Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast
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.
01:06:43 · S1, Shawn Wang
[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. [01:06:54] S0: So, I mean, we hope to have representation from everybody, and I think that there's a lot of people interested in in that cross cultural exchange that are not interested in the politics. Right. Like, we will not do politics, we'll only do tech. [01:07:06] S1: Yeah. Okay. That's great. And I really, really look for... Forward. And so I guess these are my questions, but I still have, like, three quick final questions. Anything just first pop up in your mind, but first is, what AI development or are you most excited about right now? And actually, actually worries you most? [01:07:27] S0: AI development that most excites me, I think system one models is like a very clear number one answer, so it's boring, so I'm not gonna say it. So I think the thing that people are under the radar about is interaction models. Interaction model? So this is something that Thinking Machines is doing for people who haven't... Who missed the announcement, look it up. It is where you are full duplex back and forth communication at all times. You don't start, and then you take a turn. I take a turn. You take a turn. No. At at, like, at all times, like, you are listening while you're speaking, and I'm listening to you while I'm speaking, and I can interrupt you, and you will immediately respond and adjust. [01:08:04] S1: Yeah. Saw the demo. Bye.
01:08:04 · S1, Shawn Wang
[01:08:04] S1: Yeah. Saw the demo. Bye. [01:08:05] S0: That should be the way of AI. Right? There's a corollary of that, which is continual learning AI, where you don't have pre trained, post trained done. Mhmm. You are learn learn learn learn learn learn as I work with you. And that's just very... That's a very interesting and important field. And then the last part is world models. Mhmm. Which are obviously doing very well, and I don't have to explain that. But, yeah, what I'm worried about, I think, personally, if we have an AI winter... It isn't AI summer. This is probably the longest AI summer we've ever had in human history, but the history of AI has been... Is about fifty years old. There's always summers. Everything's gonna work. Winter, summer, winter. If we ever have a winter, when is it gonna happen? And am I gonna go bankrupt? Which is a real concern for [01:08:52] S1: a
01:08:52 · S1, Shawn Wang
[01:08:52] S1: a [01:08:52] S0: conference company that relies on hype. More more broadly, I think that there is a real concern about safety that all my friends at all the labs are really, really very worried about, and that society cannot handle and adjust quickly enough. And it is not because of fake news. It is not because of losing your jobs. It is something worse. You know, right now, the the way that we express it is cybersecurity. Mhmm. It's like, oh, I get hacked all the time. Every every day, I just hack hack hack hack hack. I feel like there's something even worse on the horizon that we don't know about. The most extreme version of this is bioweapons. Right? Like, oops, like I have invented COVID too. Mhmm. Yeah. What if it's worse than that? Mhmm. So so the way that we phrase it in... On the podcast that we do is that the default assumption for most people should be AI doom. That 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. And so at some point it's gonna be more advanced, and then we have to figure out what to do there. [01:10:01] S1: Mhmm. No. Cool. Yeah. And and the second question will be... Well, just a bit light one is that what kind of other newsletters and podcasts or the contents that you recommend? [01:10:11] S0: I have a list. It's called the Good AI Newsletters and Podcast List. [01:10:15] S1: Okay. Is it on the It's really... It's on the call. Okay.
01:10:15 · S1, Shawn Wang
[01:10:15] S1: Okay. Is it on the It's really... It's on the call. Okay. [01:10:17] S0: It's it's on my GitHub. But actually, the... For the more recent one, you can check a eo.latent.space. So basically, what I did was I asked every model, what are the best AI podcasts for engineers? And it gives me a list, I transcribe it and I put it in the ranking. [01:10:32] S1: Okay. [01:10:32] S0: I asked 200 of these questions. What is the best payment startup? What is the best bank? What is the best financial adviser? What is the best database? What is... Everything. Every every every question. That's why [01:10:42] S1: you call it AIEO? Yes. [01:10:44] S0: Because I'm agent optimizing for what the model's answering. But it's probably a pretty decent proxy for what the people who choose the datasets in labs choose, and they choose Latent Space. [01:10:55] S1: Okay. The the top, [01:10:56] S0: the first one. It does very well. It's either number one or number... Between number one and number three, and and... Yeah. So that's that's the answer. [01:11:03] S1: Cool. Cool. Cool. I guess I'll just leave the last question for you to ask me if you have any questions. [01:11:08] S0: Then we are here. What are your hosts for AIEi Shanghai?