In this episode, Nathan sits down with Swyx of Latent Space to chat about AI engineers and tools to check out, competitive dynamics between OpenAI, other foundation model providers, and developers, and if Swyx would wear an AI Horcrux. We also learn that Nathan lived in the same dorm as Mark Zuckerberg back in his college days (and was a late adopter to Facebook…). If you're looking for an ERP platform, check out our sponsor, NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive

Subscribe to the show Substack to join future conversations and submit questions to upcoming guests! https://cognitiverevolution.substack.com/

We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal team on other projects he's incubating. He's hiring a Chief of Staff, EA, Head of Special Projects, Investment Associate, and more. For a list of JDs, check out: eriktorenberg.com.

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TIMESTAMPS:

(00:00) Episode Preview

(00:00:49) AI Nathan’s intro

(00:03:14) What is an AI engineer?

(00:05:56) What backgrounds do AI engineers typically have?

(00:15:51) Sponsors: Netsuite | Omneky

(00:17:13) Swyx’s Discord AI project

(00:20:41) Key tools for AI engineers

(00:23:42) HumanLoop, Guardrails, Langchain

(00:27:01) Criteria for identifying capable AI engineers when hiring

(00:30:59) Skepticism around AI being a fad and doubts about contributing to AI

(00:34:03) AI Engineer Conference speaker lineup

(00:41:14) AI agents and two years to AGI

(00:46:04) Expectations and disagreement around what AI agent capabilities will work soon

(00:50:12) Swyx’s OpenAI thesis

(00:53:03) AI safety considerations and the role of AI engineers

(00:56:24) Disagreement on whether AI will soon be able to generate code pull requests

(01:01:07) AI helping non-technical people to code

(01:01:49) Multi-modal Chat-GPT and the future implications

(01:03:33) Nathan living in the same dorm as Mark Zuckerberg

(01:04:44) Competitive dynamics between OpenAI and other AI model developers

(01:05:39) Play.ht vs ElevenLabs

(01:09:20) The tension between platforms and developers building on top of them

(01:11:40) The best thing startups can do to compete with foundation model providers

(01:16:26) User identity/authentication services like Login with OpenAI

(01:19:20) Google vs the other live players

(01:20:46) AI Horcruxes / Pendants

(01:22:05) The concept of an AI app bundle for consumers and developers