Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast
00:48:38 · Shawn Wang, S1
[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. [00:48:49] S1: I just found out that Diogo himself also a very, you know, such a character, and and he's really passionate about what he's been doing. So I just wonder, you know, you've talked to a lot of like researchers and developers or AI engineers. What do you think? Why was Diogo that made the JAF? Was it something special or different from other kinds of researchers or people that you've talked with? Because I find it quite special about Bob, about him talking to what he's building and what he's believing.
00:49:22 · Shawn Wang, S1
[00:49:22] S0: He has a nontraditional background himself. He didn't go to, Stanford PhD and, you know, the kind of... Those kind of things. So he has that sympathy with a regular developer, but he also worked on ChatGPT. Mhmm. I think that a lot of people who... Maybe they went through the traditional ML researcher path, you go to a top university and then you work on some interesting paper, and then you get hired into a lab and you work on a lab, they're in the big models cult. Everything will be solved by making our model bigger, by having more more flops in our training run, and more parameters and more, more, more, more. Right. Right? And so it takes someone who doesn't come from that mold to really say, well, actually, there's another way to do this, which is smaller stuff that is sprinkled everywhere instead of one big one. And I think that is... By the way, Diogo was not the first to do that. There's been thousands of people who've tried to say smaller model is good. Right. Faster, cheaper, better, whatever. But somehow Diogo worked. Mhmm. One, because he has the credibility of OpenAI. Two, he made it into a system one versus system two thing, which I think makes the communication very clear to the point where you can play Doom or whatever it was with... So there's some game demo that he that he showed in the launch post that was very clear, like, there's no way you will ever use LLM to do this. [00:50:46] S1: Mhmm.
00:50:46 · S1, Shawn Wang
[00:50:46] S1: Mhmm. [00:50:47] S0: And I think that showmanship that he wears the pink jacket, he... He's so passionate and he's talking. That showmanship plus the technical capability is, again, like, similar to the learning public. Like, I'm a small version of that. Right? Like, I'm technically capable and I can talk. But for him, he's like 10 x on both dimensions. And I think that really comes through when when you talk to him. [00:51:08] S1: And also, I guess my next question is about your your roles on advising other startups especially just you mentioned. I'm just very curious, you know, us an advising role, like exactly what kind of advices that you are working with those [00:51:25] S0: startups and I'm how is also curious what can you, for your listeners and for me, what do you do for other companies? [00:51:32] S1: Oh, yeah. So we are actually a community that started three years ago till we found out there are lot of Chinese based founders want to go global. And then I think they were pretty good at building or shipping products quickly, but they found a huge gap between, you know, go to market and marketing and understanding Okay. The [00:51:54] S0: You're a Chinese founder trying to break in The US. You suck at this. You are very good at your tech [00:52:01] S1: Yeah. [00:52:01] S0: And you suck at marketing [00:52:02] S1: Yeah. [00:52:02] S0: And you better talk to someone who's good because you cannot do it yourself. Yeah. That's it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right.
00:52:02 · Shawn Wang, S1
[00:52:02] S0: And you better talk to someone who's good because you cannot do it yourself. Yeah. That's it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. [00:52:08] S1: Yeah. So that's how I truly found out that there's a huge gap between, you know, understanding the local market and, you know, and then ship the product correctly, I found your PMF. Yeah. Yeah. So that's basically, we hold out a lot of meetups and then working with some advisors here, and then try to provide different kinds of workshops and other bursaries to those founders really start to find a little bit on the right track of BMF, but still lack some talents and help from the go to market side. [00:52:40] S0: Yeah, it's interesting. We also host meetups. Diogo actually, before he launched JEV, he was actually here in this room. [00:52:49] S1: Oh,
00:52:49 · Shawn Wang
[00:52:49] S0: okay. We hold this sort of writers meetup thing where people can show their work, and I will give commentary on it on it. And so the the sort of TypeSaf manifesto came out of that. But I I think it's very similar to to that, except that I would... For some peep... Some of them, I'll do it for equity. Mhmm. Most of it, do it for free, and then some of them, they want to have a, like, a recurring call Yeah. Or they... Or something, they... Then then then they offer some equity. It's just easier to do that, and it turns out it's worth a lot of money if it... If the company does very well. Right. So I think that is interesting in terms of, like, a job because it's... You cannot eat equity, And, like, maybe they never sell. Like, Databricks is, like, whatever, 15 years old and worth $200,000,000,000, and it's... And, like, I have my equity. I was like, what is it? But I think it's it's very useful to be able to test your theories on a number of different companies. So when you work as an employee in one company, you only see one example, and your advice only works in one company. But now that I have done 30 something, 35, 36 different companies, I can really see the universal truths among all of them, and I'm better as an advisor to all of them because I've tried everything. Right. Yeah. Talk to everyone, like... And I understand the different scenarios of, like, okay, my advice is not gonna work for you here because I tried it at this other company, and and and, you know, your situation is, like, clearly very different. And, like, I I I feel like, actually, almost all domain subject matter experts, like, I happen to own developer marketing. Right? That's my thing. But if you work in, I don't know, your strategic finance or you're working in, like, GPU compute acquisition or whatever, and you and you are trying to be global number one in that, you kind of have to go through a tour of duty of just advising everyone so you can just take... Fucking test everything. Yeah. Some of it doesn't work, but but sometimes, I mean, some of them is clearly going to work.
00:54:58 · S1, Shawn Wang
[00:54:58] S1: Mhmm. [00:54:58] S0: And then you will learn. And that's the only... Like, your sample size has to be more than one, and most people's sample size is, like, five. But, like, you know, if you can get it up to, like, 50, then, like, you probably are one of the top in the field anyway. [00:55:11] S1: And I can share with you some, you know, something that I find it quite similar in those, you know, global Chinese founders, because right now more and more came from engineering background, even research background. Yeah. And they think that they're building the best products because they have like best harness skill or technical skills and knowledges, etcetera. But actually there's still sometimes a huge gap between what the customer actually wants, that the skills and the product you offer. And sometimes like different local markets have even have different demands and have using a similar things. Yeah. All those technical founders, research founders, because I've There are also a lot of founders from the same background.