Show Notes
https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/chit-chat-stocks/the-future-of-artificial-3ylaqngtMR7/
[00:00:00] intro: Welcome to Chitchat Stocks on this show host Ryan Henderson and Brett Schaefer analyze businesses and riff on the world of investing. As a quick reminder, Chitchat Stocks is a CCM media group podcast. Anything discussed on Chitchat Stocks by Ryan, Brett, or any other podcast guest is not formal advice or recommendation. intro: Now, please enjoy this episode. Brett: Welcome in. We have another episode of the Chitchat Stocks podcast for you this week. We have a fantastic interview coming up with Shawn Wang from LatentSpace. It is a, I'll say covering anything AI. A lot of the stuff, you know, for me and Ryan, it might be going over our heads and it might be a little too hard technically for us, but that's what we brought on Shawn to the show today. Brett: For a lot of public market investors, this new [00:01:00] AI stuff, it's hard to You know, see what is, what is working, what's just a narrative, what all the stuff that's getting thrown at us during this boom times. So Shawn, we wanted to bring you back on the show. You came on, I think almost exactly two years ago now to talk more cloud stuff. Brett: Now we're really going to talk about cloud AI and how it is impacting the startup ecosystem. So Shawn, as we kick off the show. What is your relevant expertise in this booming AI field? swyx: Oh God, that's the million dollar question here. So I am so for, for listeners who haven't heard back the previous episode that I was on I was finance and public markets guy. swyx: And I was, I was in a hedge fund for my first career. And then I changed careers to tech where I worked at AWS and three unicorn Sort of developer tooling cloud startups. My relevant expertise is you know, on, on some [00:02:00] level, I, I'm just a software engineer that is building with AI now. And then on another level, I had, I actually, when I was an options trader back in the sales side, I actually did a lot of natural language processing of the Bloomberg chats. swyx: So I fed all of the Bloomberg chats into a pricing mechanism. Then built our global pricer. So our entire options desk was running off of that thing. This was about 13 years ago. So so you know, I, I've always had some involvement with like AI, but like, you know, it was never a big part of my identity and I think. swyx: The more foundation models came into focus, and foundation models is a very special term as opposed to traditional, maybe machine learning finance that a lot of your listeners might be familiar with then you start to build differently, and there the traditional software engineering skills become a lot more relevant. swyx: So relevant expertise now is that I, I guess I've sort of popularized and created the term of AI engineer, which you can talk about and created the industry such that Gartner now considers, considers [00:03:00] it like the peak of its hype right now. And I, I consider that both a point of success and also a challenge because I have to prove Gartner wrong that it has not peaked, but you know, they put us at the top of the hype cycle, which is kind of funny. swyx: Because I started it, so. Ryan: Yeah, it's it's a unique challenge but yeah, funny anecdote. Okay, so a lot has changed since we last spoke. Yeah. Pretty much this whole world of AI that everyone's talking about now or at least has become mainstream has, I believe that kind of kicked off right after the discussion or our last discussion. Ryan: So I guess the last discussion was really focused on the cloud computing industry broadly. And that was actually right around the time when AWS. Azure, GCP all the revenue growth rates were coming down and actually now with the hindsight bottoming. So my question for you is what has, I guess, [00:04:00] what has changed over the last two years and why has revenue growth at the big cloud providers re accelerated? swyx: Yeah, again, like, revenue growth
More from The Swyx Mixtape
The creative process of one of the most basic but successful pop duos
a surprisingly good quality dense chat with Delta Institute https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYr1mSDNqKM
https://podcast.scalingdevtools.com/episodes/swyx-2 Plus, Shawn started the AI Engineer movement with his essay Rise of the AI Engineer and organized two incredible AI engineer conferences in the past twelve months - AI Engineer World's Fair and AI Engineer Summit And Shawn has angel invested in DevTools like Airbyte, Railway, Supabase, Replay.io, Stackblitz, Flutterflow, Fireworks.ai while running the DevTools angels community. Besides this, Shawn curates DX.tips (DevTools magazine) and in a past life wrote the Coding Career handbook, championed learn in public, cofounded Svelte Society and was previously Head of Developer Experience at Temporal, and a Developer Advocate at AWS and Netlify. Also, before this, Shawn had a very successful career in investment banking, trading, building data pipelines and performing quantitate portfolio management. I think this brings him a very unique perspective - I've always admired his ability to zoom out and see the big picture and the trends. Even though Shawn is now all-in on AI, he's still one of the go-to authorities on DevTools go-to-market. As you can tell, Shawn is someone I deeply admire. So I'm glad he came back. What we discuss: Organizing the AI Engineer Conferences Rise of the AI Engineer Intentionality and principles (yes we even talk about Alcoholics Anonymous) The AI CEO Invisible deadlines Ilya believing in AGI more than most people at OpenAI Are developers going to be obsolete? Thor convinced swyx to invest in Supabase Building DevTools that work well with LLMs Angel investing in DevTools - why and how Is DevRel dead? How to hire DevRel Why DX.tips exists Links: Rise of the AI Engineer https://www.latent.space/p/ai-engineer Latent Space Podcast https://www.latent.space/ swyx's Twitter https://x.com/swyx swyx's website https://www.swyx.io/ swyx's LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/shawnswyxwang/ smol.ai https://smol.ai/ DevTools Angels https://github.com/sw-yx/devtools-angels DX.tips https://dx.tips/ DevRel's Death as Zero Interest Rate Phenomenon https://dx.tips/zirp AI Engineer Summit https://www.ai.engineer/summit/2023 AI Engineer World's Fair https://www.ai.engineer/worldsfair Coding Career Handbook https://www.learninpublic.org/ Shawn's previous appearance on Scaling DevTools https://podcast.scalingdevtools.com/episodes/swyx Eisenhower Matrix https://asana.com/resources/eisenhower-matrix Thor from Supabase https://x.com/thorwebdev Solaris AI coworking space in SF https://www.solarissf.com/ Browserbase https://www.browserbase.com/ Indent https://indent.com/ and Fouad https://x.com/fouadmatin How to do hackathons https://dx.tips/hackathons How to do conferences https://dx.tips/conf-guide How to hire DevRel https://dx.tips/mailbox-first-devrel-hiring Climbing the ladder of abstraction with Amelia Wattenberger https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAy_GHUAICw...for the job. And they should not be doing that job and they should try something else to do. People pay for it because they need the job title to be filled more than they need that person. Those good people are very hard to reach.That's one thing there. I also mentioned some other things that I've found in the different roles in the category: Bottoms-up and open source have been very challenging in the growing a company success criteria. That's what different roles focus on: bottoms-up and open source, and particularly open source. You don't have to be open source.
https://sites.libsyn.com/493303/building-ai-in-2024-is-not-what-you-think-with-swyx
In episode 18 of Generationship, Rachel Chalmers sits down with Shawn "swyx" Wang to delve into AI Engineering. Shawn shares his journey from popularizing the term "AI Engineer" to navigating the rapid advancements in AI technology. Together, they explore the evolving demands and opportunities in AI, offering unparalleled insights into the future of this transformative field.