Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast
00:59:41 · S1, Shawn Wang
[00:59:41] S1: I just have... Becoming little bit hard for me to define what a taste is because the investors talk about. So I just wonder in your view, like, how do you define the taste seen from those engineers or even founders? [00:59:52] S0: Okay. I can define taste in a way that is not helpful. Taste is something where you are able to... Out of a large set of possibilities, you're able to narrow it down quickly, cheaply Uh-huh. To the set of possibilities that when you look back, is immediately obvious is good. So when you when you're at the start, you look out, there's a thousand different things I can possibly do. Which one do I choose? Right? Yeah. The brute force... You can brute force. You can try 1,000 of them, and then you find a good one. But a tasteful person can say, yeah, obviously these are bad. I I don't... I cannot explain it. I cannot explain it. But obviously these are bad. This one looks... This this too looks interesting. Mhmm. And then at the end of the journey, they'll pick one, and you look back and you're like, well, that is... Yeah. What do you mean we're considering the other nine ninety nine? Obviously, this is the correct one. There's many versions, applications of this, but the one that's coming to mind right now is the iPhone, where for a long time, the smartphone had a keyboard, And it took Steve Jobs to say, no. We will do whatever it takes to have touch screen, a virtualized screen, because it look... Needs to look like a screen that's a flat slab. [01:01:05] S1: Mhmm.
01:01:05 · S1, Shawn Wang
[01:01:05] S1: Mhmm. [01:01:05] S0: And that took ten years to R and D, because there was a company called General Magic that tried to do this and failed, but like, obviously now every phone in the world looks like this. That is taste. In 1990, when people were starting to have smartphones, you could do a number... A huge number of things, but it takes the the person with taste to say like, yeah, this is what we want, and I'm gonna say no to everything else. And my first phone I shipped was gonna be this. If [01:01:32] S1: you're looking back at all those AI products, could you share an example that you think you find it has taste? [01:01:40] S0: I actually think that everything that Cursor does has a lot of taste because they were first to the VS Code thing before it's... And now they're they're doing Crock Pot, which is like a good taste thing. Because like now now, like, OpenAI has to, like, copy them and what have you. And, Claude has to copy them, which is like, you know you have taste when other people copy the thing that you just shipped. [01:01:59] S1: Yeah.
01:01:59 · S1, Shawn Wang
[01:01:59] S1: Yeah. [01:01:59] S0: The interesting way, you know, to go below the labs, I think it's interesting to think about, like, the more boring kind of problems that people solve. Legora, you know, in the legal field, they have this sort of, like, document review process that's, like, massively parallel. Yeah. And, like, once you see that, you're like, I don't wanna do my work anywhere else. I I I have to do it in Legora. Mhmm. And, like, again, like, anyone could have come up with it. Anyway, these ideas are cheap. Yeah. But you didn't do it. Yeah. Legora did it. And so someone at Legora has that taste of, like, we will define this billion possible things we can do. We will just define this products that that becomes the way that people do their work. [01:02:43] S1: Yeah. I think coming to an end, and I think probably we have talked about AIEi arriving in Shanghai, like two weeks later. I just wonder, you know, what do you hope to see or to learn from the builders or develop their... What kind of topics actually are you most [01:03:00] S0: interested It's tough because it's more of a differential for me. I want to see how very different Shanghai is from San Francisco, because I think San Francisco has a b two p SaaS bubble, but Shanghai, you you guys use ComfyUI UI? We don't use it here. [01:03:18] S1: Okay. [01:03:19] S0: We like our Canva, we like our fal AI. Yeah. Don't use don't use ComfyUI. Like, ComfyUI is more of like a open source tool. And it's it's same same for OpenClaw. OpenClaw had more traction here than Comfy, but OpenClaw was really traction here.
01:03:19 · Shawn Wang, S1
[01:03:19] S0: We like our Canva, we like our fal AI. Yeah. Don't use don't use ComfyUI. Like, ComfyUI is more of like a open source tool. And it's it's same same for OpenClaw. OpenClaw had more traction here than Comfy, but OpenClaw was really traction here. [01:03:36] S1: Really traction. Yeah. [01:03:38] S0: I bet you heard that. Yeah. Yeah. Of course, I know. But, like, I I've seen those kinds of like, you know, Chinese influencer farms, it's like all these Chinese girls doing this and the phone. The scale in China is just so different and it's so competitive. Say they do nine ninety six in San Francisco, They don't really. Like Saturday, Sunday, they're still kind of chilling, but in China, they are really nine ninety six. [01:04:19] S1: Well, it's kind of normal in startups and also the big tech. [01:04:24] S0: Yeah. But like, I think that's really intense. People don't like Toutiao and like Meituan, Intense. [01:04:33] S1: Yes. [01:04:34] S0: Right? And like, people here don't work that hard. [01:04:37] S1: I heard that engineers or startup founders work that hard. [01:04:40] S0: Would say hard because I have no equity, but, like, employees. Employees. Legally, you cannot ask people to work that hard. It's illegal. Okay? Yeah. I've seen some of the most competitive top tier US startups, I'm sure they're not working as hard as China. There's BAT, there's like the first generation, then there's like [01:04:57] S1: second Second generation. [01:04:58] S0: Yeah. Whatever the the thing is. Yeah. I mean, like, those guys, oh my god. [01:05:03] S1: Like How did you learn...
01:05:03 · S1, Shawn Wang
[01:05:03] S1: Like How did you learn... [01:05:05] S0: Did you They're such good founders. [01:05:06] S1: Yes. [01:05:07] S0: There's such good... Like, if they live in the wrong country, if they live in The US, they'll kill it. They'll kill Amazon. They'll kill like Facebook. Right? The only reason they're not richer is they live in China. [01:05:19] S1: Also the SaaS. I mean, the software as well. [01:05:21] S0: Yeah. I mean, even even like... Okay. So when I did my study abroad in beta in 2007, BYD was still like, oh, we're we're up and coming. Like, you know, we're we're Chinese based. We'll always be Chinese based. People love BYD here. [01:05:36] S1: Oh, really?
01:05:36 · S1, Shawn Wang
[01:05:36] S1: Oh, really? [01:05:37] S0: BYD is taking over The US. Oh, okay. It's crazy. And, like, I would never have thought, never, that BYD would ever come here. It's insane. I I don't know I don't know what conclusion I would say it is. I think that the Chinese energy and spirit and creativity and grit is something that people don't have exposure to. And then don't... That's not even talking about the model labs, which obviously, like, DeepSeek and all those all those labs. So I think there's many reasons to be excited about exposing that more, especially... You know, I think Chinese events, they're very... There's regulations against live streaming, but even they're presented differently than the way that Western audiences like to consume them, so they don't have the same reach. Right. Right? Ali did like... Ali Yun did like this thing where they presented the whole Alibaba roadmap with the quen and everything. No. Nobody saw it here. Why? Because it was in the middle of some corporate presentation presented by other people. So I had to go and translate everything for The US audience. But like, just do it with me. Right? Just do it [01:06:43] S1: on the AIE and I could... They will see it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And also I saw that already there's some open source, like, motor companies attended AIE this year in San Francisco MiniMax. Yeah.