophical doubt is, does the router model have to be at least as smart as the smartest model? What's the minimum required intelligence of a router model, right? Like, if it's too dumb, it's not going to route properly.Anastasios [00:36:32]: Well, I think that you can build a very, very simple router that is very effective. So let me give you an example. You can build a great router with one parameter, and the parameter is just like, I'm going to check if my question is hard. And if it's hard, then I'm going to go to the big model. If it's easy, I'm going to go to the little model. You know, there's various ways of measuring hard that are like, pretty trivial, right? Like, does it have code? Does it have math? Is it long? That's already a great first step, right? Because ultimately, at the end of the day, you're competing with a weak baseline, which is any individual model. And you're trying to ask the question, how do I improve cost? And that's like a one-dimensional trade-off. It's like performance cost, and it's great. Now, you can also get into the extension, which is what models are good at what particularWei Lin [00:37:23]: types of queries.Anastasios [00:37:25]: And then, you know, I think your concern starts taking into effect is, can we actually do that? Can we estimate which models are good in which parts of the space in a way that doesn't introduce more variability and more variation and error into our final pipeline than just using the best of them? That's kind of how I see it.Swyx [00:37:44]: Your approach is really interesting compared to the commercial approaches where you use information from the chat arena to inform your model, which is, I mean, smart, and it's the foundation of everything you do. Yep.Alessio [00:37:56]: As we wrap, can we just talk about LMSYS and what that's going to be going forward? Like, LMRENA, I'm becoming something. I saw you announced yesterday you're graduating. I think maybe that was confusing since you're PhD students, but this is a different typeWei Lin [00:38:09]: of graduation.Anastasios [00:38:10]: Just for context, LMSYS started as like a student club.Wei Lin [00:38:15]: Student driven. Yeah.Anastasios [00:38:16]: Student driven, like research projects, you know, many different research projects are part of LMSYS. Sort of chatbot arena has, of course, like kind of become its own thing. And Lianmin and Ying, who are, you know, created LMSYS, have kind of like moved on to working on SGLANG. And now they're doing other projects that are sort of originated from LMSYS. And for that reason, we thought it made sense to kind of decouple the two. Just so, A, the LMSYS thing, it's not like when someone says LMSYS, they think of chatbot arena. That's not fair, so to speak.Wei Lin [00:38:52]: And we want to support new projects.Anastasios [00:38:54]: And we want to support new projects and so on and so forth. But of course, these are all like, you know, our friends.Wei Lin [00:38:59]: So that's why we call it graduation. I agree.Alessio [00:39:03]: That's like one thing that people wear. Maybe a little confused by where LMSYS kind of starts and ends and where arena startsWei Lin [00:39:10]: and ends.Alessio [00:39:10]: So I think you reach escape velocity now that you're kind of like your own thing.Swyx [00:39:15]: So I have one parting question. Like, what do you want more of? Like, what do you want people to approach you with?Anastasios [00:39:21]: Oh, my God, we need so much help. One thing would be like, we're obviously expanding into like other kinds of arenas, right? We definitely need like active help on red teaming. We definitely need active help on our different modalities, different modalities.Wei Lin [00:39:35]: So pilot, yeah, coding, coding.Anastasios [00:39:38]: You know, if somebody could like help us implement this, like REPL in REPL in chatbot arena,Wei Lin [00:39:44]: massive, that would be a massive delta.Anastasios [00:39:45]: And I know that there's people out there who are passionate and capable of doing it. It's just, we don't have enough hands on deck. We're just like an academic research lab, right? We're not equipped to support this kind of project. So, yeah, we need help with that. We also need just like general back-end dev. And new ideas, new conceptual ideas. I mean, honestly, the work that we do spans everything from like foundational statistics, like new proofs to full stack dev. And like anybody who's like, wants to contribute something to that pipeline is, should definitely reach out.Wei Lin [00:40:22]: We need it. And it's an open source project anyways. Anyone can make a PR.Anastasios [00:40:26]: And we're happy to, you know, whoever wants to contribute, we'll give them credit, you know? We're not trying to keep all the credit for ourselves. We want it to be a community project.Wei Lin [00:40:33]: That's great.Alessio [00:40:34]: And fits this pair of everything you've been doing over there. So, awesome, guys. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. And we'll put all the links in the show notes so that people can find you and reach out if they need it. Thank you so much.Anastasios [00:40:46]: It's very nice to talk to you. And thank you for the wonderful questions.Wei Lin [00:40:49]: Thank you so much. Get full access to Latent Space at www.latent.space/subscribe

If you’ve listened to the podcast for a while, you might have heard our ElevenLabs-powered AI co-host Charlie a few times. Text-to-speech has made amazing progress in the last 18 months, with OpenAI’s Advanced Voice Mode (aka “Her”) as a sneak peek of the future of AI interactions (see our “Building AGI in Real Time” recap). Yet, we had yet to see a real killer app for AI voice (not counting music).Today’s guests, Raiza Martin and Usama Bin Shafqat, are the lead PM and AI engineer behind the NotebookLM feature flag that gave us the first viral AI voice experience, the “Deep Dive” podcast:The idea behind the “Audio Overviews” feature is simple: take a bunch of documents, websites, YouTube videos, etc, and generate a podcast out of them. This was one of the first demos that people built with voice models + RAG + GPT models, but it was always a glorified speech-to-text. Raiza and Usama took a very different approach:* Make it conversational: when you listen to a NotebookLM audio there are a ton of micro-interjections (Steven Johnson calls them disfluencies) like “Oh really?” or “Totally”, as well as pauses and “uh…”, like you would expect in a real conversation. These are not generated by the LLM in the transcript, but they are built into the the audio model. See ~28:00 in the pod for more details. * Listeners love tension: if two people are always in agreement on everything, it’s not super interesting. They tuned the model to generate flowing conversations that mirror the tone and rhythm of human speech. They did not confirm this, but many suspect the 2 year old SoundStorm paper is related to this model.* Generating new insights: because the hosts’ goal is not to summarize, but to entertain, it comes up with funny metaphors and comparisons that actually help expand on the content rather than just paraphrasing like most models do. We have had listeners make podcasts out of our podcasts, like this one.This is different than your average SOTA-chasing, MMLU-driven model buildooor. Putting product and AI engineering in the same room, having them build evals together, and understanding what the goal is lets you get these unique results. The 5 rules for AI PMsWe always focus on AI Engineers, but this episode had a ton of AI PM nuggets as well, which we wanted to collect as NotebookLM is one of the most successful products in the AI space:1. Less is more: the first version of the product had 0 customization options. All you could do is give it source documents, and then press a button to generate. Most users don’t know what “temperature” or “top-k” are, so you’re often taking the magic away by adding more options in the UI. Since recording they added a few, like a system prompt, but those were features that users were “hacking in”, as Simon Willison highlighted in his blog post.2. Use Real-Time Feedback: they built a community of 65,000 users on Discord that is constantly reporting issues and giving feedback; sometimes they noticed server downtime even before the Google internal monitoring did. Getting real time pings > aggregating user data when doing initial iterations. 3. Embrace Non-Determinism: AI outputs variability is a feature, not a bug. Rather than limiting the outputs from the get-go, build toggles that you can turn on/off with feature flags as the feedback starts to roll in.4. Curate with Taste: if you try your product and it sucks, you don’t need more data to confirm it. Just scrap that and iterate again. This is even easier for a product like this; if you start listening to one of the podcasts and turn it off after 10 seconds, it’s never a good sign. 5. Stay Hands-On: It’s hard to build taste if you don’t experiment. Trying out all your competitors products as well as unrelated tools really helps you understand what users are seeing in market, and how to improve on it.Chapters00:00 Introductions01:39 From Project Tailwind to NotebookLM09:25 Learning from 65,000 Discord members12:15 How NotebookLM works18:00 Working with Steven Johnson23:00 How to prioritize features25:13 Structuring the data pipelines29:50 How to eval34:34 Steering the podcast outputs37:51 Defining speakers personalities39:04 How do you make audio engaging?45:47 Humor is AGI51:38 Designing for non-determinism53:35 API when?55:05 Multilingual support and dialect considerations57:50 Managing system prompts and feature requests01:00:58 Future of NotebookLM01:04:59 Podcasts for your codebase01:07:16 Plans for real-time chat01:08:27 Wrap upShow Notes* Notebook LM* AI Test Kitchen* Nicholas Carlini* Steven Johnson* Wealth of Nations* Histories of Mysteries by Andrej Karpathy* chicken.pdf Threads* Area 120* Raiza Martin* Usama Bin ShafqatTranscriptNotebookLM [00:00:00]: Hey everyone, we're here today as guests on Latent Space. It's great to be here, I'm a long time listener and fan, they've had some great guests on this show before. Yeah, what an honor to have us, the hosts of another podcast, join as guests. I mean a huge thank you to Swyx and Alessio for the invite, thanks for having us on the show. Yeah really, it seems like they brought us here to talk a little bit about our show, our podcast. Yeah, I mean we've had lots of listeners ourselves, listeners at Deep Dive. Oh yeah, we've made a ton of audio overviews since we launched and we're learning a lot. There's probably a lot we can share around what we're building next, huh? Yeah, we'll share a little bit at least. The short version is we'll keep learning and getting better for you. We're glad you're along for the ride. So yeah, keep listening. Keep listening and stay curious. We promise to keep diving deep and bringing you even better options in the future. Stay curious.Alessio [00:00:52]: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO at Residence at Decibel Partners. And I'm joined by my co-host, Swyx, founder of Smol.ai.Swyx [00:01:01]: Hey, and today we're back in the studio with our special guest, Raiza Martin. And Raiza, I forgot to get your last name, Shafqat.Raiza [00:01:10]: Yes.Swyx [00:01:10]: Okay, welcome.Raiza [00:01:12]: Hello, thank you for having us.Swyx [00:01:14]: So AI podcasters meet human podcasters, always fun. Congrats on the success of Notebook LM. I mean, how does it feel?Raiza [00:01:22]: It's been a lot of fun. A lot of it, honestly, was unexpected. But my favorite part is really listening to the audio overviews that people have been making.Swyx [00:01:29]: Maybe we should do a little bit of intros and tell the story. You know, what is your path into the sort of Google AI org? Or maybe, actually, I don't even know what org you guys are in.Raiza [00:01:39]: I can start. My name is Raisa. I lead the Notebook LM team inside of Google Labs. So specifically, that's the org that we're in. It's called Google Labs. It's only about two years old. And our whole mandate is really to build AI products. That's it. We work super closely with DeepMind. Our entire thing is just, like, try a bunch of things and see what's landing with users. And the background that I have is, really, I worked in payments before this, and I worked in ads right before, and then startups. I tell people, like, at every time that I changed orgs, I actually almost quit Google. Like, specifically, like, in between ads and payments, I was like, all right, I can't do this. Like, this is, like, super hard. I was like, it's not for me. I'm, like, a very zero-to-one person. But then I was like, okay, I'll try. I'll interview with other teams. And when I interviewed in payments, I was like, oh, these people are really cool. I don't know if I'm, like, a super good fit with this space, but I'll try it because the people are cool. And then I really enjoyed that, and then I worked on, like, zero-to-one features inside of payments, and I had a lot of fun. But then the time came again where I was like, oh, I don't know. It's like, it's time to leave. It's time to start my own thing. But then I interviewed inside of Google Labs, and I was like, oh, darn. Like, there's definitely, like—Alessio [00:02:48]: They got you again.Raiza [00:02:49]: They got me again. And so now I've been here for two years, and I'm happy that I stayed because especially with, you know, the recent success of Notebook LM, I'm like, dang, we did it. I actually got to do it. So that was really cool.Usama [00:03:02]: Kind of similar, honestly. I was at a big team at Google. We do sort of the data center supply chain planning stuff. Google has, like, the largest sort of footprint. Obviously, there's a lot of management stuff to do there. But then there was this thing called Area 120 at Google, which does not exist anymore. But I sort of wanted to do, like, more zero-to-one building and landed a role there. We were trying to build, like, a creator commerce platform called Kaya. It launched briefly a couple years ago. But then Area 120 sort of transitioned and morphed into Labs. And, like, over the last few years, like, the focus just got a lot clearer. Like, we were trying to build new AI products and do it in the wild and sort of co-create and all of that. So, you know, we've just been trying a bunch of different things. And this one really landed, which has felt pretty phenomenal. Really, really landed.Swyx [00:03:53]: Let's talk about the brief history of Notebook LM. You had a tweet, which is very helpful for doing research. May 2023, during Google I.O., you announced Project Tailwind.Raiza [00:04:03]: Yeah.Swyx [00:04:03]: So today is October 2024. So you joined October 2022?Raiza [00:04:09]: Actually, I used to lead AI Test Kitchen. And this was actually, I think, not I.O. 2023. I.O. 2022 is when we launched AI Test Kitchen, or announced it. And I don't know if you remember it.Swyx [00:04:23]: That's how you, like, had the basic prototype for Gemini.Raiza [00:04:26]: Yes, yes, exactly. Lambda.Swyx [00:04:28]: Gave beta access to people.Raiza [00:04:29]: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I remember, I was like, wow, this is crazy. We're going to launch an LLM into the wild. And that was the first project that I was working on at Google. But at the same time, my manager at the time, Josh, he was like, hey, I want you to really think about, like, what real products would we build that are not just demos of the technology? That was in October of 2022. I was sitting next to an engineer that was working on a project called Talk to Small Corpus. His name was Adam. And the idea of Talk to Small Corpus is basically using LLM to talk to your data. And at the time, I was like, wait, there's some, like, really practical things that you can build here. And just a little bit of background, like, I was an adult learner. Like, I went to college while I was working a full-time job. And the first thing I thought was, like, this would have really helped me with my studying, right? Like, if I could just, like, talk to a textbook, especially, like, when I was tired after work, that would have been huge. We took a lot of, like, the Talk to Small Corpus prototypes, and I showed it to a lot of, like, college students, particularly, like, adult learners. They were like, yes, like, I get it, right? Like, I didn't even have to explain it to them. And we just continued to iterate the prototype from there to the point where we actually got a slot as part of the I.O. demo in 23.Swyx [00:05:42]: And Corpus, was it a textbook? Oh, my gosh.Raiza [00:05:45]: Yeah. It's funny. Actually, when he explained the project to me, he was like, talk to Small Corpus. It was like, talk to a small corpse?Swyx [00:05:51]: Yeah, nobody says Corpus.Raiza [00:06:00]: It was like, a small corpse? This is not AI. Yeah, yeah. And it really was just, like, a way for us to describe the amount of data that we thought, like, it could be good for.Swyx [00:06:02]: Yeah, but even then, you're still, like, doing rag stuff. Because, you know, the context length back then was probably, like, 2K, 4K.Raiza [00:06:08]: Yeah, it was basically rag.Raiza [00:06:09]: That was essentially what it was.Raiza [00:06:10]: And I remember, I was like, we were building the prototypes. And at the same time, I think, like, the rest of the world was. Right? We were seeing all of these, like, chat with PDF stuff come up. And I was like, come on, we gotta go. Like, we have to, like, push this out into the world. I think if there was anything, I wish we would have launched sooner because I wanted to learn faster. But I think, like, we netted out pretty well.Alessio [00:06:30]: Was the initial product just text-to-speech? Or were you also doing kind of, like, synthesizing of the content, refining it? Or were you just helping people read through it?Raiza [00:06:40]: Before we did the I.O. announcement in 23, we'd already done a lot of studies. And one of the first things that I realized was the first thing anybody ever typed was, summarize the thing. Right?Raiza [00:06:53]: Summarize the document.Raiza [00:06:54]: And it was, like, half like a test and half just like, oh, I know the content. I want to see how well it does this. So it was part of the first thing that we launched. It was called Project Tailwind back then. It was just Q&A, so you could chat with the doc just through text, and it would automatically generate a summary as well. I'm not sure if we had it back then.Raiza [00:07:12]: I think we did.Raiza [00:07:12]: It would also generate the key topics in your document, and it could support up to, like, 10 documents. So it wasn't just, like, a single doc.Alessio [00:07:20]: And then the I.O. demo went well, I guess. And then what was the discussion from there to where we are today? Is there any, maybe, intermediate step of the product that people missed between this was launch or?Raiza [00:07:33]: It was interesting because every step of the way, I think we hit, like, some pretty critical milestones. So I think from the initial demo, I think there was so much excitement of, like, wow, what is this thing that Google is launching? And so we capitalized on that. We built the wait list. That's actually when we also launched the Discord server, which has been huge for us because for us in particular, one of the things that I really wanted to do was to be able to launch features and get feedback ASAP. Like, the moment somebody tries it, like, I want to hear what they think right now, and I want to ask follow-up questions. And the Discord has just been so great for that. But then we basically took the feedback from I.O., we continued to refine the product.Raiza [00:08:12]: So we added more features.Raiza [00:08:13]: We added sort of, like, the ability to save notes, write notes. We generate follow-up questions. So there's a bunch of stuff in the product that shows, like, a lot of that research. But it was really the rolling out of things. Like, we removed the wait list, so rolled out to all of the United States. We rolled out to over 200 countries and territories. We started supporting more languages, both in the UI and, like, the actual source stuff. We experienced, like, in terms of milestones, there was, like, an explosion of, like, users in Japan. This was super interesting in terms of just, like, unexpected. Like, people would write to us and they would be like, this is amazing. I have to read all of these rules in English, but I can chat in Japanese. It's like, oh, wow. That's true, right? Like, with LLMs, you kind of get this natural, it translates the content for you. And you can ask in your sort of preferred mode. And I think that's not just, like, a language thing, too. I think there's, like, I do this test with Wealth of Nations all the time because it's, like, a pretty complicated text to read. The Evan Smith classic.Swyx [00:09:11]: It's, like, 400 pages or something.Raiza [00:09:12]: Yeah. But I like this test because I'm, like, asking, like, Normie, you know, plain speak. And then it summarizes really well for me. It sort of adapts to my tone.Swyx [00:09:22]: Very capitalist.Raiza [00:09:25]: Very on brand.Swyx [00:09:25]: I just checked in on a Notebook LM Discord. 65,000 people. Yeah.Raiza [00:09:29]: Crazy.Swyx [00:09:29]: Just, like, for one project within Google. It's not, like, it's not labs. It's just Notebook LM.Raiza [00:09:35]: Just Notebook LM.Swyx [00:09:36]: What do you learn from the community?Raiza [00:09:39]: I think that the Discord is really great for hearing about a couple of things.Raiza [00:09:43]: One, when things are going wrong. I think, honestly, like, our fastest way that we've been able to find out if, like, the servers are down or there's just an influx of people being, like, it saysRaiza [00:09:53]: system unable to answer.Raiza [00:09:54]: Anybody else getting this?Raiza [00:09:56]: And I'm, like, all right, let's go.Raiza [00:09:58]: And it actually catches it a lot faster than, like, our own monitoring does.Raiza [00:10:01]: It's, like, that's been really cool. So, thank you.Swyx [00:10:03]: Canceled eat a dog.Raiza [00:10:05]: So, thank you to everybody. Please keep reporting it. I think the second thing is really the use cases.Raiza [00:10:10]: I think when we put it out there, I was, like, hey, I have a hunch of how people will use it, but, like, to actually hear about, you know, not just the context of, like, the use of Notebook LM, but, like, what is this person's life like? Why do they care about using this tool?Raiza [00:10:23]: Especially people who actually have trouble using it, but they keep pushing.Raiza [00:10:27]: Like, that's just so critical to understand what was so motivating, right?Raiza [00:10:31]: Like, what was your problem that was, like, so worth solving? So, that's, like, a second thing.Raiza [00:10:34]: The third thing is also just hearing sort of, like, when we have wins and when we don't have wins because there's actually a lot of functionality where I'm, like, hmm, IRaiza [00:10:42]: don't know if that landed super well or if that was actually super critical.Raiza [00:10:45]: As part of having this sort of small project, right, I want to be able to unlaunch things, too. So, it's not just about just, like, rolling things out and testing it and being, like, wow, now we have, like, 99 features. Like, hopefully we get to a place where it's, like, there's just a really strong core feature set and the things that aren't as great, we can just unlaunch.Swyx [00:11:02]: What have you unlaunched? I have to ask.Raiza [00:11:04]: I'm in the process of unlaunching some stuff, but, for example, we had this idea that you could highlight the text in your source passage and then you could transform it. And nobody was really using it and it was, like, a very complicated piece of our architecture and it's very hard to continue supporting it in the context of new features. So, we were, like, okay, let's do a 50-50 sunset of this thing and see if anybody complains.Raiza [00:11:28]: And so far, nobody has.Swyx [00:11:29]: Is there, like, a feature flagging paradigm inside of your architecture that lets you feature flag these things easily?Raiza [00:11:36]: Yes, and actually...Raiza [00:11:37]: What is it called?Swyx [00:11:38]: Like, I love feature flagging.Raiza [00:11:40]: You mean, like, in terms of just, like, being able to expose things to users?Swyx [00:11:42]: Yeah, as a PM. Like, this is your number one tool, right?Raiza [00:11:44]: Yeah, yeah.Swyx [00:11:45]: Let's try this out. All right, if it works, roll it out. If it doesn't, roll it back, you know?Raiza [00:11:49]: Yeah, I mean, we just run Mendel experiments for the most part. And, actually, I don't know if you saw it, but on Twitter, somebody was able to get around our flags and they enabled all the experiments.Raiza [00:11:58]: They were, like, check out what the Notebook LM team is cooking.Raiza [00:12:02]: I was, like, oh!Raiza [00:12:03]: And I was at lunch with the rest of the team and I was, like, I was eating. I was, like, guys, guys, Magic Draft League!Raiza [00:12:10]: They were, like, oh, no!Raiza [00:12:12]: I was, like, okay, just finish eating and then let's go figure out what to do.Raiza [00:12:15]: Yeah.Alessio [00:12:15]: I think a post-mortem would be fun, but I don't think we need to do it on the podcast now. Can we just talk about what's behind the magic? So, I think everybody has questions, hypotheses about what models power it. I know you might not be able to share everything, but can you just get people very basic? How do you take the data and put it in the model? What text model you use? What's the text-to-speech kind of, like, jump between the two? Sure.Raiza [00:12:42]: Yeah.Raiza [00:12:42]: I was going to say, SRaiza, he manually does all the podcasts.Raiza [00:12:46]: Oh, thank you.Usama [00:12:46]: Really fast. You're very fast, yeah.Raiza [00:12:48]: Both of the voices at once.Usama [00:12:51]: Voice actor.Raiza [00:12:52]: Good, good.Usama [00:12:52]: Yeah, so, for a bit of background, we were building this thing sort of outside Notebook LM to begin with. Like, just the idea is, like, content transformation, right? Like, we can do different modalities. Like, everyone knows that. Everyone's been poking at it. But, like, how do you make it really useful? And, like, one of the ways we thought was, like, okay, like, you maybe, like, you know, people learn better when they're hearing things. But TTS exists, and you can, like, narrate whatever's on screen. But you want to absorb it the same way. So, like, that's where we sort of started out into the realm of, like, maybe we try, like, you know, two people are having a conversation kind of format. We didn't actually start out thinking this would live in Notebook, right? Like, Notebook was sort of, we built this demo out independently, tried out, like, a few different sort of sources. The main idea was, like, go from some sort of sources and transform it into a listenable, engaging audio format. And then through that process, we, like, unlocked a bunch more sort of learnings. Like, for example, in a sense, like, you're not prompting the model as much because, like, the information density is getting unrolled by the model prompting itself, in a sense. Because there's two speakers, and they're both technically, like, AI personas, right? That have different angles of looking at things. And, like, they'll have a discussion about it. And that sort of, we realized that's kind of what was making it riveting, in a sense. Like, you care about what comes next, even if you've read the material already. Because, like, people say they get new insights on their own journals or books or whatever. Like, anything that they've written themselves. So, yeah, from a modeling perspective, like, it's, like Reiza said earlier, like, we work with the DeepMind audio folks pretty closely. So, they're always cooking up new techniques to, like, get better, more human-like audio. And then Gemini 1.5 is really, really good at absorbing long context. So, we sort of, like, generally put those things together in a way that we could reliably produce the audio.Raiza [00:14:52]: I would add, like, there's something really nuanced, I think, about sort of the evolution of, like, the utility of text-to-speech. Where, if it's just reading an actual text response, and I've done this several times. I do it all the time with, like, reading my text messages. Or, like, sometimes I'm trying to read, like, a really dense paper, but I'm trying to do actual work. I'll have it, like, read out the screen. There is something really robotic about it that is not engaging. And it's really hard to consume content in that way. And it's never been really effective. Like, particularly for me, where I'm, like, hey, it's actually just, like, it's fine for, like, short stuff. Like, texting, but even that, it's, like, not that great. So, I think the frontier of experimentation here was really thinking about there is a transform that needs to happen in between whatever.Raiza [00:15:38]: Here's, like, my resume, right?Raiza [00:15:39]: Or here's, like, a 100-page slide deck or something. There is a transform that needs to happen that is inherently editorial. And I think this is where, like, that two-person persona, right, dialogue model, they have takes on the material that you've presented. That's where it really sort of, like, brings the content to life in a way that's, like, not robotic. And I think that's, like, where the magic is, is, like, you don't actually know what's going to happen when you press generate.Raiza [00:16:08]: You know, for better or for worse.Raiza [00:16:09]: Like, to the extent that, like, people are, like, no, I actually want it to be more predictable now. Like, I want to be able to tell them. But I think that initial, like, wow was because you didn't know, right? When you upload your resume, what's it about to say about you? And I think I've seen enough of these where I'm, like, oh, it gave you good vibes, right? Like, you knew it was going to say, like, something really cool. As we start to shape this product, I think we want to try to preserve as much of that wow as much as we can. Because I do think, like, exposing, like, all the knobs and, like, the dials, like, we've been thinking about this a lot. It's like, hey, is that, like, the actual thing?Raiza [00:16:43]: Is that the thing that people really want?Alessio [00:16:45]: Have you found differences in having one model just generate the conversation and then using text-to-speech to kind of fake two people? Or, like, are you actually using two different kind of system prompts to, like, have a conversation step-by-step? I'm always curious, like, if persona system prompts make a big difference? Or, like, you just put in one prompt and then you just let it run?Usama [00:17:05]: I guess, like, generally we use a lot of inference, as you can tell with, like, the spinning thing takes a while. So, yeah, there's definitely, like, a bunch of different things happening under the hood. We've tried both approaches and they have their, sort of, drawbacks and benefits. I think that that idea of, like, questioning, like, the two different personas, like, persists throughout, like, whatever approach we try. It's like, there's a bit of, like, imperfection in there. Like, we had to really lean into the fact that, like, to build something that's engaging, like, it needs to be somewhat human and it needs to be just not a chatbot. Like, that was sort of, like, what we need to diverge from. It's like, you know, most chatbots will just narrate the same kind of answer, like, given the same sources, for the most part, which is ridiculous. So, yeah, there's, like, experimentation there under the hood, like, with the model to, like, make sure that it's spitting out, like, different takes and different personas and different, sort of, prompting each other is, like, a good analogy, I guess.Swyx [00:18:00]: Yeah, I think Steven Johnson, I think he's on your team. I don't know what his role is. He seems like chief dreamer, writer.Raiza [00:18:08]: Yeah, I mean, I can comment on Steven. So, Steven joined, actually, in the very early days, I think before it was even a fully funded project. And I remember when he joined, I was like, Steven Johnson's going to be on my team? You know, and for folks who don't know him, Steven is a New York Times bestselling author of, like, 14 books. He has a PBS show. He's, like, incredibly smart, just, like, a true, sort of, celebrity by himself. And then he joined Google, and he was like, I want to come here, and I want to build the thing that I've always dreamed of, which is a tool to help me think. I was like, a what? Like, a tool to help you think? I was like, what do you need help with? Like, you seem to be doing great on your own. And, you know, he would describe this to me, and I would watch his flow. And aside from, like, providing a lot of inspiration, to be honest, like, when I watched Steven work, I was like, oh, nobody works like this, right? Like, this is what makes him special. Like, he is such a dedicated, like, researcher and journalist, and he's so thorough, he's so smart. And then I had this realization of, like, maybe Steven is the product. Maybe the work is to take Steven's expertise and bring it to, like, everyday people that could really benefit from this. Like, just watching him work, I was like, oh, I could definitely use, like, a mini-Steven, like, doing work for me. Like, that would make me a better PM. And then I thought very quickly about, like, the adjacent roles that could use sort of this, like, research and analysis tool. And so, aside from being, you know, chief dreamer, Steven also represents, like, a super workflow that I think all of us, like, if we had access to a tool like it, would just inherently, like, make us better.Swyx [00:19:46]: Did you make him express his thoughts while he worked, or you just silently watched him, or how does this work?Raiza [00:19:52]: Oh, now you're making me admit it. But yes, I did just silently watch him.Swyx [00:19:57]: This is a part of the PM toolkit, right? They give user interviews and all that.Raiza [00:20:00]: Yeah, I mean, I did interview him, but I noticed, like, if I interviewed him, it was different than if I just watched him. And I did the same thing with students all the time. Like, I followed a lot of students around. I watched them study. I would ask them, like, oh, how do you feel now, right?Raiza [00:20:15]: Or why did you do that? Like, what made you do that, actually?Raiza [00:20:18]: Or why are you upset about, like, this particular thing? Why are you cranky about this particular topic? And it was very similar, I think, for Steven, especially because he was describing, he was in the middle of writing a book. And he would describe, like, oh, you know, here's how I research things, and here's how I keep my notes. Oh, and here's how I do it. And it was really, he was doing this sort of, like, self-questioning, right? Like, now we talk about, like, chain of, you know, reasoning or thought, reflection.Raiza [00:20:44]: And I was like, oh, he's the OG.Raiza [00:20:46]: Like, I watched him do it in real time. I was like, that's, like, L-O-M right there. And to be able to bring sort of that expertise in a way that was, like, you know, maybe, like, costly inference-wise, but really have, like, that ability inside of a tool that was, like, for starters, free inside of NotebookLM, it was good to learn whether or not people really did find use out of it.Swyx [00:21:05]: So did he just commit to using NotebookLM for everything, or did you just model his existing workflow?Raiza [00:21:12]: Both, right?Raiza [00:21:12]: Like, in the beginning, there was no product for him to use. And so he just kept describing the thing that he wanted. And then eventually, like, we started building the thing. And then I would start watching him use it. One of the things that I love about Steven is he uses the product in ways where it kind of does it, but doesn't quite. Like, he's always using it at, like, the absolute max limit of this thing. But the way that he describes it is so full of promise, where he's like, I can see it going here. And all I have to do is sort of, like, meet him there and sort of pressure test whether or not, you know, everyday people want it. And we just have to build it.Swyx [00:21:47]: I would say OpenAI has a pretty similar person, Andrew Mason, I think his name is. It's very similar, like, just from the writing world and using it as a tool for thought to shape Chachabitty. I don't think that people who use AI tools to their limit are common. I'm looking at my NotebookLM now. I've got two sources. You have a little, like, source limit thing. And my bar is over here, you know, and it stretches across the whole thing. I'm like, did he fill it up?Raiza [00:22:09]: Yes, and he has, like, a higher limit than others, I think. He fills it up.Raiza [00:22:14]: Oh, yeah.Raiza [00:22:14]: Like, I don't think Steven even has a limit, actually.Swyx [00:22:17]: And he has Notes, Google Drive stuff, PDFs, MP3, whatever.Raiza [00:22:22]: Yes, and one of my favorite demos, he just did this recently, is he has actually PDFs of, like, handwritten Marie Curie notes. I see.Swyx [00:22:29]: So you're doing image recognition as well. Yeah, it does support it today.Raiza [00:22:32]: So if you have a PDF that's purely images, it will recognize it.Raiza [00:22:36]: But his demo is just, like, super powerful.Raiza [00:22:37]: He's like, okay, here's Marie Curie's notes. And it's like, here's how I'm using it to analyze it. And I'm using it for, like, this thing that I'm writing.Raiza [00:22:44]: And that's really compelling.Raiza [00:22:45]: It's like the everyday person doesn't think of these applications. And I think even, like, when I listen to Steven's demo, I see the gap. I see how Steven got there, but I don't see how I could without him. And so there's a lot of work still for us to build of, like, hey, how do I bring that magic down to, like, zero work? Because I look at all the steps that he had to take in order to do it, and I'm like, okay, that's product work for us, right? Like, that's just onboarding.Alessio [00:23:09]: And so from an engineering perspective, people come to you and it's like, hey, I need to use this handwritten notes from Marie Curie from hundreds of years ago. How do you think about adding support for, like, data sources and then maybe any fun stories and, like, supporting more esoteric types of inputs?Raiza [00:23:25]: So I think about the product in three ways, right? So there's the sources, the source input. There's, like, the capabilities of, like, what you could do with those sources. And then there's the third space, which is how do you output it into the world? Like, how do you put it back out there? There's a lot of really basic sources that we don't support still, right? I think there's sort of, like, the handwritten notes stuff is one, but even basic things like DocX or, like, PowerPoint, right? Like, these are the things that people, everyday people are like, hey, my professor actually gave me everything in DocX. Can you support that? And then just, like, basic stuff, like images and PDFs combined with text. Like, there's just a really long roadmap for sources that I think we just have to work on.Raiza [00:24:04]: So that's, like, a big piece of it.Raiza [00:24:05]: On the output side, and I think this is, like, one of the most interesting things that we learned really early on, is, sure, there's, like, the Q&A analysis stuff, which is like, hey, when did this thing launch? Okay, you found it in the slide deck. Here's the answer. But most of the time, the reason why people ask those questions is because they're trying to make something new. And so when, actually, when some of those early features leaked, like, a lot of the features we're experimenting with are the output types. And so you can imagine that people care a lot about the resources that they're putting into NotebookLM because they're trying to create something new. So I think equally as important as, like, the source inputs are the outputs that we're helping people to create. And really, like, you know, shortly on the roadmap, we're thinking about how do we help people use NotebookLM to distribute knowledge? And that's, like, one of the most compelling use cases is, like, shared notebooks. It's, like, a way to share knowledge. How do we help people take sources and, like, one-click new documents out of it, right? And I think that's something that people think is, like, oh, yeah, of course, right? Like, one push a document. But what does it mean to do it right? Like, to do it in your style, in your brand, right?Raiza [00:25:08]: To follow your guidelines, stuff like that.Raiza [00:25:09]: So I think there's a lot of work, like, on both sides of that equation.Raiza [00:25:13]: Interesting.Swyx [00:25:13]: Any comments on the engineering side of things?Usama [00:25:16]: So, yeah, like I said, I was mostly working on building the text to audio, which kind of lives as a separate engineering pipeline, almost, that we then put into NotebookLM. But I think there's probably tons of NotebookLM engineering war stories on dealing with sources. And so I don't work too closely with engineers directly. But I think a lot of it does come down to, like, Gemini's native understanding of images really well with the latest generation.Raiza [00:25:39]: Yeah, I think on the engineering and modeling side, I think we are a really good example of a team that's put a product out there, and we're getting a lot of feedback from the users, and we return the data to the modeling team, right? To the extent that we say, hey, actually, you know what people are uploading, but we can't really support super well?Raiza [00:25:56]: Text plus image, right?Raiza [00:25:57]: Especially to the extent that, like, NotebookLM can handle up to 50 sources, 500,000 words each. Like, you're not going to be able to jam all of that into, like, the context window. So how do we do multimodal embeddings with that? There's really, like, a lot of things that we have to solve that are almost there, but not quite there yet.Alessio [00:26:16]: On then turning it into audio, I think one of the best things is it has so many of the human... Does that happen in the text generation that then becomes audio? Or is that a part of, like, the audio model that transforms the text?Usama [00:26:27]: It's a bit of both, I would say. The audio model is definitely trying to mimic, like, certain human intonations and, like, sort of natural, like, breathing and pauses and, like, laughter and things like that. But yeah, in generating, like, the text, we also have to sort of give signals on, like, where those things maybe would make sense.Alessio [00:26:45]: And on the input side, instead of having a transcript versus having the audio, like, can you take some of the emotions out of it, too? If I'm giving, like, for example, when we did the recaps of our podcast, we can either give audio of the pod or we can give a diarized transcription of it. But, like, the transcription doesn't have some of the, you know, voice kind of, like, things.Raiza [00:27:05]: Yeah, yeah.Alessio [00:27:05]: Do you reconstruct that when people upload audio or how does that work?Raiza [00:27:09]: So when you upload audio today, we just transcribe it. So it is quite lossy in the sense that, like, we don't transcribe, like, the emotion from that as a source. But when you do upload a text file and it has a lot of, like, that annotation, I think that there is some ability for it to be reused in, like, the audio output, right? But I think it will still contextualize it in the deep dive format. So I think that's something that's, like, particularly important is, like, hey, today we only have one format.Raiza [00:27:37]: It's deep dive.Raiza [00:27:38]: It's meant to be a pretty general overview and it is pretty peppy.Raiza [00:27:42]: It's just very upbeat.Raiza [00:27:43]: It's very enthusiastic, yeah.Raiza [00:27:45]: Yeah, yeah.Raiza [00:27:45]: Even if you had, like, a sad topic, I think they would find a way to be, like, silver lining, though.Raiza [00:27:50]: Really?Raiza [00:27:51]: Yeah.Raiza [00:27:51]: We're having a good chat.Raiza [00:27:54]: Yeah, that's awesome.Swyx [00:27:54]: One of the ways, many, many, many ways that deep dive went viral is people saying, like, if you want to feel good about yourself, just drop in your LinkedIn. Any other, like, favorite use cases that you saw from people discovering things in social media?Raiza [00:28:08]: I mean, there's so many funny ones and I love the funny ones.Raiza [00:28:11]: I think because I'm always relieved when I watch them. I'm like, haha, that was funny and not scary. It's great.Raiza [00:28:17]: There was another one that was interesting, which was a startup founder putting their landing page and being like, all right, let's test whether or not, like, the value prop is coming through. And I was like, wow, that's right.Raiza [00:28:26]: That's smart.Usama [00:28:27]: Yeah.Raiza [00:28:28]: And then I saw a couple of other people following up on that, too.Raiza [00:28:32]: Yeah.Swyx [00:28:32]: I put my about page in there and, like, yeah, if there are things that I'm not comfortable with, I should remove it. You know, so that it can pick it up. Right.Usama [00:28:39]: I think that the personal hype machine was, like, a pretty viral one. I think, like, people uploaded their dreams and, like, some people, like, keep sort of dream journals and it, like, would sort of comment on those and, like, it was therapeutic. I didn't see those.Raiza [00:28:54]: Those are good. I hear from Googlers all the time, especially because we launched it internally first. And I think we launched it during the, you know, the Q3 sort of, like, check-in cycle. So all Googlers have to write notes about, like, hey, you know, what'd you do in Q3? And what Googlers were doing is they would write, you know, whatever they accomplished in Q3 and then they would create an audio overview. And these people they didn't know would just ping me and be like, wow, I feel really good, like, going into a meeting with my manager.Raiza [00:29:25]: And I was like, good, good, good, good. You really did that, right?Usama [00:29:29]: I think another cool one is just, like, any Wikipedia article. Yeah. Like, you drop it in and it's just, like, suddenly, like, the best sort of summary overview.Raiza [00:29:38]: I think that's what Karpathy did, right? Like, he has now a Spotify channel called Histories of Mysteries, which is basically, like, he just took, like, interesting stuff from Wikipedia and made audio overviews out of it.Swyx [00:29:50]: Yeah, he became a podcaster overnight.Raiza [00:29:52]: Yeah.Raiza [00:29:53]: I'm here for it. I fully support him.Raiza [00:29:55]: I'm racking up the listens for him.Swyx [00:29:58]: Honestly, it's useful even without the audio. You know, I feel like the audio does add an element to it, but I always want, you know, paired audio and text. And it's just amazing to see what people are organically discovering. I feel like it's because you laid the groundwork with NotebookLM and then you came in and added the sort of TTS portion and made it so good, so human, which is weird. Like, it's this engineering process of humans. Oh, one thing I wanted to ask. Do you have evals?Raiza [00:30:23]: Yeah.Swyx [00:30:23]: Yes.Raiza [00:30:24]: What? Potatoes for chefs.Swyx [00:30:27]: What is that? What do you mean, potatoes?Raiza [00:30:29]: Oh, sorry.Raiza [00:30:29]: Sorry. We were joking with this, like, a couple of weeks ago. We were doing, like, side-by-sides. But, like, Raiza sent me the file and it was literally called Potatoes for Chefs. And I was like, you know, my job is really serious, but you have to laugh a little bit. Like, the title of the file is, like, Potatoes for Chefs.Swyx [00:30:47]: Is it like a training document for chefs?Usama [00:30:50]: It's just a side-by-side for, like, two different kind of audio transcripts.Swyx [00:30:54]: The question is really, like, as you iterate, the typical engineering advice is you establish some kind of test or benchmark. You're at, like, 30 percent. You want to get it up to 90, right?Raiza [00:31:05]: Yeah.Swyx [00:31:05]: What does that look like for making something sound human and interesting and voice?Usama [00:31:11]: We have the sort of formal eval process as well. But I think, like, for this particular project, we maybe took a slightly different route to begin with. Like, there was a lot of just within the team listening sessions. A lot of, like, sort of, like... Dogfooding.Raiza [00:31:23]: Yeah.Usama [00:31:23]: Like, I think the bar that we tried to get to before even starting formal evals with raters and everything was much higher than I think other projects would. Like, because that's, as you said, like, the traditional advice, right? Like, get that ASAP. Like, what are you looking to improve on? Whatever benchmark it is. So there was a lot of just, like, critical listening. And I think a lot of making sure that those improvements actually could go into the model. And, like, we're happy with that human element of it. And then eventually we had to obviously distill those down into an eval set. But, like, still there's, like, the team is just, like, a very, very, like, avid user of the product at all stages.Raiza [00:32:02]: I think you just have to be really opinionated.Raiza [00:32:05]: I think that sometimes, if you are, your intuition is just sharper and you can move a lot faster on the product.Raiza [00:32:12]: Because it's like, if you hold that bar high, right?Raiza [00:32:15]: Like, if you think about, like, the iterative cycle, it's like, hey, we could take, like, six months to ship this thing. To get it to, like, mid where we were. Or we could just, like, listen to this and be like, yeah, that's not it, right? And I don't need a rater to tell me that. That's my preference, right? And collectively, like, if I have two other people listen to it, they'll probably agree. And it's just kind of this step of, like, just keep improving it to the point where you're like, okay, now I think this is really impressive. And then, like, do evals, right? And then validate that.Swyx [00:32:43]: Was the sound model done and frozen before you started doing all this? Or are you also saying, hey, we need to improve the sound model as well? Both.Usama [00:32:51]: Yeah, we were making improvements on the audio and just, like, generating the transcript as well. I think another weird thing here was, like, we needed to be entertaining. And that's much harder to quantify than some of the other benchmarks that you can make for, like, you know, Sweebench or get better at this math.Swyx [00:33:10]: Do you just have people rate one to five or, you know, or just thumbs up and down?Usama [00:33:14]: For the formal rater evals, we have sort of like a Likert scale and, like, a bunch of different dimensions there. But we had to sort of break down what makes it entertaining into, like, a bunch of different factors. But I think the team stage of that was more critical. It was like, we need to make sure that, like, what is making it fun and engaging? Like, we dialed that as far as it goes. And while we're making other changes that are necessary, like, obviously, they shouldn't make stuff up or, you know, be insensitive.Raiza [00:33:41]: Hallucinations. Safety.Swyx [00:33:42]: Other safety things.Raiza [00:33:43]: Right.Swyx [00:33:43]: Like a bunch of safety stuff.Raiza [00:33:45]: Yeah, exactly.Usama [00:33:45]: So, like, with all of that and, like, also just, you know, following sort of a coherent narrative and structure is really important. But, like, with all of this, we really had to make sure that that central tenet of being entertaining and engaging and something you actually want to listen to. It just doesn't go away, which takes, like, a lot of just active listening time because you're closest to the prompts, the model and everything.Swyx [00:34:07]: I think sometimes the difficulty is because we're dealing with non-deterministic models, sometimes you just got a bad roll of the dice and it's always on the distribution that you could get something bad. Basically, how many do you, like, do ten runs at a time? And then how do you get rid of the non-determinism?Raiza [00:34:23]: Right.Usama [00:34:23]: Yeah, that's bad luck.Raiza [00:34:25]: Yeah.Swyx [00:34:25]: Yeah.Usama [00:34:26]: I mean, there still will be, like, bad audio overviews. There's, like, a bunch of them that happens. Do you mean for, like, the raider? For raiders, right?Swyx [00:34:34]: Like, what if that one person just got, like, a really bad rating? You actually had a great prompt, you actually had a great model, great weights, whatever. And you just, you had a bad output.Usama [00:34:42]: Like, and that's okay, right?Raiza [00:34:44]: I actually think, like, the way that these are constructed, if you think about, like, the different types of controls that the user has, right? Like, what can the user do today to affect it?Usama [00:34:54]: We push a button.Raiza [00:34:55]: You just push a button.Swyx [00:34:56]: I have tried to prompt engineer by changing the title. Yeah, yeah, yeah.Raiza [00:34:59]: Changing the title, people have found out.Raiza [00:35:02]: Yeah.Raiza [00:35:02]: The title of the notebook, people have found out. You can add show notes, right? You can get them to think, like, the show has changed. Someone changed the language of the output. Changing the language of the output. Like, those are less well-tested because we focused on, like, this one aspect. So it did change the way that we sort of think about quality as well, right? So it's like, quality is on the dimensions of entertainment, of course, like, consistency, groundedness. But in general, does it follow the structure of the deep dive? And I think when we talk about, like, non-determinism, it's like, well, as long as it follows, like, the structure of the deep dive, right? It sort of inherently meets all those other qualities. And so it makes it a little bit easier for us to ship something with confidence to the extent that it's like, I know it's going to make a deep dive. It's going to make a good deep dive. Whether or not the person likes it, I don't know. But as we expand to new formats, as we open up controls, I think that's where it gets really much harder. Even with the show notes, right? Like, people don't know what they're going to get when they do that. And we see that already where it's like, this is going to be a lot harder to validate in terms of quality, where now we'll get a greater distribution. Whereas I don't think we really got, like, varied distribution because of, like, that pre-process that Raiza was talking about. And also because of the way that we'd constrain, like, what were we measuring for? Literally, just like, is it a deep dive?Swyx [00:36:18]: And you determine what a deep dive is. Yeah. Everything needs a PM. Yeah, I have, this is very similar to something I've been thinking about for AI products in general. There's always like a chief tastemaker. And for Notebook LM, it seems like it's a combination of you and Steven.Raiza [00:36:31]: Well, okay.Raiza [00:36:32]: I want to take a step back.Swyx [00:36:33]: And Raiza, I mean, presumably for the voice stuff.Raiza [00:36:35]: Raiza's like the head chef, right? Of, like, deep dive, I think. Potatoes.Raiza [00:36:40]: Of potatoes.Raiza [00:36:41]: And I say this because I think even though we are already a very opinionated team, and Steven, for sure, very opinionated, I think of the audio generations, like, Raiza was the most opinionated, right? And we all, like, would say, like, hey, I remember, like, one of the first ones he sent me.Raiza [00:36:57]: I was like, oh, I feel like they should introduce themselves. I feel like they should say a title. But then, like, we would catch things, like, maybe they shouldn't say their names.Raiza [00:37:04]: Yeah, they don't say their names.Usama [00:37:05]: That was a Steven catch, like, not give them names.Raiza [00:37:08]: So stuff like that is, like, we all injected, like, a little bit of just, like, hey, here's, like, my take on, like, how a podcast should be, right? And I think, like, if you're a person who, like, regularly listens to podcasts, there's probably some collective preference there that's generic enough that you can standardize into, like, the deep dive format. But, yeah, it's the new formats where I think, like, oh, that's the next test. Yeah.Swyx [00:37:30]: I've tried to make a clone, by the way. Of course, everyone did. Yeah. Everyone in AI was like, oh, no, this is so easy. I'll just take a TTS model. Obviously, our models are not as good as yours, but I tried to inject a consistent character backstory, like, age, identity, where they work, where they went to school, what their hobbies are. Then it just, the models try to bring it in too much.Raiza [00:37:49]: Yeah.Swyx [00:37:49]: I don't know if you tried this.Raiza [00:37:51]: Yeah.Swyx [00:37:51]: So then I'm like, okay, like, how do I define a personality? But it doesn't keep coming up every single time. Yeah.Raiza [00:37:58]: I mean, we have, like, a really, really good, like, character designer on our team.Raiza [00:38:02]: What?Swyx [00:38:03]: Like a D&D person?Raiza [00:38:05]: Just to say, like, we, just like we had to be opinionated about the format, we had to be opinionated about who are those two people talking.Raiza [00:38:11]: Okay.Raiza [00:38:12]: Right.Raiza [00:38:12]: And then to the extent that, like, you can design the format, you should be able to design the people as well.Raiza [00:38:18]: Yeah.Swyx [00:38:18]: I would love, like, a, you know, like when you play Baldur's Gate, like, you roll, you roll like 17 on Charisma and like, it's like what race they are. I don't know.Raiza [00:38:27]: I recently, actually, I was just talking about character select screens.Raiza [00:38:30]: Yeah. I was like, I love that, right.Raiza [00:38:32]: And I was like, maybe there's something to be learned there because, like, people have fallen in love with the deep dive as a, as a format, as a technology, but also as just like those two personas.Raiza [00:38:44]: Now, when you hear a deep dive and you've heard them, you're like, I know those two.Raiza [00:38:48]: Right.Raiza [00:38:48]: And people, it's so funny when I, when people are trying to find out their names, like, it's a, it's a worthy task.Raiza [00:38:54]: It's a worthy goal.Raiza [00:38:55]: I know what you're doing. But the next step here is to sort of introduce, like, is this like what people want?Raiza [00:39:00]: People want to sort of edit the personas or do they just want more of them?Swyx [00:39:04]: I'm sure you're getting a lot of opinions and they all, they all conflict with each other. Before we move on, I have to ask, because we're kind of on this topic. How do you make audio engaging? Because it's useful, not just for deep dive, but also for us as podcasters. What is, what does engaging mean? If you could break it down for us, that'd be great.Usama [00:39:22]: I mean, I can try. Like, don't, don't claim to be an expert at all.Swyx [00:39:26]: So I'll give you some, like variation in tone and speed. You know, there's this sort of writing advice where, you know, this sentence is five words. This sentence is three, that kind of advice where you, where you vary things, you have excitement, you have laughter, all that stuff. But I'd be curious how else you break down.Usama [00:39:42]: So there's the basics, like obviously structure that can't be meandering, right? Like there needs to be sort of a, an ultimate goal that the voices are trying to get to, human or artificial. I think one thing we find often is if there's just too much agreement between people, like that's not fun to listen to. So there needs to be some sort of tension and build up, you know, withholding information. For example, like as you listen to a story unfold, like you're going to learn more and more about it. And audio that maybe becomes even more important because like you actually don't have the ability to just like skim to the end of something. You're driving or something like you're going to be hooked because like there's, and that's how like, that's how a lot of podcasts work. Like maybe not interviews necessarily, but a lot of true crime, a lot of entertainment in general. There's just like a gradual unrolling of information. And that also like sort of goes back to the content transformation aspect of it. Like maybe you are going from, let's say the Wikipedia article of like one of the History of Mysteries, maybe episodes. Like the Wikipedia article is going to state out the information very differently. It's like, here's what happened would probably be in the very first paragraph. And one approach we could have done is like maybe a person's just narrating that thing. And maybe that would work for like a certain audience. Or I guess that's how I would picture like a standard history lesson to unfold. But like, because we're trying to put it in this two-person dialogue format, like there, we inject like the fact that, you know, there's, you don't give everything at first. And then you set up like differing opinions of the same topic or the same, like maybe you seize on a topic and go deeper into it and then try to bring yourself back out of it and go back to the main narrative. So that's, that's mostly from like the setting up the script perspective. And then the audio, I was saying earlier, it's trying to be as close to just human speech as possible. I think was the, what we found success with so far.Raiza [00:41:40]: Yeah. Like with interjections, right?Raiza [00:41:41]: Like I think like when you listen to two people talk, there's a lot of like, yeah, yeah, right. And then there's like a lot of like that questioning, like, oh yeah, really?Raiza [00:41:49]: What did you think?Swyx [00:41:50]: I noticed that. That's great.Raiza [00:41:52]: Totally.Usama [00:41:54]: Exactly.Swyx [00:41:55]: My question is, do you pull in speech experts to do this? Or did you just come up with it yourselves? You can be like, okay, talk to a whole bunch of fiction writers to, to make things engaging or comedy writers or whatever, stand up comedy, right? They have to make audio engaging, but audio as well. Like there's professional fields of studying where people do this for a living, but us as AI engineers are just making this up as we go.Raiza [00:42:19]: I mean, it's a great idea, but you definitely didn't.Raiza [00:42:22]: Yeah.Swyx [00:42:24]: My guess is you didn't.Raiza [00:42:25]: Yeah.Swyx [00:42:26]: There's a, there's a certain field of authority that people have. They're like, oh, like you can't do this because you don't have any experience like making engaging audio. But that's what you literally did.Raiza [00:42:35]: Right.Usama [00:42:35]: I mean, I was literally chatting with someone at Google earlier today about how some people think that like you need a linguistics person in the room for like making a good chatbot. But that's not actually true because like this person went to school for linguistics. And according to him, he's an engineer now. According to him, like most of his classmates were not actually good at language. Like they knew how to analyze language and like sort of the mathematical patterns and rhythms and language. But that doesn't necessarily mean they were going to be eloquent at like while speaking or writing. So I think, yeah, a lot of we haven't invested in specialists in audio format yet, but maybe that would.Raiza [00:43:13]: I think it's like super interesting because I think there is like a very human question of like what makes something interesting. And there's like a very deep question of like what is it, right? Like what is the quality that we are all looking for? Is it does somebody have to be funny? Does something have to be entertaining? Does something have to be straight to the point? And I think when you try to distill that, this is the interesting thing I think about our experiment, about this particular launch is first, we only launched one format. And so we sort of had to squeeze everything we believed about what an interesting thing is into one package. And as a result of it, I think we learned it's like, hey, interacting with a chatbot is sort of novel at first, but it's not interesting, right? It's like humans are what makes interacting with chatbots interesting.Raiza [00:43:59]: It's like, ha ha ha, I'm going to try to trick it. It's like, that's interesting.Raiza [00:44:02]: Spell strawberry, right?Raiza [00:44:04]: This is like the fun that like people have with it. But like that's not the LLM being interesting.Raiza [00:44:08]: That's you just like kind of giving it your own flavor. But it's like, what does it mean to sort of flip it on its head and say, no, you be interesting now, right? Like you give the chatbot the opportunity to do it. And this is not a chatbot per se. It is like just the audio. And it's like the texture, I think, that really brings it to life. And it's like the things that we've described here, which is like, okay, now I have to like lead you down a path of information about like this commercialization deck.Raiza [00:44:36]: It's like, how do you do that?Raiza [00:44:38]: To be able to successfully do it, I do think that you need experts. I think we'll engage with experts like down the road, but I think it will have to be in the context of, well, what's the next thing we're building, right? It's like, what am I trying to change here? What do I fundamentally believe needs to be improved? And I think there's still like a lot more studying that we have to do in terms of like, well, what are people actually using this for? And we're just in such early days. Like it hasn't even been a month. Two, three weeks.Usama [00:45:05]: Three weeks.Raiza [00:45:06]: Yeah, yeah.Usama [00:45:07]: I think one other element to that is the fact that you're bringing your own sources to it. Like it's your stuff. Like, you know this somewhat well, or you care to know about this. So like that, I think, changed the equation on its head as well. It's like your sources and someone's telling you about it. So like you care about how that dynamic is, but you just care for it to be good enough to be entertaining. Because ultimately they're talking about your mortgage deed or whatever.Swyx [00:45:33]: So it's interesting just from the topic itself. Even taking out all the agreements and the hiding of the slow reveal. I mean, there's a baseline, maybe.Usama [00:45:42]: Like if it was like too drab. Like if someone was reading it off, like, you know, that's like the absolute worst.Raiza [00:45:46]: But like...Swyx [00:45:47]: Do you prompt for humor? That's a tough one, right?Raiza [00:45:51]: I think it's more of a generic way to bring humor out if possible. I think humor is actually one of the hardest things. Yeah.Raiza [00:46:00]: But I don't know if you saw...Raiza [00:46:00]: That is AGI.Swyx [00:46:01]: Humor is AGI.Raiza [00:46:02]: Yeah, but did you see the chicken one?Raiza [00:46:03]: No.Raiza [00:46:04]: Okay. If you haven't heard it... We'll splice it in here.Swyx [00:46:06]: Okay.Raiza [00:46:07]: Yeah.Raiza [00:46:07]: There is a video on Threads. I think it was by Martino Wong. And it's a PDF.Raiza [00:46:16]: Welcome to your deep dive for today. Oh, yeah. Get ready for a fun one. Buckle up. Because we are diving into... Chicken, chicken, chicken. Chicken, chicken. You got that right. By Doug Zonker. Now. And yes, you heard that title correctly. Titles. Our listener today submitted this paper. Yeah, they're going to need our help. And I can totally see why. Absolutely. It's dense. It's baffling. It's a lot. And it's packed with more chicken than a KFC buffet. What? That's hilarious.Raiza [00:46:48]: That's so funny. So it's like stuff like that, that's like truly delightful, truly surprising.Raiza [00:46:53]: But it's like we didn't tell it to be funny.Usama [00:46:55]: Humor is contextual also. Like super contextual is what we're realizing. So we're not prompting for humor, but we're prompting for maybe a lot of other things that are bringing out that humor.Alessio [00:47:04]: I think the thing about ad-generated content, if we look at YouTube, like we do videos on YouTube and it's like, you know, a lot of people like screaming in the thumbnails to get clicks. There's like everybody, there's kind of like a meta of like what you need to do to get clicks. But I think in your product, there's no actual creator on the other side investing the time. So you can actually generate a type of content that is maybe not universally appealing, you know, at a much, yeah, exactly. I think that's the most interesting thing. It's like, well, is there a way for like, take Mr.Raiza [00:47:36]: Beast, right?Alessio [00:47:36]: It's like Mr. Beast optimizes videos to reach the biggest audience and like the most clicks. But what if every video could be kind of like regenerated to be closer to your taste, you know, when you watch it?Raiza [00:47:48]: I think that's kind of the promise of AI that I think we are just like touching on, which is, I think every time I've gotten information from somebody, they have delivered it to me in their preferred method, right?Raiza [00:47:59]: Like if somebody gives me a PDF, it's a PDF.Raiza [00:48:01]: Somebody gives me a hundred slide deck, that is the format in which I'm going to read it. But I think we are now living in the era where transformations are really possible, which is, look, like I don't want to read your hundred slide deck, but I'll listen to a 16 minute audio overview on the drive home. And that, that I think is, is really novel. And that is, is paving the way in a way that like maybe we wanted, but didn'tRaiza [00:48:24]: expect.Raiza [00:48:25]: Where I also think you're listening to a lot of content that normally wouldn't have had content made about it. Like I watched this TikTok where this woman uploaded her diary from 2004.Raiza [00:48:36]: For sure, right?Raiza [00:48:36]: Like nobody was going to make a podcast about a diary.Raiza [00:48:39]: Like hopefully not. Like it seems kind of embarrassing. It's kind of creepy. Yeah, it's kind of creepy.Raiza [00:48:43]: But she was, she was doing this like live listen of like, oh, like here's a podcast of my diary.Raiza [00:48:48]: And it's like, it's entertaining right now to sort of all listen to it together. But like the connection is personal. It was like, it was her interacting with like her information in a totallyRaiza [00:48:57]: different way.Raiza [00:48:58]: And I think that's where like, oh, that's a super interesting space, right? Where it's like, I'm creating content for myself in a way that suits the way that I want to, I want to consume it.Usama [00:49:06]: Or people compare like retirement plan options. Like no one's going to give you that content. Like for your personal financial situation.Raiza [00:49:14]: Yeah.Usama [00:49:14]: And like, even when we started out the experiment, like a lot of the goal was to go for really obscure content and see how well we could transform that. So like if you look at the mountain view, like city council meeting notes, like you're never going to read it. But like if it was a three minute summary, like that would be interesting. I see.Swyx [00:49:33]: You have one system, one prompt that just covers everything you threw at it.Raiza [00:49:37]: Maybe.Swyx [00:49:39]: I'm just, I'm just like, yeah, it's really interesting. You know what? I'm trying to figure out what you nailed compared to others. And I think that the way that you treat your, the AI is like a little bit different than a lot of the builders I talked to. So I don't know what it is. You said, I wish I had a transcript right in front of me, but it's something like people treat AI as like a tool for thought, but usually it's kind of doing their bidding and you know, what you're really doing is loading up these like two virtual agents. I don't, you've never said the word agents. I put that in your mouth, but two virtual humans or AIs and letting them from the, from their own opinion and letting them kind of just live and embody it a little bit. Is that accurate?Raiza [00:50:17]: I think that that is as close to accurate as possible. I mean, in general, I try to be careful about saying like, oh, you know,Raiza [00:50:24]: letting, you know, yeah, like these, these personas live.Raiza [00:50:27]: But I think to your earlier question of like, what makes it interesting? That's what it takes to make it interesting.Raiza [00:50:32]: Yeah.Raiza [00:50:32]: Right. And I think to do it well is like a worthy challenge. I also think that it's interesting because they're interested, right? Like, is it interesting to compare?Raiza [00:50:42]: Yeah.Raiza [00:50:42]: Is it, is it interesting to have two retirement plans?Raiza [00:50:46]: No, but to listen to these two talk about it.Raiza [00:50:50]: Oh my gosh.Raiza [00:50:50]: You'd think it was like the best thing ever invented, right? It's like, get this, deep dive into 401k through Chase versus, you know,Raiza [00:50:59]: whatever.Swyx [00:51:00]: They do do a lot of get this.Raiza [00:51:02]: I know. I know.Raiza [00:51:03]: I dream about it.Raiza [00:51:06]: I'm sorry.Swyx [00:51:08]: There's a, I have a few more questions on just like the engineering around this. And obviously some of this is just me creatively asking how this works. How do you make decisions between when to trust the AI overlord to decide for you? In other words, stick it, let's say products as it is today. You want to improve it in some way. Do you engineer it into the system? Like write code to make sure it happens or you just stick it in the prompt and hope that the LLM does it for you?Raiza [00:51:38]: Do you know what I mean?Raiza [00:51:39]: Do you mean specifically about audio or sort of in general?Swyx [00:51:41]: In general, like designing AI products. I think this is like the one thing that people are struggling with. And there's, there's compound AI people and then there's big AI people. So compound AI people will be like Databricks, have lots of little models, chain them together to make an output. It's deterministic. You control every single piece and you know, you produce what you produce. The open AI people, totally the opposite. Like write one giant prompts and let the model figure it out.Raiza [00:52:05]: Yeah.Swyx [00:52:06]: And obviously the answer for most people is going to be a spectrum in between those two, like big model, small model. When do you decide that?Raiza [00:52:11]: I think it depends on the task. It also depends on, well, it depends on the task, but ultimately depends on what is your desired outcome? Like what am I engineering for here? And I think there's like several potential outputs and there's sort of like generalRaiza [00:52:24]: categories.Raiza [00:52:24]: Am I trying to delight somebody? Am I trying to just like meet whatever the person is trying to do? Am I trying to sort of simplify a workflow?Raiza [00:52:31]: At what layer am I implementing this?Raiza [00:52:32]: Am I trying to implement this as part of the stack to reduce like friction, you know, particularly for like engineers or something? Or am I trying to engineer it so that I deliver like a super high qualityRaiza [00:52:43]: thing?Raiza [00:52:44]: I think that the question of like which of those two, I think you're right, itRaiza [00:52:48]: is a spectrum.Raiza [00:52:49]: But I think fundamentally it comes down to like it's a craft, like it's still a craft as much as it is a science. And I think the reality is like you have to have a really strong POV about like what you want to get out of it and to be able to make that decision. Because I think if you don't have that strong POV, like you're going to get lost in sort of the detail of like capability. And capability is sort of the last thing that matters because it's like, models will catch up, right? Like models will be able to do, you know, whatever in the next five years. It's going to be insane. So I think this is like a race to like value. And it's like really having a strong opinion about like, what does that lookRaiza [00:53:25]: like today?Raiza [00:53:25]: And how far are you going to be able to push it? Sorry, I think maybe that was like very like philosophical.Swyx [00:53:31]: We get there.Usama [00:53:32]: And I think that hits a lot of the points it's going to make.Alessio [00:53:35]: I tweeted today or I ex-posted, whatever, that we're going to interview you on what we should ask you. So we got a list of feature requests, mostly. It's funny. Nobody actually had any like specific questions about how the product was built. They just want to know when you're releasing some feature. So I know you cannot talk about all of these things, but I think maybe it would give people an idea of like where the product is going. So I think the most common question I think five people asked is like, are you going to build an API? And, you know, do you see this product as still be kind of like a full head product for like a login and do everything there? Or do you want it to be a piece of infrastructure that people build on?Raiza [00:54:13]: I mean, I think why not both?Raiza [00:54:16]: I think we work at a place where you could have both. I think that end user products, like products that touch the hands of usersRaiza [00:54:23]: have a lot of value.Raiza [00:54:24]: For me personally, like we learn a lot about what people are trying to do and what's like actually useful and what people are ready for. And so we're going to keep investing in that. I think at the same time, right, there are a lot of developers that are interested in using the same technology to build their own thing. We're going to look into that, how soon that's going to be ready. I can't really comment, but these are the things that like, Hey, we heard it.Raiza [00:54:47]: We're trying to figure it out.Raiza [00:54:48]: And I think there's room for both.Swyx [00:54:50]: Is there a world in which this becomes a default Gemini interface because it's technically different org?Raiza [00:54:55]: It's such a good question.Raiza [00:54:56]: And I think every, every time someone asks me, it's like, Hey, I just leadRaiza [00:55:00]: Domogolem.Raiza [00:55:02]: We'll ask the Gemini folks what they think.Alessio [00:55:05]: Multilingual support. I know people kind of hack this a little bit together. Any ideas for full support, but also I'm mostly interested in dialects. In Italy, we have Italian obviously, but we have a lot of local dialects. Like if you go to Rome, people don't really speak Italian, they speak localRaiza [00:55:20]: dialect.Alessio [00:55:21]: Do you think there's a path to which these models, especially the speech can learn very like niche dialects? Like how much data do you need? Can people contribute? Like I'm curious, like if you see this as a possibility.Raiza [00:55:35]: Totally.Usama [00:55:35]: So I guess high level, like we're definitely working on adding moreRaiza [00:55:39]: languages.Usama [00:55:39]: That's like top priority. We're going to start small, but like theoretically we should be able to cover like most languages pretty soon. What a ridiculous statement, by the way.Swyx [00:55:48]: That's, that's crazy.Usama [00:55:49]: Unlike the soon or the pretty soon part.Swyx [00:55:52]: No, but like, you know, a few years ago, like a small team of like, I don't know, 10 people saying that we will support the top 100, 200 languages is like absurd, but you can do it. Yeah, you can do it.Raiza [00:56:03]: And I think like the speech team, you know, we are a small team, but the speech team is another team and the modeling team, like these folks are just like absolutely brilliant at what they do. And I think like when we've talked to them and we've said, Hey, you know, howRaiza [00:56:17]: about more languages? How about more voices? How about dialects?Raiza [00:56:20]: Right?Raiza [00:56:20]: This is something that like they are game to do. And like, that's, that's the roadmap for them.Usama [00:56:25]: The speech team supports like a bunch of other efforts across Google, like Gemini Live, for example, is also the models built by the same like sort of deep mind speech team. But yeah, the thing about dialects is really interesting. Cause like, and some of our sort of earliest testing with trying out other languages, we actually noticed that sometimes it wouldn't stick to a certain dialect, especially for like, I think for French, we noticed that like when we presented it to like a native speaker, it would sometimes go from like a Canadian person speaking French versus like a French person speaking French or an American person speaking French, which is not what we wanted. So there's a lot more sort of speech quality work that we need to do there to make sure that it works reliably. And at least sort of like the, the standard dialect that we want, but that does show that there's potential to sort of do the thing that you're talking about of like fixing a dialect that you want, maybe contribute your own voice or like you pick from one of the options. There's, there's a lot more headroom there. Yeah.Alessio [00:57:20]: Because we have movies, like we have old Roman movies that have like different languages, but there's not that many, you know? So I'm always like, well, I'm sure like the Italian is so strong in the model that like when you're trying to like pull that away from it, like you kind of need a lot, but right.Usama [00:57:35]: That's, that's all sort of like wonderful deep mind speech team.Swyx [00:57:39]: Well, anyway, if you need Italian, he's got you.Swyx [00:57:44]: Specifically Singlish.Raiza [00:57:45]: I got you.Swyx [00:57:46]: Managing system prompts. People want a lot of that. I assume.Raiza [00:57:50]: Yes.Swyx [00:57:50]: Ish.Raiza [00:57:51]: Definitely looking into it for just core notebook LM. Like everybody's wanted that forever. So we're working on that. I think for the audio itself, we're trying to figure out the best way to do it. So we'll launch something sooner rather than later. So we'll probably stage it. And I think like, you know, just to be fully transparent, we'll probably launch something that's more of a fast follow than like a fully baked feature first.Raiza [00:58:15]: Just because like, I see so many people put in like the fake show notes.Raiza [00:58:18]: It's like, Hey, I'll, I'll help you out.Raiza [00:58:19]: We'll just put a text box. Yeah. Yeah.Usama [00:58:21]: I think a lot of people are like, this is almost perfect, but like, I just need that extra 10, 20%. Yeah.Swyx [00:58:26]: I noticed that you say no a lot, I think, or you try to ship one thing and that there's different about you than maybe other PMs or other teams that try to ship, but they're like, Oh, here are all the knobs.Raiza [00:58:38]: I'm just.Swyx [00:58:38]: Take all my knobs. Yeah.Raiza [00:58:40]: Yeah.Swyx [00:58:40]: Top P top cake. It doesn't matter. I'll just put it in the docs and you figure it out. Right. Whereas for you, it's you, you actually just, you make one product.Raiza [00:58:49]: Yeah.Swyx [00:58:49]: As opposed to like 10, you could possibly have done.Raiza [00:58:51]: Yeah.Swyx [00:58:51]: I don't know.Raiza [00:58:52]: It's interesting. I think about this a lot.Raiza [00:58:53]: I think it requires a lot of discipline because I thought about the knobs.Raiza [00:58:57]: I was like, Oh, I saw on Twitter, you know, on X people want the knobs. It's like, great.Raiza [00:59:02]: Start mocking it up, making the text boxes, designing like the little fiddles.Raiza [00:59:06]: Right.Raiza [00:59:07]: And then I looked at it and I was kind of sad. I was like, well, right. It's like, Oh, it's like, this is not cool.Raiza [00:59:12]: This is not fun.Raiza [00:59:13]: This is not magical. It is sort of exactly what you would expect knobs to be. Then, you know, it's like, Oh, I mean, how much can you, you know, design a knob?Raiza [00:59:24]: I thought about it. I was like, but the thing that people really like was that there wasn't any.Raiza [00:59:29]: That they just pushed a button and it was cool.Raiza [00:59:32]: And so I was like, how do we bring more of that?Raiza [00:59:34]: Right.Raiza [00:59:34]: That still gives the user the optionality that they want. And so this is where like, you have to have a strong POV. I think you have to like really boil down. What did I learn in like the month since I've launched this thing that people really want? And I can give it to them while preserving like that, that delightful sort of fun experience. And I think that's actually really hard.Raiza [00:59:54]: Like I'm not going to come up with that by myself.Raiza [00:59:55]: And like, that's something that like our team thinks about every day. We all have different ideas. We're all experimenting with sort of how to get the most out of like the insight and also ship it quick. So, so we'll see.Raiza [01:00:06]: We'll find out soon if people like it or not.Usama [01:00:08]: I think the other interesting thing about like AI development now is that the knobs are not necessarily like speak going back to all the sort of like craft and like human taste and all of that that went into building it. Like the knobs are not as easy to add as simply like I'm going to add a parameter to this and it's going to make it happen. It's like you kind of have to redo the quality process for everything. Yeah, the prioritization is also different.Raiza [01:00:36]: It goes back to sort of like, it's a lot easier to do an eval for like the deep dive format than if like, okay, now I'm going to let you inject like these random things, right?Raiza [01:00:45]: Okay.Raiza [01:00:45]: How am I going to measure quality?Raiza [01:00:46]: Either?Raiza [01:00:46]: I say, I don't care because like you just input whatever.Raiza [01:00:50]: Or I say, actually wait, right?Raiza [01:00:53]: Like I want to help you get the best output ever.Raiza [01:00:55]: What's it going to take?Usama [01:00:56]: The knob actually needs to work reliably.Raiza [01:00:58]: Yeah. Yeah. Very important part.Alessio [01:01:00]: Two more things we definitely want to talk about. I guess now people equivalent notebook LM to like a podcast generator, but I guess, you know, there's a whole product suite there.Raiza [01:01:09]: Yeah.Alessio [01:01:10]: How should people think about that? Like is this, and also like the future of the product as far as monetization too, you know, like, is it going to be the voice thing going to be a core to it? Is it just going to be one output modality? And like, you're still looking to build like a broader kind of like a interface with data and documents.Raiza [01:01:27]: I mean, that's such a, that's such a good question that I think the answer it's I'm waiting to get more data. I think because we are still in the period where everyone's really excited about it, everyone's trying it. I think I'm getting a lot of sort of like positive feedback on the audio. We have some early signal that says it's a really good hook, but people stay for the other features.Raiza [01:01:49]: So that's really good too.Raiza [01:01:50]: I was making a joke yesterday.Raiza [01:01:51]: I was like, it'd be really nice, you know, if it was just the audio, because then I could just like simplify the train.Raiza [01:01:58]: Right.Raiza [01:01:58]: I don't have to think about all this other functionality, but I think the reality is that the framework kind of like what we were talking about earlier that we had laid out, which is like you bring your own sources. There's something you do in the middle and then there's an output is that really extensible one. And it's a really interesting one. And I think like, particularly when we think about what a big business looks like, especially when we think about commercialization, audio is just one such modality. But the editor itself, like the space in which you're able to do these things is like, that's the business, right? Like maybe the audio by itself, not so much, but like in this big package, like, oh, I could see that. I could see that being like a really big business.Raiza [01:02:37]: Yep.Alessio [01:02:37]: Any thoughts on some of the alternative interact with data and documents thing, like cloud artifacts, like a JGBD canvas, you know, kind of how do you see, maybe we're notebook LM stars, but like Gemini starts, like you have so many amazing teams and products at Google. There's sometimes like, I'm sure you have to figure that out.Raiza [01:02:56]: Yeah.Raiza [01:02:56]: Well, I love artifacts.Raiza [01:02:59]: I played a little bit with canvas. I got a little dizzy using it. I was like, oh, there's something.Raiza [01:03:03]: Well, you know, I like the idea of it fundamentally, but something about the UX was like, oh, this is like more disorienting than like artifacts.Raiza [01:03:11]: And I couldn't figure out what it was. And I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about it, but I love that, right?Raiza [01:03:16]: Like the thing where you are like, I'm working with, you know, an LLM, an agent, a chap or whatever to create something new. And there's like the chat space.Raiza [01:03:26]: There's like the output space. I love that. And the thing that I think I feel angsty about is like, we've been talking about this for like a year, right?Raiza [01:03:35]: Like, of course, like I'm going to say that, but it's like, but like for a year now I've had these like mocks that I was just like, I want to push the button.Raiza [01:03:42]: But we prioritize other things.Raiza [01:03:43]: We were like, okay, what can we like really win at? And like we prioritize audio, for example, instead of that. But just like when people were like, oh, what is this magic draft thing? Oh, it's like a hundred percent, right?Raiza [01:03:54]: It's like stuff like that that we want to try to build into notebook too.Raiza [01:03:57]: And I'd made this comment on Twitter as well, where I was like, now I don't know, actually, right? I don't actually know if that is the right thing.Raiza [01:04:05]: Like, are people really getting utility out of this? I mean, from the launches, it seems like people are really getting it.Raiza [01:04:11]: But I think now if we were to ship it, I have to rev on it like one layer more, right? I have to deliver like a differentiating value compared to like artifacts or chemicals, which is hard.Swyx [01:04:20]: Which is because you've, you demonstrated the ability to fast follow. So you don't have to innovate every single time. I know, I know.Raiza [01:04:27]: I think for me, it's just like the bar is high to ship.Raiza [01:04:30]: And when I say that, I think it's sort of like conceptually like the value that you deliver to the user. I mean, you'll, you'll see a notebook alarm. There are a lot of corners that like that I have personally cut where it's like our UX designer is always like, I can't believe you let us ship with like these ugly scroll bars. And I'm like, no, no one notices, I promise.Raiza [01:04:47]: He's like, no, everyone.Raiza [01:04:48]: It's a screenshot, this thing.Raiza [01:04:50]: But I mean, kidding aside, I think that's true that it's like we do want to be able to fast follow.Raiza [01:04:54]: But I think we want to make sure that things also land really well. So the utility has to be there.Swyx [01:04:59]: Code in, especially on our podcast has a special place. Is code notebook LLM interesting to you? I haven't, I've never, I don't see like a connect my GitHub to this thing. Yeah, yeah.Raiza [01:05:10]: I think code, code is a big one. Code is a big one. I think we have been really focused, especially when we had like a much smaller team, we were really focused on like, let's push like an end to end journey together. Let's prove that we can do that. Because then once you lay the groundwork of like sources, do something in the chat output, once you have that, you just scale it up from there. Right. And it's like, now it's just a matter of like scaling the inputs, scaling the outputs, scaling the capabilities of the chat. So I think we're going to get there. And now I also feel like I have a much better view of like where the investment is required. Whereas previously I was like, Hey, like let's flesh out the story first before we put more engineers on this thing, because that's just going to slow us down.Usama [01:05:49]: For what it's worth, the model still understands code. So I've seen at least one or two people just like download their GitHub repo, put it in there and get like an audio overview of your code.Raiza [01:06:00]: Yeah, yeah. I've never tried that.Usama [01:06:01]: This is like, these are all the files are connected together because the model still understands code. Like even if you haven't like.Raiza [01:06:07]: I think on sort of like the creepy side of things, I did watch a student like with her permission, of course, I watched her do her homework in Notebook LM.Raiza [01:06:17]: And I didn't tell her like what kind of homework to bring, but she brought like her computer science homework.Raiza [01:06:23]: And I was like, Oh, and she uploaded it. And she said, here's my homework, read it. And it was just the instructions. And Notebook LM was like, okay, I've read it. And the student was like, okay, here's my code so far.Raiza [01:06:37]: And she copy pasted it from the editor.Raiza [01:06:39]: And she was like, check my homework. And Notebook LM was like, well, number one is wrong.Raiza [01:06:44]: And I thought that was really interesting because it didn't tell her what was wrong. It just said it's wrong.Raiza [01:06:48]: And she was like, okay, don't tell me the answer, but like walk me through like how you think about this. And it was what was interesting for me was that she didn't ask for the answer.Raiza [01:06:58]: And I asked her, I was like, oh, why did you do that? And she was like, well, I actually want to learn it. She's like, because I'm gonna have to take a quiz on this at some point. And I was like, oh, yeah, it's a really good point.Raiza [01:07:05]: And it was interesting because, you know, Notebook LM, while the formatting wasn't perfect, like did say like, hey, have you thought about using, you know, maybe an integer instead of like this?Raiza [01:07:14]: And so that was, that was really interesting.Alessio [01:07:16]: Are you adding like real-time chat on the output? Like, you know, there's kind of like the deep dive show and then there's like the listeners call in and say, hey.Raiza [01:07:26]: Yeah, we're actively, that's one of the things we're actively prioritizing. Actually, one of the interesting things is now we're like, why would anyone want to do that? Like, what are the actual, like kind of going back to sort of having a strong POV about the experience? It's like, what is better? Like, what is fundamentally better about doing that? That's not just like being able to Q&A or Notebook. How is that different from like a conversation? Is it just the fact that there was a show and you want to tweak the show? Is it because you want to participate? So I think there's a lot there that like we can continue to unpack. But yes, that's coming.Swyx [01:07:58]: It's because I formed a parasocial relationship. Yeah, that just might be part of your life.Raiza [01:08:03]: Get this.Raiza [01:08:05]: Totally.Swyx [01:08:07]: Yeah, but it is obviously because OpenAI has just launched a real-time chat. It's a very hot topic. I would say one of the toughest AI engineering disciplines out there because even their API doesn't do interruptions that well, to be honest. And, you know, yeah, so real-time chat is tough.Raiza [01:08:25]: I love that thing.Raiza [01:08:26]: I love it.Swyx [01:08:27]: Okay, so we have a couple ways to end. Either call to action or laying out one principle of AI PMing or engineering that you really think about a lot. Is there anything that comes to mind?Raiza [01:08:39]: I feel like that's a test.Raiza [01:08:40]: Of course, I'm going to say go to notebooklm.google.com, try it out, join the Discord and tell us what you think.Swyx [01:08:46]: Yeah, especially like you have a technical audience. What do you want from a technical engineering audience?Raiza [01:08:52]: I mean, I think it's interesting because the technical and engineering audience typically will just say, hey, where's the API?Raiza [01:08:58]: But, you know, I think we addressed it. But I think what I would really be interested to discover is, is this useful to you?Raiza [01:09:05]: Why is it useful?Raiza [01:09:05]: What did you do? Right? Is it useful tomorrow?Raiza [01:09:08]: How about next week?Raiza [01:09:08]: Just the most useful thing for me is if you do stop using it or if you do keep using it, tell me why.Raiza [01:09:14]: Because I think contextualizing it within your life, your background, your motivations, is what really helps me build really cool things.Swyx [01:09:22]: And then one piece of advice for AI PMs.Raiza [01:09:24]: Okay, if I had to pick one, it's just always be building. Build things yourself. I think for PMs, it's such a critical skill. And just take time to pop your head up and see what else is new out there. On the weekends, I try to have a lot of discipline. I only use ChatGPT and Cloud on the weekend. I try to use the APIs. Occasionally, I'll try to build something on GCP over the weekend because I don't do that normally at work. But it's just the rigor of just trying to be a builder yourself. And even just testing, right? You could have an idea of how a product should work and maybe your engineers are building it. But it's like, what was your proof of concept? What gave you conviction that that was the right thing?Raiza [01:10:06]: Call to action?Usama [01:10:07]: I feel like consistently, the most magical moments out of AI building come about for me when I'm really, really, really just close to the edge of the model capability. And sometimes it's farther than you think it is. I think while building this product, some of the other experiments, there were phases where it was easy to think that you've approached it. But sometimes at that point, what you really need is to show your thing to someone and they'll come up with creative ways to improve it. We're all sort of learning, I think. So yeah, I feel like unless you're hitting that bound of this is what Gemini 1.5 can do, probably the magic moment is somewhere there, in that sort of limit.Swyx [01:10:48]: So push the edge of the capability. Yeah, totally.Alessio [01:10:51]: It's funny because we had a Nicola Scarlini from DeepMind on the pod and he was like, if the model is always successful, you're probably not trying hard enough to give it heart.Raiza [01:11:00]: Right. Thanks.Alessio [01:11:00]: So, yeah.Swyx [01:11:03]: My problem is sometimes I'm not smart enough to judge. Yeah, right.Raiza [01:11:08]: Well, I think I hear that a lot.Raiza [01:11:11]: Like people are always like, I don't know how to use it.Raiza [01:11:14]: And it's hard.Raiza [01:11:15]: Like I remember the first time I used Google search. I was like, what do we type?Raiza [01:11:18]: My dad was like, anything.Raiza [01:11:19]: It's like anything.Raiza [01:11:20]: I got nothing in my brain, dad. What do you mean?Raiza [01:11:23]: And I think there is a lot of like for product builders is like, have a strong opinion about like, what is the user supposed to do?Raiza [01:11:30]: Yeah. Help them do it.Swyx [01:11:31]: Principle for AI engineers or like just one advice that you have others?Usama [01:11:36]: I guess like in addition to pushing the bounds and to do that, that often means like you're not going to get it right in the first go. So like, don't be afraid to just like batch multiple models together. I guess that's I'm basically describing an agent, but more thinking time equals just better results consistently. And that holds true for probably every single time that I've tried to build something.Swyx [01:12:01]: Well, at some point we will talk about the sort of longer inference paradigm. It seems like DeepMind is rumored to be coming out with something. You can't comment, of course.Raiza [01:12:09]: Yeah.Swyx [01:12:09]: Well, thank you so much. You know, you've created. I actually said, I think you saw this. I think that Notebook LLM was kind of like the ChatGPT moment for Google.Raiza [01:12:18]: That was so crazy when I saw that.Raiza [01:12:19]: I was like, what?Raiza [01:12:20]: Like, ChatGPT was huge for me. And I think, you know, when you said it and other people have said it, I was like, is it?Raiza [01:12:27]: Yeah. That's crazy.Swyx [01:12:28]: People weren't like really cognizant of Notebook LLM before and audio overviews and Notebook LLM like unlocked the, you know, a use case for people in the way that I would go so far as to say cloud projects never did. And I don't know. You know, I think a lot of it is competent PMing and engineering, but also just, you know, it's interesting how a lot of these projects are always like low key research previews for you. It's like you're a separate org, but like, you know, you built products and UI innovation on top of also working with research to improve the model. That was a success that wasn't planned to be this whole big thing. You know, your TPUs were on fire, right?Raiza [01:13:06]: Oh my gosh, that was so funny.Raiza [01:13:08]: I didn't know people would like really catch on to the Elmo fire, but it was just like one of those things where I was like, you know, we had to ask for more TPUs.Raiza [01:13:16]: Yeah, we many times.Raiza [01:13:18]: And, you know, it was a little bit of a, of a subtweet of like, Hey, reminder, give us more TPUs on here.Raiza [01:13:25]: It's weird.Swyx [01:13:25]: I just think like when people try to make big launches, then they flop. And then like when they're not trying and they just, they're just trying to build a good thing, then, then they succeed. It's, it's this fundamentally really weird magic that I haven't really encapsulated yet, but you've, you've done it. Well, thank you.Raiza [01:13:40]: Thank you.Raiza [01:13:40]: And, you know, I think we'll just keep going in like the same way. We just keep trying, keep trying to make it better.Raiza [01:13:45]: I hope so.Swyx [01:13:46]: All right.Raiza [01:13:47]: Cool.Swyx [01:13:47]: Thank you.Raiza [01:13:48]: Thank you. Thanks for having us. Thanks. Get full access to Latent Space at www.latent.space/subscribe

Singapore's GovTech is hosting an AI CTF challenge with ~$15,000 in prizes, starting October 26th, open to both local and virtual hackers. It will be hosted on Dreadnode's Crucible platform; signup here!It is common to say if you want to work in AI, you should come to San Francisco. Not everyone can. Not everyone should. If you can only do meaningful AI work in one city, then AI has failed to generalize meaningfully.As non-Americans working in the US, we know what it’s like to see AI progress so rapidly here, and yet be at a loss for what our home countries can do. Through Latent Space we’ve tried to tell the story of AI outside of the Bay Area bubble; we talked to Notion in New York and Humanloop and Wondercraft in London and HuggingFace in Paris and ICLR in Vienna, and the Reka, RWKV, and Winds of AI Winter episodes were taped in Singapore (the World’s Fair also had Latin America representation and we intend to at least add China, Japan, and India next year).The Role of Government with AIAs an intentionally technical resource, we’ve mostly steered clear of regulation and safety debates on the podcast; whether it is safety bills or technoalarmism, often at the cost of our engagement numbers or ability to book big name guests with a political agenda. When SOTA shifts 3x faster than it takes to pass a law, when nobody agrees on definitions of important things, when you can elicit never-before-seen behavior by slightly different prompting or sampling, it is hard enough to simply keep up to speed, so we are happy limiting our role to that. The story of AI progress has more often been achieved in the private sector, usually in spite of, rather than with thanks to, government intervention.But industrial policy is inextricably linked to the business of AI, which we do very much care about, has an explicitly accelerationist intent if not impact, and has a track record of success in correcting for legitimate market failures in private sector investment, particularly outside of the US. It is with this lens we approach today’s episode and special guest, our first with a sitting Cabinet member.Singapore’s National AI StrategyIt is well understood that much of Singapore’s economic success is attributable to industrial policy, from direct efforts like the Jurong Town Corporation industrialization to indirect ones like going all in on English as national first language. Singapore’s National AI Strategy grew out of its 2014 Smart Nation initiative, first launched in 2019 and then refreshed in 2023 by Minister Josephine Teo, our guest today.While Singapore is not often thought of as an AI leader, the National University ranks in the top 10 in publications (above Oxford/Harvard!), and many overseas Singaporeans work at the leading AI companies and institutions in the US (and some of us even run leading AI Substacks?). OpenAI has often publicly named the Singapore government as their model example of government collaborator and is opening an office in Singapore in time for DevDay 2024.AI Engineer NationsSwyx first pitched the AI Engineer Nation concept at a private Sovereign AI summit featuring Dr. He Ruimin, Chief AI Officer of Singapore, which eventually led to an invitation to discuss the concept with Minister Teo, the country’s de-facto minister for tech (she calls it Digital Development, for good reasons she explains in the pod).This chat happened (with thanks to Jing Long, Joyce, and other folks from MDDI)!The central pitch for any country, not just Singapore, to emphasize and concentrate bets on AI Engineers, compared with other valuable efforts like training more researchers, releasing more government-approved data, or offering more AI funding, is a calculated one, based on the fact that: * GPU clusters and researchers have massive returns to scale and colocation, mostly concentrated in the US, that are irresponsibly expensive to replicate* Even if research stopped today and there was no progress for the next 30 years, there are far more capabilities to unlock and productize from existing foundation models and we * Good AI Engineering requires genuine skill and is deepening enough to justify sub-specialization as a sub-industry of Software Engineering* Companies and countries with better AI engineer workforces will disproportionately benefit from AI vs those who equivocate it as one of many equivalent priorities* Tech progress is often framed as “the future is here but it is not evenly distributed”. The role of the AI Engineer is therefore to better distribute the state of the art to as much of humanity as possible, including the elderly, poor, and differently abled.All of which are themes we first identified in the Rise of the AI Engineer. Singapore simply has a few additional factors that make it not just a good fit, but an economic imperative:* English speaking, very-online country that is great at STEM* Aging, ex-growth population (Total Fertility Rate of 1.1)* #3 GDP per capita (PPP) country in the world* Physically remote from major economic growth centers ex China/SEAThat basically dictates that any continued economic growth must be disconnected to geography, timezone, or headcount, or reliance on existing industrial drivers. Short of holding Taylor Swift hostage, making an intentional, concentrated bet on AI industrial policy is Singapore’s best option to keep up progress in the 21st century. As a pioneer in education policy being the primary long term determinant of economic success, this may result in Python as Singapore’s next National Language in the long run, a proposal we also discussed extensively at the RAISE retreat where this episode was recorded.Because of upcoming election season concerns around the globe, we also took the opportunity to ask about Singapore’s recent deepfake (election integrity) law.Full YouTube episodeShow Notes* Josephine Teo Official Bio, Wikipedia* Singapore National AI Strategy* 2019 - v1* 2023 - v2* ICLR (machine learning conference)* Philipp Kandal (CPO of Grab)* Temasek* GIC* EDBI* Economic Development Board (EDB)* Michael Fay incident* Quincy Larson* AIBots (internal RAG system for Singapore government)* Slovakia election incident* National AI Strategy - Singapore* Singapore AI Safety Institute* AI Verify* SkillsFuture* Ministry of Digital Development and Information (MDDI)* GovTech* NTU (Nanyang Technological University)Timestamps00:00:00 Introductions00:00:34 Singapore's National AI Strategy00:02:50 Ministry of Digital Development and Information00:08:49 Defining a National AI Strategy00:14:32 AI Safety and Governance00:16:50 AI Adoption in Companies and Government00:19:53 Balancing AI Innovation and Safety00:22:56 Structuring Government for Rapid Technological Change00:27:08 Doing Business with Singapore00:32:21 Training and Workforce Development in AI00:37:05 Career Transition Help for Post-AI Jobs00:40:19 AI Literacy and Coding as a Language00:43:28 Sovereign AI and Digital Infrastructure00:50:48 Government and AI Workloads00:51:02 Favorite AI Use Case in Government00:53:52 AI and ElectionsTranscriptAlessio [00:00:00]: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO at Residence at Decibel Partners, and I'm joined by my co-host Swyx, founder of Small.ai.Swyx [00:00:13]: Hey everyone, this is a very, very special episode. We have here Mr. Josephine Teo from Singapore. Welcome.Josephine [00:00:19]: Hi Shawn and hi Alessio. Thank you for having me. Of course.Swyx [00:00:23]: You are the Minister for Digital Development and Information and Second Minister for Home Affairs. We're meeting here at RAISE, which is effectively your agency. Maybe we want to explain a little bit about what Singapore is doing in AI.Josephine [00:00:34]: Well, we've had an AI strategy at the national level for some years now, and about two years ago when generative AI became so prominent, we thought it was about time for us to refresh our national AI strategy. And it's not unusual on such occasions for us to consult widely. We want to talk to people who are familiar with the field. We want to talk to people who are active as practitioners, and we also want to talk to people in Singapore who have an interest in seeing the AI ecosystem develop. So when we put all these together, we discovered something else by chance, and it was really a bonus. This was the fact that there were already Singaporeans that were active in the AI space, particularly in the US, particularly in the Bay Area. And one of the exciting things for us was how could we also consult these Singaporeans who clearly still have a passion for Singapore, they do care about what happens back home, and they want to contribute to it. So that's how RAISE came about. And RAISE actually preceded the publication of the refresh of our national AI strategy, which took place in December last year. So the inputs of the participants from RAISE helped us to sharpen what we thought would be important in building up the AI ecosystem. And also with the encouragement of participants at RAISE, primarily Singaporeans who were doing great work in the US, we decided to raise our ambitions, literally. That's why we say AI for the public good, recognising the fact that commercial interest will certainly drive exciting developments in the industry space. But keep in mind, there is a need to make sure that AI serves the public good. And we say for Singapore and the world. So the idea is that experiments that are carried out in Singapore, things that are scaled up in Singapore potentially could have contributions elsewhere in the world. And so AI for the public good, for Singapore and the world. That's how it came about.Alessio [00:02:50]: I was listening to some of your previous interviews, and even the choice of the name development in the ministry name was very specific. You mentioned naming is your ethos. Can you explain maybe a bit about what the ministry does, which is not simply funding R&D, but it's also thinking about how to apply the technologies in industry and just maybe give people an overview since there's not really an equivalent in the US?Josephine [00:03:13]: Yeah, so when people talk about our Smart Nation efforts, it was helpful in articulating a few key pillars. We talked about one pillar being a vibrant digital economy. We also talk about a stable digital society because digital technologies, the way in which they are used, can sometimes cause divisions in society or entrench polarisation. They can also have the potential of causing social upheaval. So when we talked about stable digital society, that was what we had in mind. How do you preserve cohesion? Then we said that in this domain, government has to be progressive too. You can't expect the rest of Singapore to digitalise, and yet the government is falling behind. So a progressive digital government is another very important pillar. And underpinning all of this has to be comprehensive digital security. There is, of course, cyber security, but there is also how individuals feel safe in the digital domain, whether as users on social media or if they're using devices and they're using services that are delivered digitally. So when we talk about these four pillars of a Smart Nation, people get it. When we then asked ourselves, what is the appropriate way to think of the ministry? We used to be known as the Ministry of Communications and Information, and we had been doing all this digital stuff without actually putting it into our name. So when we eventually decided to rename the ministry, there were a couple of options to choose from. We could have gone for digital technologies, we could have gone for digital advancement, we could have gone for digital innovation. But ultimately we decided on digital development because it wasn't the technologies, the advancements or the innovation that we cared about, they are important, but we're really more interested in their impact to society, impact to communities. So how do we shape those developments? How do we achieve a digital experience that is trustworthy? How do we make sure that everyone, not just individuals who are savvy from the get-go in digital engagements, how does everyone in society, regardless of age, regardless of background, also feel that they have a sense of progression, that embracing technology brings benefits to them? And we also believe that if you don't pay attention to it, then you might not consciously apply the use of technology to bring people together. And you may passively just allow society to break apart without being too...Swyx [00:06:05]: Oh my god, that's drastic.Josephine [00:06:06]: That sounds very drastic, that sounds a bit scary. But we thought that it's important to say that we do have the objective of bringing people together with the help of technology. So that's how we landed on the idea of digital development. And there's one more dimension, that one we draw reference from perhaps the physical developmental aspects of cities. We say that if you think of yourself as a developer, all developers have to conceptualise, all developers have to plan, developers have to implement, and in the process of implementation you will monitor and things don't go as well as you'd like them to, you have to rectify. Yeah, it sucks, essentially, it is. But that's what any developer, any good developer must do. But a best-in-class developer would also have to think about the higher purpose that you're trying to achieve. Should also think about who are the partners that you bring into the picture and not try to do everything alone. And I think very importantly, a best-in-class developer seeks to be a leader in thought and action. So we say that if we call ourselves the Ministry of Digital Development, how do we also, whether in thinking of the digital economy, thinking of the digital society, digital security or digital government, embody these values, these values of being a bridge builder, being an entity that cares about the longer-term impact, that serves a higher purpose. So those were the kinds of things that we brought into the discussions on our own renaming. That's quite a good experience for the whole team.Swyx [00:07:49]: From the outside, I actually was surprised, I was looking for MCI and I couldn't find it. Since you renamed it.Josephine [00:07:54]: There, there, there.Swyx [00:07:55]: Yeah, exactly. We have to plug the little logo for the cameras. I really like that you are now recognizing the role of the web, digital development, technology. We never really had it officially, it used to be Ministry of Information Communication and the Arts. One thing that we're going to touch on is the growth of Singapore as an engineering hub. OpenAI is opening an office in Singapore and how we can grow more AI engineers in Singapore as well. Because I do think that that is something that people are interested in, whether or not it's for their own careers or to hire out in Singapore. Maybe it's a good time to get into the National AI Strategy. You presented it to the PM, now PM, I guess. I don't know what the process was because we have a new PM. Most of our audience is not going to be Singaporeans. There are going to be more Singaporeans than normal, but most of our audience are not Singaporeans, they've never heard of it. But they all come from countries which are all trying to figure out the National AI Strategy. So how did you go about defining a National AI Strategy?Josephine [00:08:49]: Well, in some sense, we went back to the drawing board and said, what do we want to see AI be able to do in Singapore? I mean, there are all these exciting developments, obviously we would like to be part of the action. But it has to be in service of something. And what we were interested in is just trying to find a way to continuously uplift our people. Because ultimately, for any national strategy to work, it must bring benefits to the local communities. And the local communities can be defined very broadly. You have citizen communities, and citizens would like to be able to do better jobs, and they would like to be able to earn higher wages. But it's not just citizen communities. Citizens are themselves sometimes involved in businesses. So how about the enterprise community? And in the enterprise community, in the Singapore landscape, it's really interesting. Like most other economies, we do have SMEs. But we also have multinationals that are at the very cutting edge. Because in order to succeed in Singapore, they have to be very competitive. So the question is, how can they, through the use of technologies, and including AI, offer an even higher value proposition to their customers, to their owners. And so we were very interested in seeing enterprise applications of AI. That in a way also relates back to the workforce. Because for all of the employees of these organisations, then to see that their employers are implementing AI models, and they are identifying AI use cases, is tremendously motivating for the broader workforce to themselves want to acquire AI-related skills. Then not forgetting that for the large body of small and medium enterprises, it's always going to be a little bit harder for smaller businesses to access technologies. So what do we put in place to enable these small businesses to take advantage of what AI has to offer? So you have to have a holistic strategy that can fire up many different engines. So we work across the board to make compute available, firstly to the research community, but also taking care to ensure that compute capacity could be available to companies that are in need of them. So how do we do that? That's one question that we have to go get it organised. Then another very important aspect is making data available. And I think in this regard, some of the earlier work that we did was helpful. We did, from more than a decade ago, already have privacy laws in place. We have data protection, and these laws have also been updated so as to support businesses with legitimate use cases. So the clarity and the certainty is there. And then we've also tried to organise data, make it more readily available. Some of it, for example, could be specific to the finance sector, some specific to the logistics sector. But then there are also different kinds of data that lies within government possession, and we are making it much more readily available to the private sector. So that deals with the data part of it. I think the third and very important part of it is talent. And we're thinking of talent at different levels. We're thinking of talent at the uppermost level, you know, for want of a better term, we call them AI creators. We know that they are very highly sought after, there aren't all that many in the world. And we want to interest them to do work with Singapore. Sometimes they will be in Singapore, but there is a value in them being plugged into the international networks, to be plugged into globally leading-edge projects that may or may not be done out of Singapore. We think that keeping those linkages are very important. These AI creators have to be supported by what we generally refer to as AI practitioners. We're talking about people who do data science, we're talking about people who do machine learning, they're engineers, they're absolutely engineers. But then you also need the broad swath of AI users, people who are going to be comfortable using the tools that are made available to them. So you may have, for example, a group within a company that designs AI bots or finds use cases, but if their colleagues aren't comfortable using them, then in some sense, the picture is not complete. So we want to address the talent question at all of these levels. In a sense, we are fortunate that Singapore is compact enough for us to be able to get these kinds of interventions organised. We already have a robust training infrastructure, we can rely on that. People know what funding support is available to them. Training providers know that if they curate programmes that lead to good employment outcomes, they are very likely to be able to get support to offer these programmes at subsidised rates. So in a sense, that ecosystem is able to support what we hope to see come out of an AI strategy. So those are just some of the pieces that we put in place.Swyx [00:14:15]: Many pieces. 15 items. Okay. So for people who are interested, they can look it up, but I just wanted to get an introduction to people. Many people don't even know that we have a very active AI strategy, and actually it's the second one. There's already been a five-year plan, pre-generative AI, which was very foresighted.Josephine [00:14:32]: One thing that we also pay attention to is how can AI be developed and deployed in a responsible manner, in a way that is trustworthy. And we want to plug ourselves into conversations at the forefront. We have an AI Safety Institute, and we work together with our colleagues in the US, as well as in the UK, and anywhere else that has AI Safety Institutes to try and advance our understanding of this topic. But I think more importantly is that in the meantime, we've got to offer the business community, offer AI developers something practical to work with. So we've developed testing tools, by no means perfect, but they're a start. And then we also said that because AI Verify was developed for traditional AI, classical AI, then for generative AI, you need something different. Something that also does red teaming, something that also does benchmarking. But actually our interests go beyond that, beyond AI governance frameworks and practical tools. We are interested in getting into the research as to how do you prove that an AI system is really safe? How do you get into the mathematics of it? I'm not an expert in this field, but I think it's not difficult for people to understand that until you can get to a proof, then some of the other testing is reassuring, but to an extent.Swyx [00:15:58]: It may be fundamentally unprovable.Josephine [00:16:00]: It may well be.Swyx [00:16:01]: You might have to be comfortable with that and go ahead anyway.Josephine [00:16:03]: Yes.Alessio [00:16:04]: Yeah. Yeah. The simulations especially are really interesting. I think NTU is going to be one of the first universities to have these cyber ranges for like a AI red teaming training. One of our companies does AI red teaming and their customers are like some of the biggest foundation model labs. And then GovTech is like the only government organization working. So yeah, Singapore has been at the forefront of this. We sat down with the CPO of Grab, Philip Kendall, on my trip there, and they shut down their whole company for a week to just focus on Gen AI training. Literally, if you work at Grab, you have to do something in Gen AI and learn and get comfortable with it. Going back to your point, I think the interest of the government easily transpires into the companies. This is like a national priority, so we should all spend time in it.Josephine [00:16:50]: You're right. Companies like Grab, what they are trying to do is to make awareness so broad within their organization and to get to a level of comfort with using Gen AI tools, which I think is a smart move because the returns will come later, but they will surely come. They're not the only ones doing that, I'm glad to say, some of our leading banks, even Singapore Airlines, which may be the airline that you flew into Singapore, they've got a serious team looking at AI use cases, and I don't know whether you are aware of it, they have definitely quite a good number. I'm not sure that they have talked about it openly because airline operations are quite complex.Swyx [00:17:37]: At least Singapore Airlines offer.Josephine [00:17:38]: No, because airline operations are very complex. There are lots of things that you can optimize. There are lots of things that you have to comply with. There are lots of processes that you must follow, and this kind of context makes it interesting for AI. You can put it to good use. And government mustn't be lagging too. We've always believed that in time to come, we may well have to put in place guardrails, but you are able to put in place guardrails better if you yourself have used the technology. So that's the approach that we are taking. Quite early on, we decided to lay out some guidelines on how Gen AI could be used by government offices. And then we also went about developing tools that will enable them to practice and also to try their hand at it. I think in today's context, we're quite happy with the fact that there are enough colleagues within government that are competent, that know, in fact, how to generate their own AI and create a system for their colleagues. And that's quite an exciting development.Swyx [00:18:47]: I will mention that as a citizen and someone keen on developing AI in Singapore, I do worry that we lead with safety, lead with public good. I'm not sure that the Singapore government is aware that safety sometimes is a bad word in some AI circles because their work is associated with censorship.Josephine [00:19:09]: Or over-regulation.Swyx [00:19:10]: Over-regulation. And nerfing is the Gen Z word for this, of capabilities in order to be safe. And actually that pushes what you call AI creators, some others might call LLM trainers, whatever. There are trade-offs. You cannot have it all. You cannot have safe and cutting edge sometimes, because sometimes cutting edge means unsafe. I don't know what the right answer is, but I will say that my perception is a lot of the Bay Area, San Francisco is on the, let everything be unregulated as possible. Let's explore the frontier. And Europe's approach is like, we're going to have government conferences on the safety of AI, even before creating frontier AI. And Singapore, I think is like in the middle of that. There's a risk. Maybe not. I saw you shake your head.Josephine [00:19:53]: It's a really interesting question. How do you approach AI development? Do you say that there are some ethical principles that should be adhered to? Do you say that there are certain guidelines that should inform the developer's thinking? And we don't have a law in place just yet. We've only introduced very recently a law that has yet to be passed. This is on AI generated content, other synthetic materials that could be used during an election. But that's very specific to an election. It's very specific to election. For the broader base of AI developers and AI model deployers, the way in which we've gone about it is to put in place the principles. We articulate what good AI governance should look like. And then we've decided to take it one step further. We have testing tools, we have frameworks, and we've also tried to say, well, if you go about AI development, what are some of the safety considerations that you should put in place? And then we suggest to AI model developers that they should be transparent. What are the things they ought to be transparent about? For example, your data. How is it sourced? You should also be transparent about the use cases. What do you intend for it to be used for? So there are some of these specific guidelines that we provide. They are, to a large extent, voluntary in nature. But on the other hand, we hope that through this process, there is enough education being done so that on the receiving end, those who are impacted by those models will learn to ask the right questions. And when they ask the right questions of the model developers and the deployers, then that generates a virtual cycle where good questions are being brought to the surface, and there is a certain sense of responsibility to address those questions. I take your point that until you are very clear about the outcomes you want to achieve, putting in place regulations could be counterproductive. And I think we see this in many different sectors. Well, since AI is often talked about as general purpose technology, yes, of course, in another general purpose technology, electricity, in its production, of course, there are regulations around that. You know, how to keep the workers safe in a power plant, for example. But many of the regulations do not attempt to stifle electricity usage to begin with. It says that, well, if you use electricity in this particular manner or in that particular manner, then here are the rules that you have to follow. I believe that that could be true of AI too. It depends on the use cases. If you use it for elections, then okay, we will have a set of rules. But if you're not using it for elections, then actually in Singapore today, go ahead. But of course, if you do harmful things, that's a different story altogether.Alessio [00:22:56]: How do you structure a ministry when the technology moves so quickly? Even if you think about the moratorium that Singapore had on data center build-out that was lifted recently, obviously, you know, that's a forward-looking thing. As you think about what you want to put in place for AI versus what you want to wait out and see, like, how do you make that decision? You know, CEOs have to make the same decision. Should I invest in AI now? Should I follow and see where it goes? What's the thought process and who do you work with?Josephine [00:23:23]: The fortunate thing for Singapore, I think, is that we're a single tier of government. In many other countries, you may have the federal level and then you have the provincial or state level governments, depending on the nomenclature in that particular jurisdiction. For us, it's a single tier.Swyx [00:23:41]: City-state.Josephine [00:23:42]: City-state. When you're referring to the government, well, is the government, no one asks, okay, is it the federal government or is it the local government? So that in itself is greatly facilitative already. The second thing is that we do have a strong culture of cooperating across different ministries. In the digital domain, you absolutely have to, because it's not just my ministry that is interested in seeing applications being developed and percolate throughout our system. If you are the Ministry of Transport, you'd be very interested how artificial intelligence, machine learning can be applied to the rail system to help it to advance from corrective maintenance where you go in and maintain equipment after they've broken down to preventive maintenance, which is still costly because you can't go around maintaining everything preventatively. So how do you prioritize? If you use machine learning to prioritize and move more effectively into predictive maintenance, then potentially you can have a more reliable rail system without it costing a lot more. So Ministry of Transport would have this set of considerations and they have to be willing to support innovations in their particular sector. In healthcare, there would be equally a different set of considerations. How can machine learning, how can AI algorithms be applied to help physicians, not to overtake physicians? I don't think physicians can be overtaken so easily, not at all for the imaginable future. But can it help them with diagnosis? Can it help them with treatment plans? What constitutes an optimized treatment plan that would take into consideration the patient's whole set of health indicators? And how does a physician look at all these inputs and still apply judgment? Those are the areas that we would be very interested in as MDDI, but equally, I think, my colleagues in the Ministry of Health. So the way in which we organize ourselves must allow for ownership to also be taken by our colleagues, that they want to push it forward. We keep ourselves relatively lean. At the broad level, we may say there's a group of colleagues who looked at digital economy, another group that looks at digital society, another group looks at digital government. But actually, there are many occasions where you have to be cross-disciplinary. Even digital government, the more you digitalize your service delivery to citizens, the more you have to think about the security architecture, the more you have to think about whether this delivery mechanism is resilient. And you can't do it in isolation. You have to then say, if the standards that we set for ourselves are totally dislocated with what the industry does, how hyperscalers go about architecting their security, then the two are not interoperable. So a degree of flexibility, a way of allowing people to take ownership of the areas that come within their charge, and very importantly, constantly building bridges, and also encouraging a culture of not saying that, here's where my job stops. In a field that is, as you say, developing as quickly as it does, you can't rigidly say that, beyond this, not my problem. It is your problem until you find somebody else to take care of it.Swyx [00:27:08]: The thing you raised about healthcare is something that a lot of people here are interested in. If someone, let's say a foreign startup or company, or someone who is a Singaporean founder wants to do this in the healthcare system, what should they do? Who do they reach out to? It often seems impenetrable, but I feel like we want to say Singapore is open for business, but where do they go?Josephine [00:27:30]: Well, the good thing about Singapore is that it's not that difficult eventually to reach the right person. But we can also understand that to someone who is less familiar with Singapore, you need an entry point. And fortunately, that entry point has been very well served by the Economic Development Board. The Economic Development Board has got colleagues who are based in, I believe, more than 40 And they serve as a very useful initial touch point. And then they might provide advice as to who do you link up with in Singapore. And it doesn't take more than a few clicks, in a way, to get to the right person.Swyx [00:28:09]: I will say I've been dealing with EDB a little bit from my conference, and they've been extremely responsive and it's been nice to see, because I never get to see this out of government, nice to see that as someone that wants to bring a foreign business into Singapore, they're kind of rolling on the welcome mat.Josephine [00:28:24]: But we also recognise that in newer areas, there could be question of, oh, okay, this is something unfamiliar. The way in which we go about it is to say that, okay, even if there is no particular group or entity that champions a topic, we don't have to immediately turn away that opportunity. There must be a way for us to connect to the right group of people. So that tends to be the approach that we take.Swyx [00:28:52]: There's a bit of tension. The external perception of Singapore, people are very influenced by still the Michael Faye incident of like 30 years ago. And they feel us as conservative. And I feel like within Singapore, we know what the OB markers are, quote unquote, and then we can live within that. And it's actually, you can have a lot of experimentation within that. In fact, I think a lot of Singapore's success in finance has been due to a liberal acceptance of what we can do. I don't have a point apart from which to say, I hope that people who are looking to enter Singapore, don't have that preconception that we are hard to deal with because we're very eager, I think, is my perception.Josephine [00:29:29]: You need to hop on a plane and get to Singapore, and then we are happy to show them around.Swyx [00:29:34]: I'll take this chance to mention that, so next year, I kind of have been pitching as the Olympics of Singapore year, in the sense that ICLR, one of the big machine learning conferences is coming. I think one of your agencies had a part to do with that, and I'm bringing my own conference as well to host alongside. Excellent.Josephine [00:29:50]: So you're hosting a conference on AI engineers? Yes. Fantastic. You'll be very welcome. Oh, yeah. Thanks.Swyx [00:29:56]: I hope so. Well, you can't deny me entry.Josephine [00:29:58]: Should we have reason to? No, no, no.Swyx [00:30:02]: My general hope is that when conferences like ICLR happen in Singapore, that a lot of AI creators will be coming to Singapore for the first time, and they'll be able to see the kind of work that's being done. Yes. And that will be on the research side. And I hope that the engineering side grows as well. Yeah. We can talk about the talent side if you want.Josephine [00:30:18]: Well, it's quite interesting for me because I was listening to your podcast explaining the different dimensions of what an AI engineer does, and maybe we haven't called them AI engineers just yet, but we are seeing very healthy interest amongst people in companies that take an enthusiastic approach to try and see how AI can be helpful to their business. They seem to me to fit the bill. They seem to me already, whether they recognize it or not, to be the kind of AI engineers that you have in mind, meaning that they may not have done a PhD, they may not have gotten their degrees in computer science, they may not have themselves used NLP. They may not be steep in this area, but they are acquiring the skills very quickly. They are pivoting. They have the domain knowledge.Swyx [00:31:11]: Correct. It's not even about the pivoting. They might just train from the start, but the point is that they can take a foundation model that is capable of anything and actually fashion it into a useful product at the end of it. Yes. Right? Which is what we all want. Everybody downstairs wants that. Everybody here wants that. They want useful products, not just general capable models. I see the job title. There are some people walking around with their lanyards today, which is kind of cool. I think you have a lot of terms, which are AI creators, AI practitioners. I want to call out that there was this interesting goal to increase the triple the number of AI practitioners, which is part of the national AI strategy from 5,000 to 15,000. But people don't walk around with the title AI practitioners.Josephine [00:31:49]: Absolutely not.Swyx [00:31:50]: So I'm like, no, you have to focus on job title because job titles get people jobs. Yeah.Josephine [00:31:55]: Fair enough.Swyx [00:31:56]: It is just shorthand for companies to hire and it's a shorthand for people to skill up in whatever they need in order to get those jobs. I'm a very practical person. I think many Singaporeans are, and that's kind of my pitch on the AI engineer side.Josephine [00:32:10]: Thank you for that suggestion. We'll be thinking about how we also help Singaporeans understand the opportunities to be AI engineers, how they can get into it.Swyx [00:32:21]: A lot of governments are trying to do this, right? Like train their citizens and offer opportunities. I have not been in the Singapore workforce my adult career, so I don't really know what's available apart from SkillsFuture. I think that there are a lot of people wanting help and they go for courses, they get certificates. I don't know how we get them over the hump of going into industry and being successful engineers and I fear that we're going to create a whole bunch of certificates that don't mean anything. I don't know if you have any thoughts or responses on that.Josephine [00:32:53]: This idea that you don't want to over-rely on qualifications and credentials is also something that has been recognised in Singapore for some years now. That even includes your academic qualifications. Every now and then you do hear people decide that that's not the path that they're going to take and they're going to experiment and they're going to try different ways. Entrepreneurship could be one of it. For the broad workforce, what we have discovered is that the signal from the employer is usually the most important. As members of the workforce, they are very responsive to what employers are telling them. In the organisational context, like in the case of Grab, Alessio was talking about them shutting down completely for one week so that everyone can pick up generative AI skills. That sends a very strong signal. So quite a lot of the government funding will go to the company and say that it's an initiative you want to undertake. We recognise that it does take up some of your company's resources and we are willing to help with it. These are what we call company-led training programmes. But not everyone works for a company that is progressive. If the company is not ready to introduce an organisation-wide training initiative, then what does an individual do? So we have an alternative to offer. What we've done is to work with knowledgeable industry practitioners to identify for specific sectors, the kinds of technology that will disrupt jobs within the next three to five years. We're not choosing to look at a very long horizon because no one really knows how the future of work will be like in 15, 35 years, except in very broad terms. You can. You can say in very broad terms that you are going to have shorter learning cycles, you are going to have skills atrophy at a much quicker rate. Those broad things we can say. But specifically, the job that I'm doing today, the tasks that I have to perform today, how will I do them differently? I think in three to five years you can say. And you can also be quite specific. If you're in logistics, what kinds of technology will change the way you work? Robotics will be one of them. Robotics isn't as likely to change jobs in financial services, but AI and machine learning will. So if you identify the timeframe and if you identify the specific technologies, then you go to a specific job role and say, here's what you're doing today and here's what you're going to be doing in this new timeframe. Then you have a chance to allow individuals to take ownership of their learning and say then, how do I plug it? So one of the examples I like to give is that if you look at the accounting profession, a lot of the routine work will be replaceable. A lot of the tasks that are currently done by individuals can be done with a good model backing you. Now, then what happens to the individual? They have to be able to use the model. They have to be able to use the AI tools, and then they will have to pivot to doing other things. For example, there will still be a great shortage of people who are able to do forensics. And if you want someone to do forensics, for example, a financial crime has taken place. Within an organisation, there was a discovery that was fraud. How did this come about? That forensics work still needs an application of human understanding of the problem. Now, one of the jobs that we found is that a person with audit experience is actually quite suitable to do digital forensics because of their experience in audit. So then how do we help a person like that pivot? Good if his employer is interested to invest in his training, but we would also like to encourage individuals to refer to what we call jobs transformation maps to plan their own career trajectory. That's exactly what we have done. I think we have definitely more than a dozen of such job transformation maps available, and they cut across a variety of sectors.Swyx [00:37:05]: So it's like open source career change programmes. Exactly.Josephine [00:37:08]: I think you put it better than I, Sean.Swyx [00:37:11]: You can count on me for marketing.Josephine [00:37:13]: Yeah. So actually, one day, somebody is going to feed this into a model.Swyx [00:37:17]: Yeah, I was exactly thinking that.Josephine [00:37:19]: Yeah, they have to. Actually, if they just use REG, it wouldn't be too difficult, right? Because that document, to add to a database for the purposes of REG, they will still all fit into the window. It's going to be possible.Swyx [00:37:32]: This is a planning task. That is the talk of the week. The talk of the town this week, because of OpenAI's O1 model, that is, the next frontier after REG is planning and reasoning. So the steps need to make sense. And that is not typically a part of REG. REG is more recall of facts. And this is much more about planning, something that in sequence makes sense to get to a destination. Which could be really interesting. I would love the auditors to spell out their reasoning traces so that the language model guys can go and train on it.Josephine [00:38:04]: The planning part, I was trying to do this a couple of years ago. That was when I was still in the manpower ministry. We were talking to, in fact, some recruitment firms in the US. And it's exactly as you described. It's a planning process. To pivot from one career to the next is very often not a single step. There might be a path for you to take there. And if you were able to research the whole database of people's career paths, then potentially for every person that shows up and asks the question, you can use this database to map a new career path.Swyx [00:38:44]: I'm very open about my own career transition from finance to tech. That's why I brought Quincy Larson here to RAISE, because he taught me to code. And I think he can teach Singapore to code. Wow, why not?Josephine [00:38:55]: If they want to. Many do. Yeah, many do.Swyx [00:38:58]: Many do.Josephine [00:38:59]: So they will be complementary. There is the planning aspect of it. But if you wanted to use REG, it does not have individual personalised career paths to draw on. That one has got a frame, a proposal of how you could go about it. It could tell you, maybe from A, you could get to B. Whereas what you're talking about planning is that, well, here's how someone else has gotten from A to B by going through C, D, E in between. So they're complementary things.Swyx [00:39:33]: You and I talked a little bit this morning about winning the 30-year war, right? A lot of the plans are very short term, very like, how can we get it now? How can we, like, we got OpenAI to open an office here, great, let's go and get Anthropic, Google DeepMind, all these guys, the AI creators to move to Singapore. Hopefully we can get there, maybe not. Maybe, maybe not, right? It's hard to tell. The 30-year war, in my mind, is the kind of scale of operation that we did that leads me to speak English today. We as a government decided, strategically, English is an important thing, we'll teach it in schools, we'll adopt it as the language of business. And you and I discussed, like, is there something for code? Is it that level? Is it time for that kind of shift that we've done for English, for Mandarin? And like, is this the third one that we speak Python as a second language? And I want to just get your reactions to this crazy idea.Josephine [00:40:19]: This may not be so crazy, the idea that you need to acquire literacy in a particular field. I mean, some years ago, we decided that computer literacy was important for everyone to have and put in place quite a lot of programs in order to enable people at various stages of learning, including those who are already adult learners, to try and acquire these kinds of skills. So, you know, AI literacy is not a far-fetched idea. Is it all going to be coding? Perhaps for some people, this type of skills will be very relevant. Is it necessary for everyone? That's something I think the jury is out. I don't think that there is a clear conclusion. We've discussed this also with colleagues from around the world who are interested in trying to improve the educational outcomes. These are professional educators who are very interested in curriculum. They're interested in helping children become more effective in the future. And I think as far as we are able to see, there is no real landing point yet. Does everyone need to learn coding? And I think even for some of the participants that raised today, they did not necessarily start with a technical background. Some of them came into it quite late. This is not to say that we are completely close to the idea. I think it is something that we will continue to investigate. And the good thing about Singapore is that if and when we come to the conclusion that that's something that has to become either third language for everyone or has to become as widespread as mathematics or some other skillset, digital skills, or rather reading skills, then maybe it's something that we have to think about introducing on a wider scale.Alessio [00:42:17]: In July, we were in Singapore. We hosted the Sovereign AI Summit. We gave a presentation to a lot of the leaders from Temasek, GSE, EDVI about some of the stuff we've seen in Silicon Valley and how different countries are building out AI. Singapore was 15% of NVIDIA's revenue in Q3 of 2024. So you have a big investment in sovereign data infrastructure and the power grid and all the build-outs there. Malaysia has been a very active space for that too. How do you think about the importance of owning the infrastructure and understanding where the models are run, both from the autonomous workforce perspective, as you enable people to use this, but also you mentioned the elections. If you have a model that is being used to generate election-related content, you want to see where it runs, whether or not it's running in a safe environment. And obviously, there's more on the geopolitical side that we will not touch on. But why was that so important for Singapore to do so early, to make such a big investment? And how do you think about, especially the Saudi Sino-Asian, not bloc, but coalition, was at an office in Singapore, and you can see Indonesia from a window, you can see Malaysia from another window. So everything there is pretty interconnected.Josephine [00:43:28]: There seems to be a couple of strands in your question. There was a strand on digital infrastructure, and then I believe there was also a strand in terms of digital governance. How do you make sure that the environment continues to be supportive of innovation activities, but also that you manage the potential harms?Swyx [00:43:48]: I think there's a key term of sovereign AI as well that's kind of going around. I don't know what level this is at.Josephine [00:43:52]: What did you have in mind?Alessio [00:43:54]: Especially as you think about deploying some of these technologies and using them, you could deploy them in any data center in the world, in theory. But as they become a bigger part of your government, they become a bigger part of the infrastructure that the country runs on, maybe bringing them closer to you is more important. You're one of the most advanced countries in doing that. So I'm curious to hear what that planning was, the decision was going into it. It's like, this is something important for us to do today versus waiting later. We want to touch on the elections thing that you also mentioned, but that's kind of like a separate topic.Swyx [00:44:29]: He's squeezing two questions in one.Josephine [00:44:32]: Right. Alessio, a couple of years ago, we articulated for the government a cloud-first strategy, which therefore means that we accept that there are benefits of putting some of our workloads on the cloud. For one thing, it means that you don't have to have all the capacity available to you on a dedicated basis all the time. We acknowledge the need for flexibility. We acknowledge the need to be able to expand more quickly when the workload needs increase. But when we say a cloud-first strategy, it also means that there will be certain things that are perhaps not suitable to put on the cloud. And for those, you need to have a different set of infrastructure to support. So having a hybrid approach where some of the workloads, even for government, can go to the cloud, and then some of the workloads have to remain on-prem. I think that is a question of the mix. To the extent that you are able to identify the systems that are suitable to go to the cloud, then the need to have the workloads run on your on-prem systems is more circumscribed as a result. And potentially, you can devote better resources to safeguarding this smaller bucket rather than to try and spread your resources to protecting the whole, because you are also relying on security architecture of cloud service providers. So this hybrid approach, I think, has defined how we think about government workloads. In some sense, how we will think about AI workloads is not going to be entirely different. This is looking at the question from the government standpoint. But more broadly, if you think about Singapore as a whole, equally, not all the AI workloads can be hosted in Singapore. The analogy I like to make sometimes is, if you think about manufacturing, some of the earlier activities that were carried out in Singapore at some point in time became not feasible to continue. And then they have to be redistributed elsewhere. You're always going to be part of this supply chain. There is a global supply chain. There is a regional supply chain. And if everyone occupies a point in that supply chain that is optimal for their own circumstances, that plays to their advantage, then in fact, the whole system gains. That's also how we will think of it. Not all the AI workloads, no matter how much we expand our data center capacity, will be possible to host. Now, the only way we can host all the AI workloads is if we are totally unambitious. There's so little AI workload that you can host everything in Singapore. That has to be the case, right? I mean, if there's more AI workloads, it has to be distributed elsewhere. Does all of it require the latency, the very tight latency margins that you can tolerate and absolutely have to have them in Singapore? Some of it actually can be distributed, we'll have to see. But a reasonable guess would be that there is always going to be scope for redistribution. And in that sense, we look at the whole development in our region in a positive way. There is just more scope to be able to host these activities. For Southeast Asia?Swyx [00:47:44]: For Southeast Asia.Josephine [00:47:46]: Could be elsewhere in the world. And it's generally a helpful thing to happen. Keep in mind also that when you look at data center capacity in Singapore, relative to our GDP, relative to our population, it's already one of the most dense in the world. In that regard, that doesn't mean that we stop expanding the capacity. We are still trying to open up headroom. And that means greener data centers. And there are really two main ways of making the greener centers become a reality. One is you use less energy. One is you use greener energy. And we are pursuing activities on both fronts.Alessio [00:48:22]: I think one of the ideas in the Sovereign AI team is the government also becoming an intelligence provider. So if you think about the accounting work that you mentioned, some of these AI models can do some of that work. In the future, do you see the government being able to offer AI accountants as a service in the Singaporean infrastructure? I think that's one of the themes that are very new. But as you have, most countries have shrunken population, declining workforce. So there needs to be a way to close the gap for productivity growth. And I think governments owning some of this infrastructure for workloads and then re-offering it to local enterprises and small businesses will be one of the drivers of this gap closure. So yeah, I was just curious to get your thoughts. But it seems like you're already thinking about how to scale versus what to put outside of the country. But we were.Josephine [00:49:12]: We were thinking about access for startups. We were concerned about access by the research community. So we did set aside, I think, a reasonable budget in Singapore to make available compute capacity for these two groups in particular. What we are seeing is a lot of interest on the part of private providers. Some are hyperscalers, but they're not confined to hyperscalers. There are also data center operators that are offering to provide compute as a service. So they would be interested in linking up with entities that have the demand. We'll monitor the situation. In some sense, government ought to complement what is available in the private sector. It's not always the case that the government has to step in. So we'll look at where the needs are. Yeah.Swyx [00:50:04]: You told me that this is a change in the way the government works in the private sector recently.Josephine [00:50:09]: Certainly the idea that we were talking specifically about training. We said that with adult education in particular, it's very often the case that training intermediaries in the private sector are closer to the needs of industry. They're more familiar with what the employers want. The government should not assume that it needs to be the sole provider. So yes, our institutes of higher learning, meaning our polytechnics, our universities, they also run programs that are helpful to industry, but they're not the only ones. So it would have to depend on the situation, who is in a better position to fulfill those requirements. Yeah, excellent.Swyx [00:50:48]: We do have to wrap up for your other events going on. There's a lot of programs that the Singapore government and GovTech in particular does to make use of AI within the government to serve citizens and for internal use. I'll show that in the show notes for readers and listeners.Josephine [00:51:02]: Sure.Swyx [00:51:02]: But I was wondering if you personally have a favourite AI use case that has inspired you or maybe affected your life or kids' life in some way.Josephine [00:51:11]: That's a really good question. I would say I'm more proud of the fact that my colleagues are so enthusiastic. I'm not sure whether you've heard of it. Internally, we have something called AIBot. Yes.Swyx [00:51:21]: Your staff actually said to me like three times, like AIBot, AIBot, AIBot.Josephine [00:51:24]: Oh, okay.Swyx [00:51:25]: I was like, what is this AIBot?Josephine [00:51:26]: I've never heard of it.Swyx [00:51:26]: But apparently, it's like the RAG system for the Singapore government. Yeah.Josephine [00:51:30]: What happens is that we're encouraging our colleagues to experiment. And they have access to internal memos in each ministry or each agency that are treasure trove of how the agency has thought about a problem. So for example, if you're the Inland Revenue, and somebody comes to you with an appeal for a tax case. Well, it has been decided on before, many times over. But to a newer colleague, what is the decision to begin with? Now, they can input through a RAG system, all the stuff that they have done in the past. And it can help the newer colleague figure out the answer much faster. It doesn't mean that there's no longer a pause to understand, okay, why is it done this way? To your point earlier, that the reasoning part of it also has to come to the fore. That's potentially one next step that we can take. But at least there are many bots that are being developed now that are helping lots of agencies. It could be the Inland Revenue, as I mentioned earlier. It could be the agency that looks after our social security that has a certain degree of complexity. That if you simply did a search, or if you relied on our previous assistant, it was an assistant that was not so smart, if I could put it that way. It gave a standard answer. And it wasn't able really to understand your question. It was frustrating when after asking A, you say, okay, then how about B? And then how about C? It wasn't able to then take you to the next level. It just kept spewing out the same answer. So I think with the AI bots that we've created, the ability to have a more intelligent answer to the question has improved a great deal. But it's still early days yet. But they represent the kind of advancements that we'd like to see our colleagues make more of.Swyx [00:53:21]: Jensen Huang calls this preservation of institutional knowledge. You can actually transfer knowledge much easier. And I'm also very positive on the impact of this for an aging population. We have one of the lowest birth rates in the world. And making our systems, our government systems smarter for them, it is the most motivating thing as an engineer that I would work on.Josephine [00:53:37]: Great.Swyx [00:53:38]: Yeah, I'm very excited about that. Is there anything we should ask you, like open-ended?Josephine [00:53:43]: Unless you had another question that we didn't really finish.Alessio [00:53:47]: Yeah, I think just the elections piece. Yeah, Singapore's running for elections.Swyx [00:53:52]: How worried are you? How worried are you about AI? And it's a very topical thing for the US as well.Josephine [00:53:58]: Well, we have seen it show up elsewhere. It's not only in the US. There have been several other elections. I think in Slovakia, for example, there was material, there was content that was put out that eventually turned out to be false. And it was very damaging to the person being portrayed in that content. So the way we think about it is that political discourse has to be built on the foundation of facts. It's very difficult to have honest discourse. You can be critical of each other. It doesn't mean that I have to agree with your opinions. It doesn't mean that only what you say or what somebody else says is acceptable. But the discourse has to be based on facts. So the troubling point about AI-generated content or other synthetic material is that it no longer contains facts. It's made up. So that in itself is problematic. So if a person is depicted in a realistic manner to be saying something that he did not say, or to be doing something that he did not do, that's very confusing for people who want to participate in the discourse. In an election, it could also affect people favorably or in a prejudicial manner, and neither of it is right. So we have to take a decision that when it comes to an election, we have to decide on the basis of what actually happened, what was actually said. We may not like what was said, but that was what was actually said. You can't create something and override it, as it were. So that was where we were coming from. It is, in a way, a very specific set of requirements that we are putting in place, which is that in an election setting, we should only be shown saying what we actually said, or doing what we actually did. And anything else would be an assault on factual accuracy. And that should not become a norm in our election. And people should be able to trust what was said and what they are seeing. So that's where it's coming from.Swyx [00:56:13]: Thank you so much for your time. You've been extremely generous to have a minister as a listener of our little thing, but hopefully it's useful to you as well. If you're interested in anything, let us know.Josephine [00:56:21]: I hope your AI engineer conference in Singapore is a great success. Yeah, well, you can help us.Swyx [00:56:26]: Okay. 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CEOs of publicly traded companies are often in the news talking about their new AI initiatives, but few of them have built anything with it. Drew Houston from Dropbox is different; he has spent over 400 hours coding with LLMs in the last year and is now refocusing his 2,500+ employees around this new way of working, 17 years after founding the company.Timestamps00:00 Introductions00:43 Drew's AI journey04:14 Revalidating expectations of AI08:23 Simulation in self-driving vs. knowledge work12:14 Drew's AI Engineering setup15:24 RAG vs. long context in AI models18:06 From "FileGPT" to Dropbox AI23:20 Is storage solved?26:30 Products vs Features30:48 Building trust for data access33:42 Dropbox Dash and universal search38:05 The evolution of Dropbox42:39 Building a "silicon brain" for knowledge work48:45 Open source AI and its impact51:30 "Rent, Don't Buy" for AI54:50 Staying relevant58:57 Founder Mode01:03:10 Advice for founders navigating AI01:07:36 Building and managing teams in a growing companyTranscriptAlessio [00:00:00]: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO at Decibel Partners, and there's no Swyx today, but I'm joined by Drew Houston of Dropbox. Welcome, Drew.Drew [00:00:14]: Thanks for having me.Alessio [00:00:15]: So we're not going to talk about the Dropbox story. We're not going to talk about the Chinatown bus and the flash drive and all that. I think you've talked enough about it. Where I want to start is you as an AI engineer. So as you know, most of our audience is engineering folks, kind of like technology leaders. You obviously run Dropbox, which is a huge company, but you also do a lot of coding. I think that's how you spend almost 400 hours, just like coding. So let's start there. What was the first interaction you had with an LLM API and when did the journey start for you?Drew [00:00:43]: Yeah. Well, I think probably all AI engineers or whatever you call an AI engineer, those people started out as engineers before that. So engineering is my first love. I mean, I grew up as a little kid. I was that kid. My first line of code was at five years old. I just really loved, I wanted to make computer games, like this whole path. That also led me into startups and eventually starting Dropbox. And then with AI specifically, I studied computer science, I got my, I did my undergrad, but I didn't do like grad level computer science. I didn't, I sort of got distracted by all the startup things, so I didn't do grad level work. But about several years ago, I made a couple of things. So one is I sort of, I knew I wanted to go from being an engineer to a founder. And then, but sort of the becoming a CEO part was sort of backed into the job. And so a couple of realizations. One is that, I mean, there's a lot of like repetitive and like manual work you have to do as an executive that is actually lends itself pretty well to automation, both for like my own convenience. And then out of interest in learning, I guess what we call like classical machine learning these days, I started really trying to wrap my head around understanding machine learning and informational retrieval more, more formally. So I'd say maybe 2016, 2017 started me writing these more successively, more elaborate scripts to like understand basic like classifiers and regression and, and again, like basic information retrieval and NLP back in those days. And there's sort of like two things that came out of that. One is techniques are super powerful. And even just like studying like old school machine learning was a pretty big inversion of the way I had learned engineering, right? You know, I started programming when everyone starts programming and you're, you're sort of the human, you're giving an algorithm to the, and spelling out to the computer how it should run it. And then machine learning, here's machine learning where it's like actually flip that, like give it sort of the answer you want and it'll figure out the algorithm, which was pretty mind bending. And it was both like pretty powerful when I would write tools, like figure out like time audits or like, where's my time going? Is this meeting a one-on-one or is it a recruiting thing or is it a product strategy thing? I started out doing that manually with my assistant, but then found that this was like a very like automatable task. And so, which also had the side effect of teaching me a lot about machine learning. But then there was this big problem, like anytime you, it was very good at like tabular structured data, but like anytime it hit, you know, the usual malformed English that humans speak, it would just like fall over. I had to kind of abandon a lot of the things that I wanted to build because like there's no way to like parse text. Like maybe it would sort of identify the part of speech in a sentence or something. But then fast forward to the LLM, I mean actually I started trying some of like this, what we would call like very small LLMs before kind of the GPT class models. And it was like super hard to get those things working. So like these 500 parameter models would just be like hallucinating and repeating and you know. So actually I'd kind of like written it off a little bit. But then the chat GPT launch and GPT-3 for sure. And then once people figured out like prompting and instruction tuning, this was sort of like November-ish 2022 like everybody else sort of that the chat GPT launch being the starting gun for the whole AI era of computing and then having API access to three and then early access to GPT-4. I was like, oh man, it's happening. And so I was literally on my honeymoon and we're like on a beach in Thailand and I'm like coding these like AI tools to automate like writing or to assist with writing and all these different use cases.Alessio [00:04:14]: You're like, I'm never going back to work. I'm going to automate all of it before I get back.Drew [00:04:17]: And I was just, you know, ever since then, I mean, I've always been like coding like prototypes and just stuff to make my life more convenient, but like escalated a lot after 22. And yeah, I spent, I checked, I think it was probably like over 400 hours this year so far coding because I had my paternity leave where I was able to work on some special projects. But yeah, it's a super important part of like my whole learning journey is like being really hands-on with these things. And I mean, it's probably not a typical recipe, but I really love to get down to the metal as far as how this stuff works.Alessio [00:04:47]: Yeah. So Swyx and I were with Sam Altman in October 22. We were like at a hack day at OpenAI and that's why we started this podcast eventually. But you did an interview with Sam like seven years ago and he asked you what's the biggest opportunity in startups and you were like machine learning and AI and you were almost like too early, right? It's like maybe seven years ago, the models weren't quite there. How should people think about revalidating like expectations of this technology? You know, I think even today people will tell you, oh, models are not really good at X because they were not good 12 months ago, but they're good today.Drew [00:05:19]: What's your project? Heuristics for thinking about that or how is, yeah, I think the way I look at it now is pretty, has evolved a lot since when I started. I mean, I think everybody intuitively starts with like, all right, let's try to predict the future or imagine like what's this great end state we're going to get to. And the tricky thing is like often those prognostications are right, but they're right in terms of direction, but not when. For example, you know, even in the early days of the internet, 90s when things were even like tech space and you know, even before like the browser or things like that, people were like, oh man, you're going to have, you know, you're going to be able to order food, get like a Snickers delivered to your house, you're going to be able to watch any movie ever created. And they were right. But they were like, you know, it took 20 years for that to actually happen. And before you got to DoorDash, you had to get, you started with like Webvan and Cosmo and before you get to Spotify, you had to do like Napster and Kazaa and LimeWire and like a bunch of like broken Britney Spears MP3s and malware. So I think the big lesson is being early is the same as being wrong. Being late is the same as being wrong. So really how do you calibrate timing? And then I think with AI, it's the same thing that people are like, oh, it's going to completely upend society and all these positive and negative ways. I think that's like most of those things are going to come true. The question is like, when is that going to happen? And then with AI specifically, I think there's also, in addition to sort of the general tech category or like jumping too fast to the future, I think that AI is particularly susceptible to that. And you look at self-driving, right? This idea of like, oh my God, you can have a self-driving car captured everybody's imaginations 10, 12 years ago. And you know, people are like, oh man, in two years, there's not going to be another year. There's not going to be a human driver on the road to be seen. It didn't work out that way, right? We're still 10, 12 years later where we're in a world where you can sort of sometimes get a Waymo in like one city on earth. Exciting, but just took a lot longer than people think. And the reason is there's a lot of engineering challenges, but then there's a lot of other like societal time constants that are hard to compress. So one thing I think you can learn from things like self-driving is they have these levels of autonomy that's a useful kind of framework in driving or these like maturity levels. People sort of skip to like level five, full autonomy, or we're going to have like an autonomous knowledge worker that's just going to take, that's going to, and then we won't need humans anymore kind of projection that that's going to take a long time. But then when you think about level one or level two, like these little assistive experiences, you know, we're seeing a lot of traction with those. So what you see really working is the level one autonomy in the AI world would be like the tab auto-complete and co-pilot, right? And then, you know, maybe a little higher is like the chatbot type interface. Obviously you want to get to the highest level you can to build a good product, but the reliability just isn't, and the capability just isn't there in the early innings. And so, and then you think of other level one, level two type things, like Google Maps probably did more for self-driving than in literal self-driving, like a billion people have like the ability to have like maps and navigation just like taken care of for you autonomously. So I think the timing and maturity are really important factors to include.Alessio [00:08:23]: The thing with self-driving, maybe one of the big breakthroughs was like simulation. So it's like, okay, instead of driving, we can simulate these environments. It's really hard to do when knowledge work, you know, how do you simulate like a product review? How do you simulate these things? I'm curious if you've done any experiments. I know some companies have started to build kind of like a virtual personas that you can like bounce ideas off of.Drew [00:08:42]: I mean, fortunately in a company you generate lots of, you know, actual human training data all the time. And then I also just like start with myself, like, all right, I can, you know, it's pretty tricky even within your company to be like, all right, let's open all this up as quote training data. But, you know, I can start with my own emails or my own calendar or own stuff without running into the same kind of like privacy or other concerns. So I often like start with my own stuff. And so that is like a one level of bootstrapping, but actually four or five years ago during COVID, we decided, you know, a lot of companies were thinking about how do we go back to work? And so we decided to really lean into remote and distributed work because I thought, you know, this is going to be the biggest change to the way we work in our lifetimes. And COVID kind of ripped up a bunch of things, but I think everybody was sort of pleasantly surprised how with a lot of knowledge work, you could just keep going. And actually you were sort of fine. Work was decoupled from your physical environment, from being in a physical place, which meant that things people had dreamed about since the fifties or sixties, like telework, like you actually could work from anywhere. And that was now possible. So we decided to really lean into that because we debated, should we sort of hit the fast forward button or should we hit the rewind button and go back to 2019? And obviously that's been playing out over the last few years. And we decided to basically turn, we went like 90% remote. We still, the in-person part's really important. We can kind of come back to our working model, but we're like, yeah, this is, everybody is going to be in some kind of like distributed or hybrid state. So like instead of like running away from this, like let's do a full send, let's really go into it. Let's live in the future. A few years before our customers, let's like turn Dropbox into a lab for distributed work. And we do that like quite literally, both of the working model and then increasingly with our products. And then absolutely, like we have products like Dropbox Dash, which is our universal search product. That was like very elevated in priority for me after COVID because like now you have, we're putting a lot more stress on the system and on our screens, it's a lot more chaotic and overwhelming. And so even just like getting the right information, the right person at the right time is a big fundamental challenge in knowledge work and these, in the distributed world, like big problem today is still getting, you know, has been getting bigger. And then for a lot of these other workflows, yeah, there's, we can both get a lot of natural like training data from just our own like strategy docs and processes. There's obviously a lot you can do with synthetic data and you know, actually like LMs are pretty good at being like imitating generic knowledge workers. So it's, it's kind of funny that way, but yeah, the way I look at it is like really turn Dropbox into a lab for distributed work. You think about things like what are the big problems we're going to have? It's just the complexity on our screens just keeps growing and the whole environment gets kind of more out of sync with what makes us like cognitively productive and engaged. And then even something like Dash was initially seeded, I made a little personal search engine because I was just like personally frustrated with not being able to find my stuff. And along that whole learning journey with AI, like the vector search or semantic search, things like that had just been the tooling for that. The open source stuff had finally gotten to a place where it was a pretty good developer experience. And so, you know, in a few days I had sort of a hello world type search engine and I'm like, oh my God, like this completely works. You don't even have to get the keywords right. The relevance and ranking is super good. We even like untuned. So I guess that's to say like I've been surprised by if you choose like the right algorithm and the right approach, you can actually get like super good results without having like a ton of data. And even with LLMs, you can apply all these other techniques to give them, kind of bootstrap kind of like task maturity pretty quickly.Alessio [00:12:14]: Before we jump into Dash, let's talk about the Drew Haas and AI engineering stuff. So IDE, let's break that down. What IDE do you use? Do you use Cursor, VS Code, do you use any coding assistant, like WeChat, is it just autocomplete?Drew [00:12:28]: Yeah, yeah. Both. So I use VS Code as like my daily driver, although I'm like super excited about things like Cursor or the AI agents. I have my own like stack underneath that. I mean, some off the shelf parts, some pretty custom. So I use the continue.dev just like AI chat UI basically as just the UI layer, but I also proxy the request. I proxy the request to my own backend, which is sort of like a router. You can use any backend. I mean, Sonnet 3.5 is probably the best all around. But then these things are like pretty limited if you don't give them the right context. And so part of what the proxy does is like there's a separate thing where I can say like include all these files by default with the request. And then it becomes a lot easier and like without like cutting and pasting. And I'm building mostly like prototype toy apps, so it's like a front end React thing and a Python backend thing. And so it can do these like end to end diffs basically. And then I also like love being able to host everything locally or do it offline. So I have my own, when I'm on a plane or something or where like you don't have access or the internet's not reliable, I actually bring a gaming laptop on the plane with me. It's like a little like blue briefcase looking thing. And then I like literally hook up a GPU like into one of the outlets. And then I have, I can do like transcription, I can do like autocomplete, like I have an 8 billion, like Llama will run fine.Alessio [00:13:44]: And you're using like a Llama to run the model?Drew [00:13:47]: No, I use, I have my own like LLM inference stack. I mean, it uses the backend somewhat interchangeable. So everything from like XLlama to VLLM or SGLang, there's a bunch of these different backends you can use. And then I started like working on stuff before all this tooling was like really available. So you know, over the last several years, I've built like my own like whole crazy environment and like in stack here. So I'm a little nuts about it.Alessio [00:14:12]: Yeah. What's the state of the art for, I guess not state of the art, but like when it comes to like frameworks and things like that, do you like using them? I think maybe a lot of people say, hey, things change so quickly, they're like trying to abstract things. Yeah.Drew [00:14:24]: It's maybe too early today. As much as I do a lot of coding, I have to be pretty surgical with my time. I don't have that much time, which means I have to sort of like scope my innovation to like very specific places or like my time. So for the front end, it'll be like a pretty vanilla stack, like a Next.js, React based thing. And then these are toy apps. So it's like Python, Flask, SQLite, and then all the different, there's a whole other thing on like the backend. Like how do you get, sort of run all these models locally or with a local GPU? The scaffolding on the front end is pretty straightforward, the scaffolding on the backend is pretty straightforward. Then a lot of it is just like the LLM inference and control over like fine grained aspects of how you do generation, caching, things like that. And then there's a lot, like a lot of the work is how do you take, sort of go to an IMAP, like take an email, get a new, or a document or a spreadsheet or any of these kinds of primitives that you work with and then translate them, render them in a format that an LLM can understand. So there's like a lot of work that goes into that too. Yeah.Alessio [00:15:24]: So I built a kind of like email triage system and like I would say 80% of the code is like Google and like pulling emails and then the actual AI part is pretty easy.Drew [00:15:34]: Yeah. And even, same experience. And then I tried to do all these like NLP things and then to my dismay, like a bunch of reg Xs were like, got you like 95% of the way there. So I still leave it running, I just haven't really built like the LLM powered version of it yet. Yeah.Alessio [00:15:51]: So do you have any thoughts on rag versus long context, especially, I mean with Dropbox, you know? Sure. Do you just want to shove things in? Like have you seen that be a lot better?Drew [00:15:59]: Well, they kind of have different strengths and weaknesses, so you need both for different use cases. I mean, it's been awesome in the last 12 months, like now you have these like long context models that can actually do a lot. You can put a book in, you know, Sonnet's context and then now with the later versions of LLAMA, you can have 128k context. So that's sort of the new normal, which is awesome and that, that wasn't even the case a year ago. That said, models don't always use, and certainly like local models don't use the full context well fully yet, and actually if you provide too much irrelevant context, the quality degrades a lot. And so I say in the open source world, like we're still just getting to the cusp of like the full context is usable. And then of course, like when you're something like Dropbox Dash, like it's basically building this whole like brain that's like read everything your company's ever written. And so that's not going to fit into your context window, so you need rag just as a practical reality. And even for a lot of similar reasons, you need like RAM and hard disk in conventional computer architecture. And I think these things will keep like horse trading, like maybe if, you know, a million or 10 million is the new, tokens is the new context length, maybe that shifts. Maybe the bigger picture is like, it's super exciting to talk about the LLM and like that piece of the puzzle, but there's this whole other scaffolding of more conventional like retrieval or conventional machine learning, especially because you have to scale up products to like millions of people you do in your toy app is not going to scale to that from a cost or latency or performance standpoint. So I think you really need these like hybrid architectures that where you have very like purpose fit tools, or you're probably not using Sonnet 3.5 for all of your normal product use cases. You're going to use like a fine tuned 8 billion model or sort of the minimum model that gets you the right output. And then a smaller model also is like a lot more cost and latency versus like much better characteristics on that front.Alessio [00:17:48]: Yeah. Let's jump into the Dropbox AI story. So sure. Your initial prototype was Files GPT. How did it start? And then how did you communicate that internally? You know, I know you have a pretty strong like mammal culture. One where you're like, okay, Hey, we got to really take this seriously.Drew [00:18:06]: Yeah. Well, on the latter, it was, so how do we say like how we took Dropbox, how AI seriously as a company started kind of around that time, that honeymoon time, unfortunately. In January, I wrote this like memo to the company, like around basically like how we need to play offense in 23. And that most of the time the kind of concrete is set and like the winners are the winners and things are kind of frozen. But then with these new eras of computing, like the PC or the internet or the phone or the concrete on freezes and you can sort of build, do things differently and have a new set of winners. It's sort of like a new season starts as a result of a lot of that sort of personal hacking and just like thinking about this. I'm like, yeah, this is an inflection point in the industry. Like we really need to change how we think about our strategy. And then becoming an AI first company was probably the headline thing that we did. And then, and then that got, and then calling on everybody in the company to really think about in your world, how is AI going to reshape your workflows or what sort of the AI native way of thinking about your job. File GPT, which is sort of this Dropbox AI kind of initial concept that actually came from our engineering team as, you know, as we like called on everybody, like really think about what we should be doing that's new or different. So it was kind of organic and bottoms up like a bunch of engineers just kind of hacked that together. And then that materialized as basically when you preview a file on Dropbox, you can have kind of the most straightforward possible integration of AI, which is a good thing. Like basically you have a long PDF, you want to be able to ask questions of it. So like a pretty basic implementation of RAG and being able to do that when you preview a file on Dropbox. So that was the origin of that, that was like back in 2023 when we released just like the starting engines had just, you know, gotten going.Alessio [00:19:53]: It's funny where you're basically like these files that people have, they really don't want them in a way, you know, like you're storing all these files and like you actually don't want to interact with them. You want a layer on top of it. And that's kind of what also takes you to Dash eventually, which is like, Hey, you actually don't really care where the file is. You just want to be the place that aggregates it. How do you think about what people will know about files? You know, are files the actual file? Are files like the metadata and they're just kind of like a pointer that goes somewhere and you don't really care where it is?Drew [00:20:21]: Yeah.Alessio [00:20:22]: Any thoughts about?Drew [00:20:23]: Totally. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of potential complexity in that question, right? Is it a, you know, what's the difference between a file and a URL? And you can go into the technicals, it's like pass by value, pass by reference. Okay. What's the format like? All right. So it starts with a primitive. It's not really a flat file. It's like a structured data. You're sort of collaborative. Yeah. That's keeping in sync. Blah, blah, blah. I actually don't start there at all. I just start with like, what do people, like, what do humans, let's work back from like how humans think about this stuff or how they should think about this stuff. Meaning like, I don't think about, Oh, here are my files and here are my links or cloud docs. I'm just sort of like, Oh, here's my stuff. This, this, here's sort of my documents. Here's my media. Here's my projects. Here are the people I'm working with. So it starts from primitives more like those, like how do people, how do humans think about these things? And then, then start from like a more ideal experience. Because if you think about it, we kind of have this situation that will look like particularly medieval in hindsight where, all right, how do you manage your work stuff? Well, on all, you know, on one side of your screen, you have this file browser that literally hasn't changed since the early eighties, right? You could take someone from the original Mac and sit them in front of like a computer and they'd be like, this is it. And that's, it's been 40 years, right? Then on the other side of your screen, you have like Chrome or a browser that has so many tabs open, you can no longer see text or titles. This is the state of the art for how we manage stuff at work. Interestingly, neither of those experiences was purpose-built to be like the home for your work stuff or even anything related to it. And so it's important to remember, we get like stuck in these local maxima pretty often in tech where we're obviously aware that files are not going away, especially in certain domains. So that format really matters and where files are still going to be the tool you use for like if there's something big, right? If you're a big video file, that kind of format in a file makes sense. There's a bunch of industries where it's like construction or architecture or sort of these domain specific areas, you know, media generally, if you're making music or photos or video, that all kind of fits in the big file zone where Dropbox is really strong and that's like what customers love us for. It's also pretty obvious that a lot of stuff that used to be in, you know, Word docs or Excel files, like all that has tilted towards the browser and that tilt is going to continue. So with Dash, we wanted to make something that was really like cloud-native, AI-native and deliberately like not be tied down to the abstractions of the file system. Now on the other hand, it would be like ironic and bad if we then like fractured the experience that you're like, well, if it touches a file, it's a syncing metaphor to this app. And if it's a URL, it's like this completely different interface. So there's a convergence that I think makes sense over time. But you know, but I think you have to start from like, not so much the technology, start from like, what do the humans want? And then like, what's the idealized product experience? And then like, what are the technical underpinnings of that, that can make that good experience?Alessio [00:23:20]: I think it's kind of intuitive that in Dash, you can connect Google Drive, right? Because you think about Dropbox, it's like, well, it's file storage, you really don't want people to store files somewhere, but the reality is that they do. How do you think about the importance of storage and like, do you kind of feel storage is like almost solved, where it's like, hey, you can kind of store these files anywhere, what matters is like access.Drew [00:23:38]: It's a little bit nuanced in that if you're dealing with like large quantities of data, it actually does matter. The implementation matters a lot or like you're dealing with like, you know, 10 gig video files like that, then you sort of inherit all the problems of sync and have to go into a lot of the challenges that we've solved. Switching on a pretty important question, like what is the value we provide? What does Dropbox do? And probably like most people, I would have said like, well, Dropbox syncs your files. And we didn't even really have a mission of the company in the beginning. I'm just like, yeah, I just don't want to carry a thumb driving around and life would be a lot better if our stuff just like lived in the cloud and I just didn't have to think about like, what device is the thing on or what operating, why are these operating systems fighting with each other and incompatible? You know, I just want to abstract all of that away. But then so we thought, even we were like, all right, Dropbox provides storage. But when we talked to our customers, they're like, that's not how we see this at all. Like actually, Dropbox is not just like a hard drive in the cloud. It's like the place where I go to work or it's a place like I started a small business is a place where my dreams come true. Or it's like, yeah, it's not keeping files in sync. It's keeping people in sync. It's keeping my team in sync. And so they're using this kind of language where we're like, wait, okay, yeah, because I don't know, storage probably is a commodity or what we do is a commodity. But then we talked to our customers like, no, we're not buying the storage, we're buying like the ability to access all of our stuff in one place. We're buying the ability to share everything and sort of, in a lot of ways, people are buying the ability to work from anywhere. And Dropbox was kind of, the fact that it was like file syncing was an implementation detail of this higher order need that they had. So I think that's where we start too, which is like, what is the sort of higher order thing, the job the customer is hiring Dropbox to do? Storage in the new world is kind of incidental to that. I mean, it still matters for things like video or those kinds of workflows. The value of Dropbox had never been, we provide you like the cheapest bits in the cloud. But it is a big pivot from Dropbox is the company that syncs your files to now where we're going is Dropbox is the company that kind of helps you organize all your cloud content. I started the company because I kept forgetting my thumb drive. But the question I was really asking was like, why is it so hard to like find my stuff, organize my stuff, share my stuff, keep my stuff safe? You know, I'm always like one washing machine and I would leave like my little thumb drive with all my prior company stuff on in the pocket of my shorts and then almost wash it and destroy it. And so I was like, why do we have to, this is like medieval that we have to think about this. So that same mindset is how I approach where we're going. But I think, and then unfortunately the, we're sort of back to the same problems. Like it's really hard to find my stuff. It's really hard to organize myself. It's hard to share my stuff. It's hard to secure my content at work. Now the problem is the same, the shape of the problem and the shape of the solution is pretty different. You know, instead of a hundred files on your desktop, it's now a hundred tabs in your browser, et cetera. But I think that's the starting point.Alessio [00:26:30]: How has the idea of a product evolved for you? So, you know, famously Steve Jobs started by Dropbox and he's like, you know, this is just a feature. It's not a product. And then you build like a $10 billion feature. How in the age of AI, how do you think about, you know, maybe things that used to be a product are now features because the AI on top of it, it's like the product, like what's your mental model? Do you think about it?Drew [00:26:50]: Yeah. So I don't think there's really like a bright line. I don't know if like I use the word features and products and my mental model that much of how I break it down because it's kind of a, it's a good question. I mean, I don't not think about features, I don't think about products, but it does start from that place of like, all right, we have all these new colors we can paint with and all right, what are these higher order needs that are sort of evergreen, right? So people will always have stuff at work. They're always need to be able to find it or, you know, all the verbs I just mentioned. It's like, okay, how can we make like a better painting and how can we, and then how can we use some of these new colors? And then, yeah, it's like pretty clear that after the large models, the way you find stuff share stuff, it's going to be completely different after COVID, it's going to be completely different. So that's the starting point. But I think it is also important to, you know, you have to do more than just work back from the customer and like what they're trying to do. Like you have to think about, and you know, we've, we've learned a lot of this the hard way sometimes. Okay. You might start with a customer. You might start with a job to be on there. You're like, all right, what's the solution to their problem? Or like, can we build the best product that solves that problem? Right. Like what's the best way to find your stuff in the modern world? Like, well, yeah, right now the status quo for the vast majority of the billion, billion knowledge workers is they have like 10 search boxes at work that each search 10% of your stuff. Like that's clearly broken. Obviously you should just have like one search box. All right. So we can do that. And that also has to be like, I'll come back to defensibility in a second, but like, can we build the right solution that is like meaningfully better from the status quo? Like, yes, clearly. Okay. Then can we like get distribution and growth? Like that's sort of the next thing you learned is as a founder, you start with like, what's the product? What's the product? What's the product? Then you're like, wait, wait, we need distribution and we need a business model. So those are the next kind of two dominoes you have to knock down or sort of needles you have to thread at the same time. So all right, how do we grow? I mean, if Dropbox 1.0 is really this like self-serve viral model that there's a lot of, we sort of took a borrowed from a lot of the consumer internet playbook and like what Facebook and social media were doing and then translated that to sort of the business world. How do you get distribution, especially as a startup? And then a business model, like, all right, storage happened to be something in the beginning happened to be something people were willing to pay for. They recognize that, you know, okay, if I don't buy something like Dropbox, I'm going to have to buy an external hard drive. I'm going to have to buy a thumb drive and I have to pay for something one way or another. People are already paying for things like backup. So we felt good about that. But then the last domino is like defensibility. Okay. So you build this product or you get the business model, but then, you know, what do you do when the incumbents, the next chess move for them is I just like copy, bundle, kill. So they're going to copy your product. They'll bundle it with their platforms and they'll like give it away for free or no added cost. And, you know, we had a lot of, you know, scar tissue from being on the wrong side of that. Now you don't need to solve all four for all four or five variables or whatever at once or you can sort of have, you know, some flexibility. But the more of those gates that you get through, you sort of add a 10 X to your valuation. And so with AI, I think, you know, there's been a lot of focus on the large language model, but it's like large language models are a pretty bad business from a, you know, you sort of take off your tech lens and just sort of business lens. Like there's sort of this weirdly self-commoditizing thing where, you know, models only have value if they're kind of on this like Pareto frontier of size and quality and cost. Being number two, you know, if you're not on that frontier, the second the frontier moves out, which it moves out every week, like your model literally has zero economic value because it's dominated by the new thing. LLMs generate output that can be used to train or improve. So there's weird, peculiar things that are specific to the large language model. And then you have to like be like, all right, where's the value going to accrue in the stack or the value chain? And, you know, certainly at the bottom with Nvidia and the semiconductor companies, and then it's going to be at the top, like the people who have the customer relationship who have the application layer. Those are a few of the like lenses that I look at a question like that through.Alessio [00:30:48]: Do you think AI is making people more careful about sharing the data at all? People are like, oh, data is important, but it's like, whatever, I'm just throwing it out there. Now everybody's like, but are you going to train on my data? And like your data is actually not that good to train on anyway. But like how have you seen, especially customers, like think about what to put in, what to not?Drew [00:31:06]: I mean, everybody should be. Well, everybody is concerned about this and nobody should be concerned about this, right? Because nobody wants their personal companies information to be kind of ground up into little pellets to like sell you ads or train the next foundation model. I think it's like massively top of mind for every one of our customers, like, and me personally, and with my Dropbox hat on, it's like so fundamental. And, you know, we had experience with this too at Dropbox 1.0, the same kind of resistance, like, wait, I'm going to take my stuff on my hard drive and put it on your server somewhere. Are you serious? What could possibly go wrong? And you know, before that, I was like, wait, are you going to sell me, I'm going to put my credit card number into this website? And before that, I was like, hey, I'm going to take all my cash and put it in a bank instead of under my mattress. You know, so there's a long history of like tech and comfort. So in some sense, AI is kind of another round of the same thing, but the issues are real. And then when I think about like defensibility for Dropbox, like that's actually a big advantage that we have is one, our incentives are very aligned with our customers, right? We only get, we only make money if you pay us and you only pay us if we do a good job. So we don't have any like side hustle, you know, we're not training the next foundation model. You know, we're not trying to sell you ads. Actually we're not even trying to lock you into an ecosystem, like the whole point of Dropbox is it works, you know, everywhere. Because I think one of the big questions we've circling around is sort of like, in the world of AI, where should our lane be? Like every startup has to ask, or in every big company has to ask, like, where can we really win? But to me, it was like a lot of the like trust advantages, platform agnostic, having like a very clean business model, not having these other incentives. And then we also are like super transparent. We were transparent early on. We're like, all right, we're going to establish these AI principles, very table stakes stuff of like, here's transparency. We want to give people control. We want to cover privacy, safety, bias, like fairness, all these things. And we put that out up front to put some sort of explicit guardrails out where like, hey, we're, you know, because everybody wants like a trusted partner as they sort of go into the wild world of AI. And then, you know, you also see people cutting corners and, you know, or just there's a lot of uncertainty or, you know, moving the pieces around after the fact, which no one feels good about.Alessio [00:33:14]: I mean, I would say the last 10, 15 years, the race was kind of being the system of record, being the storage provider. I think today it's almost like, hey, if I can use Dash to like access my Google Drive file, why would I pay Google for like their AI feature? So like vice versa, you know, if I can connect my Dropbook storage to this other AI assistant, how do you kind of think about that, about, you know, not being able to capture all the value and how open people will stay? I think today things are still pretty open, but I'm curious if you think things will get more closed or like more open later.Drew [00:33:42]: Yeah. Well, I think you have to get the value exchange right. And I think you have to be like a trustworthy partner or like no one's going to partner with you if they think you're going to eat their lunch, right? Or if you're going to disintermediate them and like all the companies are quite sophisticated with how they think about that. So we try to, like, we know that's going to be the reality. So we're actually not trying to eat anyone's like Google Drive's lunch or anything. Actually we'll like integrate with Google Drive, we'll integrate with OneDrive, really any of the content platforms, even if they compete with file syncing. So that's actually a big strategic shift. We're not really reliant on being like the store of record and there are pros and cons to this decision. But if you think about it, we're basically like providing all these apps more engagement. We're like helping users do what they're really trying to do, which is to get, you know, that Google Doc or whatever. And we're not trying to be like, oh, by the way, use this other thing. This is all part of our like brand reputation. It's like, no, we give people freedom to use whatever tools or operating system they want. We're not taking anything away from our partners. We're actually like making it, making their thing more useful or routing people to those things. I mean, on the margin, then we have something like, well, okay, to the extent you do rag and summarize things, maybe that doesn't generate a click. Okay. You know, we also know there's like infinity investment going into like the work agents. So we're not really building like a co-pilot or Gemini competitor. Not because we don't like those. We don't find that thing like captivating. Yeah, of course. But just like, you know, you learn after some time in this business that like, yeah, there's some places that are just going to be such kind of red oceans or just like super big battlefields. Everybody's kind of trying to solve the same problem and they just start duplicating all each other effort. And then meanwhile, you know, I think the concern would be is like, well, there's all these other problems that aren't being properly addressed by AI. And I was concerned that like, yeah, and everybody's like fixated on the agent or the chatbot interface, but forgetting that like, hey guys, like we have the opportunity to like really fix search or build a self-organizing Dropbox or environment or there's all these other things that can be a compliment. Because we don't really want our customers to be thinking like, well, do I use Dash or do I use co-pilot? And frankly, none of them do. In a lot of ways, actually, some of the things that we do on the security front with Dash for Business are a good compliment to co-pilot. Because as part of Dash for Business, we actually give admins, IT, like universal visibility and control over all the different, what's being shared in your company across all these different platforms. And as a precondition to installing something like co-pilot or Dash or Glean or any of these other things, right? You know, IT wants to know like, hey, before we like turn all the lights in here, like let's do a little cleaning first before we let everybody in. And there just haven't been good tools to do that. And post AI, you would do it completely differently. And so that's like a big, that's a cornerstone of what we do and what sets us apart from these tools. And actually, in a lot of cases, we will help those tools be adopted because we actually help them do it safely. Yeah.Alessio [00:36:27]: How do you think about building for AI versus people? It's like when you mentioned cleaning up is because maybe before you were like, well, humans can have some common sense when they look at data on what to pick versus models are just kind of like ingesting. Do you think about building products differently, knowing that a lot of the data will actually be consumed by LLMs and like agents and whatnot versus like just people?Drew [00:36:46]: I think it'll always be, I aim a little bit more for like, you know, level three, level four kind of automation, because even if the LLM is like capable of completely autonomously organizing your environment, it probably would do a reasonable job. But like, I think you build bad UI when the sort of user has to fit itself to the computer versus something that you're, you know, it's like an instrument you're playing or something where you have some kind of good partnership. And you know, and on the other side, you don't have to do all this like manual effort. And so like the command line was sort of subsumed by like, you know, graphical UI. We'll keep toggling back and forth. Maybe chat will be, chat will be an increasing, especially when you bring in voice, like will be an increasing part of the puzzle. But I don't think we're going to go back to like a million command lines either. And then as far as like the sort of plumbing of like, well, is this going to be consumed by an LLM or a human? Like fortunately, like you don't really have to design it that differently. I mean, you have to make sure everything's legible to the LLM, but it's like quite tolerant of, you know, malformed everything. And actually the more, the easier it makes something to read for a human, the easier it is for an LLM to read to some extent as well. But we really think about what's that kind of right, how do we build that right, like human machine interface where you're still in control and driving, but then it's super easy to translate your intent into like the, you know, however you want your folder, setting your environment set up or like your preferences.Alessio [00:38:05]: What's the most underrated thing about Dropbox that maybe people don't appreciate?Drew [00:38:09]: Well, I think this is just such a natural evolution for us. It's pretty true. Like when people think about the world of AI, file syncing is not like the next thing you would auto complete mentally. And I think we also did like our first thing so well that there were a lot of benefits to that. But I think there also are like, we hit it so hard with our first product that it was like pretty tough to come up with a sequel. And we had a bit of a sophomore slump and you know, I think actually a lot of kids do use Dropbox through in high school or things like that, but you know, they're not, they're using, they're a lot more in the browser and then their file system, right. And we know all this, but still like we're super well positioned to like help a new generation of people with these fundamental problems and these like that affect, you know, a billion knowledge workers around just finding, organizing, sharing your stuff and keeping it safe. And there's, there's a ton of unsolved problems in those four verbs. We've talked about search a little bit, but just even think about like a whole new generation of people like growing up without the ability to like organize their things and yeah, search is great. And if you just have like a giant infinite pile of stuff, then search does make that more manageable. But you know, you do lose some things that were pretty helpful in prior decades, right? So even just the idea of persistence, stuff still being there when you come back, like when I go to sleep and wake up, my physical papers are still on my desk. When I reboot my computer, the files are still on my hard drive. But then when in my browser, like if my operating system updates the wrong way and closes the browser or if I just more commonly just declared tab bankruptcy, it's like your whole workspace just clears itself out and starts from zero. And you're like, on what planet is this a good idea? There's no like concept of like, oh, here's the stuff I was working on. Yeah, let me get back to it. And so that's like a big motivation for things like Dash. Huge problems with sharing, right? If I'm remodeling my house or if I'm getting ready for a board meeting, you know, what do I do if I have a Google doc and an air table and a 10 gig 4k video? There's no collection that holds mixed format things. And so it's another kind of hidden problem, hidden in plain sight, like he's missing primitives. Files have folders, songs have playlists, links have, you know, there's no, somehow we miss that. And so we're building that with stacks in Dash where it's like a mixed format, smart collection that you can then, you know, just share whatever you need internally, externally and have it be like a really well designed experience and platform agnostic and not tying you to any one ecosystem. We're super excited about that. You know, we talked a little bit about security in the modern world, like IT signs all these compliance documents, but in reality has no way of knowing where anything is or what's being shared. It's actually better for them to not know about it than to know about it and not be able to do anything about it. And when we talked to customers, we found that there were like literally people in IT whose jobs it is to like manually go through, log into each, like log into office, log into workspace, log into each tool and like go comb through one by one the links that people have shared and like unshares. There's like an unshare guy in all these companies and that that job is probably about as fun as it sounds like, my God. So there's, you know, fortunately, I guess what makes technology a good business is for every problem it solves, it like creates a new one, so there's always like a sequel that you need. And so, you know, I think the happy version of our Act 2 is kind of similar to Netflix. I look at a lot of these companies that really had multiple acts and Netflix had the vision to be streaming from the beginning, but broadband and everything wasn't ready for it. So they started by mailing you DVDs, but then went to streaming and then, but the value probably the whole time was just like, let me press play on something I want to see. And they did a really good job about bringing people along from the DVD mailing off. You would think like, oh, the DVD mailing piece is like this burning platform or it's like legacy, you know, ankle weight. And they did have some false starts in that transition. But when you really think about it, they were able to take that DVD mailing audience, move, like migrate them to streaming and actually bootstrap a, you know, take their season one people and bootstrap a victory in season two, because they already had, you know, they weren't starting from scratch. And like both of those worlds were like super easy to sort of forget and be like, oh, it's all kind of destiny. But like, no, that was like an incredibly competitive environment. And Netflix did a great job of like activating their Act 1 advantages and winning in Act 2 because of it. So I don't think people see Dropbox that way. I think people are sort of thinking about us just in terms of our Act 1 and they're like, yeah, Dropbox is fine. I used to use it 10 years ago. But like, what have they done for me lately? And I don't blame them. So fortunately, we have like better and better answers to that question every year.Alessio [00:42:39]: And you call it like the silicon brain. So you see like Dash and Stacks being like the silicon brain interface, basically forDrew [00:42:46]: people. I mean, that's part of it. Yeah. And writ large, I mean, I think what's so exciting about AI and everybody's got their own kind of take on it, but if you like really zoom out civilizationally and like what allows humans to make progress and, you know, what sort of is above the fold in terms of what's really mattered. I certainly want to, I mean, there are a lot of points, but some that come to mind like you think about things like the industrial revolution, like before that, like mechanical energy, like the only way you could get it was like by your own hands, maybe an animal, maybe some like clever sort of machines or machines made of like wood or something. But you were quite like energy limited. And then suddenly, you know, the industrial revolution, things like electricity, it suddenly is like, all right, mechanical energy is now available on demand as a very fungible kind of, and then suddenly we consume a lot more of it. And then the standard of living goes way, way, way, way up. That's been pretty limited to the physical realm. And then I believe that the large models, that's really the first time we can kind of bottle up cognitive energy and offloaded, you know, if we started by offloading a lot of our mechanical or physical busy work to machines that freed us up to make a lot of progress in other areas. But then with AI and computing, we're like, now we can offload a lot more of our cognitive busy work to machines. And then we can create a lot more of it. Price of it goes way down. Importantly, like, it's not like humans never did anything physical again. It's sort of like, no, but we're more leveraged. We can move a lot more earth with a bulldozer than a shovel. And so that's like what is at the most fundamental level, what's so exciting to me about AI. And so what's the silicon brain? It's like, well, we have our human brains and then we're going to have this other like half of our brain that's sort of coming online, like our silicon brain. And it's not like one or the other. They complement each other. They have very complimentary strengths and weaknesses. And that's, that's a good thing. There's also this weird tangent we've gone on as a species to like where knowledge work, knowledge workers have this like epidemic of, of burnout, great resignation, quiet quitting. And there's a lot going on there. But I think that's one of the biggest problems we have is that be like, people deserve like meaningful work and, you know, can't solve all of it. But like, and at least in knowledge work, there's a lot of own goals, you know, enforced errors that we're doing where it's like, you know, on one side with brain science, like we know what makes us like productive and fortunately it's also what makes us engaged. It's like when we can focus or when we're some kind of flow state, but then we go to work and then increasingly going to work is like going to a screen and you're like, if you wanted to design an environment that made it impossible to ever get into a flow state or ever be able to focus, like what we have is that. And that was the thing that just like seven, eight years ago just blew my mind. I'm just like, I cannot understand why like knowledge work is so jacked up on this adventure. It's like, we, we put ourselves in like the most cognitively polluted environment possible and we put so much more stress on the system when we're working remotely and things like that. And you know, all of these problems are just like going in the wrong direction. And I just, I just couldn't understand why this was like a problem that wasn't fixing itself. And I'm like, maybe there's something Dropbox can do with this and you know, things like Dash are the first step. But then, well, so like what, well, I mean, now like, well, why are humans in this like polluted state? It's like, well, we're just, all of the tools we have today, like this generation of tools just passes on all of the weight, the burden to the human, right? So it's like, here's a bajillion, you know, 80,000 unread emails, cool. Here's 25 unread Slack channels. Here's, we all get started like, it's like jittery like thinking about it. And then you look at that, you're like, wait, I'm looking at my phone, it says like 80,000 unread things. There's like no question, product question for which this is the right answer. Fortunately, that's why things like our silicon brain are pretty helpful because like they can serve as like an attention filter where it's like, actually, computers have no problem reading a million things. Humans can't do that, but computers can. And to some extent, this was already happening with computer, you know, Excel is an aversion of your silicon brain or, you know, you could draw the line arbitrarily. But with larger models, like now so many of these little subtasks and tasks we do at work can be like fully automated. And I think, you know, I think it's like an important metaphor to me because it mirrors a lot of what we saw with computing, computer architecture generally. It's like we started out with the CPU, very general purpose, then GPU came along much better at these like parallel computations. We talk a lot about like human versus machine being like substituting, it's like CPU, GPU, it's not like one is categorically better than the other, they're complements. Like if you have something really parallel, use a GPU, if not, use a CPU. The whole relationship, that symbiosis between CPU and GPU has obviously evolved a lot since, you know, playing Quake 2 or something. But right now we have like the human CPU doing a lot of, you know, silicon CPU tasks. And so you really have to like redesign the work thoughtfully such that, you know, probably not that different from how it's evolved in computer architecture, where the CPU is sort of an orchestrator of these really like heavy lifting GPU tasks. That dividing line does shift a little bit, you know, with every generation. And so I think we need to think about knowledge work in that context, like what are human brains good at? What's our silicon brain good at? Let's resegment the work. Let's offload all the stuff that can be automated. Let's go on a hunt for like anything that could save a human CPU cycle. Let's give it to the silicon one. And so I think we're at the early earnings of actually being able to do something about it.Alessio [00:48:00]: It's funny, I gave a talk to a few government people earlier this year with a similar point where we used to make machines to release human labor. And then the kilowatt hour was kind of like the unit for a lot of countries. And now you're doing the same thing with the brain and the data centers are kind of computational power plants, you know, they're kind of on demand tokens. You're on the board of Meta, which is the number one donor of Flops for the open source world. The thing about open source AI is like the model can be open source, but you need to carry a briefcase to actually maybe run a model that is not even that good compared to some of the big ones. How do you think about some of the differences in the open source ethos with like traditional software where it's like really easy to run and act on it versus like models where it's like it might be open source, but like I'm kind of limited, sort of can do with it?Drew [00:48:45]: Yeah, well, I think with every new era of computing, there's sort of a tug of war between is this going to be like an open one or a closed one? And, you know, there's pros and cons to both. It's not like open is always better or open always wins. But, you know, I think you look at how the mobile, like the PC era and the Internet era started out being more on the open side, like it's very modular. Everybody sort of party that everybody could, you know, come to some downsides of that security. But I think, you know, the advent of AI, I think there's a real question, like given the capital intensity of what it takes to train these foundation models, like are we going to live in a world where oligopoly or cartel or all, you know, there's a few companies that have the keys and we're all just like paying them rent. You know, that's one future. Or is it going to be more open and accessible? And I'm like super happy with how that's just I find it exciting on many levels with all the different hats I wear about it. You know, fortunately, you've seen in real life, yeah, even if people aren't bringing GPUs on a plane or something, you've seen like the price performance of these models improve 10 or 100x year over year, which is sort of like many Moore's laws compounded together for a bunch of reasons like that wouldn't have happened without open source. Right. You know, for a lot of same reasons, it's probably better that we can anyone can sort of spin up a website without having to buy an internet information server license like there was some alternative future. So like things are Linux and really good. And there was a good balance of trade to where like people contribute their code and then also benefit from the community returning the favor. I mean, you're seeing that with open source. So you wouldn't see all this like, you know, this flourishing of research and of just sort of the democratization of access to compute without open source. And so I think it's been like phenomenally successful in terms of just moving the ball forward and pretty much anything you care about, I believe, even like safety. You can have a lot more eyes on it and transparency instead of just something is happening. And there was three places with nuclear power plants attached to them. Right. So I think it's it's been awesome to see. And then and again, for like wearing my Dropbox hat, like anybody who's like scaling a service to millions of people, again, I'm probably not using like frontier models for every request. It's, you know, there are a lot of different configurations, mostly with smaller models. And even before you even talk about getting on the device, like, you know, you need this whole kind of constellation of different options. So open source has been great for that.Alessio [00:51:06]: And you were one of the first companies in the cloud repatriation. You kind of brought back all the storage into your own data centers. Where are we in the AI wave for that? I don't think people really care today to bring the models in-house. Like, do you think people will care in the future? Like, especially as you have more small models that you want to control more of the economics? Or are the tokens so subsidized that like it just doesn't matter? It's more like a principle. Yeah. Yeah.Drew [00:51:30]: I mean, I think there's another one where like thinking about the future is a lot easier if you start with the past. So, I mean, there's definitely this like big surge in demand as like there's sort of this FOMO driven bubble of like all of big tech taking their headings and shipping them to Jensen for a couple of years. And then you're like, all right, well, first of all, we've seen this kind of thing before. And in the late 90s with like Fiber, you know, this huge race to like own the internet, own the information superhighway, literally, and then way overbuilt. And then there was this like crash. I don't know to what extent, like maybe it is really different this time. Or, you know, maybe if we create AGI that will sort of solve the rest of the, or we'll just have a different set of things to worry about. But, you know, the simplest way I think about it is like this is sort of a rent not buy phase because, you know, I wouldn't want to be, we're still so early in the maturity, you know, I wouldn't want to be buying like pallets of over like of 286s at a 5x markup when like the 386 and 486 and Pentium and everything are like clearly coming there around the corner. And again, because of open source, there's just been a lot more competition at every layer in the stack. And so product developers are basically beneficiaries of that. You know, the things we can do with the sort of cost estimates I was looking at a year or two ago to like provide different capabilities in the product, you know, cut, right, you know, slashing by 10, 100, 1000x. I think about coming back around. I mean, I think, you know, at some point you have to believe that the sort of supply and demand will even out as it always does. And then there's also like non-NVIDIA stacks like the Grok or Cerebris or some of these custom silicon companies that are super interesting and outperformed NVIDIA stack in terms of latency and things like that. So I guess it'd be a pretty exciting change. I think we're not close to the point where we were with like hard drives or storage when we sort of went back from the public cloud because like there it was like, yeah, the cost curves are super predictable. We know what the cost of a hard drive and a server and, you know, terabyte of bandwidth and all the inputs are going to just keep going down, riding down this cost curve. But to like rely on the public cloud to pass that along is sort of, we need a better strategy than like relying on the kindness of strangers. So we decided to bring that in house and still do, and we still get a lot of advantages. That said, like the public cloud is like scaled and been like a lot more reliable and just good all around than we would have predicted because actually back then we were worried like, is the public cloud going to even scale fast enough to where to keep up with us? But yeah, I think we're in the early innings. It's a little too chaotic right now. So I think renting and not sort of preserving agility is pretty important in times like these. Yeah.Alessio [00:54:01]: We just went to the Cerebrus factory to do an episode there. We saw one of their data centers inside. Yeah. It's kind of like, okay, if this really works, you know, it kind of changes everything.Drew [00:54:13]: And that is one of the things there, like this is one where you could just have these things that just like, okay, there's just like a new kind of piece on the chessboard, like recalc everything. So I think there's still, I mean, this is like not that likely, but I think this is an area where it actually could, you could have these sort of like, you know, and out of nowhere, all of a sudden, you know, everything's different. Yeah.Alessio [00:54:33]: I know one of the management books he references, Ending Growth's, I'm only the paranoid survive.Drew [00:54:37]: Yeah.Alessio [00:54:37]: Maybe if you look at Intel, they did a great job memory to chip, but then it's like maybe CPU to GPU, they kind of missed that thing. Yeah. How do you think about staying relevant for so long now? It's been 17 years you've been doing Dropbox.Drew [00:54:50]: What's the secret?Alessio [00:54:50]: And maybe we can touch on founder mode and all of that. Yeah.Drew [00:54:55]: Well, first, what makes tech exciting and also makes it hard is like, there's no standing still, right? And your customers never are like, oh no, we're good now. They always want more just, and then the ground is shifting under you or it's like, oh yeah, well, files are not even that relevant to the modern. I mean, it's still important, but like, you know, so much is tilted elsewhere. So I think you have to like always be moving and think about on the one level, like what is, and thinking of these different layers of abstraction, like, well, yeah, the technical service we provide is file syncing and storage in the past, but in the future it's going to be different. The way Netflix had to look at, well, technically we mail people physical DVDs and fulfillment centers, and then we have to switch like streaming and codex and bandwidth and data centers. So you, you, you do have to think about that level, but then it's like our, what's the evergreen problem we're solving is an important problem. Can we build the best product? Can we get distribution? Can we get a business model? Can we defend ourselves when we get copied? And then having like some context of like history has always been like one of the reading about the history, not just in tech, but of business or government or sports or military, these things that seem like totally new, you know, and to me would have been like totally new as a 25 year old, like, oh my God, the world's completely different and everything's going to change. You're like, well, there's not a lot of great things about getting older, but you do see like, well, no, this actually has like a million like precedents and you can actually learn a lot from, you know, about like the future of GPUs from like, I don't know how, you know, how formula one teams work or you can draw all these like weird analogies that are super helpful in guiding you from first principles or through a combination of first principles and like past context. But like, you know, build s**t we're really proud of. Like, that's a pretty important first step and really think about like, you sort of become blind to like how technology works as that's just the way it works. And even something like carrying a thumb drive, you're like, well, I'd much rather have a thumb drive than like literally not have my stuff or like have to carry a big external hard drive around. So you're always thinking like, oh, this is awesome. Like I ripped CDs and these like MP3s and these files and folders. This is the best. But then you miss on the other side. You're like, this isn't the end, right? MP3s and folders. It's like an Apple comes along. It's like, this is dumb. You should have like a catalog, artists, playlists, you know, that Spotify is like, Hey, this is dumb. Like you should, why are you buying these things? All the cards, it's the internet. You should have access to everything. And then by the way, why is this like such a single player experience? You should be able to share and they should have, there should be AI curated, et cetera, et cetera. And then a lot of it is also just like drawing, connecting dots between different disciplines, right? So a lot of what we did to make Dropbox successful is like we took a lot of the consumer internet playbook, applied it to business software from a virality and kind of ease of use standpoints. And then, you know, I think there's a lot of, you can draw from the consumer realm and what's worked there and that hasn't been ported over to business, right? So a lot of what we think about is like, yeah, when you sign into Netflix or Spotify or YouTube or any consumer experience, like what do you see? Well, you don't see like a bunch of titles starting with AA, right? You see like this whole, and it went on evolution, right? Like we talked about music and TV went through the same thing, like 10 channels over the air broadcast to 30 channels, a hundred channels, but that's something like a thousand channels. You're like, this has totally lost the plot. So we're sort of in the thousand channels era of productivity tools, which is like, wait, wait, we just need to like rethink the system here and we don't need another thousand channels. We need to redesign the whole experience. And so I think the consumer experiences that are like smart, you know, when you sign into Netflix, it's not like a thousand channels. It's like, here are a bunch of smart defaults. Even if you're a new signup, we don't know anything about you, but because of what the world is watching, here are some, you know, reasonable suggestions. And then it's like, okay, I watched drive to survive. I didn't watch squid game. You know, the next time I sign in, it's like a complete, it's a learning system, right? So a combination of design, machine learning, and just like the courage to like rethink the whole thing. I think that's, that's a pretty reliable recipe. And then you think you're like, all right, there's all that intelligence in the consumer experience. There's no filing things away. Everything's, there's all this sort of auto curated for you and sort of self optimizing. Then you go to work and you're like, there's not even an attempt to incorporate any intelligence or organization anywhere in this experience. And so like, okay, can we do something about that?Alessio [00:58:57]: You know, you're one of the last founder CEOs, like you would talk, then you're like, Toby Lute, some of these folks.Drew [00:59:03]: How, how does that change? I'm like 300 years old and why can't I be a founder CEO?Alessio [00:59:07]: I was saying like when you run, when you run a company, like you've had multiple executives over the years, like how important is that for the founder to be CEO and just say, Hey, look, we're changing the way the company and the strategy works. It's like, we're really taking this seriously versus like you could be a public CEO and be like, Hey, I got my earnings call and like whatever, I just need to focus on getting the right numbers. Like how does that change the culture in the company? Yeah.Drew [00:59:29]: Well, I think it's sort of dovetails with the founder mode whole thing. You know, I think founder mode is kind of this Rorschach test. It's, it's sort of like ill specified. So it's sort of like whatever you, you know, it is whatever you see it. I think it's also like a destination you get to more than like a state of mind. Right. So if you think about, you know, imagine someone, there was something called surgeon mode, you know, given a med student, the scalpel on day one, it's like, okay, hold up. You know, so there's something to be said for like experience and conviction and you know, you're going to do a lot better. A lot of things are a lot easier for me, like 17 years into it than they were one year into it. I think part of why founder mode is so resonant is, or it's like striking such a chord with so many people is, yeah, there's, there's a real power when you have like a directive, intuitive leader who can like decisively take the company like into the future. It's like, how the hell do you get that? Um, and I think every founder who makes it this long, like kind of can't help it, but to learn a lot during that period. And you talk about the, you know, Steve jobs or Elan's of the world, they, they did go through like wandering a period of like wandering in the desert or like nothing was working and they weren't the cool kids. I think you either sort of like unsubscribe or kind of get off the train during that. And I don't blame anyone for doing that. There are many times where I thought about that, but I think at some point you sort of, it all comes together and you sort of start being able to see the matrix. So you've sort of seen enough and learned enough. And as long as you keep your learning rate up, you can kind of surprise yourself in terms of like how capable you can become over a long period. And so I think there's a lot of like founder CEO journey, especially as an engineer. Like, you know, I never like set out to be a CEO. In fact, like the more I like understood in the early days, what CEOs did, the more convinced I was that I was like not the right person actually. And it was only after some like shoving by a previous mentor, like, Hey, don't just, just go try it. And if you don't like it, then you don't have to do it forever. So I think you start founder mode, you're, you're sort of default that because there's like, you realize pretty quickly, like nothing gets done in this company unless the founders are literally doing it by hand, then you scale. And then you're like, you get, you know, a lot of actually pretty good advice that like, you can't do everything yourself. Like you actually do need to hire people and like give them real responsibilities and empower people. And that's like a whole discipline called like management that, you know, we're not figuring out for the first time here, but then you, then there's a tendency to like lean too far back, you know, it's tough. And if you're like a 30 year old and you hire a 45 year old exec from, you know, high-flying company and a guy who was running like a $10 billion P&L and came to work for Dropbox where we were like a fraction of a billion dollar P&L and, you know, what am I going to tell him about sales? Right. And so you sort of recognize pretty quickly, like, I actually don't know a lot about all these different disciplines and like, maybe I should lean back and like let people do their thing. But then you can create this, like, if you lean too far back out, you create this sort of like vacuum, leadership vacuum where people are like, what are we doing? And then, you know, the system kind of like nature reports a vacuum, it builds all these like kind of weird structures just to keep the thing like standing up. And then at some point you learn enough of this that you're like, wait, this is not how this should be designed. And you actually get like the conviction and you learn enough to like know what to do and things like that. And then on the other side, you lean way back in. I think it's more of like a table flipping where you're like, hey, this company is like not running the way I want it. Like something, I don't know what happened, but it's going to be like this now. And I think that that's like an important developmental stage for a founder CEO. And if you can do it right and like make it to that point, like then the job becomes like a lot of fun and exciting and good things happen for the company, good things for happening for your customers. But it's not, it's like a really rough, you know, learning journey. It is. It is.Alessio [01:03:10]: I've had many therapy sessions with founder CEOs. Let's go back to the beginning. Like today, the AI wave is like so big that like a lot of people are kind of scared to jump in the water. And when you started Dropbox, one article said, fortunately, the Dropbox founders are too stupid to know everyone's already tried this. In AI now, it kind of feels the same. You have a lot of companies that sound the same, but like none of them are really working. So obviously the problem is not solved. Do you have any advice for founders trying to navigate like the idea maze today on like what they should do? What are like counterintuitive things maybe to try?Drew [01:03:45]: Well, I think like, you know, bringing together some of what we've covered, I think there's a lot of very common kind of category errors that founders make. One is, you know, I think he's starting from the technology versus starting from like a customer or starting from a use case. And I think every founder has to start with what you know. Like you're, yeah, you know, maybe if you're an engineer, you know how to build a product, but don't know any of the other next, you know, hurdle. You don't know much about the next hurdles you have to go through. So I think, I think the biggest lesson would be you have to keep your personal growth curve out of the company's growth curve. And for me, that meant you have to be like super systematic about training up what you don't know, because no one's going to do that for you. Your investors aren't going to do that. Like literally no one else will do that for you. And so then, then you have to have like, all right, well, and I think the most important, one of the most helpful questions to ask there is like, in five years from now, what do I wish I had been learning today? In three years from now, what do I wish in one year? You know, how will my job be different? How do I work back from that? And so, for example, you know, when I was just starting in 2007, it really was just like coding and talking to customers. And it's sort of like the YC ethos, you know, make something people want and coding and talking to customers are really all you should be doing in that early phase. But then if I were like, all right, well, that's sort of YC phase, what's, what are the next hurdles? Well, a year from now, then I'm going to need, but to get people, we're going to need fundraise, like raise money. Okay. To raise money, we're going to have to like, have to answer all these questions. We have to see like work back from that. And you're like, all right, we need to become like an expert in like venture capital financing. And then, you know, the circle keeps expanding. Then if we have a bunch of money, we're going to need like accountants and lawyers and employees. And I'm not to start managing people. Then two years would be like, well, we're gonna have this like products, but then we're gonna need users. We need money revenue. And then in five years, it'd be like, yeah, we're going to be like tangling with like Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook, everybody. And like, somehow we're going to feel like deal with that. And then that's like what the company's got to deal with. And as CEO, I'm going to be responsible for all that. But then like my personal growth, there's all these skills I'm going to need. I'm going to need to know like what marketing is and like what finance is and how to manage people, how to be a leader, whatever that is. And so, and then I think one thing people often do is like, oof, like that it's like imposter syndrome kind of stuff. You're like, oh, it seems so remote or far away that, or I'm not comfortable speaking publicly or I've never managed people before. I haven't this. I haven't been like, and maybe even learning a little bit about it makes it feel even worse. He's like, now I, I thought I didn't know a lot. Now I know I don't know a lot, right. Part of it is more technical. Like how do I learn all these different disciplines and sort of train myself and a lot of that's like reading, you know, having founders or community that are sort of going through the same thing. So that's, that was how I learned. Maybe reading was the single most helpful thing more than any one person or, or talking to people like reading books. But then there's a whole mindset piece of it, which is sort of like, you have to cut yourself a little bit of slack. Like, you know, I wish someone had sort of sat me down and told me like, dude, you may be an engineer, but like, look, all the tech founders that, you know, tech CEOs that you admire, like they actually all, you know, almost all of them started out as engineers, they learned the business stuff on the job. So like, this is actually something that's normal and achievable. You're not like broken for not knowing, you know, no, those people didn't, weren't like, didn't come out of the womb with like shiny hair and Armani suit. You know, you can learn this stuff. So even just like knowing it's learnable and then second, like, but I think there's a big piece of it around like discomfort where it's like, I mean, we're like kind of pushing the edges. I don't know if I want to be CEO or I don't know if I'm ready for this, this, this, like learning to like walk towards that when you want to run away from it. And then lastly, I think, you know, just recognizing the time constant. So five weeks, you're not going to be a great leader or manager or a great public speaker or whatever, you know, think any more than you'll be a great guitar players, you know, play sport that well, or be a surgeon. But in like five years, like actually you can be pretty good at any of those things. Maybe you won't be like fully expert, but you like a lot more latent potential. You know, people have a lot more latent potential than they fully appreciate, but it doesn't happen by itself. You have to like carve out time and really be systematic about unlocking it.Alessio [01:07:36]: How do you think about that for building your team? I know you're a big Pat's fan. Obviously the, that's a great example of building a dynasty on like some building blocks and bringing people into the system. When you're building a company, like how much slack do you have people on, Hey, you're going to learn this versus like, how do you measure like the learning grade of the people you hire? And like, how do you think about picking and choosing? Great question.Drew [01:07:56]: It's hard. Um, what you want is a balance, right? And we've had a lot of success with great leaders who actually grew up with a company, started as an IC engineer or something, then made their way to whatever level our exec team is populated with a lot of those folks. But, but yeah, but there's also a lot of benefit to experience and having seen different environments and kind of been there, done that. And there's a lot of drawbacks to kind of learning by trial and error only. Um, and then even your high potential people like can go up the learning curve faster if they have like someone experienced to learn from now, like experiences in a panacea, either you can, you know, have various organ rejection or misfit or like overfitting from their past experience or cultural mismatches or, you know, you name it, I've seen it all. I've done, I've kind of gotten all the mistake merit badges on that. But I think it's like constructing a team where there's a good balance, like, okay, for the high potential folks who are sort of in the biggest jobs, their lives can, do they either have someone that they're managing them that they can learn from, you know, as a CEO, part of your job or as a manager, like you have to like surround or they help support them. So getting the mentors are getting first time execs like mentors who have been there, done that, or, um, getting them in like, you know, there's usually for any function, there's usually like a social group, like, Oh, chiefs of staff of Silicon Valley. Okay. Like, you know, there's usually these informal kind of communities you can join. And then, um, yeah, you just don't want to be too rotated in one direction or the other, because we've, we've done it. We've like overdone it on the high potential piece, but then like everybody's kind of making dumb mistakes, the bad mistakes are the ones where you're like, either you're making it multiple times or like these are known knowns to the industry, but if they're not known, known, if they're like unknown unknowns to your team, then you're doing, you have a problem. And then again, if you have too much, if you've just only hire external people, like then you're sort of at the mercy, you'll be like whatever random average of whatever culture or practices they bring in can create resentment or like lack of career opportunities. Um, so it's really about how do you get, you know, it doesn't really matter if it's like exactly 50 50, I don't think about a sort of perfect balance, but you just need to be sort of tending that garden continuously. Awesome.Alessio [01:09:57]: Drew, just to wrap, do you have any call to actions? Like who should come work at Dropbox? Like who should use Dropbox? Anything you want, uh, you want to tell people?Drew [01:10:06]: Well, I'm super, I mean, today's a super exciting day for, cause we just launched dash for business and, you know, we've talked a little bit about the product. It's like universal search, universal access control, a lot of rethinking, sharing for the modern environment. But you know, what's personally exciting, you could talk about the product, but like the, it's just really exciting for me to like, yeah, this is like the first, like most major and most public step we've taken from our kind of Dropbox 1.0 roots. And there's probably a lot of people out there who either like grew up not using Dropbox or like, yeah, I used Dropbox like 10 years ago and it was cool, but I don't do that much of fun. So I think there's a lot of new reasons to kind of tune into what we're doing. And, and it's a lot of, it's been a lot of fun to, I think like the sort of the AI era has created all these new like paths forward for Dropbox that wouldn't have been here five years ago. And then, yeah, to the founders, like, you know, hang in there, do some reading and don't be too stressed about it. So we're pretty lucky to get to do what we do. Yeah.Alessio [01:11:05]: Watch the Pats documentary on Apple TV.Drew [01:11:08]: Yeah, Bill Belichick. I'm still Pats fan. Really got an F1. So we're technology partners with McLaren. They're doing super well.Alessio [01:11:15]: So were you a McLaren fan before you were technology partner? So did you become partners?Drew [01:11:19]: It's sort of like co-evolved. Yeah. I mean, I was a fan beforehand, but I'm like a lot more of a fan now, as you'd imagine.Alessio [01:11:24]: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for the time, Drew. This was great. It was a lot of fun.Drew [01:11:28]: Thanks for having me. Get full access to Latent Space at www.latent.space/subscribe

We are in 🗽 NYC this Monday! Join the AI Eng NYC meetup, bring demos and vibes!It is a bit of a meme that the first thing developer tooling founders think to build in AI is all the non-AI operational stuff outside the AI. There are well over 60 funded LLM Ops startups all with hoping to solve the new observability, cost tracking, security, and reliability problems that come with putting LLMs in production, not to mention new LLM oriented products from incumbent, established ops/o11y players like Datadog and Weights & Biases. 2 years in to the current hype cycle, the early winners have tended to be people with practical/research AI backgrounds rather than MLOps heavyweights or SWE tourists:* LangSmith: We covered how Harrison Chase worked on AI at Robust Intelligence and Kensho, the alma maters of many great AI founders* HumanLoop: We covered how Raza Habib worked at Google AI during his PhD* BrainTrust: Today’s guest Ankur Goyal founded Impira pre-Transformers and was acquihired to run Figma AI before realizing how to solve the Ops problem.There have been many VC think pieces and market maps describing what people thought were the essential pieces of the AI Engineering stack, but what was true for 2022-2023 has aged poorly. The basic insight that Ankur had is the same thesis that Hamel Husain is pushing in his World’s Fair talk and podcast with Raza and swyx:Evals are the centerpiece of systematic AI Engineering.REALLY believing in this is harder than it looks with the benefit of hindsight. It’s not like people didn’t know evals were important. Basically every LLM Ops feature list has them. It’s an obvious next step AFTER managing your prompts and logging your LLM calls. In fact, up til we met Braintrust, we were working on an expanded version of the Impossible Triangle Theory of the LLM Ops War that we first articulated in the Humanloop writeup:The single biggest criticism of the Rise of the AI Engineer piece is that we neglected to split out the role of product evals (as opposed to model evals) in the now infamous “API line” chart:With hindsight, we were very focused on the differentiating 0 to 1 phase that AI Engineers can bring to an existing team of ML engineers. As swyx says on the Day 2 keynote of AI Engineer, 2024 added a whole new set of concerns as AI Engineering grew up:A closer examination of Hamel’s product-oriented virtuous cycle and this infra-oriented SDLC would have eventually revealed that Evals, even more than logging, was the first point where teams start to get really serious about shipping to production, and therefore a great place to make an entry into the marketplace, which is exactly what Braintrust did.Also notice what’s NOT on this chart: shifting to shadow open source models, and finetuning them… per Ankur, Fine-tuning is not a viable standalone product:“The thing I would say is not debatable is whether or not fine-tuning is a business outcome or not. So let's think about the other components of your triangle. Ops/observability, that is a business… Frameworks, evals, databases [are a business, but] Fine-tuning is a very compelling method that achieves an outcome. The outcome is not fine-tuning, it is can I automatically optimize my use case to perform better if I throw data at the problem? And fine-tuning is one of multiple ways to achieve that.”OpenAI vs Open AI Market ShareWe last speculated about the market shifts in the End of OpenAI Hegemony and the Winds of AI Winter, and Ankur’s perspective is super valuable given his customer list:Some surprises based on what he is seeing:* Prior to Claude 3, OpenAI had near 100% market share. This tracks with what Harrison told us last year.* Claude 3.5 Sonnet and also notably Haiku have made serious dents* Open source model adoption is . Contra to Eugene Cheah’s ideal marketing pitch, virtually none of Braintrust’s customers are really finetuning open source models for cost, control, or privacy. This is partially caused by…* Open source model hosts, aka Inference providers, aren’t as mature as OpenAI’s API platform. Kudos to Michelle’s team as if they needed any more praise!* Adoption of Big Lab models via their Big Cloud Partners, aka Claude through AWS, or OpenAI through Azure, is low. Surprising! It seems that there are issues with accessing the latest models via the Cloud partners.swyx [01:36:51]: What % of your workload is open source?Ankur Goyal [01:36:55]: Because of how we're deployed, I don't have like an exact number for you. Among customers running in production, it's less than 5%.Full Video EpisodeCheck out the Braintrust demo on YouTube! (and like and subscribe etc)Show Notes* Ankur’s companies* MemSQL/SingleStore → now Nikita Shamgunov of Neon* Impira* Braintrust* Papers mentioned* AlexNet* BERT Paper* Layout LM Paper* GPT-3 Paper* Voyager Paper* AI Engineer World's Fair* Ankur and Olmo’s talk at AIEWF* Together.ai* Fireworks* People* Nikita Shamgunov* Alana Goyal* Elad Gil* Clem Delangue* Guillermo Rauch* Prior episodes* HumanLoop episode* Michelle Pokrass episode* Dylan Patel episodeTimestamps* [00:00:00] Introduction and background on Ankur career* [00:00:49] SingleStore and HTAP databases* [00:08:19] Founding Impira and lessons learned* [00:13:33] Unstructured vs Structured Data * [00:25:41] Overview of Braintrust and its features* [00:40:42] Industry observations and trends in AI tooling* [00:58:37] Workload types and AI use cases in production* [01:06:37] World's Fair AI conference discussion* [01:11:09] AI infrastructure market landscape* [01:24:59] OpenAI vs Anthropic vs other model providers* [01:38:11] GPU inference market discussion* [01:45:39] Hypothetical AI projects outside of Braintrust* [01:50:25] Potentially joining OpenAI* [01:52:37] Insights on effective networking and relationships in techTranscriptswyx [00:00:00]: Ankur Goyal, welcome to Latent Space.Ankur Goyal [00:00:06]: Thanks for having me.swyx [00:00:07]: Thanks for coming all the way over to our studio.Ankur Goyal [00:00:10]: It was a long hike.swyx [00:00:11]: A long trek. Yeah. You got T-boned by traffic. Yeah. You were the first VP of Eng at Signal Store. Yeah. Then you started Impira. You ran it for six years, got acquired into Figma, where you were at for eight months, and you just celebrated your one-year anniversary at Braintrust. I did, yeah. What a journey. I kind of want to go through each in turn because I have a personal relationship with Signal Store just because I have been a follower and fan of databases for a while. HTAP is always a dream of every database guy. It's still the dream. When HTAP, and Signal Store I think is the leading HTAP. Yeah. What's that journey like? And then maybe we'll cover the rest later.Ankur Goyal [00:00:49]: Sounds good.swyx [00:00:50]: We can start Signal Store first. Yeah, yeah.Ankur Goyal [00:00:52]: In college, as a first-generation Indian kid, I basically had two options. I had already told my parents I wasn't going to be a doctor. They're both doctors, so only two options left. Do a PhD or work at a big company. After my sophomore year, I worked at Microsoft, and it just wasn't for me. I realized that the work I was doing was impactful. I was working on Bing and the distributed compute infrastructure at Bing, which is actually now part of Azure. There were hundreds of engineers using the infrastructure that we were working on, but the level of intensity was too low. It felt like you got work-life balance and impact, but very little creativity, very little room to do interesting things. I was like, okay, let me cross that off the list. The only option left is to do research. I did research the next summer, and I realized, again, no one's working that hard. Maybe the times have changed, but at that point, there's a lot of creativity. You're just bouncing around fun ideas and working on stuff and really great work-life balance, but no one would actually use the stuff that we built, and that was not super energizing for me. I had this existential crisis, and I moved out to San Francisco because I had a friend who was here and crashed on his couch and was talking to him and just very, very confused. He said, you should talk to a recruiter, which felt like really weird advice. I'm not even sure I would give that advice to someone nowadays, but I met this really great guy named John, and he introduced me to like 30 different companies. I realized that there's actually a lot of interesting stuff happening in startups, and maybe I could find this kind of company that let me be very creative and work really hard and have a lot of impact, and I don't give a s**t about work-life balance. I talked to all these companies, and I remember I met MemSQL when it was three people and interviewed, and I thought I just totally failed the interview, but I had never had so much fun in my life. I remember I was at 10th and Harrison, and I stood at the bus station, and I called my parents and said, I'm sorry, I'm dropping out of school. I thought I wouldn't get the offer, but I just realized that if there's something like this company, then this is where I need to be. Luckily, things worked out, and I got an offer, and I joined as employee number two, and I worked there for almost six years, and it was an incredible experience. Learned a lot about systems, got to work with amazing customers. There are a lot of things that I took for granted that I later learned at Impira that I had taken for granted, and the most exciting thing is I got to run the engineering team, which was a great opportunity to learn about tech on a larger stage, recruit a lot of great people, and I think, for me personally, set me up to do a lot of interesting things after.swyx [00:03:41]: Yeah, there's so many ways I can take that. The most curious, I think, for general audiences is, is the dream real of SingleStore? Should, obviously, more people be using it? I think there's a lot of marketing from SingleStore that makes sense, but there's a lot of doubt in people's minds. What do you think you've seen that is the most convincing as to when is it suitable for people to adopt SingleStore and when is it not?Ankur Goyal [00:04:06]: Bear in mind that I'm now eight years removed from SingleStore, so they've done a lot of stuff since I left, but maybe the meta thing, I would say, or the meta learning for me is that, even if you build the most sophisticated or advanced technology in a particular space, it doesn't mean that it's something that everyone can use. I think one of the trade-offs with SingleStore, specifically, is that you have to be willing to invest in hardware and software cost that achieves the dream. At least, when we were doing it, it was way cheaper than Oracle Exadata or SAP HANA, which were kind of the prevailing alternatives. So, not ultra-expensive, but SingleStore is not the kind of thing that, when you're building a weekend project that will scale to millions, you would just spin up SingleStore and start using. I think it's just expensive. It's packaged in a way that is expensive because the size of the market and the type of customer that's able to drive value almost requires the price to work that way. You can actually see Nikita almost overcompensating for it now with Neon and attacking the market from a different angle.swyx [00:05:11]: This is Nikita Shamgunov, the actual original founder. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.Ankur Goyal [00:05:15]: So, now he's doing the opposite. He's built the world's best free tier and is building hyper-inexpensive Postgres. But because the number of people that can use SingleStore is smaller than the number of people that can use free Postgres, yet the amount that they're willing to pay for that use case is higher, SingleStore is packaged in a way that just makes it harder to use. I know I'm not directly answering your question, but for me, that was one of those sort of utopian things. It's the technology analog to, if two people love each other, why can't they be together? SingleStore, in many ways, is the best database technology, and it's the best in a number of ways. But it's just really hard to use. I think Snowflake is going through that right now as well. As someone who works in observability, I dearly miss the variant type that I used to use in Snowflake. It is, without any question, at least in my experience, the best implementation of semi-structured data and sort of solves the problem of storing it very, very efficiently and querying it efficiently, almost as efficiently as if you specified the schema exactly, but giving you total flexibility. So it's just a marvel of engineering, but it's packaged behind Snowflake, which means that the minimum query time is quite high. I have to have a Snowflake enterprise license, right? I can't deploy it on a laptop, I can't deploy it in a customer's premises, or whatever. So you're sort of constrained to the packaging by which one can interface with Snowflake in the first place. And I think every observability product in some sort of platonic ideal would be built on top of Snowflake's variant implementation and have better performance, it would be cheaper, the customer experience would be better. But alas, it's just not economically feasible right now for that to be the case.swyx [00:07:03]: Do you buy what Honeycomb says about needing to build their own super wide column store?Ankur Goyal [00:07:09]: I do, given that they can't use Snowflake. If the variant type were exposed in a way that allowed more people to use it, and by the way, I'm just sort of zeroing in on Snowflake in this case. Redshift has something called Super, which is fairly similar. Clickhouse is also working on something similar, and that might actually be the thing that lets more people use it. DuckDB does not. It has a struct type, which is dynamically constructed, but it has all the downsides of traditional structured data types. For example, if you infer a bunch of rows with the struct type, and then you present the n plus first row, and it doesn't have the same schema as the first n rows, then you need to change the schema for all the preceding rows, which is the main problem that the variant type solves. It's possible that on the extreme end, there's something specific to what Honeycomb does that wouldn't directly map to the variant type. And I don't know enough about Honeycomb, and I think they're a fantastic company, so I don't mean to pick on them or anything, but I would just imagine that if one were starting the next Honeycomb, and the variant type were available in a way that they could consume, it might accelerate them dramatically or even be the terminal solution.swyx [00:08:19]: I think being so early in single store also taught you, among all these engineering lessons, you also learned a lot of business lessons that you took with you into Impira. And Impira, that was your first, maybe, I don't know if it's your exact first experience, but your first AI company.Ankur Goyal [00:08:35]: Yeah, it was. Tell the story. There's a bunch of things I learned and a bunch of things I didn't learn. The idea behind Impira originally was I saw when AlexNet came out that you were suddenly able to do things with data that you could never do before. And I think I was way too early into this observation. When I started Impira, the idea was what if we make using unstructured data as easy as it is to use structured data? And maybe ML models are the glue that enables that. And I think deep learning presented the opportunity to do that because you could just kind of throw data at the problem. Now in practice, it turns out that pre-LLMs, I think the models were not powerful enough. And more importantly, people didn't have the ability to capture enough data to make them work well enough for a lot of use cases. So it was tough. However, that was the original idea. And I think some of the things I learned were how to work with really great companies. We worked with a number of top financial services companies. We worked with public enterprises. And there's a lot of nuance and sophistication that goes into making that successful. I'll tell you the things I didn't learn though, which I learned the hard way. So one of them is when I was the VP of engineering, I would go into sales meetings and the customer would be super excited to talk to me. And I was like, oh my god, I must be the best salesperson ever. And after I finished the meeting, the sales people would just be like, yeah, okay, you know what, it looks like the technical POC succeeded and we're going to deal with some stuff. It might take some time, but they'll probably be a customer. And then I didn't do anything. And a few weeks later or a few months later, they were a customer.swyx [00:10:09]: Money shows up. Exactly. And like,Ankur Goyal [00:10:11]: oh my god, I must have the Midas touch, right? I go into the meeting. I've been that guy. I sort of speak a little bit and they become a customer. I had no idea how hard it was to get people to take meetings with you in the first place. And then once you actually sort of figure that out, the actual mechanics of closing customers at scale, dealing with revenue retention, all this other stuff, it's so freaking hard. I learned a lot about that. I thought it was just an invaluable experience at Empira to sort of experienceswyx [00:10:41]: that myself firsthand. Did you have a main salesperson or a sales advisor?Ankur Goyal [00:10:45]: Yes, a few different things. One, I lucked into, it turns out, my wife, Alana, who I started dating right as I was starting Empira. Her father, who is just super close now, is a seasoned, very, very seasoned and successful sales leader. So he's currently the president of CloudFlare. At the time, he was the president of Palo Alto Networks, and he joined just right before the IPO and was managing a few billion dollars of revenue at the time. And so I would say I learned a lot from him. I also hired someone named Jason, who I worked with at MemSQL, and he's just an exceptional account executive. So he closed probably like 90 or 95% of our business over our years at Empira. And he's just exceptionally good. I think one of the really fun lessons, we were trying to close a deal with Stitch Fix at Empira early on. It was right around my birthday, and so I was hanging out with my father-in-law and talking to him about it. And he was like, look, you're super smart. Empira sounds really exciting. Everything you're talking about, a mediocre account executive can just do and do much better than what you're saying. If you're dealing with these kinds of problems, you should just find someone who can do this a lot better than you can. And that was one of those, again, very humbling things that you sort of...swyx [00:11:57]: Like he's telling you to delegate? I think in this case, he's actually saying,Ankur Goyal [00:12:01]: yeah, you're making a bunch of rookie errors in trying to close a contract that any mediocre or better salesperson will be able to do for you or in partnership with you. That was really interesting to learn. But the biggest thing that I learned, which was, I'd say, very humbling, is that at MemSQL, I worked with customers that were very technical. And I always got along with the customers. I always found myself motivated when they complained about something to solve the problems. And then most importantly, when they complained about something, I could relate to it personally. At Empira, I took kind of the popular advice, which is that developers are in a terrible market. So we sold to line of business. And there are a number of benefits to that. We were able to sell six- or seven-figure deals much more easily than we could at SingleStore or now we can at Braintrust. However, I learned firsthand that if you don't have a very deep, intuitive understanding of your customer, everything becomes harder. You need to throw product managers at the problem. Your own ability to see your customers is much weaker. And depending on who you are, it might actually be very difficult. And for me, it was so difficult that I think it made it challenging for us to one, stay focused on a particular segment, and then two, out-compete or do better than people that maybe had inferior technology that we did, but really deeply understood what the customer needed. I would say if you just asked me what was the main humbling lesson that I facedswyx [00:13:33]: with it, it was that. I have a question on this market because I think after Impera, there's a cohort of new Imperas coming out. Datalab, I don'tAnkur Goyal [00:13:41]: know if you saw that. I get a phone call about one every week.swyx [00:13:45]: What have you learned about this unstructured data to structured data market? Everyone thinks now you can just throw an LLM at it. Obviously, it's going to be better than what you had.Ankur Goyal [00:13:53]: I think the fundamental challenge is not a technology problem. It is the fact that if you're a business, let's say you're the CEO of a company that is in the insurance space and you have a number of inefficient processes that would benefit from unstructured to structured data. You have the opportunity to create a new consumer user experience that totally circumvents the unstructured data and is a much better user experience for the end customer. Maybe it's an iPhone app that does the insurance underwriting survey by having a phone conversation with the user and filling out the form or something instead. The second option potentially unlocked a totally new segment of users and maybe cost you like 10 times as much money. The first segment is this pain. It affects your cogs. It's annoying. There's a solution that works which is throwing people at the problem but it could be a lot better. Which one are you going to prioritize? I think as a technologist, maybe this is the third lesson, you tend to think that if a problem is technically solvable and you can justify the ROI or whatever, then it's worth solving. You also tend to not think about how things are outside of your control. If you empathize with a CEO or a CTO who's sort of considering these two projects, I can tell you straight up, they're going to pick the second project. They're going to prioritize the future. They don't want the unstructured data to exist in the first place. That is the hardest part. It is very hard to motivate an organization to prioritize the problem. You're always going to be a second or third tier priority. There's revenue in that because it does affect people's day-to-day lives. There are some people who care enough to try to solve it. I would say this in very stark contrast to Braintrust where if you look at the logos on our website, almost all of the CEOs or CTOs or founders are daily active users of the product themselves. Every company that has a software product is trying to incorporate AI in a meaningful way. It's so meaningful that literally the exec team isswyx [00:16:03]: using the product every day. Just to not bury the lead, the logos are Instacart, Stripe, Zapier, Airtable, Notion, Replit, Brex, Versa, Alcota, and the browser company of New York. I don't want to jump the gun to Braintrust. I don't think you've actually told the Impira acquisition story publicly that I can tell. It's on the surface. I think I first met you slightly before the acquisition. I was like, what the hell is Figma acquiring this kind of company? You're not a design tool. Any details you canAnkur Goyal [00:16:33]: share? I would say the super candid thing that we realized, just for timing context, I probably personally realized this during the summer of 2022 and then the acquisition happened in December of 2022. Just for temporal context, NTT came out in November of 2022. At Impira, I think our primary technical advantage was the fact that if you were extracting data from PDF documents, which ended up being the flavor of unstructured data that we focused on, back then you had to assemble thousands of examples of a particular type of document to get a deep neural network to learn how to extract data from it accurately. We had figured out how to make that really small, maybe two or three examples through a variety of old-school ML techniques and maybe some fancy deep learning stuff. But we had this really cool technology that we were proud of. It was actually primarily computer vision-based because at that time, computer vision was a more mature field. If you think of a document as one-part visual signals and one-part text signals, the visual signals were more readily available to extract information from. What happened is text starting with BERT and then accelerating through and including chat GPT just totally cannibalized that. I remember I was in New York and I was playing with BERT on HuggingFace, which had made it really easy at that point to actually do that. They had this little square in the right-hand panel of a model. I just started copy-pasting documents into a question-answering fine-tune using BERT and seeing whether it could extract the invoice number and this other stuff. I was somewhat mind-boggled by how often it would get it right.swyx [00:18:25]: That was really scary. Hang on, this is a vision-based BERT? Nope. So this was raw PDFAnkur Goyal [00:18:31]: parsing? Yep. No, no PDF parsing.swyx [00:18:33]: Just taking the PDF, command-A,Ankur Goyal [00:18:35]: copy-paste. So there's no visual signal. By the way, I know we don't want to talk about brain trust yet, but this is also how these technologies were formed because I had a lot of trouble convincing our team that this was real. Part of that naturally, not to anyone's fault, is just the pride that you have in what you've done so far. There's no way something that's not trained or whatever for our use case is going to be as good, which is in many ways true. But part of it is just I had no simple way of proving that it was going to be better. There's no tooling. I could just run something and show I remember on the flight, before the flight, I downloaded the weights and then on the flight when I didn't have internet, I was playing around with a bunch of documents and anecdotally it was like, oh my god, this is amazing. And then that summer we went deep into Layout LM, Microsoft. I personally got super into Hugging Face and I think for two or three months was the top non-employee contributor to Hugging Face, which was a lot of fun. We created the document QA model type and a bunch of stuff. And then we fine-tuned a bunch of stuff and contributed it as well. I love that team. Clem is now an investor in Braintrust, so it started forming that relationship. And I realized, and again, this is all pre-Chat GPT, I realized like, oh my god, this stuff is clearly going to cannibalize all the stuff that we've built. And we quickly retooled Impira’s product to use Layout LM as kind of the base model and in almost all cases we didn't have to use our new but somewhat more complex technology to extract stuff. And then I started playing with GPT-3 and that just totally blew my mind. Again, Layout LM is visual, right? So almost the same exact exercise, like I took the PDF contents, pasted it into Chat GPT, no visual structure, and it just destroyed Layout LM. And I was like, oh my god, what is stable here? And I even remember going through the psychological justification of like, oh, but GPT-3 is expensive and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.swyx [00:20:37]: So nobody would call it in quantity, right?Ankur Goyal [00:20:41]: Yeah, exactly. But as I was doing that, because I had literally just gone through that, I was able to kind of zoom outswyx [00:20:47]: and be like, you're an idiot.Ankur Goyal [00:20:49]: And so I realized, wow, okay, this stuff is going to change very, very dramatically. And I looked at our commercial traction, I looked at our exhaustion level, I looked at the team and I thought a lot about what would be best and I thought about all the stuff I'd been talking about, like how much did I personally enjoy working on this problem? Is this the problem that I want to raise more capital and work on with a high degree of integrity for the next 5, 10, 15 years? And I realized the answer was no. And so we started pursuing, we had some inbound interest already, given now Chat GPT, this stuff was starting to pick up. I guess Chat GPT still hadn't come out, but GPT-3 was gaining and there weren't that many AI teams or ML teams at the time. So we also started to get some inbound and I kind of realized like, okay, this is probably a better path. And so we talked to a bunch of companies and ran a process. Ilad was insanelyswyx [00:21:47]: helpful.Ankur Goyal [00:21:49]: He was an investor in Empira. Yeah, I met him at a pizza shop in 2016 or 2017 and then we went on one of those famous really long walks the next day. We started near Salesforce Tower and we ended in Noe Valley. And Ilad walks at the speed of light. I think it was like 30 or 40, it was crazy. And then he invested. And then I guess we'll talk more about him in a little bit. I was talking to him on the phone pretty much every day through that process. And Figma had a number of positive qualities to it. One is that there was a sense of stability because of the acquisition, Figma's another is the problem... By Adobe?swyx [00:22:31]: Yeah. Oh, oops.Ankur Goyal [00:22:33]: The problem domain was not exactly the same as what we were solving, but was actually quite similar in that it is a combination of textual language signal, but it's multimodal. So our team was pretty excited about that problem and had some experience. And then we met the whole team and we just thought these people are great. And that's true, they're great people. And so we felt really excited about working there.swyx [00:22:57]: But is there a question of, because the company was shut down effectively after, you're basically letting down your customers? Yeah. How does that... I mean, obviously you don't have to cover this, so we can cut this out if it's too comfortable. But I think that's a question that people have when they go through acquisition offers.Ankur Goyal [00:23:15]: Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, it was hard. It was really hard. I would say that there's two scenarios. There's one where it doesn't seem hard for a founder, and I think in those scenarios, it ends up being much harder for everyone else. And then in the other scenario, it is devastating for the founder. In that scenario, I think it works out to be less devastating for everyone else. And I can tell you, it was extremely devastating. I was very, very sad forswyx [00:23:45]: three, four months. To be acquired, but also to be shutting down.Ankur Goyal [00:23:49]: Yeah, I mean, just winding a lot of things down. Winding a lot of things down. I think our customers were very understanding, and we worked with them. To be honest, if we had more traction than we did, then it would have been harder. But there were a lot of document processing solutions. The space is very competitive. And so I think I'm hoping, although I'm not 100% sure about this, but I'm hoping we didn't leave anyone totally out to pasture. And we did very, very generous refunds and worked quite closely with people and wrote codeswyx [00:24:23]: to help them where we could.Ankur Goyal [00:24:25]: But it's not easy. It's one of those things where I think as an entrepreneur, you sometimes resist making what is clearly the right decision because it feels very uncomfortable. And you have to accept that it's your job to make the right decision. And I would say for me, this is one of N formative experiences where viscerally the gap between what feels like the right decision and what is clearly the right decision, and you have to embrace what is clearly the right decision, and then map back and fix the feelings along the way. And this was definitely one of those cases.swyx [00:25:03]: Thank you for sharing that. That's something that not many people get to hear. And I'm sure a lot of people are going through that right now, bringing up Clem. He mentions very publicly that he gets so many inbounds acquisition offers. I don't know what you call it. Please buy me offers. And I think people are kind of doing that math in this AI winter that we're somewhat going through. Maybe we'll spend a little bit on Figma. Figma AI. I've watched closely the past two configs. A lot going on. You were only there for eight months. What would you say is interesting going on at Figma, at least from the time that you were there and whatever you see now as an outsider?Ankur Goyal [00:25:41]: Last year was an interesting time for Figma. One, Figma was going through an acquisition. Two, Figma was trying to think about what is Figma beyond being a design tool. And three, Figma is kind of like Apple, a company that is really optimized around a periodic, annual release cycle rather than something that's continuous. If you look at some of the really early AI adopters, like Notion for example, Notion is shipping stuff constantly. It's a new thing.swyx [00:26:13]: We were consulted on that. Because Ivan liked World's Fair.Ankur Goyal [00:26:17]: I'll be there if anyone is there. Hit me up. Very iterative company. Ivan and Simon and a couple others hacked the first versions of Notion AIswyx [00:26:27]: at a retreat.Ankur Goyal [00:26:29]: In a hotel room. I think with those three pieces of context in mind, it's a little bit challenging for Figma. Very high product bar. Of the software products that are out there right now, one of, if not the best, just quality product. It's not janky, you sort of rely on it to work type of products. It's quite hard to introduce AI into that. And then the other thing I would just add to that is that visual AI is very new and it's very amorphous. Vectors are very difficult because they're a data inefficient representation. The vector format in something like Figma chews up many, many, many, many, many more tokens than HTML and JSX. So it's a very difficult medium to just sort of throw into an LLM compared to writing problems or coding problems. And so it's not trivial for Figma to release like, oh, this company has blah-blah AI and Acme AI and whatever. It's not super trivial for Figma to do that. I think for me personally, I really enjoyed everyone that I worked with and everyone that I met. I am a creature of shipping. I wake up every morning nowadays to several complaints or questions from people and I just like pounding through stuff and shipping stuff and making people happy and iterating with them. And it was just literally challenging for me to do that in that environment. That's why it ended up not being the best fit for me personally. But I think it's going to be interesting what they do. Within the framework that they're designed to, as a company, to ship stuff when they do sort of make that big leap, I think it could be very compelling.swyx [00:28:11]: I think there's a lot of value in being the chosen tool for an industry because then you just get a lot of community patience for figuring stuff out. The unique problem that Figma has is it caters to designers who hate AI right now. When you mention AI, they're like, oh, I'm going to...Ankur Goyal [00:28:27]: The thing is, in my limited experience and working with designers myself, I think designers do not want AI to design things for them. But there's a lot of things that aren't in the traditional designer toolkit that AI can solve. And I think the biggest one is generating code. So in my mind, there's this very interesting convergence happening between UI engineering and design. And I think Figma can play an incredibly important part in that transformation which, rather than being threatening, is empowering to designers and probably helps designers contribute and collaborate with engineers more effectively, which is a little bit different than the focus around actually designing things in the editor.swyx [00:29:09]: Yeah, I think everyone's keen on that. Dev mode was, I think, the first segue into that. So we're going to go into Braintrust now, about 20-something minutes into the podcast. So what was your idea for Braintrust? Tell the full origin story.Ankur Goyal [00:29:23]: At Impira, while we were having an existential revelation, if you will, we realized that the debates we were having about what model and this and that were really hard to actually prove anything with. So we argued for like two or three months and then prototyped an eval system on top of Snowflake and some scripts, and then shipped the new model like two weeks later. And it wasn't perfect. There were a bunch of things that were less good than what we had before, but in aggregate, it was just way better. And that was a holy s**t moment for me. I kind of realized there's this, sometimes in engineering organizations or maybe organizations more generally, there are what feel like irrational bottlenecks. It's like, why are we doing this? Why are we talking about this? Whatever. This was one of those obvious irrational bottlenecks.swyx [00:30:13]: Can you articulate the bottleneck again? Was it simplyAnkur Goyal [00:30:17]: evals? Yeah, the bottleneck is there's approach A, and it has these trade-offs. And approach B has these other trade-offs. Which approach should we use? And if people don't very clearly align on one of the two approaches, then you end up going in circles. This approach, hey, check out this example. It's better at this example. Or, I was able to achieve it with this document, but it doesn't work with all of our customer cases, right? And so you end up going in circles. If you introduce evals into the mix, then you sort of change the discussion from being hypothetical or one example and another example into being something that's extremely straightforward and almost scientific. Like, okay, great. Let's get an initial estimate of how good LayoutLM is compared to our hand-built computer vision model. Oh, it looks like there are these 10 cases, invoices that we've never been able to process that now we can suddenly process, but we regress ourselves on these three. Let's think about how to engineer a solution to actually improve these three, and then measure it for you. And so it gives you a framework to have that. And I think, aside from the fact that it literally lets you run the sort of scientific process of improving an AI application, organizationally, it gives you a clear set of tools, I think, to get people to agree. And I think in the absence of evals, what I saw at Empira, and I see with almost all of our customers before they start using BrainTrust, is this kind of stalemate between people on which prompt to use or which model to use or which technique to use, that once you embrace engineering around evals, it justswyx [00:31:51]: goes away. Yeah. We just did an episode with Hamil Hussain here, and the cynic in that statement would be like, this is not new. All ML engineering deploying models to production always involves evals. Yeah. You discovered it, and you built your own solution, but everyone in the industry has their own solution. Why the conviction that there's a company here?Ankur Goyal [00:32:13]: I think the fundamental thing is, prior to BERT, I was, as a traditional software engineer, incapable of participating in what happens behind the scenes in ML development. Ignore the CEO or founder title, just imagine I'm a software engineer who's very empathetic about the product. All of my information about what's going to work and what's not going to work is communicated through the black box of interpretation by ML people. So I'm told that this thing is better than that thing, or it'll take us three months to improve this other thing. What is incredibly empowering about these, I would just maybe say that the quality that transformers bring to the table, and even BERT does this, but GPT 3 and then 4 very emphatically do it, is that software engineers can now participate in this discussion. But all the tools that ML people have built over the years to help them navigate evals and data generally are very hard to use for software engineers. I remember when I was first acclimating to this problem, I had to learn how to use Hugging Face and Weights and Biases. And my friend Yanda was at Weights and Biases at the time, and I was talking to him about this, and he was like, yeah, well, prior to Weights and Biases, all data scientists had was software engineering tools, and it felt really uncomfortable to them. And Weights and Biases brought software engineering to them. And then I think the opposite happened. For software engineers, it's just really hard to use these tools. And so I was having this really difficult time wrapping my head around what seemingly simple stuff is. And last summer, I was talking to a lot about this, and I think primarily just venting about it. And he was like, well, you're not the only software engineer who's starting to work on AI now. And that is when we realized that the real gap is that software engineers who have a particular way of thinking, a particular set of biases, a particular type of workflow that they run, are going to be the ones who are doing AI engineering, and that the tools that were built for ML are fantastic in terms of the scientific inspiration, the metrics they track, the level of quality that they inspire, but they're just not usable for software engineers. And that's really where the opportunity is.swyx [00:34:35]: I was talking with Sarah Guo at the same time, and that led to the rise of the AI engineer and everything that I've done. So very much similar philosophy there. I think it's just interesting that software engineering and ML engineering should not be that different. It's still engineering at the same... You're still making computers boop. Why?Ankur Goyal [00:34:53]: Well, I mean, there's a bunch of dualities to this. There's the world of continuous mathematics and discrete mathematics. I think ML people think like continuous mathematicians and software engineers, like myself, who are obsessed with algebra. We like to think in terms of discrete math. What I often talk to people about is, I feel like there are people for whom NumPy is incredibly intuitive, and there are people for whom it is incredibly non-intuitive. For me, it is incredibly non-intuitive. I was actually talking to Hamel the other day. He was talking about how there's an eval tool that he likes, and I should check it out. And I was like, this thing, what? Are you freaking kidding me? It's terrible. Yeah, but it has data frames. I was like, yes, exactly. You don't like data frames? I don't like data frames. It's super hard for me to think about manipulating data frames and extracting a column or a row out of data frames. And by the way, this is someone who's worked on databases for more than a decade. It's just very, very programmer-wise. It's very non-ergonomic for me to manipulate a data frame.swyx [00:35:55]: And what's your preference then?Ankur Goyal [00:35:57]: For loops.swyx [00:35:59]: Okay. Well, maybe you should capture a statement of what is BrainTrust today because there's a little bit of the origin story. And you've had a journey over the past year, and obviously now with Series A, which will, like, woohoo, congrats. Put a little intro for the Series A stuff. What is BrainTrust today?Ankur Goyal [00:36:15]: BrainTrust is an end-to-end developer platform for building AI products. And I would say our core belief is that if you embrace evaluation as the sort of core workflow in AI engineering, meaning every time you make a change, you evaluate it, and you use that to drive the next set of changes that you make, then you're able to build much, much better AI software. That's kind of our core thesis. And we started probably as no surprise by building, I would say, by far the world's best evaluation product, especially for software engineers and now for product managers and others. I think there's a lot of data scientists now who like BrainTrust, but I would say early on, a lot of, like, ML and data science people hated BrainTrust. It felt, like, really weird to them. Things have changed a little bit, but really, like, making evals something that software engineers, product managers can immediately do, I think that's where we started. And now people have pulled us into doing more. So the first thing that people said is, like, okay, great, I can do evals. How do I get the data to do evals? And so what we realized, anyone who's spent some time in evals knows that one of the biggest pain points is ETLing data from your logs into a dataset format that you can use to do evals. And so what we realized is, okay, great, when you're doing evals, you have to instrument your code to capture information about what's happening and then render the eval. What if we just capture that information while you're actually running your application? There's a few benefits to that. One, it's in the same familiar trace and span format that you use for evals. But the other thing is that you've almost accidentally solved the ETL problem. And so if you structure your code so that the same function abstraction that you define to evaluate on equals the abstraction that you actually use to run your application, then when you log your application itself, you actually log it in exactly the right format to do evals. And that turned out to be a killer feature in Braintrust. You can just turn on logging, and now you have an instant flywheel of data that you can collect in datasets and use for evals. And what's cool is that customers, they might start using us for evals, and then they just reuse all the work that they did, and they flip a switch, and boom, they have logs. Or they start using us for logging, and then they flip a switch, and boom, they have data that they can use and the code already written to do evals. The other thing that we realized is that Braintrust went from being kind of a dashboard into being more of a debugger, and now it's turning into kind of an IDE. And by that I mean, at first you ran an eval, and you'd look at our web UI and sort of see a chart or something that tells you how your eval did. But then you wanted to interrogate that and say, okay, great, 8% better. Is that 8% better on everything, or is that 15% better and 7% worse? And where it's 7% worse, what are the cases that regressed? How do I look at the individual cases? They might be worse on this metric. Are they better on that metric? What are the cases that differ? Let me dig in detail. And that sort of turned us into a debugger. And then people said, okay, great, now I want to take action on that. I want to save the prompt or change the model and then click a button and try it again. And that's kind of pulled us into building this very, very souped-up playground. And we started by calling it the Playground, and it started as my wish list of things that annoyed me about the OpenAI Playground. First and foremost, it's durable. So every time you type something, it just immediately saves it. If you lose the browser or whatever, it's all saved. You can share it, and it's collaborative, kind of like Google Docs, Notion, Figma, etc. And so you can work on it with colleagues in real time, and that's a lot of fun. It lets you compare multiple prompts and models side-by-side with data. And now you can actually run evals in the Playground. You can save the prompts that you create in the Playground and deploy them into your code base. And so it's become very, very advanced. And I remember actually, we had an intro call with Brex last year, who's now a customer. And one of the engineers on the call said, he saw the Playground and he said, I want this to be my IDE. It's not there yet. Here's a list of 20 complaints, but I want this to be my IDE. I remember when he told me that, I had this very strong reaction, like, what the F? We're building an eval observability thing, we're not building an IDE. But I think he turned out to be right, and that's a lot of what we've done over the past few months and what we're looking to in the future.swyx [00:40:42]: How literally can you take it? Can you fork VS Code? It's not off the table.Ankur Goyal [00:40:48]: We're friends with the cursor people and now part of the same portfolio. And sometimes people say, AI and engineering, are you cursor? Are you competitive? And what I think is like, cursor is taking AI and making traditional software engineering insanely good with AI. And we're taking some of the best things about traditional software engineering and bringing them to building AI software. And so, we're almost like yin and yang in some ways with development. But forking VS Code and doing crazy stuff is not off the table. It's all ideas that we're cooking at this point.swyx [00:41:27]: Interesting. I think that when people say analogies, they should often take it to the extreme and see what that generates in terms of ideas. And when people say IDE, literally go there. Because I think a lot of people treat their playground and they say figuratively IDE, they don't mean it. And they should. They should mean it.Ankur Goyal [00:41:45]: So, we've had this playground in the product for a while. And the TLDR of it is that it lets you test prompts. They could be prompts that you save in Braintrust or prompts that you just type on the fly against a bunch of different models or your own fine-tuned models. And you can hook them into the datasets that you create in Braintrust to do your evals. So, I've just pulled this press-release dataset. And this is actually one of the first features we built. It's really easy to run stuff. And by the way, we're trying to see if we can build a prompt that summarizes the document well. But what's kind of happened over time is that people have pulled us to make this prompt playground more and more powerful. So, I kind of like to think of Braintrust as two ends of the spectrum. If you're writing code, you can create evals with infinite complexity. You don't even have to use large language models. You can use any models you want. You can write any scoring functions you want. And you can do that in the most complicated code bases in the world. And then we have this playground that dramatically simplifies things. It's so easy to use that non-technical people love to use it. Technical people enjoy using it as well. And we're sort of converging these things over time. So, one of the first things people asked about is if they could run evals in the playground. And we've supported running pre-built evals for a while. But we actually just added support for creating your own evals in the playground. And I'm going to show you some cool stuff. So, we'll start by adding this summary quality thing. And if we look at the definition of it, it's just a prompt that maps to a few different choices. And each one has a score. We can try it out and make sure that it works. And then, let's run it. So, now you can run not just the model itself, but also the summary quality score and see that it's not great. So, we have some room to improve it. The next thing you can do is let's try to tweak this prompt. So, let's say like in one to two lines. And let's run it again.swyx [00:43:49]: One thing I noticed about the... you're using an LLM as a judge here. That prompt about one to two lines should actually go into the judge input. It is. Oh, okay. Was that it? Oh, this was generated?Ankur Goyal [00:44:07]: No, no, no. This is how...swyx [00:44:09]: I pre-wrote this ahead of time. So, you're matching up the prompt to the eval that you already knew.Ankur Goyal [00:44:15]: Exactly. So, the idea is like it's useful to write the eval before you actually tweak the prompt so that you can measure the impact of the tweak. So, you can see that the impact is pretty clear, right? It goes from 54% to 100% now. This is a little bit of a toy example, but you kind of get the point. Now, here's an interesting case. If you look at this one, there's something that's obviously wrong with this. What is wrong with this new summary?swyx [00:44:41]: It has an intro.Ankur Goyal [00:44:43]: Yeah, exactly. So, let's actually add another evaluator. And this one is Python code. It's not a prompt. And it's very simple. It's just checking if the word sentence is here. And this is a really unique thing. As far as I know, we're the only product that does this. But this Python code is running in a sandbox. It's totally dynamic. So, for example, if we change this, it'll put the Boolean. Obviously, we don't want to save that. We can also try running it here. And so, it's really easy for you to... It's really easy for you to actually go and tweak stuff and play with it and create more interesting scores. So, let's save this. And then we'll run with this one as well. Awesome. And then let's try again. So, now let's say, just include summary. Anything else?Ankur Goyal [00:45:47]: Amazing. So, the last thing I'll show you, and this is a little bit of an allude to what's next, is that the Playground experience is really powerful for doing this interactive editing. But we're already running at the limits of how much information we can see about the scores themselves and how much information is fitting here. And we actually have a great user experience that, until recently, you could only access by writing an eval in your code. But now you can actually go in here and kick off full brain trust experiments from the Playground. So, in addition to this, we'll actually add one more. We'll add the embedding similarity score. And we'll say, original summarizer,swyx [00:46:31]: shortAnkur Goyal [00:46:33]: summary, and no sentenceswyx [00:46:37]: wording.Ankur Goyal [00:46:39]: And then to create... And this is actually going to kick off full experiments.swyx [00:46:43]: So,Ankur Goyal [00:46:45]: if we go into one of these things,Ankur Goyal [00:46:51]: now we're in the full brain trust UI. And one of the really cool things is that you can actually now not just compare one experiment, but compare multiple experiments. And so you can actually look at all of these experiments together and understand, like, okay, good. I did this thing which said, like, please keep it to one to two sentences. Looks like it improved the summary quality and sentence checker, of course, but it looks like it actually also did better on the similarity score, which is my main score to track how well the summary compares to a reference summary. And you can go in here and then very granularly look at the diff between two different versions of the summary and do this whole experience. So, this is something that we actually just shipped a couple weeks ago. And it's already really powerful. But what I wanted to show you is kind of what, like, even the next version or next iteration of this is. And by the time the podcast airs, what I'm about to show you will be live. So, we're almost done shipping it. But before I do that, any questions on this stuff? No, this isswyx [00:47:53]: a really good demo. Okay, cool. So,Ankur Goyal [00:47:55]: as soon as we showed people this kind of stuff, they said, well, you know, this is great, and I wish I could do everything with this experience, right? Like, imagine you could, like, create an agent or do rag, like, more interesting stuff with this kind of interactivity. And so, we were like, huh, it looks like we built support for you to do, you know, to run code. And it looks like we know how to actually run your prompts. I wonder if we can do something more interesting. So, we just added support for you to actually define your own tools. I'll sort of shell two different tool options for you. So, one is Browserbase, and the other is Exa. I think these are both really cool companies. And here, we're just writing, like, really simple TypeScript code that wraps the Browserbase API and then, similarly, really simple TypeScript code that wraps the Exa API. And then we give it a type definition. This will get used as a, um, as the schema for a tool call. And then we give it a little bit of metadata so Braintrust knows, you know, where to store it and what to name it and stuff. And then you just run a really simple command, npx braintrust push, and then you give it these files, and it will bundle up all the dependencies and push it into Braintrust. And now you can actually access these things from Braintrust. So, if we go to the search tool, we could say, you know, what is the tallest mountain...swyx [00:49:19]: Oops. ... ... ...Ankur Goyal [00:49:27]: And it'll actually run search by Exa. So, what I'm very excited to show you is that now you can actually do this stuff in the Playground, too. So, if we go to the Playground, um, let's try playing with this. So, uh, we'll create a new session.swyx [00:49:45]: ... ... ... ...Ankur Goyal [00:49:53]: And let's create a dataset.swyx [00:49:57]: ... ...Ankur Goyal [00:50:01]: Let's put one row in here, and we'll say,swyx [00:50:03]: um,Ankur Goyal [00:50:05]: what is the premier conference for AI engineers?swyx [00:50:11]: Ooh, I wonder what we'll find.Ankur Goyal [00:50:15]: Um, following question, feel free to search the internet. Okay, so, let's plug this in, and let's start without using any tools.swyx [00:50:27]: ... ...Ankur Goyal [00:50:31]: Uh, I'm not sure I agree with this statement.swyx [00:50:33]: That was correct as of his training data. ...Ankur Goyal [00:50:37]: Okay, so, let's add this Exa tool in, and let's try running it again. Watch closely over here. So, you see it's actually running.swyx [00:50:45]: Yeah. There we go. ... Not exactly accurate, but good enough. Yeah, yeah.Ankur Goyal [00:50:55]: So, I think that this is really cool, because for probably 80 or 90% of the use cases that we see with people doing this, like, very, very simple, I create a prompt, it calls some tools, I can, like, very ergonomically write the tools, plug into popular services, et cetera, and then just call them, kind of like, assistance API-style stuff. It covers so many use cases, and it's honestly so hard to do. Like, if you try to do this by yourself, you have to write a for loop,swyx [00:51:25]: you have toAnkur Goyal [00:51:27]: host it somewhere. You know, with this thing, you can actually just access it through our REST API, so every prompt gets a REST API endpoint that you can invoke. And so, we're very, very excited about this, and I think it kind of represents the future of AI engineering, one where you can spend a lot of time writing English, and sort of crafting the use case itself. You can reuse tools across different use cases, and then, most importantly, the development process is very nicely and kind of tightly integrated with evaluation, and so you have the ability to create your own scores and sort of do all of this very interactively as you actually build stuff.swyx [00:52:05]: I thought about a business in this area, and I'll tell you why I didn't do it. And I think that might be generative for insights onto this industry that you would have that I don't. When I interviewed for Anthropic, they gave me Cloud and Sheets, and with Cloud and Sheets, I was able to build my own evals. Because I can use Sheets formulas, I can use LLM, I can use Cloud to evaluate Cloud, whatever. And I was like, okay, there will be AI spreadsheets, there will all be plugins, spreadsheets is like the universal business tool of whatever. You can API spreadsheets. I'm sure Airtable, you know, Howie's an investor in you now, but I'm sure Airtable has some kind of LLM integration. The second thing was that HumanLoop also existed, HumanLoop being like one of the very, very first movers in this field where same thing, durable playground, you can share them, you can save the prompts and call them as APIs. You can also do evals and all the other stuff. So there's a lot of tooling, and I think you saw something or you just had the self-belief where I didn't, or you saw something that was missing still, even in that space from DIY no-code Google Sheets to custom tool, they were first movers.Ankur Goyal [00:53:11]: Yeah, I mean, I think evals, it's not hard to do an initial eval script. Not to be too cheeky about it, I would say almost all of the products in the space are spreadsheet plus plus. Like, here's a script generates an eval, I look at the cells, whatever, side by sideswyx [00:53:33]: and compare it. The main thing I was impressed by was that you can run all these things in parallel so quickly. Yeah, exactly.Ankur Goyal [00:53:41]: So I had built spreadsheet plus plus a few times. And there were a couple nuggets that I realized early on. One is that it's very important to have a history of the evals that you've run and make it easy to share them and publish in Slack channel, stuff like that, because that becomes a reference point for you to have discussions among a team. So at Impira, when we were first ironing out our layout LM usage, we would publish screenshots of the evals in a Slack channel and go back to those screenshots and riff on ideas from a week ago that maybe we abandoned. And having the history is just really important for collaboration. And then the other thing is that writing for loops is quite hard. Like, writing the right for loop that parallelizes things is durable, someone doesn't screw up the next time they write it, you know, all this other stuff. It sounds really simple, but it's actually not. And we sort of pioneered this syntax where instead of writing a for loop to do an eval, you just create something called eval, and you give it an argument which has some data, then you give it a task function, which is some function that takes some input and returns some output. Presumably it calls an LLM, nowadays it might be an agent, you know, it does whatever you want, and then one or more scoring functions. And then Braintrust basically takes that specification of an eval and then runs it as efficiently and seamlessly as possible. And there's a number of benefits to that. The first is that we can make things really fast, and I think speed is a superpower. Early on we did stuff like cache things really well, parallelize things, async Python is really hard to use, so we made it easy to use. We made exactly the same interface in TypeScript and Python, so teams that were sort of navigating the two realities could easily move back and forth between them. And now what's become possible, because this data structure is totally declarative, an eval is actually not just a code construct, but it's actually a piece of data. So when you run an eval in Braintrust now, you can actually optionally bundle the eval and then send it. And as you saw in the demo, you can run code functions and stuff. Well, you can actually do that with the evals that you write in your code. So all the scoring functions become functions in Braintrust. The task function becomes something you can actually interactively play with and debug in the UI. So turning it into this data structure actually makes it a much more powerful thing. And by the way, you can run an eval in your code base, save it to Braintrust, and then hit it with an API and just try out a new model, for example. That's more recent stuff nowadays, but early on just having the very simple declarative data structure that was just much easier to write than a for loop that you sort of had to cobble together yourself, and making it really fast, and then having a UI that just very quickly gives you the number of improvements or regressions and filter them, that was kind of the key thing that worked. I give a lot of credit to Brian from Zapier, who was our first user, and super harsh. I mean, he told me straight up, I know this is a problem, you seem smart, but I'm not convinced of the solution. And almost like Mr. Miyagi or something, I'd produce a demo and then he'd send me back and be like, eh, it's not good enough for me to show the team. And so we sort of iterated several times until he was pretty excited by the developer experience. That core developer experience was just more helpful enough and comforting enough for people that were new to evals that they were willing to try it out. And then we were just very aggressive about iterating with them. So people said, you know, I ran this eval, I'd like to be able to rerun the prompt. So we made that possible. Or I ran this eval, it's really hard for me to group by model and actually see which model did better and why. I ran these evals, one thing is slower than the other. How do I correlate that with token counts? That's actually really hard to do. It's annoying because you're often doing LLM as a judge and generating tokens by doing that too. And so you need to instrument the code to distinguish the tokens that are used for scoring from the tokens that are used for actually computing the thing. Now we're way out of the realm of what you can do with clod and sheets, right? In our case at least, once we got some very sophisticated early adopters of AI using the product, it was a no-brainer to just keep making the product better and better and better. I could just see that from the first week that people were using the product,swyx [00:58:11]: that there was just a ton of depth here. There is a ton of depth. Sometimes it's not even just that the ideas are not worth anything. It's almost just the persistence and execution that I think you do very well. So whatever, kudos. We're about to zoom out a little bit to industry observations, but I want to spend time on Braintrust. Any other area of Braintrust or part of the Braintrust story that you think people should appreciate or which is personally insightful to you that you want toAnkur Goyal [00:58:37]: discuss it? There's probably two things I would point to. The first thing, actually there's one silly thing and then two maybe less silly things. So when we started, there were a bunch of things that people thought were stupid about Braintrust. One of them was this hybrid on-prem model that we have. And it's funny because Databricks has a really famous hybrid on-prem model and the CEO and others sort of have a mixed perspective on it. And sometimes you talk to Databricks people and they're like, this is the worst thing ever. But I think Databricks is doing pretty well and it's hard to know how successful they would have been without doing that. But because of that and Snowflake was doing really well at the time, everyone thought this hybrid thing was stupid. But I was talking to customers and Zapier was our first user and then Coda and Airtable quickly followed. And there was just no chance they would be able to use the product unless the data stayed in their cloud. Maybe they could a year from when we started or whatever, but I wanted to work with them now. And so it never felt like a question to me. I remember there's so many VCsswyx [00:59:41]: that I talked to.Ankur Goyal [00:59:43]: Yeah, exactly. Like, oh my god, look, here's a quote from the Databricks CEO Here's a quote from this person. You're just clearly wrong. I was like, okay, great. See ya. Luckily, you know, Elad, Alanna, Sam, and now Martin were just like, that's stupid. Don't worry about that.swyx [00:59:58]: Martin is king of not being religious in cloud stuff.Ankur Goyal [01:00:02]: But yeah, I think that was just funny because it was something that just felt super obvious to me and everyone thought I was pretty stupid about it. And maybe I am, but I think it's helped us quite a bit.swyx [01:00:15]: We had this issue at Temporal and the solution was like cloud VPC peering. And what I'm hearing from you is you went further than that. You're bundling up your package software and you're shipping it over and you're charging by seat.Ankur Goyal [01:00:27]: You asked about single store and lessons from single store. I have been through the ringer with on-prem software and I've learned a lot of lessons. So we know how to do it really well. I think the tricks with brain trust are, one, that the cloud has changed a lot even since Databricks came out and there's a number of things that are easy that used to be very hard. I think serverless is probably one of the most important unlocks for us because it sort of allows us to bound failure into something that doesn't require restarting servers or restarting Linux processes. So even though it has a number of problems, it's made it much easier for us to have this model. And then the other thing is we literally engineered brain trust from day zero to have this model. If you treat it as an opportunity and then engineer a very, very good solution around it, just like DX or something, you can build a really good system, you can test it well, etc. So we viewed it as an opportunity rather than a challenge. The second thing is the space was really crowded. You and I even talked about this and it doesn't feel very crowded now. Sometimes people literally ask me if we have anyswyx [01:01:35]: competitors. We'll go into that industry stuff later.Ankur Goyal [01:01:39]: I think what I realized then, my wife, Alana, actually told me this when we were working on Impira. She said, based on your personality, I want you to work on something next that is super competitive. And I kind of realized there's only one of two types of markets in startups. Either it's not crowded or it is crowded. Each of those things has a different set of trade-offs and I think there are founders that thrive in either environment. As someone who enjoys competition, I find it very motivating. Personally, it's better for me to work in a crowded market than it is to work in an empty market. Again, people are like, blah, blah, blah, stupid, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, actually, this is what I want to be doing. There were a few strategic bets that we made early on at Braintrust that I think helped us a lot. So one of them I mentioned is the hybrid on-prem thing. Another thing is we were the original folks who really prioritized TypeScript. Now, I would say every customer and probably north of 75% of the users that are running evals in Braintrust are using the TypeScript SDK. It's an overwhelming majority. And again, at the time, and still, AI is at least nominally dominated by Python, but product building is dominated by TypeScript. And the real opportunity to our discussion earlier is for product builders to use AI. And so, even if it's not the majority of typists using AI stuff, writing TypeScript, it worked out to be this magical niche for us that's led to a lot of, I would say, strong product market fit among product builders. And then the third thing that we did is, look, we knew that this LLM ops or whatever you want to call it space is going to be more than just evals. But again, early on, evals, I mean, there's one VC, I won't call them out. You know who you are because I assume you're going to be listening to this. But there's one VC who insisted on meeting us. And I've known them for a long time, blah, blah, blah. And they're like, you know what, actually, after thinking about it, we don't want to invest in Braintrust because it reminds me of CICD and that's a crappy market. And if you were going after logging and observability, that was your main thing, then that's a great market. But of all the things in LLM ops or whatever, if you draw a parallel to the previous world of software development, this is like CICD and CICD is not a great market. And I was like, okay, it's sort of like the hybrid on-prem thing. Go talk to a customer and you'll realize that this is the, I mean, I was at Figma when we used Datadog and we built our own prompt playground. It's not super hard to write some code that, you know, Vercel has a template that you can use to create your own prompt playground now. But evals were just really hard. And so I knew that the pain around evals was just significantly greater than anything else. And so if we built an insanely good solution around it, the other things would follow. And lo and behold, of course, that VC came back a few months later and said, oh my God, you guys are doing observability now. Now we're interested. And that was another kind of interesting thing.swyx [01:04:47]: We're going to tie this off a little bit with some customer motivations and quotes. We already talked about the logos that you have, which are all really very impressive. I've seen what Stripe can do. I don't know if it's quotable, but you said you had something from Vercel, from Malte.Ankur Goyal [01:05:01]: Yeah, yeah. Actually, I'll let you read it. It's on our website. I don't want to butcherswyx [01:05:07]: his language. So Malta says, we deeply appreciate the collaboration. I've never seen a workflow transformation like the one that incorporates evals into mainstream engineering processes before. It's astonishing.Ankur Goyal [01:05:19]: Yeah. I mean, I think that is a perfect encapsulation ofswyx [01:05:23]: our goal. For those who don't know, Malte used to work on Google Search.Ankur Goyal [01:05:29]: He's super legit. Kind of scary, as are all of the Vercel people.swyx [01:05:35]: My funniest quote of Malte is a recent incident of Malte. He published this very, very long guide to SEO, like how SEO works. And people are like, this is not to be trusted. This is not how it works. And literally, the guy worked on the search algorithm. Yeah.Ankur Goyal [01:05:51]: That's really funny.swyx [01:05:53]: People don't believe when you are representing a company. I think everyone has an angle. In Silicon Valley, it's this whole thing where if you don't have skin in the game, you're not really in the know, because why would you? You're not an insider. But then once you have skin in the game, you do have a perspective. You have a point of view. And maybe that segues into a little bit of industry talk. Sounds good. Unless you want to bring up your World's Fair, we can also riff on just what you saw at the World's Fair. You were the first speaker, and you were one of the few who brought a customer, which is something I think I want to encourage more. I think the DVT conference also does. Their conference is exclusively vendors and customers, and then sharing lessons learned and stuff like that. Maybe plug your talk a little bit and people canAnkur Goyal [01:06:37]: go watch it. Yeah. First, Olmo is an insanely good engineer. He actually worked with Guillermo onswyx [01:06:43]: Mutools back in the day.Ankur Goyal [01:06:45]: This was mafia. I remember when I first met him, speaking of TypeScript, we only had a Python SDK. And he was like, where's the TypeScript SDK? And I was like, here's some curl commands you can use. This was on a Friday. And he was like, okay. And Zapier was not a customer yet, but they were interested in brain trust. And so I built the TypeScript SDK over the weekend, and then he was the first user of it. And what better than to have one of the core authors of Mutools bike-shedding SDK from the beginning. I would give him a lot of credit for how some of the ergonomics of our product have worked out. By the way, another benefit of structuring the talk this way is he actually worked out of our office earlier that week and built the talk and found a ton of bugs in the product or usability things. And it was so much fun. He sat next to me at the office. He'd find something or complain about something, and I'd point him to the engineer who works on it, and then he'd go and chat with them. And we recently had our first off-site, we were talking about some of people's favorite moments in the company, and multiple engineers were like, that was one of the best weeks to get to interact with a customer that way.swyx [01:07:51]: You know, a lot of people have embedded engineer. This is embedded customer. Yeah.Ankur Goyal [01:07:57]: I mean, we might do more of it. Sometimes, just like launches, sometimes these things are a forcing function for you to improve.swyx [01:08:05]: Why did he discover it preparing for the talk and not as a user?Ankur Goyal [01:08:09]: Because when he was preparing for the talk, he was trying to tell a narrative about how they use brain trust. And when you tell a narrative, you tend to look over a longer period of time. And at that point, although I would say we've improved a lot since, that part of our experience was very, very rough. For example, now, if you are working in our experiments page, which shows you all of your experiments over time, you can dynamically filter things, you can group things, you can create like a scatter plot, actually, which Hamel sort of helping me work out when we're working on a blog post together. But there's all this analysis you can do. At that time, it was just a line. And so he just ran into all these problems and complained. But the conference was incredible. It is the conference that gets people who are working in this field together. And I won't say which one, but there was a POC, for example, that we had been working on for a while, and it was kind of stuck. And I was the guy at the conference, and we chatted, and then a few weeks later, things worked out. There's almost nothing better I could ask for or say in a conference than it leading to commercial activity and success for a company like us. And it's just true.swyx [01:09:23]: Yeah, it's marketing, it's sales, it's hiring. And then it's also, honestly, for me as a curator, I'm trying to get together the state of the art and make a statement on, here's where the industry is at this time. And 10 years from now, we'll be able to look back at all the videos and go like, you know, how cute, how young, how naive we were. One thing I fear is getting it wrong. And there's many, many ways for you to get it wrong. I think people give me feedback and keepAnkur Goyal [01:09:51]: me honest. Yeah, I mean, the whole team is super receptive to feedback. But I think, honestly, just having the opportunity and space for people to organically connect with each other, that's the most importantswyx [01:10:01]: thing. And you asked for dinners and stuff. We'll do that next year. Excellent. Actually, we're doing a whole syndicated track thing. So, you know, Brain Trust Con or whatever might happen. One thing I think about when organizing, like literally when I organize a thing like that, or I do my content or whatever, I have to have a map of the world. And something I came to your office to do was this, I call this the three ring circus or the impossible triangle. And I think what ties into what that VC that rejected you did not see, which is that eventually everyone starts somewhere and they grow into each other's circles. So this is ostensibly, it started off as the sort of AI LM ops market. And then I think we agreed to call it like the AI infra map, which is ops, frameworks and databases. Databases are sort of a general thing and gateways and serving. And Brain Trust has beds and all these things, but started with evals. It's kind of like an evals framework and then obviously extended into observability, of course. And now it's doing more and more things. How do you see the market? Does that jive with your view of the world?Ankur Goyal [01:11:09]: I think the market is very dynamic and it's interesting because almost every company cares. It is an existential question and how software is built is totally changing. And honestly, the last time I saw this happen, it felt less intense, but it was cloud. I still remember I was talking to I think it was 2012 or something. I was hanging out with one of our engineers at MemSQL or SingleStore, MemSQL at the time, and I was like, is cloud really going to be a thing? It seems like for some use cases it's economic, but for the oil company or whatever that's running all these analytics and they have this hardware and it's very predictable, is cloud actually going to be worth it? Like security? He was right, but he was like, yeah, if you assume that the benefits of elasticity and whatnot are actually there, then the cost is going to go down, the security is going to go up, all these things will get solved. But for my naive brain at that point, it was just so hard to see. I think the same thing, to a more intense degree, is happening in AI. When I talk to AI skeptics, I often rewind myself into the mental state I was in when I was somewhat of a cloud skeptic early on. But it's a very dynamic marketplace and I think there's benefit to separating these things and having best-of-breed tools do different things for you, and there's also benefits to some level of vertical integration across the stack. As a product-driven company that's navigating this, I think we are constantly thinking about how do we make bets that allow us to provide more value to customers and solve more use cases while doing so durably. We had Guillermo from Vercel, who is also an investor and a very sprightly character.swyx [01:12:59]: I don't know.Ankur Goyal [01:13:01]: But anyway, he gave me this really good advice, which was, as a startup, you only get to make a few technology bets and you should be really careful about those bets. Actually, at the time, I was asking him for advice about how to make arbitrary code execution work, because obviously they've solved and in JavaScript, arbitrary code execution is itself such a dynamic thing. There's so many different ways of, there's workers and Deno and Node and Firecracker, there's all this stuff. Ultimately, we built it in a way that just supports Node, which I think Vercel has sort of embraced as well. But where I'm kind of trying to go with this is, in AI, there are many things that are changing, and there are many things that you've got to predict whether or not they're going to be durable. If something's durable, then you can build depth around it. But if you make the wrong predictions about durability and you build depth, then you're very, very vulnerable. Because a customer's priorities might change tomorrow, and you've built depth around something that is no longer relevant. And I think what's happening with frameworks right now is a really, really good example of that playing out. We are not in the app framework universe, so we have the luxury of sort of observing it, as intended, from the side.swyx [01:14:17]: You are a little bit... I captured when you said if you structure your code with the same function extraction, triple equals to run evals. Sure, yeah.Ankur Goyal [01:14:27]: But I would argue that it's kind of like a clever insight. And we, in the kindest way, almost trick you into writing code that doesn't require ETL.swyx [01:14:37]: It's good for you.Ankur Goyal [01:14:39]: Yeah, exactly. But you don't have to use... It's kind of like a lesson that is designed to brain trust itself.swyx [01:14:45]: Sure. I buy that. There was an obvious part of this market for you to start in, which is maybe... Curious, we're spending two seconds on it. You could have been the VectorDB CEO. Right? Yeah, I got a lot of calls about that. You're a database guy. Why no vector database?Ankur Goyal [01:15:01]: Oh, man. I was drooling over that problem. It just checks everything. It's performance and potentially serverless. It's just everything I love to type. The problem is that... I had a fantastic opportunity to see these things play out at Figma. The problem is that the challenge in deploying vector search has very little to do with vector search itself and much more to do with the data adjacent to vector search. So, for example, if you are at Figma, the vector search is not actually the hard problem. It is the permissions and who has access to what design files or design system components blah, blah, blah. All of this stuff that has been beautifully engineered into a variety of systems that serve the product. You think about something like vector search and you really have two options. One is, there's all this complexity around my application and then there's this new little idea of technology, sort of a pattern or paradigm of technology which is vector search. Should I cram vector search into this existing ecosystem? And then the other is, okay, vector search is this new, exciting thing. Do I kind of rebuild around this new paradigm? And it's just super clear that it's the former. In almost all cases, vector search is not a storage or performance bottleneck. And in almost all cases, vector search involves exactly one query which is nearest neighbors.swyx [01:16:29]: The hard part... Yeah, I mean, that's the implementation of it.Ankur Goyal [01:16:33]: But the hard part is how do I join that with the other data? How do I implement RBAC and all this other stuff? And there's a lot of technology that does that. In my observation, database companies tend to succeed when the storage paradigm is closely tied to the execution paradigm. And both of those things need to be rewired to work. Remember that databases are not just storage, but they're also compilers. It's the fact that you need to build a compiler that understands how to utilize a particular storage mechanism that makes the nplusfirst database something that is unique. If you think about Snowflake, it is separating storage from compute and the entire compiler pipeline around query execution hides the fact that separating storage from compute is incredibly inefficient, but gives you this really fast query experience. The arbitrary code is a first-class citizen, which is a very powerful idea, and it's not possible in other database technologies. Arbitrary code is a first-class citizen in my database system. How do I make that work incredibly well? And again, that's a problem which spans storage and compute. Today, the query pattern for vector search is so constrained that it just doesn't have that property.swyx [01:17:59]: I think I fully understand and mostly agree. I want to hear the opposite view. I think yours is not the consensus view, and I want to hear the other side. I mean, there's super smart people working on this, right? We'll be having Chroma and I think Qtrends on maybe Vespa, actually. One other part of the triangle that I drew that you disagree with, and I thought that was very insightful, was fine-tuning. So I had all these overlapping circles, and I think you agreed with most of them, and I was like, at the center of it all, because you need logging from Ops, and then you need a gateway, and then you need a database with a framework, or whatever, was fine-tuning. And you were like, fine-tuning is not a thing. It's not a business.Ankur Goyal [01:18:39]: So there's two things with fine-tuning. One is the technical merits, or whether fine-tuning is a relevant component of a lot of workloads. And I think that's actually quite debatable. The thing I would say is not debatable is whether or not fine-tuning is a business outcome or not. So let's think about the other components of your triangle. Ops slash observability, that is a business thing. Do I know how much money my app costs? Am I enforcing, or sorry, do I know if it's up or down? Do I know if someone complains? Can I retrieve the information about that? Frameworks, evals, databases, do I know if I changed my code? Did it break anything? Gateway, can I access this other model? Can I enforce some cost parameter on it? Whatever. Fine-tuning is a very compelling method that achieves an outcome. The outcome is not fine-tuning, it is can I automatically optimize my use case to perform better if I throw data at the problem? And fine-tuning is one of multiple ways to achieve that. I think the DSPY-style prompt optimization is another one. Turpentine, you know, just like tweaking prompts with wording and hand-crafting few-shot examples and running evals, that's another... Is Turpentine a framework? No, sorry, it's just a metaphor. But maybe it should be a framework.swyx [01:20:03]: Right now it's a podcast network by Eric Tornberg.Ankur Goyal [01:20:05]: Yes, that's actually why I thought of that word. Old-school elbow grease is what I'm saying, of hand-tuning prompts, that's another way of achieving that business goal. And there's actually a lot of cases where hand-tuning a prompt performs better than fine-tuning because you don't accidentally destroy the generality that is built into the world-class models. So in some ways it's safer, right? But really the goal is automatic optimization. And I think automatic optimization is a really valid goal, but I don't think fine-tuning is the only way to achieve it. And so, in my mind, for it to be a business, you need to align with the problem, not the technology. And I think that automatic optimization is a really great business problem to solve. And I think if you're too fixated on fine-tuning as the solution to that problem, then you're very vulnerable to technological shifts. There's a lot of cases now, especially with large context models, where in-context learning just beats fine-tuning. And the argument is sometimes, well, yes, you can get as good a performance as in-context learning, but it's faster or cheaper or whatever. That's a much weaker argument than, oh my god, I can really improve the quality of this use case with fine-tuning. It's somewhat tumultuous. A new model might come out, it might be good enough that you don't need to use, or it might not have fine-tuning, or it might be good enough that you don't need to use fine-tuning as the mechanism to achieve automatic optimization with the model. But automatic optimization is a thing. And so that's kind of the semantic thing, which I would say is maybe, at least to me, it feels like more of an absolute. I just don't think fine-tuning is a business outcome. There are several means to an end, and the end is valuable. Now, is fine-tuning a technically valid way of doing automatic optimization? I think it's very context-dependent. I will say, in my own experience with customers, as of the recording date today, which is September or something, very few of our customers are currently fine-tuning models. And I think a very, very small fraction of them are running fine-tuned models in production. More of them were running fine-tuned models six months ago than they are right now. And that may change. I think what OpenAI is doing with basically making it free and how powerful Llama 3 AB is and some other stuff, that may change. Maybe by the time this airs, more of our customers are fine-tuning stuff. But it's changing all the time. But all of them want to do automatic optimization.swyx [01:22:35]: Yeah, it's worth asking a follow-up question on that. Who's doing that today well that you would call out?Ankur Goyal [01:22:41]: Automatic optimization? No one.swyx [01:22:43]: Wow. DSPy is a step in that direction. Omar has decided to join Databricks and be an academic. And I have actually asked who's making the DSPy startup. Somebody should.Ankur Goyal [01:22:57]: There's a few. My personal perspective on this, which almost everyone, at least hardcore engineers, disagree with me about, but I'm okay with that, I think DSPy, I think there's two elements to it. One is automatic optimization. And the other is achieving automatic optimization by writing code. In particular, in DSPy's case, code that looks a lot like PyTorch code. And I totally recognize that if you were writing only TensorFlow before, then you started writing PyTorch. It's a huge improvement. And, oh my god, it feels like so much nicer to write code. If you are a TypeScript engineer and you're writing Next.js, writing PyTorch sucks. Why would I ever want to write PyTorch? And so I actually think the most empowering thing that I've seen is engineers and non-engineers alike writing really simple code. And whether it's simple TypeScript code that's auto-completed with cursor, or it's English, I think that the direction of programming itself is moving towards simplicity. And I haven't seen something yet that really moves programming towards simplicity. And maybe I'm a romantic at heart, but I think there is a way of doing automatic optimization that still allows us to write simpler code.swyx [01:24:21]: Yeah, I think that people are working on it, and I think it's a valuable thing to explore. I'll keep a lookout for it and try to report on it through Latentspace.Ankur Goyal [01:24:29]: And we'll integrate with everything. I don't know if you're working on this. We'd love to collaborateswyx [01:24:33]: with you. For Ops people in particular, you have a view of the world that a lot of people don't get to see. You get to see workloads and report aggregates, which is insightful to other people. Obviously, you don't have them in front of you, but I just want to give rough estimates. You already said one which is kind of juicy, which is open-source models are a very, very small percentage. Do you have a sense of OpenAI versus Anthropic versus Cohere, MarketShare, at least through the segment thatAnkur Goyal [01:24:59]: you're in? So pre-Cloud 3, it was close to 100% OpenAI. Post-Cloud 3, and I actually think Haiku has slept on a little bit, because before 4.0 MIDI came out, Haiku was a very interesting reprieve for people to have very, veryswyx [01:25:15]: ...Ankur Goyal [01:25:17]: Everyone knows Sonnet, right? But when Cloud 3 came out, Sonnet was like the middle child. Who gives a s**t about Sonnet? It's neither the super-fast thing Really, I think it was Haiku that was the most interesting foothold, because Anthropic is talented at figuring out either deliberately or not deliberately a value proposition to developers that is not already taken by OpenAI and providing it. I think now Sonnet is both cheap and smart, and it's quite pleasant to communicate with. But when Haiku came out, it was the smartest, cheapest, fastest model that was refreshing, and I think the fact that it supported tool calling was incredibly important. An overwhelming majority of the use cases that we see in production involve tool calling, because it allows you to write code that reliably ... Sorry, it allows you to write prompts that reliably plug in and out of code. And so, without tool calling, it was a very steep hill to use a non-OpenAI model with tool calling, especially because Anthropic embraced JSON schemaswyx [01:26:23]: and also did OpenAI. I mean, they did it first.Ankur Goyal [01:26:27]: Outside of OpenAI. Yeah, OpenAI had already done it, and Anthropic was smart, I think, to piggyback on that versus trying to say, hey, do it our way instead. Because they did that, now you're in business, right? The switching cost is much lower because you don't need to unwind all the tool calls that you're doing, and you have this value proposition which is cheaper, faster, especially now, every new project that people think about, they do evaluate OpenAI and Anthropic. We still see an overwhelming majority of customers using OpenAI, but almost everyone is using Anthropic and Sonnet specifically for their side projects, whether it's via cursor or prototypesswyx [01:27:09]: or whatever that they're doing. Yeah, it's such a meme.Ankur Goyal [01:27:13]: It's actually kind of funny. I made fun of it. Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that OpenAI does, an extremely exceptional job of this, is availability, rate limits, and reliability. It's just not practical outside of OpenAI to run use cases at scale in a lot of cases. You can do it, but it requires quite a bit of work, and because OpenAI is so good at making their models so available, I think they get a lot of credit for the science behind O1 and wow, it's like an amazing new model. In my opinion, they don't deserve credit for showing up every day and keeping the servers running behind one endpoint. You don't need to provision an OpenAI endpoint or whatever. It's just one endpoint. It's there. You need higher rate limits. It's there. It's reliable. That's a huge partswyx [01:28:03]: of what they do well. We interviewed Michelle from that team. They do a ton of work, and it's a surprisingly small team. It's really amazing. That actually opens the way to a little bit of something I assume that you would know, which is, I would assume that small developers like us use those model lab endpoints directly, but the big boys, they all use Amazon for Anthropic because they have the special relationship. They all use Azure for OpenAI because they have that special relationship, and then Google has Google. Is that not true? It's not true. Isn't that weird? You wouldn't have all this committed spend on AWS that you're like, okay, fine, I'll use Cloud because I already have that.Ankur Goyal [01:28:41]: In some cases, it's yes and. It hasn't been a smooth journey for people to get the capacity on public clouds that they're able to get through OpenAI directly. I mean, I think a lot of this is changing, catching up, etc., but it hasn't been perfectly smooth. I think there are a lot of caveats, especially around access to the newest models. With Azure early on, there's a lot of engineering that you need to do to actually get the equivalent of a single endpoint that you have with OpenAI. Most people built around assuming there's a single endpoint, so it's a non-trivial engineering effort to load balance across endpoints and deal with the credentials. Every endpoint has a slightly different set of credentials, has a different set of models that are available on it. There are all these problems that you just don't think about when you're using OpenAI, etc., that you have to suddenly think about. Now, for us, that turned into some opportunity. A lot of people use our proxy as aswyx [01:29:35]: ... This is the gateway.Ankur Goyal [01:29:37]: Exactly, as a load balancing mechanism to have that same user experience with more complicated deployments. But I think that in some ways, maybe a small fish in that pond, but I think that the ease of actually a single endpoint is, it sounds obvious or whatever, but it's not. And for people that are constantly, a lot of AI energy is spent on, and inference is spent on R&D, not just stuff that's running in production. And when you're doing R&D, you don't want to spend a lot of time on maybe accessing a slightly older version of a model or dealing with all these endpoints or whatever. And so I think the time to value and ease of use of what the model labs themselves have been able to provide, it's actually quite compelling.swyx [01:30:23]: That's good for them. Less good for the public cloud partners to them.Ankur Goyal [01:30:27]: I actually think it's good for both. It's not a perfect ecosystem, but it is a healthy ecosystem now with a lot of trade-offs and a lot of options. And as we're not a model lab, as someone who participates in the ecosystem, I'm happy. OpenAI released O1. I don't think Anthropic and Meta are sleeping on that. I think they're probably invigorated by it, and I think we're going to see exciting stuff happen. And I think everyone has a lot of GPUs now. There's a lot of ways of running LLAMA. There's a lot of people outside of Meta who are economically incentivized for LLAMA to succeed. And I think all of that contributes to more reliable points, lower costs, faster speed, and more options for you and me who are just using theseswyx [01:31:09]: models and benefiting from them. It's really funny. We actually interviewed Thomas from the LLAMA 3 post-training team. He actually talks a little bit about LLAMA 4, and he was already down that path even before O1 came out. I guess it was obvious to anyone in that circle, but for the broader worlds, last week was the first time they heard about it. I mean, speaking of O1, let's go there. How has O1 changed anything that you perceive? You're in enough circles that you already knew what was coming. Did it surprise you in any way? Does it change your roadmap in any way? It is long inference, so maybe it changes some assumptions?Ankur Goyal [01:31:45]: I talked about how way back, rewinding to Impira, if you make assumptions about the capabilities of models and you engineer around them, you're almost guaranteed to beswyx [01:31:57]: screwed. And I got screwed, notAnkur Goyal [01:31:59]: necessarily a bad way, but I sort of felt that twice in a short period of time. I think that shook out of me, that temptation as an engineer that you have to say, GPT-4.0 is good at this, but models will never be good at that. So let me try to build software that works around that. I think probably you might actually disagree with this, and I wouldn't say that I have a perfectly strong structural argument about this. I'm open to debate, and I might be totally wrong, but I think one of the things that felt obvious to me and somewhat vindicated by O1 is that there's a lot of code and paths that people went down with GPT-4.0 to achieve this idea of more complex reasoning, and I think agentic frameworks are kind of like a little Cambrian explosion of people trying to work around the fact that GPT-4.0 or related models have somewhat limited reasoning capabilities. I look at that stuff and writing graph code that returns edge indirections and all this, it's like, oh my god, this is so complicated. It feels very clear to me that this type of logic is going to be built into the model. Anytime there is control flow complexity or uncertainty complexity, I think the history of AI has been to push more and more into the model. In fact, no one knows whether this is true or whatever, but GPT-4.0 was famously a mixture of experts.swyx [01:33:31]: You mentioned it on our podcast.Ankur Goyal [01:33:33]: Exactly. Yeah, I guess you broke the news, right?swyx [01:33:35]: There were two breakers, Dylan and us. George was the first loud enough person to make noise about it. Prior to that,Ankur Goyal [01:33:43]: a lot of people were building these round-robin routers that were like, you know, and you look at that and you're like, okay, I'm pretty sure if you train a model to do this problem and you vertically integrate that into the LLM itself, it's going to be better. And that happened with GPT-4. And I think O1 is going to do that to agentic frameworks as well. I think, to me, it seems very unlikely that you and me sort of like sipping an espresso and thinking about how different personified roles of people should interact with each other and stuff. It seems like that is just going to get pushed into the model. That was the main takeaway for me.swyx [01:34:23]: I think that you are very perceptive in your mental modeling of me, because I do disagree 15-25%. Obviously, they can do things that we cannot, but you as a business always want more control than OpenAI will ever give you. They're charging you for thousands of reasoning tokens and you can't see it. That's ridiculous. Come on.Ankur Goyal [01:34:45]: Well, it's ridiculous until it's not, right? I mean, it was ridiculous to GPT-3 too.swyx [01:34:49]: Well, GPT-3, I mean, all the models had total transparency until now where you're paying for tokens you can't see.Ankur Goyal [01:34:55]: What I'm trying to say is that I agree that this particular flavor of transparency is novel. Where I disagree is that something that feels like an overpriced toy, I mean, I viscerally remember playing with GPT-3 and it was very silly at the time, which is kind of annoying if you're doing document extraction. But I remember playing with GPT-3 and being like, okay, yeah, this is great, but I can't deploy it on my own computer and blah, blah, blah, blah. So it's never going to actually work for the real use cases that we're doing. And then that technology became cheap, available, hosted, now I can run it on my hardware or whatever. So I agree with you if that is a permanent problem. I'm relatively optimistic that, I don't know if Llama4 is going to do this, but imagine that Llama4 figures out a way of open sourcing some similar thing and you actually doswyx [01:35:47]: have that kind of control on it. Yeah, it remains to be seen. But I do think that people want more control and this part of the reasoning step is something where if the model just goes off to do the wrong thing, you probably don't want to iterate in the prompt space, you probably just want to chain together a bunch of model calls to do what you're trying to do.Ankur Goyal [01:36:07]: Perhaps, yeah. It's one of those things where I think the answer is very gray, like the real answer is very gray. And I think for the purposes of thinking about our product and the future of the space and just for fun debates with people I enjoy talking to like you, it's useful to pick one extreme of the perspective and just sort of latch onto it. But yeah, it's a fun debate to have and maybe I would say more than anything, I'm just grateful to participate in an ecosystem where we can have these debates.swyx [01:36:39]: Very, very helpful. Your data point on the decline of open source in production is actually very...Ankur Goyal [01:36:47]: Decline of fine-tuning in production.swyx [01:36:51]: Can you put a number? Like 5%, 10% of your workload?Ankur Goyal [01:36:55]: Is open source? Yeah. Because of how we're deployed, I don't have like an exact number for you. Among customers running in production, it's less than 5%.swyx [01:37:03]: That's so small. The counters are the thesis that people want more control, that people want to create IP around their models and all that stuff.Ankur Goyal [01:37:15]: I think people want availability.swyx [01:37:17]: You can engineer availability with OpenWeights. Good luck. Really? Yeah. You can use Together, Fireworks, all these guys. They are nowhereAnkur Goyal [01:37:25]: near as reliable as... I mean, every single time I use any of those products and run a benchmark, I find a bug, text the CEO, and they fix something. It's nowhere near where OpenAI is. It feels like using Joyent instead of using AWS or something. Yeah, great. Joyent can build single-click provisioning of instances and whatever. I remember one time I was using... I don't remember if it was Joyent or something else. I tried to provision an instance and the person was like, BRB, I need to run to Best Buy to go buy the hardware. Yes, anyone can theoretically do what OpenAI has done, but they just haven't.swyx [01:38:01]: I will mention one thing that I'm trying to figure out. We obliquely mentioned the GPU inference market. Is anyone making money? Will anyone make money? In the GPU inference market,Ankur Goyal [01:38:11]: people are making money today, and they're making money with really high margins.swyx [01:38:15]: Really? Yeah. Because I calculated the grok numbers. Dylan Patel thinks they're burning cash. I think they're about break-even.Ankur Goyal [01:38:23]: It depends on the company. So there are some companies that are software companies, and there are some companies that are hardware bets, right? I don't have any insider information, so I don't know about the hardware companies, but I do know for some of the software companies, they have high margins and they're making money. I think no one knows how durable that revenue is, but all else equal, if a company has some traction and they have the opportunity to build relationships with customers, I think independent of whether their margins erode for one particular product offering, they have the opportunity to build higher margin products. And so inference is a real problem, and it is something that companies are willing to pay a lot of money to solve. To me, it feels like there's opportunity. Is the shape of the opportunity inference API? Maybe not, but we'll see.swyx [01:39:11]: We'll see. Those guys are definitely reporting very high ARR numbers.Ankur Goyal [01:39:17]: From all the knowledge I have, the ARR is real. Again, I don't have any insiderswyx [01:39:21]: information. Together's numbers were leaked or something on the Kleiner Perkins podcast. And I was like, I don't think that was public, but now it is. So that's kind of interesting. Any other industry trends you want to discuss? Nothing else that I can think of. I want to hear yours. Just generally workload market share. You serve superhuman. They have superhuman AI, they do title summaries and all that. I just would really like type of workloads, type of evals. What is AI being used in production today to do?Ankur Goyal [01:39:55]: I think 50% of the use cases that we see are what I would call single prompt manipulations. Summaries are often but not always a good example of that. And I think they're really valuable. One of my favorite gen AI features is we use linear at Braintrust. And if a customer finds a bug on Slack, we'll click a button and then file a linear ticket. And it auto generates a title for that ticket. No idea how it's implemented. I don't care. Loom has some really similar features which I just find amazing.swyx [01:40:27]: So delightful. You record the thing,Ankur Goyal [01:40:29]: it titles it properly. And even if it doesn't get it all the way properly, it sort of inspires me to maybe tweak it a little bit. It's so nice. And so I think there is an unbelievable amount of untapped value in single prompt stuff. And the thought exercise I run is anytime I use a piece of software, if I think about building that software as if it were rebuilt today, which parts of it would involve AI? Almost every part of it would involve running a little prompt here or there to have a little bit of delight.swyx [01:41:01]: By the way, before you continue, I have a rule for building Smalltalk which we can talk about separately. It should be easy to do those AI calls. Because if it's a big lift, if you have to edit five files, you're not going to do it. But if you can just sprinkle intelligence everywhere, then you're going to do it more.Ankur Goyal [01:41:17]: I totally agree. And I would say, that probably brings me to the next part of it. I'd say probably 25% of the remaining usage is what you could call a simple agent. Which is probably a prompt plus some tools. At least one, or perhaps the only tool is a rag type of tool. And it is kind of like an enhanced chatbot or whatever that interacts with someone. Then I'd say probably the remaining 25% are what I would say are advanced agents, which are things that you can maybe run for a long period of time or have a loop or do something more than that simple but effective paradigm. And I've seen a huge change in how people write code over the past six months. When this stuff first started being technically feasible, people created very complex programs that almost reminded me of studying math again in college. It's like, you compute the shortest path from this knowledge center to that knowledge center, and then blah, blah, blah. It's like, oh my god. You write this crazy continuation passing code. In theory, it's amazing. It's just very, very hard to actually debug this stuff and run it. Almost everyone that we work with has gone into this model that actually exactly what you said, which is sprinkle intelligence everywhere and make it easy to write dumb code. It's a prevailing model that is quite exciting for people on the frontier today. I dearly hope as a programmer succeeds, is one where what is AI code? It's not a thing, right? It's just, I'm creating an app, NPX, create next app, or whatever, like FastAPI, whatever you're doing, and you just start building your app, and some parts of it involve some intelligence, some parts don't. Maybe you do some prompt engineering, maybe you do some automatic optimization, you do evals as part of your CI workflow. I'm just building software, and it happens to be quite intelligent as I do it because I happen to have these things available to me. That's what I see more people doing. The sexiest intellectual way of thinking about it is that you design an agent around the user experience that the user actually works with rather than the technical implementation of how the components of an agent interact with each other. When you do that, you almost necessarily need to write a lot of little bits of code, especially UI code, between the LLM calls. The code ends up looking kind of dumber along the way because you almost have to write code that engages the user and crafts the user experience as the LLMswyx [01:44:03]: is doing its thing. Guy Podjarny So here are a couple things that you did not bring up. One is doing the Code Interpreter agent, the Voyager agent where the agent writes code, and then it persists that code and reuses that code in the future.Ankur Goyal [01:44:17]: I don't know anyone who's doing that.swyx [01:44:19]: When Code Interpreter was introduced last year, I was like,Ankur Goyal [01:44:21]: this is AGI. There's a lot of people, it should be fairly obvious if you look at our customer list, who they are, but I won't call them out specifically, that are doing CodeGen and running the code that's generated in arbitrary environments, but they have also morphed their code into this dumb pattern that I'm talking about, which is like, I'm going to write some code that calls an LLM, it's going to write some code, I might show it to a user or whatever, and then I might just run it. I like the word Voyager that you use.swyx [01:44:53]: I don't know anyone who's doing that. Guy Podjarny Voyager is in the paper. My term for this, if you want to use the term, you can use mine, is core versus LLM core. This is a direct parallel from systems engineering, where you have functional core imperative shell. This is a term that people use. You want your core system to be very well defined and imperative outside to be easy to work with. The AI engineering equivalent is that you want the core of your system to not be this Shoggoth, where you just chuck it into a very complex agent. You want to sprinkle LLMs into a database. Because we know how to scale systems, we don't know how to scale agents that are quite hard to be reliable.Ankur Goyal [01:45:39]: I was saying, I think while in the short term there may be opportunities to scale agents by doing silly things, it feels super clear to me that in the long term, anything you might do to work around that limitation of an LLM will be pushed into the LLM. If you build your system in a way that assumes LLMs will get better at reasoning and get better at sort of agentic tasks in the LLM itself, then I think you will build a more durable system.swyx [01:46:05]: What is one thing you would build if you're not working onAnkur Goyal [01:46:07]: Brain Trust? A vector database. My heart is still with databasesswyx [01:46:13]: a lot. I mean, sometimes I... Non-ironically.Ankur Goyal [01:46:17]: Not a vector database. I'll talk about this in a second, but I think I love the Odyssey. I'm not Odysseus, I don't think I'm cool enough, but I sort of romanticize going back to the farm. Maybe just like, Alanna and I move to the woods someday and I just sit in a cabin and write C++ or Rust code on my MacBook Pro and build a database or whatever. So that's sort of what I drool and dream about. I think practically speaking, I am very passionate about this variant-type issue that we've talked about because I now work in observability, where that is a cornerstone to the problem. And I mean, I've been ranting to Nikita and other people that I enjoy interacting with in the database universe about this, and my conclusion is that this is a very real problem for a very small number of companies. And that is why Datadog, Splunk, Honeycomb, et cetera, et cetera, built their own database technology, which is in some ways, it's sad because all of the technology is a remix of pieces of Snowflake and Redshift and Postgres and other things, Redis, whatever, that solve all of the technical problems. And I feel like if you gave me access to all the codebases and locked me in a room for a week or something, I feel like I could remix it into any database technology that would solve any problem. Back to our HTAP thing, it's kind of the same idea. But because of how databases are packaged, which is for a specific set of customers that have a particular set of use cases and a particular flavor of wallet, the technology ends up being inaccessible for these use cases like observability that don't fit a template that you can just sell and resell. I think there are a lot of these little opportunities, and maybe some of them will be big opportunities, maybe they'll all be little opportunities forever, but there's probably a set of such things, the variant type being the most extreme right now, that are high frustration for me and low value for database companies that are all interesting things for me to work on.swyx [01:48:23]: Well, maybe someone listening is also excited and maybe they can come to you for advice and funding. Maybe I need to refine my question. What AI company or product would you work on if you're not working onAnkur Goyal [01:48:37]: Braintrust? Honestly, I think if I weren't working on Braintrust, I would want to be working either independently or as part of a lab and training models. I think I with databases and just in general, I've always taken pride in being able to work on the most leading version of things and maybe it's a little bit too personal, but one of the things I struggled with post-single store is there are a lot of data tooling companies that have been very successful that I looked at and was like, oh my god, this is stupid. You can solve this inside of a database much better. I don't want to call out any examples because I'm friends with a lot of these people. Yeah, maybe. But what was a really sort of humbling thing for me and I wouldn't even say I fully accepted it is that people that maybe don't have the ivory tower experience of someone who worked inside of a relational database but are very close to the problem, their perspective is at least as valuable in company building and product building as someone who has the ivory tower of like, oh my god, I know how to make in-memory skip list that's durable and lock-free. And I feel like with AI stuff, I'm in the opposite scenario. I had the opportunity to be in the ivory tower and at open air, train a large language model, but I've been using them for a while now and I felt like an idiot. I kind of feel like I'm one of those people that I never really understood in databases who really understands the problem but is not all the way in the technology and so that's probably what I'd work on.swyx [01:50:13]: This might be a controversial question, but whatever. If OpenAI came to you with an offer today, would you take it? Competitive fair market value, whatever that means for your investors.Ankur Goyal [01:50:25]: Fair market value, no. But I think that I would never say never, but I really...swyx [01:50:33]: Because then you'd be able to work on their platform, bring your tools to them, and then also talk to the researchers.Ankur Goyal [01:50:39]: Yeah, I mean, we are very friendly collaborators with OpenAI and I have never had more fun day-to-day than I do right now. One of the things I've learned is that many of us take that for granted. Now having been through a few things, it's not something I feel comfortable taking forswyx [01:50:59]: granted again.Ankur Goyal [01:51:01]: I wouldn't even call it independence. I think it's being in an environment that I really enjoy. I think independence is a part of it, but I wouldn't say it's the high-order bit. I think it's working on a problem that I really care about for customers that I really care about with people that I really enjoy working with. Among other things, I'll give a few shout-outs. I work with my brother. Did I see him? No.swyx [01:51:25]: He was sitting right behind us.Ankur Goyal [01:51:27]: And he's my best friend, right? I love working with him. Our head of product, Eden, he's a designer at Airtable and Cruise. He is an unbelievably good designer. If you use the product, you should thank him. He's just so good, and he's such a good engineer as well. He destroyed our programming interviews, which we gave him for fun. But it's just such a joy to work with someone who's just so good, and so good at something that I'm not good at. Albert joined really early on, and he used to work at ABC, and he does all the business stuff for us. He has negotiated giant contracts, and I just enjoy working with these people. I feel like our whole team is just so good.swyx [01:52:15]: Yeah, you worked really hard to get here.Ankur Goyal [01:52:17]: I'm just loving the moment. That's something that would be very hard for me to give up.swyx [01:52:21]: Understood. While we're in the name-dropping and doing shout-outs, I think a lot of people in the San Francisco startup scene know Alana, and most people won't. Is there one thing that you think makes her so effective that other people can learn from, or that you learn from?Ankur Goyal [01:52:37]: Yeah, I mean, she genuinely cares about people. When I joined Figma, if you just look at my profile, I really don't mean this to sound arrogant, but if you look at my profile, it seems kind of obvious that if I were to start another company, there would be some VC interest. And literally there was. Again, I'm not that special, but...swyx [01:52:57]: No, but you had two great runs.Ankur Goyal [01:52:59]: It just seems kind of obvious. I mean, I'm married to Alana, so of course we're going to talk, but the only people that really talked to me during that period were Eladswyx [01:53:09]: and Alana. Why?Ankur Goyal [01:53:11]: It's a good question. You didn't tryswyx [01:53:13]: hard enough.Ankur Goyal [01:53:15]: It's not like I was trying to talk to VCs.swyx [01:53:19]: So in some sense, while talking to Elad is enough, and then Alana can fill in the rest,Ankur Goyal [01:53:25]: that's it? Yeah, so I'm just saying that these are people that genuinely care about another human. There are a lot of things over that period of getting acquired, being at Figma, starting a company, that they're just really hard. And what Alana does really, really well is she really, really cares about people. And people are always like, oh my god, how come she's in this company before I am or whatever? It's like, who actually gives a s**t about this person and was getting to know them before they ever sent an email? You know what I mean? Before they started this company and 10 other VCs were interested and now you're interested. Who is actually talking to this person?swyx [01:54:05]: She does that consistently. Exactly. The question is obviously how do you scale that? How do you scale caring about people? Do they have a personal CRM?Ankur Goyal [01:54:15]: Alana has actually built her entire software stack herself. She studied computer science and was a product manager for a few years, but she's super technical and really, really good at writing code.swyx [01:54:27]: For those who don't know, every YC batch, she makes the best of the batch and she puts it all into one product. Yeah, she's just an amazingAnkur Goyal [01:54:35]: hybrid between a product manager, designer, and engineer. Every time she runs into an inefficiency, she solvesswyx [01:54:41]: it. Cool. Well, there's more to dig there, but I can talk to her directly. Thank you for all this. This was a solid two hours of stuff. Any callsAnkur Goyal [01:54:49]: to action? Yes. One, we are hiring software engineers, we are hiring salespeople, we are hiring a dev rel, and we are hiring one more designer. We are in San Francisco, so ideally, if you're interested, we'd like you to be in San Francisco. There are some exceptions, so we're not totally close-minded to that, but San Francisco is significantly preferred. We'd love to work with you. If you're building AI software, if you haven't heard of Braintrust, please check us out. If you have heard of Braintrust and maybe tried us out a while ago or something and want to check back in, let us know or try out the product, we'd love to talk to you. I think, more than anything, we're very passionate about the problem that we're solving and working with the best people on the problem. We love working with great customers and have some good things in place that have helped us scale a little bit, so we have a lot of capacityswyx [01:55:49]: for more. Well, I'm sure there will be a lot of interest, especially when you announce your Series A. I've had the joy of watching you build this company a little bit, and I think you're one of the top founders I've ever met, so it's just great to sit down with you and learn a little bit. It's very kind. Thank you. Thanks. That's it.Ankur Goyal [01:56:05]: Awesome. Get full access to Latent Space at www.latent.space/subscribe