Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast
00:03:03 · Shawn Wang, S1
[00:03:03] S0: wrong country. If they live in The US, they'll kill Amazon. They'll kill, like, Facebook. The only reason they're not richer is they live in China. AI doom. In all of human history, when a more advanced civilization comes along and meets a less advanced civilization, the less advanced civilization goes extinct. And this thing is evolving roughly 1,000 times faster than us. [00:03:28] S1: Hi, Sean. So thank you for joining me for this show. So I've been a good... Long time listener for the Latent Space Podcast. And I know that many founders in... AI engineers in China as well have already learned a lot from your work and conversations on the podcast as well. And also, I'm grateful that, you know, you are bringing the AIE, the AI Engineer Conference to Shanghai the first time this year. So I think also, like several months ago, read your piece actually on Drive Forth about your essay on, you know, your relationship with the Silicon Valley, you move back and forth from Singapore and here, I guess that's why, how you actually coined or invented the role of AI engineer the last time you moved to Silicon Valley. And also this just makes me feel like it's very special that this time you bring the AIE to Shanghai the first time. So tell us a little bit about your background and your relationship with Silicon Valley.
00:04:25 · Shawn Wang, S1
[00:04:25] S0: I should correct you on one thing. That's that's wrong. I did not bring AIE to Shanghai. Shanghai brought AIE to Shanghai. Okay. Right? It's like Hanwha and, like, Lei Du and Meng Ying and those those folks as data partners. So I'm very grateful for them because we... I always wanted to do something in China, but I'm not a Chinese citizen, and I have no contacts or relationships there. But I think that there's a lot of interest on both sides of the world, on US and China, and Chinese Chinese AI in general, you know, whatever we can do to to surface, like, high quality conversations, I think that AIE in China can help there. So my TLDR is I'm from Singapore, you know, fifth generation Singaporean. Oh, sorry. Fifth fifth generation Chinese. Right? Most Singaporeans majority Chinese. I think I am from... People ask me, like, Oh, [00:05:18] S1: Chinese.
00:05:18 · S1, Shawn Wang
[00:05:18] S1: Chinese. [00:05:21] S0: Oh, cool. And I don't know. And that's that's like how it feels like to be, like, Chinese diaspora. Right? Like, we don't know what our origins are because it's just mixed and nobody kept any records. Like, nobody even knows our birthdays, like, sometimes, you know? But fifth generation Singapore, and grew and raised up in Singapore, and I went to The US for university and did my first career in finance. I was in trading and investment banking and hedge funds for ten years... Sorry, eight years, and then switched to tech. So I worked in Amazon and a few startups. And then four years ago, became independent, wrote Latent Space, figured out that there was gonna be this AI engineer thing, and then I I started AIE. [00:06:12] S1: Cool. And I know that actually you have different roles right now. You're you're you're doing the Latent Space podcast, you're writing newsletters, and also I find out that you have different roles in several startups, like Cognition, etcetera. Yes. Yeah. Just wonder, you know, you know, what your current titles or roles in different different roles and...
00:06:33 · Shawn Wang
[00:06:33] S0: Yeah. So it's very funny because I recently had to go over my taxes, like, figure out, like, what money do I have. So Cognition is the biggest one is adviser. I'm still an adviser to Cognition. Nice. I was an employee for a long time... For for for a while. So, basically, the idea was I have three companies. I have AIE, I have Latent Space, and then I have Miscellaneous. It used to be Small AI, which is my personal sort of startup vehicle. Yeah. Basically, got acqui hired into Cognition, worked there for six months, and then stepped back to be an adviser because AIE is now, you know, a global conference conference organization, and I I had to be CEO. I couldn't be part time employee, time here. Cognition is very big. Fireworks is very big. Modal is very big. Supabase. So I think it's a very common thing if you're on a Silicon Valley influencer or you've been in developer relations circles for a long time. So that that is my specialty in... Which is that I am technical, but I also write and speak. And that is a good combination of skills to have for people because any startup will wanna pay you to, like, talk about their stuff. And I think, you know, then then you start working with a bunch of things. So, like, a lot of... This is not a normal career. I actually don't even recommend it for most people, but it is my role in life that I can advise a few different companies and work with them in exchange for stock, and that's the rough idea.
00:07:57 · S1
[00:07:57] S1: I just want to deep dive a bit more into the early days of Latent Space, because I know I read your essay that you start to learn in public and then tell everyone what you learned in early days, and then you felt the need, you need to transfer the conversation, you talk with different researchers online, and then become the early conversation of the Latent Space, probably just, you know, talking about the past days, how to build up Latent Space.
00:08:24 · Shawn Wang
[00:08:24] S0: There's kind of two different things that you're mixing together, right? The first thing is the principle of learning in public, which is something I realized when I left finance and I worked in tech. Why is tech so much better... Going so much better for me? It feels so much more comfortable. And the very core reason for people who are interested in both fields, both are high paying jobs, like prestigious jobs. The difference is finance is zero sum. Right? If I know something and I tell you that that truth lose... Loses value. Right. But in tech, it is... Most stuff is... Things are positive some. If I know something I tell you, it increases value. And that's a very different paradigm for people who are crossing over from finance to tech, and it's very liberating. It means that people will get on stage and they open source their work. Right. They share their code. They screw up. They share that they screwed up. In finance, no. Like, you wanna pretend that you never screwed up and everything is top secret. And I think that is something that I really took to heart, and I I think I realized that... Oh, the the other thing that happened to me was my first job was at Two Sigma, which is still in finance, but I was on the software engineering side. And I realized that I had a bad boss. So then I got really bored, and I started to do a lot of writing and speaking because at work, I wasn't able to do the things that I wanted to do because they didn't let me. But, like, obviously, because I was so bored at work, and then I put all my energy into the the stuff outside of work, then obviously that thing took off because no one else is doing that. And by comparison, that becomes you being able to choose your own boss. Right? Like, most people, when they have a job, they join a company, they are assigned a boss, they assign a team. Most of the most of the time, don't even know if, like, the team is good or not or, like, whatever. And then you find out you're not good. You're stuck. When you learn in public, you actually can choose your own boss. You choose... You you, like, work for yourself, choose your own boss, all those things. So it's very, good. I think the... Fast forward to Latent Space, that was created when stable diffusion happened. This is before ChatGPT. Yeah. When stable diffusion happened, I was in a startup that was not going very well.