In episode 118 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Andrew Lee. Andrew is co-founder and CEO of Shortwave, a company dedicated to building a better product experience for email, particularly by leveraging AI. He previously co-founded and was CTO at Firebase. Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here or reach Daniel at [email protected] Subscribe to The Gradient Podcast:  Apple Podcasts  | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSFollow The Gradient on Twitter Outline: * (00:00) Intro * (01:43) Andrew’s previous work, Firebase * (04:48) Benefits of lacking experience in building Firebase * (08:55) On “abstract reasoning” vs empirical capabilities * (10:30) Shortwave’s AI system as a black box * (11:55) Motivations for Shortwave * (17:10) Why is Google not innovating on email? * (21:53) Shortwave’s overarching product vision and pivots * (27:40) Shortwave AI features * (33:20) AI features for email and security concerns * (35:45) Shortwave’s AI Email Assistant + architecture * (43:40) Issues with chaining LLM calls together * (45:25) Understanding implicit context in utterances, modularization without loss of context * (48:56) Performance for AI assistant, batching and pipelining * (55:10) Prompt length * (57:00) On shipping fast * (1:00:15) AI improvements that Andrew is following * (1:03:10) Outro Links: * Andrew’s blog and Twitter * Shortwave * Introducing Ghostwriter * Everything we shipped for AI Launch Week * A deep dive into the world’s smartest email AI Get full access to The Gradient at thegradientpub.substack.com/subscribe