Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast
00:41:02 · Shawn Wang
[00:41:02] S0: But I think that there is such a thing... 99designs is a very good business because there's many designers... It actually doesn't take that much to create a design, right, you just need... It's more about the quality of the idea than the amount of work. So you just need high quality ideas, and and, like, you just need to be able to to spray over to a lot of different contests. And so ninety nine designs is like that, and I think there could be a lot of 99 designs for SaaS, which is something I'm thinking about. You know what I mean? Like, basically I had to create a 99 designs for myself, for saying, here's the $40,000 SAS, here's the specs, here's the judging criteria, here's the blah, blah, blah, even right down to like, here's how we pay you money when you win, everything had to be worked out by me. But would I pay some other person to do all this for me so that I just tell them what I want and I get 70 different versions and I pick one? Oh, that for admin for me. Right? Yeah. Yeah. So there should be a 99 designs for for SAS and for cloning all these things. Because as... Again, as a business owner, I honestly, I'm only doing this because it's good content. It's a podcast, you're interested in all these things. But, like, if I didn't have a podcast, I probably wouldn't do it. It's a lot of work. We took, like, two months to eval everything, partially because I'm busy, but also it's just, it's a lot of eval. Like, this five rules for this particular SaaS, because it's about like organizer, speaker, attendee, sponsor, vendor, they all have to agree on what the conference organization looks like. Yeah. So you have to create an account for each of the... In order to test, you have to create account for each of things, and you have to do some data entry here, and you change accounts, and do something, and you read and data entry here, and you change, change, change, change, And so that's why it's like complicated. That's why... But that's what the mid tier SaaS is. That's why I pay $40,000.50 for this, because I don't wanna do it. But now that you can, it's a very fun job and problem to do.
00:42:54 · S1, Shawn Wang
[00:42:54] S1: Yeah, sure. Yeah. I mean, it's a good experiment. And because we are also running conference in China as well, like also over thousand attendance before, so I can tackle you so much [00:43:05] S0: a lot. But then, like, think about the rest. Right? So I used to pay Calendly. Do you guys have Calendly? [00:43:11] S1: I don't, but... But you know [00:43:12] S0: what I mean? Like, a booking link, like, that's how we that's how we got to this meeting. Yeah. Calendly is like a $1,313,000,000,000 dollar business. Yeah. And, you can buy pool Calendly. [00:43:21] S1: Yes. I know. Of course. [00:43:22] S0: I I have I have my own. I have I have two versions. [00:43:25] S1: You you already come your own, like, make your own [00:43:27] S0: Calendly. Yes. Yeah. I I have my own Calendly. I have my own Google Drive. I have my own GitHub. I'm serious. I have my own Dropbox. Oh my god. I have my own Slack. All of this is because I have money and I can... I I have people and I can I can assign them to do things? But I do think that you can build software for yourself, for audience of one or audience of one company. Mhmm. And and that's okay. Mhmm. And the the the fact that you can do that now is something that has never existed before for any business owner Yeah. Which is amazing. [00:44:00] S1: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Great. Great. Great. Yeah. [00:44:02] S0: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. You do some investing. Right? And then you're you're... You've you've raised money. [00:44:06] S1: Uh-huh.
00:44:06 · S1, Shawn Wang
[00:44:06] S1: Uh-huh. [00:44:06] S0: So you know DocuSign? Yes. $10,000,000,000 company. Yeah. Or maybe 7 now. Yeah. What is DocuSign? You you send a PDF, they say like, oh, yep. Sign. They give you a certificate. Oh, that's it. Yeah. Right? And they they send... They charge you something like $10 per per PDF or a first signature or something, or for envelope, they call it. Yeah. And, like, yeah, I I... There's an open source DocuSign, and I host it for myself. And you know what's the difference? Because I have my own Drive and I have my own DocuSign, the moment that the DocuSign is signed, it goes straight into the correct folder on the drive. [00:44:43] S1: Oh, yeah. Because you integrate this together. [00:44:45] S0: Yes. And that does not exist in your DocuSign. Right. Right. Yes. Right. So, like, my data room has directly the DocuSign, so every... Everything that I didn't have to touch because it already has Right. Everything. [00:44:57] S1: My one thing special about DocuSign is created... Like, because it was built long time ago, and it creates a network effect. Everyone joins the network, everyone using it. Are you still thinking it's a mode for this kind of software? Fuck no. No?
00:44:57 · S1, Shawn Wang
[00:44:57] S1: My one thing special about DocuSign is created... Like, because it was built long time ago, and it creates a network effect. Everyone joins the network, everyone using it. Are you still thinking it's a mode for this kind of software? Fuck no. No? [00:45:10] S0: No. Electronic signatures are legally enforceable everywhere. And DocuSign has no patent on it. I can do my electronic signature. What... The the network is the email address. Is it? Yeah. It it is so stupid. And, like, I can keep going about why I made each of each of those things. It doesn't matter. It's not like I'm encouraging everyone to do this. I think that whatever problem you face in your business or your life, you really can find open source version of it Yes. Host it for yourself, customize it, integrate. Okay. I want this plus this. Boom. They just work because I fucking use them all the time. I copy here, paste there, copy here, paste there. Inside of every 1,000,000 copy paste, I think there is a fantastic startup and product to be built. [00:45:52] S1: Great. And I guess next question, next year, I'm actually quite interested in about your conversation with Diogo from Jeff. Because also it was actually a really also a very hotly discussed topic and product. [00:46:05] S0: Yeah. What is the Chinese developers thinking about it?
00:46:05 · Shawn Wang, S1
[00:46:05] S0: Yeah. What is the Chinese developers thinking about it? [00:46:08] S1: I think it just creates a new way of thinking about using, like, LMs from a totally different angle. Yes. And then I even heard that, you know, one podcast podcaster from China, she didn't know anything about coding, but she she used Jeff to judge, you know, the clips from their podcast, whether it would go viral. And then Jeff gives, you know, gives the answer and and then he will post it on on the network. So I found out so many great use cases based on Jeff. So I just wonder what's your take with there and what probably [00:46:45] S0: Yeah. So for those who didn't listen to the podcast, we were the first podcast You are the first one. Because I forced him, because I have friends with him for four years and say, you give me the first floor, I'm gonna kill you. No, he's obviously like very, very accomplished. He was the co author on Instruct GPT, which became Chat GPT. And I think the interesting thing about Jeff is that it is the kind of the original vision of AI engineering for me, which is that instead of... Right now, AI engineering is is what we talked about, is a big harness Yeah. Around a model. And it's like, I'll do a bunch of work, and then I'll hand off to a model and say, please, god model, give me the right answer, and and you can take ten days to think about it. Jeff is like, well, no. Models are for us. We don't work for the model. [00:47:36] S1: Right.
00:47:36 · S1, Shawn Wang
[00:47:36] S1: Right. [00:47:37] S0: And so I will reduce the scope of the model to only one thing, which is to make choices or to estimate probabilities, and I will I will put it in the line on path of my critical work. So if you think about what is the failure mode of of what the LLM... Current LLM paradigm is, is that you have the big traditional SaaS, and then your LLM is this window that's a chatbot. Mhmm. Right? Mhmm. That is basically what everything is. Or you are... You look like Codex or ChatGPT or Claude Agent. And it's like chat window here Yeah. Menu here, that's it. For what Jeff represents and what system one models represent, this is why he doesn't call it decision model, he calls it system one models. Mhmm. It is that they are in the path of code. You write it as casually as you write an if statement inside of a normal programming language. And I think that is really what he means by smarter software, which I really, really endorse, which is like, your software should just be at every point smarter instead of at one point smart, and then everything else is dumb. That's really dumb. [00:48:37] S1: Mhmm. [00:48:38] S0: Yeah. I think the the speed stuff is almost secondary to the reliability, which is what he really is trying to say. That's why the company is called TypeSave. But, yeah, the speed is nice.