Episodes
Alessio will be at AWS re:Invent next week and hosting a casual coffee meetup on Wednesday, RSVP here! And subscribe to our calendar for our Singapore, NeurIPS, and all upcoming meetups! We are still taking questions for our next big recap episode! Submit questions and messages on Speakpipe here for a chance to appear on the show! If you've been following the AI agents space, you have heard of Lindy AI; while founder Flo Crivello is hesitant to call it "blowing up," when folks like Andrew...
Published 11/15/24
We are recording our next big recap episode and taking questions! Submit questions and messages on Speakpipe here for a chance to appear on the show! Also subscribe to our calendar for our Singapore, NeurIPS, and all upcoming meetups! In our first ever episode with Logan Kilpatrick we called out the two hottest LLM frameworks at the time: LangChain and Dust. We’ve had Harrison from LangChain on twice (as a guest and as a co-host), and we’ve now finally come full circle as Stanislas from Dust...
Published 11/11/24
Apologies for lower audio quality; we lost recordings and had to use backup tracks. Our guests today are Anastasios Angelopoulos and Wei-Lin Chiang, leads of Chatbot Arena, fka LMSYS, the crowdsourced AI evaluation platform developed by the LMSys student club at Berkeley, which became the de facto standard for comparing language models. Arena Elo is often more cited than MMLU scores to many folks, and they have attracted >1,000,000 people to cast votes since its launch, leading top model...
Published 11/01/24
If you’ve listened to the podcast for a while, you might have heard our ElevenLabs-powered AI co-host Charlie a few times. Text-to-speech has made amazing progress in the last 18 months, with OpenAI’s Advanced Voice Mode (aka “Her”) as a sneak peek of the future of AI interactions (see our “Building AGI in Real Time” recap). Yet, we had yet to see a real killer app for AI voice (not counting music). Today’s guests, Raiza Martin and Usama Bin Shafqat, are the lead PM and AI engineer behind the...
Published 10/25/24
Singapore's GovTech is hosting an AI CTF challenge with ~$15,000 in prizes, starting October 26th, open to both local and virtual hackers. It will be hosted on Dreadnode's Crucible platform; signup here! It is common to say if you want to work in AI, you should come to San Francisco. Not everyone can. Not everyone should. If you can only do meaningful AI work in one city, then AI has failed to generalize meaningfully. As non-Americans working in the US, we know what it’s like to see AI...
Published 10/19/24
CEOs of publicly traded companies are often in the news talking about their new AI initiatives, but few of them have built anything with it. Drew Houston from Dropbox is different; he has spent over 400 hours coding with LLMs in the last year and is now refocusing his 2,500+ employees around this new way of working, 17 years after founding the company. Timestamps 00:00 Introductions 00:43 Drew's AI journey 04:14 Revalidating expectations of AI 08:23 Simulation in self-driving vs. knowledge...
Published 10/18/24
We are in 🗽 NYC this Monday! Join the AI Eng NYC meetup, bring demos and vibes! It is a bit of a meme that the first thing developer tooling founders think to build in AI is all the non-AI operational stuff outside the AI. There are well over 60 funded LLM Ops startups all with hoping to solve the new observability, cost tracking, security, and reliability problems that come with putting LLMs in production, not to mention new LLM oriented products from incumbent, established ops/o11y players...
Published 10/11/24
We all have fond memories of the first Dev Day in 2023: and the blip that followed soon after. As Ben Thompson has noted, this year’s DevDay took a quieter, more intimate tone. No Satya, no livestream, (slightly fewer people?). Instead of putting ChatGPT announcements in DevDay as in 2023, o1 was announced 2 weeks prior, and DevDay 2024 was reserved purely for developer-facing API announcements, primarily the Realtime API, Vision Finetuning, Prompt Caching, and Model Distillation. However...
Published 10/03/24
OpenAI DevDay is almost here! Per tradition, we are hosting a DevDay pregame event for everyone coming to town! Join us with demos and gossip! Also sign up for related events across San Francisco: the AI DevTools Night, the xAI open house, the Replicate art show, the DevDay Watch Party (for non-attendees), Hack Night with OpenAI at Cloudflare. For everyone else, join the Latent Space Discord for our online watch party and find fellow AI Engineers in your city. OpenAI’s recent o1 release (and...
Published 09/27/24
Noah Hein from Latent Space University is finally launching with a free lightning course this Sunday for those new to AI Engineering. Tell a friend! Did you know there are >1,600 papers on arXiv just about prompting? Between shots, trees, chains, self-criticism, planning strategies, and all sorts of other weird names, it’s hard to keep up. Luckily for us, Sander Schulhoff and team read them all and put together The Prompt Report as the ultimate prompt engineering reference, which we’ll...
Published 09/20/24
Congrats to Damien on successfully running AI Engineer London! See our community page and the Latent Space Discord for all upcoming events. This podcast came together in a far more convoluted way than usual, but happens to result in a tight 2 hours covering the ENTIRE OpenAI product suite across ChatGPT-latest, GPT-4o and the new o1 models, and how they are delivered to AI Engineers in the API via the new Structured Output mode, Assistants API, client SDKs, upcoming Voice Mode API,...
Published 09/13/24
AI Engineering is expanding! Join the first 🇬🇧 AI Engineer London meetup in Sept and get in touch for sponsoring the second 🗽 AI Engineer Summit in NYC this Dec! The commoditization of intelligence takes on a few dimensions: * Time to Open Model Equivalent: 15 months between GPT-4 and Llama 3.1 405B * 10-100x CHEAPER/year: from $30/mtok for Claude 3 Opus to $3/mtok for L3-405B, and a 400x reduction in the frontier OpenAI model from 2022-2024. Notably, for personal use cases, both Gemini...
Published 09/03/24
Today's guest, Nicholas Carlini, a research scientist at DeepMind, argues that we should be focusing more on what AI can do for us individually, rather than trying to have an answer for everyone. "How I Use AI" - A Pragmatic Approach Carlini's blog post "How I Use AI" went viral for good reason. Instead of giving a personal opinion about AI's potential, he simply laid out how he, as a security researcher, uses AI tools in his daily work. He divided it in 12 sections: * To make applications *...
Published 08/29/24
Betteridge's law says no: with seemingly infinite flavors of RAG, and >2million token context + prompt caching from Anthropic/Deepmind/Deepseek, it's reasonable to believe that "in context learning is all you need". But then there’s Cosine Genie, the first to make a huge bet using OpenAI’s new GPT4o fine-tuning for code at the largest scale it has ever been used externally; resulting in what is now the #1 coding agent in the world according to SWE-Bench Full, Lite, and Verified: SWE-Bench...
Published 08/22/24
Disclaimer: We recorded this episode ~1.5 months ago, timing for the FastHTML release. It then got bottlenecked by Llama3.1, Winds of AI Winter, and SAM2 episodes, so we’re a little late. Since then FastHTML was released, swyx is building an app in it for AINews, and Anthropic has also released their prompt caching API. Remember when Dylan Patel of SemiAnalysis coined the GPU Rich vs GPU Poor war? (if not, see our pod with him). The idea was that if you’re GPU poor you shouldn’t waste your...
Published 08/16/24
Because of the nature of SAM, this is more video heavy than usual. See our YouTube! Because vision is first among equals in multimodality, and yet SOTA vision language models are closed, we’ve always had an interest in learning what’s next in vision. Our first viral episode was Segment Anything 1, and we have since covered LLaVA, IDEFICS, Adept, and Reka. But just like with Llama 3, FAIR holds a special place in our hearts as the New Kings of Open Source AI. The list of sequels better than...
Published 08/07/24
Thank you for 1m downloads of the podcast and 2m readers of the Substack! 🎉 This is the audio discussion following The Winds of AI Winter essay that also serves as a recap of Q2 2024 in AI viewed through the lens of our Four Wars framework. Enjoy! Full Video Discussion Full show notes are here. Timestamps * [00:00:00] Intro Song by Suno.ai * [00:02:01] Swyx and Alessio in Singapore * [00:05:49] GPU Rich vs Poors: Frontier Labs * [00:06:35] GPU Rich Frontier Models: Claude 3.5 * [00:10:37]...
Published 08/02/24
If you see this in time, join our emergency LLM paper club on the Llama 3 paper! For everyone else, join our special AI in Action club on the Latent Space Discord for a special feature with the Cursor cofounders on Composer, their newest coding agent! Today, Meta is officially releasing the largest and most capable open model to date, Llama3-405B, a dense transformer trained on 15T tokens that beats GPT-4 on all major benchmarks: The 8B and 70B models from the April Llama 3 release have also...
Published 07/23/24
The first AI Engineer World’s Fair talks from OpenAI and Cognition are up! In our Benchmarks 101 episode back in April 2023 we covered the history of AI benchmarks, their shortcomings, and our hopes for better ones. Fast forward 1.5 years, the pace of model development has far exceeded the speed at which benchmarks are updated. Frontier labs are still using MMLU and HumanEval for model marketing, even though most models are reaching their natural plateau at a ~90% success rate (any higher...
Published 07/12/24
Livestreams for the AI Engineer World’s Fair (Multimodality ft. the new GPT-4o demo, GPUs and Inference (ft. Cognition/Devin), CodeGen, Open Models tracks) are now live! Subscribe to @aidotEngineer to get notifications of the other workshops and tracks! It’s easy to get de-sensitized to new models topping leaderboards every other week — however, the top of the LMsys leaderboard has typically been the exclusive domain of very large, very very well funded model labs like OpenAI, Anthropic,...
Published 07/05/24
It’s return guest season here at Latent Space! We last talked to Kanjun in October and Jonathan in May (and December post Databricks acquisition): Imbue and Databricks are back for a rare treat: a double-header interview talking about DBRX from Databricks and Imbue 70B, a new internal LLM that “outperforms GPT-4o” zero-shot on a range of reasoning and coding-related benchmarks and datasets, while using 7x less data than Llama 3 70B. While Imbue, being an agents company rather than a model...
Published 06/25/24
The World’s Fair is officially sold out! Thanks for all the support and stay tuned for recaps of all the great goings on in this very special celebration of the AI Engineer! Longtime listeners will remember the fan favorite Raza Habib, CEO of HumanLoop, on the pod: Well, he’s caught the podcasting bug and is now flipping the tables on swyx! Subscribe to High Agency wherever the finest Artificial Intelligence podcast are sold. High Agency Pod Description In this episode, I chatted with Shawn...
Published 06/25/24
Editor’s note: One of the top reasons we have hundreds of companies and thousands of AI Engineers joining the World’s Fair next week is, apart from discussing technology and being present for the big launches planned, to hire and be hired! Listeners loved our previous Elicit episode and were so glad to welcome 2 more members of Elicit back for a guest post (and bonus podcast) on how they think through hiring. Don’t miss their AI engineer job description, and template which you can use to...
Published 06/21/24
In April 2023 we released an episode named “Mapping the future of *truly* open source models” to talk about Dolly, the first open, commercial LLM. Mike was leading the OSS models team at Databricks at the time. Today, Mike is back on the podcast to give us the “one year later” update on the evolution of large language models and how he’s been using them to build Brightwave, an an AI research assistant for investment professionals. Today they are announcing a $6M seed round (led by Alessio...
Published 06/11/24