Show Notes
Big tech doesn’t care about medium-sized businesses—but is AI really the solution? On this week’s podcast, Paul is fresh off the plane from Phoenix, Arizona, where he was speaking to business owners at the Inc. 5000 Conference. As he gives Rich a full report, they discuss the specific needs of the “SMB”—small-to-medium-sized business—and how little interest the software industry has in the very large middle of the business spectrum. Can AI help these orgs get the software they actually need?
More from The Aboard Podcast
Paul and Rich are ready to answer your questions about AI—and beyond. On the inaugural episode of “Ask Aboard,” they tackle a trio of queries from some familiar faces. First, NYU’s Vice Provost for AI and Technology in Education, Clay Shirky, asks how we can personally protect ourselves in the wake of the Hugging Face incident. Next, an anonymous letter-writer wants to know how to deal with clients who can’t stop generating bad AI artifacts. And finally, journalist and editor Josh Tyrangiel gets to the heart of it all, asking: What’s the software equivalent of yacht rock?
How can we get politicians and Silicon Valley on the same AI page? On this week’s episode, Paul and Rich welcome on Jason Goldman, whose long career in tech has taken him from Blogger to Twitter to the Obama administration to his current endeavor, the Center for Shared AI Prosperity. “AI capabilities are advancing faster than the political system is responding,” CSAIP’s website reads; Jason explains the challenges around and different approaches to redressing this gap. Plus: as the host of the movie podcast Escape Hatch, Jason ranks his expectations for the fall tech industry films, and makes a big prediction about Dune: Part Three.
How is AI reshaping internet culture? On this week’s episode, Paul is joined by a journalist who has truly looked into the digital abyss: Business Insider’s Katie Notopoulos. Using a few recent AI-related stories Katie reported as a lens, they discuss the increasingly blurry boundaries between the real and the artificial on our social feeds. Katie is known for, among other things, her lists of the worst things on the internet; with AI, Paul asks, has “worst” somehow gotten “even worser”? Plus: In a classic reporter move, Katie flips the script and quizzes Paul about his 2014 essay on YouTube, “The American Room.”
LLMs are often far too powerful for the small tasks they’re asked to complete. Is the more-contained Jev the alternative? On this week’s episode, Paul and Rich read a question from tech writer John Pavlus about Jev, a new model from Typesafe AI that’s been a major topic of discussion in programming circles recently. LLMs, Rich suggests, are often like using a power riding mower to cut the grass of your tiny lawn. As Paul breaks down Jev and others like it into layman’s terms, they debate whether this kind of technology is the future—or if it’ll just be one more thing absorbed by the AI giants?
How is observability being redefined in the AI era? On this week’s episode, Paul and Rich sit down with Charity Majors, the co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb. After a crash course on observability, the conversation pivots to AI and its cascading effects—both on this subfield, and on the tech community overall. Some engineers try to plan for every eventuality, but Charity stresses that the best thinking comes when you accept that anything could go wrong at any time: “There’s liberty in chaos.”