⚡ Behind Latent Space: A Rare Look Inside the Pod | AIEi Shanghai

Watch the full show on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmDLDy3ZSNE

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Oh, this is a special podcast because it's about AIE Shanghai. AIE Shanghai is the first AIE in China. It's brought to us by stand-up partners, which is one of the local partners that we have. We have a few AIEs worldwide that my team doesn't run. And this is the first one in Shanghai. I've always wanted to bring AIE to China. I think there's a lot of East meets West and a lot of progress in China that needs to be shared and distributed among the global community. China is super interested in us. There's been many Chinese fans of the InSpace. And I'll flash a few of them up on screen here on YouTube. And primarily, I want to recognize Meng Xiao, who is our primary fan,

• 0:42Speaker 00

  always translating basically every episode into Chinese, which I am super appreciative of. And in general, I think I want to also congratulate and celebrate the progress that China has made, not just in open source models, but in robotics and a lot of other startups. Who can remember Manus that was started this time last year and then moved to Singapore? And obviously, OpenClaw had a big run. And we talk a lot about what that's like in terms of the overall mood on the ground and how the scale of AI community is so different in China and the type of things that get adopted, as well as, I guess, the startup culture. People hear a lot about 996.

• 1:27Speaker 00

  We talk about the reality of that versus in a place like Cognition.

• 1:33Speaker 00

  And finally, we also talk a little bit about the origin story of the InSpace, which some of you may not have heard if you're newer to the podcast. Talk about when it was started and why it was started and how we think about running the multiple shows that we're running. And a little bit about safety and alignment and all that other stuff. So there's a little bit here for everyone. It's basically for the fans, if you've been following the InSpace for a while and if you're interested in AIE Shanghai. It's not being livestreamed, but we're going to post it up on YouTube at some point. It starts tomorrow. So anyone here in China who's watching this, I'm really looking forward to having it. And thanks to Meng Ying and team for organizing all of this. I also have to shout out Han Hua and Lei Du, who basically got this thing started.

• 2:18Speaker 00

  You know, it nearly did not happen a few times, but it's so, so exciting to have AIE Shanghai and to bring latent space to China in general. So thanks for watching and look forward to interview. The models are very good at clicking through every screen of your software and then replicating it independently. Oh, yeah. Right? So the moment I have access to your software, I can clone it. So good luck. There's a lot of talking heads who have never coded a single day in their lives. They're all like, oh, my timeline to AGI is like two years away. All of you are not going to have jobs in the future. You need to prepare for what's next. Conveniently, whatever is next looks like their job. I have my own calendar, I have my own Google Drive, I have my own GitHub. I'm serious. They're such good founders. Yes. They live in the wrong country.

• 3:03Speaker 00

  If they live in the US, they'll kill Amazon, they'll kill like Facebook. The only reason they're not richer is they live in China. AI doom. 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.

• 3:28Speaker 01

  Hi, Xiao. So thank you for joining me for this show. So I've been a good, a long-time listener for the latent space podcast. And I know that many founders in AI engineers in China as well have already learned a lot from your work and conversations on the podcast as well. And also, I'm grateful that you are bringing the AIE, the AI engineer conference to Shanghai the first time this year. So I think also, like several months ago, I read your piece actually on Drive4, about your essay on, you know, your relationship with Silicon Valley. You moved back and forth from Singapore and here. I guess that's why, how you actually coined or invented the role of AI engineer the last time you moved to Silicon Valley.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  And also, this just makes me feel like it's very special and that this time you bring the AIE to Shanghai the first time. So tell us a little bit about your background and your relationship with Silicon Valley.

• 4:25Speaker 00

  I should correct you on one thing.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 4:27Speaker 00

  That's wrong. I did not bring AIE to Shanghai. Shanghai brought AIE to Shanghai.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 4:31Speaker 00

  Right? It's like Han Hua and like Lei Du and Meng Ying and those folks as stand-up partners. So I'm very grateful for them because I always wanted to do something in China, but I'm not a Chinese citizen and I have no contacts or relationships there. But I think that there's a lot of interest on both sides of the world, on US and China, Chinese AI in general. You know, whatever we can do to surface like high-quality conversations, I think that AIE in China can help there. So my TLDR is I'm from Singapore, you know, fifth-generation Singaporean. Oh, sorry, fifth-generation Chinese, right? Most Singaporeans are majority Chinese. I think I am from...

• 5:14Speaker 00

  People ask me, like, "你的家族在哪里?"

• 5:17Speaker 01

  Oh, nice Chinese.

• 5:21Speaker 00

  我曾经留学在北京.

• 5:23Speaker 01

  Oh, cool.

• 5:24Speaker 00

  So, and I don't know. And that's like how it feels like to be like Chinese diaspora, right? Like, we don't know what our origins are because it's just mixed and nobody kept any record. It's like nobody even knows our birthdays, like sometimes, you know? But I'm fifth-generation Singaporean, grew and raised up in Singapore and went to the US for university and did my first career in finance. I was in trading and investment banking and hedge funds for 10 years. Sorry, eight years. And then switched to tech. So I worked in Amazon and a few startups. And then four years ago, became independent, wrote latent space,

• 6:08Speaker 00

  figured out that there was going to be this AI engineer thing. And then I started AIE.

• 6:12Speaker 01

  Cool. And I know that actually you have different roles right now. You're doing the latent space podcast, you're writing newsletters. And also, I found out that you have different roles in several startups like Cognition, etc.

• 6:26Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, just wonder, you know, what your current titles or roles in different roles and...

• 6:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it's very funny because I recently had to go over my taxes. I figure out like what money do I have? So Cognition is the biggest one. I'm an advisor, I'm still an advisor to Cognition. I was an employee for a long time, for a while. So basically, the idea was I have three companies. I have AIE, I have latent space, and then I have miscellaneous. It used to be Small AI, which is my personal sort of startup vehicle. Basically, got hired into Cognition, worked there for six months, and then stepped back to be an advisor because AIE is now, you know, a global conference organization. And I had to be CEO. I couldn't be part-time employee, part-time here. Cognition is very big, Fireworks is very big, Model is very big, Superbase.

• 7:17Speaker 00

  So I think it's a very common thing if you're a Silicon Valley influencer or you've been in developer relations circles for a long time. So that is my specialty, which is that I am a technical, but I also write and speak. And that is a good combination of skills to have for people because any startup will want to pay you to like talk about their stuff. And I think, you know, then you start working with a bunch of things. So like a lot of, this is not a normal career. I actually don't even recommend it for most people. But it is my role in life that I can advise a few different companies and work with them in exchange for stock. And that's the rough idea.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  I just want to deep dive a bit more into the early days of latent space because I know I read your essay that you start to, you know, learn in public and then tell everyone what you learned in the early days. And then, and then you felt the need, you need to, you know, transfer the conversation. You talk to various different researchers online and then become the early some conversation of latent space. Probably just, you know, talking about the past days, how to build up latent space and...

• 8:24Speaker 00

  There's kind of two different things that you're mixing together, right? The first thing is the principle of learning in public, which is something I realized when I left finance and I worked in tech. Why is tech so much better, going so much better for me? It feels so much more comfortable. And the very core reason for people who are interested in both fields, both are high-paying jobs, like prestigious jobs. The difference is finance is zero-sum, right? If I know something and I tell you that truth loses value.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:56Speaker 00

  But in tech, it is, most stuff is, things are positive sum. If I know something, I tell you, it increases value. And that's a very different paradigm for people who are crossing over from finance to tech. And it's very liberating. It means that people will get on stage and they open source their work. They share their code. They screw up, they share that they screwed up. In finance, no. Like, you want to pretend that you never screwed up and everything is top secret. And I think that is something that I really took to heart. And I think I realized that, oh, the other thing that happened to me was, my first job was at Two Sigma, which is still in finance, but I was on the software engineering side. And I realized that I had a bad boss.

• 9:38Speaker 00

  So then I got really bored and I started to do a lot of writing and speaking because at work, I wasn't able to do the things that I wanted to do because they didn't let me. But like, obviously, because I was so bored at work and then I put all my energy into the stuff outside of work, then obviously that thing took off because no one else is doing that. And by comparison, that becomes you being able to choose your own boss, right? Like, most people, when they have a job, they join a company, they are assigned a boss, they assign a team. Most of the time, you don't even know if like the team is good or not, like whatever. And then you find out it's not good, you're stuck. When you learn in public, you actually can choose your own boss. You choose, you like work for yourself, choose your boss, all those things. So it's very, very good.

• 10:23Speaker 00

  I think the fast forward to latent space, that was created when stable diffusion happened. This is before ChatGPT.

• 10:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:29Speaker 00

  When stable diffusion happened, I was in a startup that was not going very well. It's called Airbyte. It's still doing okay today, but nobody would call it a rocket ship. That's just, that's objectively true, and I would say that to the founders. But because I was like, okay, I did like some machine learning courses, but I'm not an AI expert. I am so interested in this field. There's only one way for me to get into the field, which is to learn in public. And so that's what I did. I started a blog and I started analyzing and learning and like writing up my learnings into a blog. And at first, nobody will notice. But then eventually, if you start talking about people's things, like literally, Iman Mustak was the CEO of Stability AI, which created stable diffusion,

• 11:09Speaker 00

  which is the reason I started the blog, read the blog post analyzing stable diffusion, and said, this is good. And I think like that work... Was basically me learning AI like the past like five years of like just grinding and and and writing about that. And I think that is really the, you know, like you are not qualified. And I'm still probably not that qualified today, but I'm a bit more qualified than I used to be four years ago. So that's good. And I think that's the only way you can learn. I think especially in Asian cultures, there's a lot of emphasis on credentialism.

• 11:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:46Speaker 00

  Like you have some资格, right? Like you need that piece of paper. You need like some qualification, like if it's not, if it's not a degree, it's a certification. If it's not a certification, you must have had a job to do it. And how do you get the job? You must have a degree. Like it's just like a infinite loop of things that basically mean that when you're sixteen, you need to decide what you want to do in life. But like I think life is a lot more flexible than that. Uh, and you can choose to pivot if you want to. Uh, you just have to be really persistent and also uh, realize that just because you work very hard, you're not entitled to win. You have to work very hard and be good. I think a lot of people try, a lot of people fail and they are like, why didn't it fail? Well, you're not good. Too bad. But some people try and they worked and they had judgments.

• 12:30Speaker 00

  Uh, they really did uh, work on substantial things rather than insubstantial things. Uh, and that's what, that's generally what happens with learning public like. So, so yeah, that's, this started in space and then uh, very, very interestingly, Lane Space was just a blog. It was just.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  Starts was just a blog.

• 12:48Speaker 00

  Yes, just a blog and I had no other, no other idea apart from this is Swigs writing about AI. That's it. But we happened to host some events, like some gatherings, like like oh, like, you know, chat G P T came out, like obviously the most exciting thing of all time. And then we wanted to host some hackathon, so we hosted a hackathon. And at the hackathon, that's where the idea for AI engineer came about. Which is the realization, it actually was this woman that came up to me and said, I'm, I'm all in on AI. I'm non-technical, what can I do? And I realized that the simple answer is based compared to an engineer, she can do nothing. Engineers are about to be so much more powerful than the non-engineer because engineers can control one hundred AIs at once and program it.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:32Speaker 00

  Whereas the, the maximum that a non-technical person can do is prompt better. Then I was like, oh, like I think I have seen this before. So my, my career, throughout my career, I've seen like professionalization of roles that are non-prestigious. So what do I mean by non-prestigious? It is not prestigious to be a prompt engineer. The prestigious thing is you train large language models. You do pre-training, you do post-training. You have to go through a PhD, you make fancy algorithms like GRPO, you know, and, and you, you do manifold hyperconnections, uh, which is what DeepSeek does. That's prestigious and that continues to be prestigious. But I think the overcorrection that people have is that looking at everything else that is not that in our research that is worthless. Uh, that actually was untrue.

• 14:17Speaker 00

  You actually do want to build harnesses and harnesses do not require you to know advanced, advanced math or have a lot of experience in supercomputing. Like actually, you just need to be a very good software engineer that is open-minded enough to understand how to put AI into traditional software code, which is a harness. We didn't have the word for harness at the time, but it was very clear that engineers would be able to do things like this that normal people cannot.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 14:43Speaker 00

  And they would be in demands and there's not only that, companies are trying to hire this kind of people and developers want to become this kind of people. They want, they want a term to call themselves um, something. And so all you have to do is figure out the right term, which is the simplest one is AI engineer. And make it a industry, make it a discipline. And so that's what I did.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  Actually, I can share with you a side story in, in China is that at the time when you, you just mentioned um, the, the event of stable diffusion, the open source of stable diffusion. It was actually at the time that, you know, right now, the largest AI community in China, which is called way to A I. Actually, that was also started from a bunch of people who are uh, ambitious or lovers of those stable diffusion technology and want to transform into different like images generation. And also it become the foundation of the comfy UI. You definitely familiar with that comfy.

• 15:40Speaker 00

  Yes, comfy, we've had him on the podcast.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and in China as well. And then so.

• 15:45Speaker 00

  Do they use comfy UI?

• 15:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 15:47Speaker 00

  Oh, wow.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  And also, and also then they like gradually invite more people to uh, learn in public and contribute more contributions on the online document, which is on the lock, which is facial on the business, but which was on the lock. So everybody contribute their knowledges, share their use cases about uh, stable diffusion, comfy UI, and then become larger and larger. I think right now, the online community has around a million users learning together and several million users like learning together. So become the largest AI community in, in China as well. So that's also, I think that happened at exactly, exactly at the same time. I think you.

• 16:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:26Speaker 01

  You start to feel like you need a, we need a new word for, for this type of engineer. And then it's, which is you just published the essay of the AI engineer.

• 16:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think people. So here are some of the alternatives. I think you, you can best understand it by the alternatives that people were trying at the time. So there was AI Thinkverse, which is another significant community. I, I know Joe and Alex uh, well. And then there are people were saying L L M engineers or applied AI engineer or all these, all these other terminology. And I think basically you have to focus on the job title that people want to have. And I think that for us, that was very key. And I think I picked this up from the James Clear. Is it James Clear that wrote Atomic Habits? I think so. Um, I, I forget, I forget, I forget the authorship relationship, but I think it's James Clear.

• 17:19Speaker 00

  Basically, if you want to deeply understand or connect to somebody, you have to connect with them not on the level of their job. Not on the level of their activities or hobbies or whatever, is their identity. Like who are you?

• 17:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:35Speaker 00

  Uh, what, what do you aspire to be? If you can give them the path towards being the better version of themselves, then you can build a community around that. Uh, and so a lot of non-AI people wanted to be in AI. And what is the path for them? Um, while you give them a job title that pays money, like yes, then they will be loyal to you.

• 17:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, right.

• 17:56Speaker 00

  And so, so yeah, yeah, now there's a lot more AI engineers in the world.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. And to follow up just to my interest as well, so I know that there are just a lot of works or um, to do all right as a AI engineer. Right now you mentioned harness, we have a lot of developments happen in, in the AI. So do you think the role of the world AI engineer has been evolved as well or is different from what you just uh, mentioned like three years ago, once you started this work?

• 18:25Speaker 00

  Honestly, it hasn't really changed that much. I think that what's hot within AI engineering has changed, but the job title is pretty much correct. I think there are people, uh, is it in the early days, it used to be rag.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:38Speaker 00

  And managing context and all that. Um, and, and then more recently, it's been coding agents, it's been harness engineering, it's been uh, maybe loop engineering or whatever.

• 18:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:50Speaker 00

  There's also other disciplines on memory and all these things. So for those who are interested in all the fields of AI engineering in A I E World's Fair, which is the, the, the flagship biggest conference. We have thirty different tracks of what it means to be an AI engineer. Um, and evals is part of that, multimodal is part of it, you know, all that stuff. So I think it has shifted over time. Um, I think agent engineer maybe is, is one of them or AI architect. Uh, you know, so AI engineers like the individual contributor version of this. But who is like the company level, company-wide boss? And AI architect is, uh, seems to be the emerging term for, for that, that person that decides this is how everybody in a company does AI. Yeah, that's AI architect. So and then like there's, there's all the, all the other like AI designer, AI PM, all these things.

• 19:34Speaker 00

  So uh, it's just like who does that work and who writes code? And who is responsible for checking that code? If, if something fails, are you responsible? No, you're not an AI engineer.

• 19:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 19:44Speaker 00

  You know, if the, the person who wakes up in like four AM in the morning to go and fix it, that's the engineer.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:49Speaker 00

  Right? And so we want to serve those people. And that's the real core of it. The other problem with AI is that there's a lot of bullshit. There's a lot of talking heads who have never coded a single day in their lives. But they are very big picture, they're very, very senior. They're like, oh, I'm CTO or blah, blah, blah. And but they have, they don't touch code. And so a lot of AI conferences and communities focus on those guys because they have big fancy titles. But then they all sound the same. They're all like, uh, my timeline to A I is like two years away. You know, uh, all of you are gonna have, not gonna have jobs in the future. You need to prepare for what's next. Conveniently, whatever is next looks like their job. So it's very self-serving. And I think that that's

• 20:32Speaker 00

  one of the reasons that AI engineer works is that we try to focus on the lower level engineer that usually doesn't get the spotlight, that actually did the work and is able to talk about all the war stories and share with their fellow engineers about what they're doing. And so I borrowed this idea from other parts, other conferences I've seen in my career, like G D C um, and CubeCon and J S Conf and PyCon and all these other conferences that I've spoken at. Where basically uh, it is engineer to engineer. And they are the decision makers for the tech stack. And they are the people who create and innovate the new things.

• 21:14Speaker 00

  And they're not necessarily the most famous person, but they are definitely correct when it comes to the engineering. There's no bullshit, right? And I think there's a lot of bullshit in the other things.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, and that comes to the the first A I E summit that you had organized in like three years ago. And then now it's actually a three day full summit with over seven thousand people joined this year. Just just for the audience who are not that familiar with what this event is. And in different kinds of contents that or workshops or the topics you actually are A I engineer is caring about. And then how did you actually bring this like small event to this such a big scale scale event this year?

• 21:56Speaker 00

  A I E World Fair is basically a similar industry flagship conference similar to the ones that every other industry already has. So gaming has G D C, thirty thousand people in San Francisco. Security has two, security has RSA, security has Black Hat. If you're in the cybersecurity field, you go to one of those things.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:14Speaker 00

  And that's that's where you learn. I I really like the gaming one because gaming is very similar to labs. You have triple A studios, they work on the hardest games in the world. And it is extreme engineering and they're all top secret, they don't do anything else. But one time a year they come to G D C and they will share like this is how I did game of the year. And that's the only way, if you're trying to be a game developer and you want to work at a triple A game studio, that's the only way you learn.

• 22:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:43Speaker 00

  So I think that now the model labs are similar to game studios. They have a lot of money, they're working on very, very big major projects. There's a lot of smaller companies that are, you know, trying to compete with them. But the labs are the important ones. And you want to learn from the labs and where are you going to learn from them? You know, they they do like very small conferences where they like they launch like developer day for Open A I or code with Claude for Anthropic. But those are super small and like very selective and mostly for customers. And they're not for engineers, talking to other engineers. And then there's like fifty other labs that are not opening in topic that also have something interesting, right?

• 23:21Speaker 00

  So they usually every industry needs one big, like everyone comes here and then you just walk around the room and just talk to everybody. And then they can talk to each other.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:31Speaker 00

  Which is very interesting because especially for Chinese labs, some of whom are on the entity list. Is this something that you guys talk about?

• 23:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 23:38Speaker 00

  They cannot officially take meetings with you.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 23:41Speaker 00

  A lot of American companies cannot officially take meetings with you. They're not allowed, they don't even respond to you. It's not because they don't want to, it's not because they're assholes, they're not allowed. But if you're in the same location, you run into each other.

• 23:52Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 23:52Speaker 00

  And I think that's that's kind of interesting as for me to create opportunities for for magic to happen. And it's like people get hired, people find a co-founder. I have one couple that started dating and now they, you know, they're they're basically married. And like, uh, yeah, that is my number one K P I, number of marriages and babies that I've created. And so so I I really like that. I I think that we can create that kind of high quality community. And, you know, we we're aiming for six thousand people this year, we managed to hit seven thousand plus. One point five million online watched our talks. So there are people who cannot afford to come, don't live in San Francisco, don't live in the U S, they can still watch.

• 24:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 24:32Speaker 00

  Our videos and catch up on all the content. We publish every single talk, every single workshop. And like I said, it's like thirty different tracks, there's too many tracks to name, but you can see on the website. But I I basically think that I really try to focus on things that are working, that you can make money. There are clear role models for you, like if you're trying to learn this field or you're a startup trying to build something. There's somebody who has probably talked about your thing at A I E.

• 25:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:00Speaker 00

  That becomes a very valuable resource for anyone looking up anything. So another thing I've actually recently done that I haven't really been super public about is I transcribe everything and I catalog everything. So you don't even have to watch the talks. You can just take all of our website and feed it into an L L M and then it can teach you whatever.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  Oh, are you actually creating a C L A or based on?

• 25:22Speaker 00

  Everything is is M C P.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  M C P.

• 25:25Speaker 00

  But yeah, everything has been transcribed, it's available as a data set. If you want to train your L L M on it, yeah, go ahead.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  Uh, have you published yet?

• 25:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a it's on A I dot engineer slash data.

• 25:35Speaker 01

  Oh, nice.

• 25:35Speaker 00

  Uh, which also, yeah, shows the L shows the M C P and the data sets that you can download. It just depends how you want to consume it. You know, we transcribe everything, we also deep research every speaker and every organization. So whoever has ever spoken at A I E, you will you have a profile and will basically try to make the Wikipedia of A I.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  Nice, and just one last question to follow up the A I is that when did you actually bring the A I E or to the A I E to global like different markets? I know.

• 26:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  Now this year we have Singapore, but I think a few years ago.

• 26:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, Paris is the first one.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  Paris is the first one, so how did, how was the journey then?

• 26:10Speaker 00

  Mostly that is basically exactly following the J S conf model, J S conf is the number one J S conference.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:17Speaker 00

  And it's a very simple model, right? Like I will never reach every country in the world, but every non-country in the world will probably want to do some A I. So obviously their country deserves to have a leading conference. They can either make their own or they can borrow our brand and our YouTube channel and our social media. So basically we just set up a partnership program, Paris was the first to apply.

• 26:37Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 26:38Speaker 00

  A very fun fact, the organizers of A I E Paris got acquired into Mistral.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 26:43Speaker 00

  So now now it's run by, you know, Francis and Europe's leading A I lab is runs A I E Paris, which is very cool. Like I want that for every single, you know, country to like, yeah, you you have A I E India, you have A I E Japan.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I'm I'm working with all those those companies now. And it's very cool, like I will never know that region as much as them. But like they do they deserve a good conference? Yeah, absolutely, yeah, and then they can do business and and hire people and all that all that stuff, right? Yeah, the the world is very big, so we we follow that model. So basically is the idea that you have, there's there's three things, right? Like one, you agree to not abuse the brand name and like, you know, we have some kind of like revenue share thing. Two, you're publishing on everything that you're you're you're doing. And then three, you have a code of conduct where like if, you know, if someone is being abused or mistreated, there's some way of of resolving that.

• 27:40Speaker 00

  I think that's mostly an ethical thing rather than anything else. So we take a lot of risk by doing this because we're sharing our brand with people that we don't work with. And so what if they throw a bad A I E?

• 27:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:52Speaker 00

  So far it hasn't happened.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  And so far.

• 27:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, because I think like mostly we're we're careful about who we want to work with. But then also the the kind of people that are drawn to us anyway are pretty enthusiastic and organically interested in like, yeah. Especially for Singapore, A I E Singapore.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:11Speaker 00

  First of all, I'm Singaporean, but that actually did not matter at all. The current top conference in Singapore that is in A I conference is actually a crypto conference.

• 28:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, which turned out to be.

• 28:22Speaker 00

  A lot of crypto people want to be, want to be A I.

• 28:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 28:25Speaker 00

  And yes, it is super A I and I think they know that I don't like them. And so like they're like, this is embarrassing for my country. You're telling me this is the number one thing in my country? We need something better. And so, yeah, now I think A I E Singapore is is up there, it's at least competitive and maybe maybe better than super A I. And I'm very proud of the team for doing that and I didn't organize any of it. So I think that is the important thing for every country in the world to have it and we can support that.

• 28:55Speaker 01

  Funny thing is that because I saw you went to Singapore for the first first A I event and I, because I knew Lei Lei very well. And I asked him that, hey, A I came to Singapore for the first time, when when do you go to go to Shanghai or China? And then he told me that he is working with you.

• 29:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, so China is the tricky one, right? Because I'm not, I'm Singaporean citizen, I'm a Chinese. And obviously there's a lot of restrictions between the U S and China. So that is the main tricky part, that which is why I needed Lei and his team to really own the whole thing.

• 29:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:28Speaker 00

  Because I like I cannot even set up a local entity in China, right? There's a lot of controls, I don't want to get in trouble because my main business is U S, right? So I cannot get into trouble with the White House. But if you want to share the brand and run it as your own thing and it's a franchise, whatever, okay, like there's lots of franchises.

• 29:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:45Speaker 00

  As far as we're concerned, I'm McDonald's and you're McDonald's China.

• 29:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 29:50Speaker 00

  Like, okay.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, happy we can bring it.

• 29:52Speaker 00

  There's K F C, K F C China.

• 29:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 29:55Speaker 00

  Great.

• 29:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, that that's great sharing and I guess next topic is something the contest you just shared like few few few weeks ago about the Q My SaaS.

• 30:04Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 30:04Speaker 01

  The I really like that show because, um, yeah, just tell us something about behind the curious SaaS and.

• 30:11Speaker 00

  Okay, I'm wondering how many of your listeners will care about this? Okay, you will only care if you own a business.

• 30:17Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 30:17Speaker 00

  Because most developers do not own businesses, they're like not that interested. But if you aspire to own a business someday.

• 30:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:24Speaker 00

  You will be better care.

• 30:25Speaker 01

  And also, you know, um, because, you know, SaaS was a very hot topic like several years ago.

• 30:30Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, SaaS is dying.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  And dying and, you know, being discussed a lot this year.

• 30:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  And so I found out that this this show is very interesting and.

• 30:40Speaker 00

  Okay, let me introduce the the the overall context.

• 30:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:44Speaker 00

  My budget for running a conference is somewhere between three to ten million, depending on the size of the conference. Roughly about three hundred K of that per conference is software. I'm paying, like, that's like ten percent of my budget. That's like ten percent of my margin that I could be getting back. That is to just somebody else's software that is shitty, slow, ugly, not exactly what we want. And, you know, so I'm paying three hundred thousand, maybe I'm calling it paying one million a year in just like SaaS, like, you want this, you want that to do your work. Okay, okay, okay, like, as the boss, like, my employee comes to me and wants to use this thing. They say it's important for their work. Yeah, I'm gonna say yes. But like, when it all adds up, like, it's a lot of money.

• 31:29Speaker 00

  And then like, and then I use it and they use it. They're like, yeah, it doesn't give me what we want. It's like it has, it's slow, like, they request, like, as a customer of a SaaS, what happens is you are in a queue for support, right? You want this feature and they're like, okay, six months from now, you know, we'll do, we'll put you on the Q three roadmap. You're very important to us. But like, it's, you know, we are an AI conference company and this is twenty twenty six and there's coding agents, right? Like, we can do this. So the idea was I took a forty thousand dollar SaaS that my employee was proposing to pay. And I said, I will pay somebody ten thousand dollars to clone this whole thing. It's open source and it's exactly what we want. And from here, we can use whatever coding agent, Codex, Claude, coding, uh, Divin, to just customize it, whatever, right?

• 32:15Speaker 00

  And we did it. We, you know, announced the competition. We had sixty nine submissions. When you have a competition like that, you offer free money. I've offered to cover everybody's coding agent subscription, right? So you have a lot of bad submissions. And so I just like, this is obviously slop, like, I didn't, I didn't give money for that. But we have sixty nine good ones and most of them were like usable. About five, I would say that we would pay for. Like, it was just like good, like, it was done in one week.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 32:45Speaker 00

  As an owner of a SaaS business, you have maybe like fifty customers, all of them paying you forty K. Imagine if all of them realized this and then they just, they just, they just turn away. In one year, your, your business is gone. You went from earning twenty million dollars a year to nothing.

• 33:00Speaker 01

  Nothing, yeah.

• 33:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's, uh, it's very scary, I think, uh, for, for a business owner. And I think that's the tricky thing of, of owning a SaaS, right? Like, like, I own a physical business, so that's not going away anytime soon. Robots are cool, but they're not, they're not organizing a conference. But like, people who do software B two B, who own this like mid-tier SaaS, Salesforce is fine. Like, nobody's worried about Salesforce. But like the mid-tier SaaS where like, you know, a lot of small, mid, SMB, do you guys call it SMB?

• 33:32Speaker 01

  SMB.

• 33:33Speaker 00

  SMBs, they're gonna really struggle. Or they are gonna pivot to something that's better. And I think they, they really better figure it out now because all of us business owners who are their customers, we also can code.

• 33:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:46Speaker 00

  And it doesn't take that much long time.

• 33:47Speaker 01

  We are the actual competitors to, to their own software right now.

• 33:51Speaker 00

  And by the way, the models are very good at clicking through every screen of your software and then replicating it independently.

• 33:59Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 34:00Speaker 00

  Right? So the moment I have access to your software, I can clone it. So good luck.

• 34:05Speaker 00

  And so I think that is the, the reality. I would say that if you're a SaaS owner, nobody knows that the right answer. I think that you basically end up having to pivot to being an agent builder. So you have to become like, the US equivalent is like Harvey or Open Evidence. Yeah, yeah, you, you own a vertical and you're the top agent in that vertical. Or you own some specialized data and you're basically a data vendor. Anything in between, someone else is gonna just code their own thing.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. Probably, can I follow a, a question? Because you already answered my first question. Yes, you already give some advice to those, those.

• 34:41Speaker 00

  I'm more interested, like, so I'm not, I'm not so sympathetic to the, the SaaS owners. Right, SaaS owners, they, they're big, big boys, they can figure it out. Uh, actually, I'm more, I'm more keen on advising the business owners.

• 34:51Speaker 01

  Of business owners?

• 34:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I run a small business. I'm SMB.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:55Speaker 00

  There's a million people like me. They're all trying to just, I, I, you know, I make an honest living. I pay employees, I pay my taxes and it's a good life. It can be better if you vibe code your own SaaS.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 35:07Speaker 00

  Right. And like, my customers are happy, my employees are happy, I'm happy. It's a cool story to tell. Yeah, you know, SMB is, I think is a golden age for us. If you do anything in the real world that is, you're just trying to do your job and there's a lot of shitty software between you and your, your, your intended outcome, you can suddenly shorten that timeline.

• 35:27Speaker 01

  Buy your Codex, buy your Claude and.

• 35:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, like, you know, forty thousand dollars worth of Claude is a lot of Claude.

• 35:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a lot of Claude.

• 35:35Speaker 00

  I can spend ten thousand and like have a lot of money to like do whatever I want.

• 35:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 35:42Speaker 00

  So I think, uh, uh, that's why I, I, I call this is a business owner problem, not a developer problem. Developer problem say like, oh, two hundred dollars is a lot, ugh. You know, like, like, I'm a business owner. I understand the productivity benefits of having ten of my employees work together well. Like, ten of my employees, I'm paying one point five million for them, right? Like, if, if they work together ten percent better, there's a hundred fifty K. The potentially, it's not, it's not ten percent better, it's like five times better. Right? That's like seven point five million.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:13Speaker 00

  Great. And that is all the agent work that is being done on, on my behalf that people used to, uh, say like, well, okay, I'll, you know, I'll come back next week with a proposal. No, I want it this afternoon.

• 36:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. My thought is that once you created so many softwares yourself, would that the maintenance, uh, the work would be something, you know, difficult?

• 36:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, it's real, right? It's not zero.

• 36:36Speaker 01

  You have to use it like.

• 36:37Speaker 00

  It's not zero, but we have coding agents and.

• 36:40Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, to maintain that, like self, self maintaining.

• 36:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, and a lot of it is, this is why I say like mid-tier SaaS. You're not Salesforce. You're not Google. You're not AWS. You're not this like mission critical ninety nine point nine nine nine uptime thing, right? You're just like a database where people type in their thing and they get that something out.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 37:01Speaker 00

  So, yeah, okay, it goes down for a day, like, whatever. And you can fix it in a day.

• 37:05Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 37:06Speaker 00

  And there's a lot of coding agents where like, I, I think I would argue, I would take that downtime for, in exchange for like, I can customize, I can customize anything. It's amazing, you know, and, and so my team is so much more productive. You know, uh, I actually put this in the episode in Kill My SaaS. One of the favorite features, let's say I have, uh, so for example, for AI code, my, my next conference next month, I have one thousand submissions and I have twenty five seats, okay? I have to go through one thousand people to get twenty five. And in the current SaaS that we use for that piece of software, we have to click one by one by one by one by one, every screen, click, click, click, click, click, click.

• 37:45Speaker 00

  And so in the Kill My SaaS competition, one of our contestants just changed everything so that you can sort of reorder it in one table. This view doesn't exist in that SaaS.

• 37:54Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 37:54Speaker 00

  To, in order to get this view, we have to request for six months.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  And they just clone it and customize.

• 37:59Speaker 00

  You just request whatever you want.

• 38:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:00Speaker 00

  And like, ah, now I can do it and I can see everything in one go.

• 38:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:03Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 38:05Speaker 01

  That's so quick.

• 38:07Speaker 00

  So I, I am, uh, for listener, you know, if you're thinking that this is a stupid example, it is, uh, I'm simplifying for audio.

• 38:14Speaker 01

  Let me, I found out that the top one winner is someone who can manage all the sleepers, lineups and that, that's a.

• 38:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it's good, it's good UX, they are testing it, uh, from the point of, point of view of humans. And I think that there is a lot of difference between the average submission and the top submission. So, uh, that is true that today in twenty twenty six, if you're a business owner and you decide to hire the youngest kid with like, you know, that looks vaguely technical to, hey, vibe code this SaaS for me, please. Maybe they're not gonna do so well because they don't have any training. But just give it one year, watch a lot of AI videos.

• 38:51Speaker 01

  And then you'll become it.

• 38:53Speaker 00

  There is a skill level, right? Like, a, a, a lot of it is slop and you don't want to use slop, right? Your, your employees deserve better, you deserve better. And actually, sometimes buying from a tried and tested SaaS is going to be better. It is going to be better.

• 39:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course.

• 39:06Speaker 00

  But for us, uh, we want to be AI forward as a company. We will be more cutting edge.

• 39:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. And one last thing to follow up here because I, uh, you just said in the podcast that, uh, you have AI judge. And actually judges, uh, the judge of the AI was quite different from the, the winners that you picked by your team.

• 39:26Speaker 00

  Wow, you really listened to the podcast.

• 39:27Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, because I'm interested about the whole process. So I just wonder why.

• 39:32Speaker 00

  So that was, uh, partially on purpose and partially not the goal of the judge. The judge was purely, did you submit a valid submission, right? Did you qualify? But the judge was not aimed for, is this the best among the whole call?

• 39:47Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 39:48Speaker 00

  Right, obviously there's a difference.

• 39:49Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 39:50Speaker 00

  So.

• 39:50Speaker 01

  So it's for your, your purpose or your team's like conference purpose to pick which is more useful rather than just.

• 39:57Speaker 00

  Because we didn't know what we wanted. So I cannot make an AI judge for, for things that I don't know what I want.

• 40:02Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 40:03Speaker 00

  But once I see seventy different examples.

• 40:06Speaker 01

  And then you know.

• 40:07Speaker 00

  Obviously.

• 40:07Speaker 01

  That is the one, okay.

• 40:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And by the way, fun fact, the Lanespace logo, if you, you see the logo for this podcast in this room outside the, here.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 40:16Speaker 00

  That was through a, a website called Ninety Nine Designs, which is, uh, very interesting. Are you familiar with this?

• 40:21Speaker 01

  No.

• 40:22Speaker 00

  Okay. When you want a new logo, when you want any design, whatever, you pick from like, you have, maybe you ask for your friend for like, hey, who's, who's good at design? And they give you three names. And you pick one of the three names and then they give you a logo and that's it.

• 40:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:36Speaker 00

  Ninety nine designs, you put up a contest and I got four hundred different ideas for a logo and then I wore the prize to the logo that we got, which is a very good logo.

• 40:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 40:48Speaker 00

  It's so much better, right? You want diversity in ideas. So actually, this idea of like do contests and

• 40:55Speaker 01

  Oh, heck, some of it.

• 40:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, which I can do because I'm an influencer.

• 40:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:59Speaker 00

  Most people cannot do because they don't have the audience.

• 41:01Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 41:02Speaker 00

  But I think that there is such a thing, but ninety nine designs is a very good business because there's many designers, it actually doesn't take that much to create a design, right? You just need, it's more about the quality of the idea than the amount of work. So you just need high quality ideas and it and like you just need to be able to spray it over to a lot of different contests. And so ninety nine designs is like that. And I think there could be a lot of ninety nine designs for SaaS, which is something I'm thinking about, you know what I mean? Like, basically, I had to create a ninety nine designs for myself for saying, here's the forty thousand dollars SaaS, here's the specs, here's the judging criteria, here's the blah, blah, blah, even right down to like, here's how we pay you money when you win.

• 41:42Speaker 00

  Everything has to be worked out by me, but would I pay some other person to do all this for me so that I just tell them what I want and I get seventy different versions and I pick one?

• 41:51Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 41:51Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. This is all the admin for me, right?

• 41:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 41:54Speaker 00

  So there should be a ninety nine designs for uh for SaaS and for cloning all these things because as again, as a business owner, I honestly, I'm only doing this because it's good content. It's a podcast, you're interested in all these things. But if I didn't have a podcast, I probably wouldn't do it. It's a lot of work. We took like two months to eval everything, partially because I'm busy, but uh also it's just, it's a lot of eval, like uh just there's five roles for this particular SaaS. Because it's about like organizer, speaker, attendee, sponsor, vendor. They all have to agree on what the conference organization looks like.

• 42:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:30Speaker 00

  So you have to create an account for each of the, in order to test, you have to create an account for each of things and you have to do some data entry here and you change accounts and do something, you read and data entry here and you change, change, change, change, change. And so that's why it's like complicated. That's why, that's what, but that's what the mid-tier SaaS is. That's why I paid forty thousand dollars for this because I don't want to do it. But uh now that you can, it's a very fun job and problem to do.

• 42:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. Yeah. I mean, it's a good experiment and because we also run a conference in China as well, like also over thousand uh attendees before, so I can echo you so much about.

• 43:05Speaker 00

  But then like think about the rest, right? So uh I used to pay uh Calendly, do you guys have Calendly?

• 43:11Speaker 01

  I don't, but.

• 43:12Speaker 00

  But you know what I mean? Like like a booking link, like that's how we, that's how we got to this meeting. Yeah, Calendly is like a thirteen dollar, thirteen billion dollar business.

• 43:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:19Speaker 00

  And yes, you can buy pool Calendly.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  Yes, I know.

• 43:21Speaker 00

  Of course. I have, I have my own. I have, I have two versions.

• 43:25Speaker 01

  You, you already come your uh like make your own calendar.

• 43:28Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, yes, yeah. I, I have my own Calendly, I have my own Google Drive, I have my own GitHub. I'm serious. I have my own Dropbox.

• 43:35Speaker 01

  My gosh.

• 43:35Speaker 00

  I have my own Slack. All of this is because I have money and I can, I have people and I can, I can assign them to do things. But I do think that you can build software for yourself for audience of one or audience of one company.

• 43:51Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 43:52Speaker 00

  And that's okay. And the, the fact that you can do that now is something that has never existed before for any business owner.

• 43:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:59Speaker 00

  Which is amazing.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes. Great, great, great. Yeah.

• 44:02Speaker 00

  Yeah. Okay. You do some investing, right? And you're, you've, you've raised money.

• 44:06Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 44:06Speaker 00

  So you know DocuSign?

• 44:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 44:09Speaker 00

  Ten billion dollar company.

• 44:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:10Speaker 00

  Or maybe seven now.

• 44:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:12Speaker 00

  Uh, what is DocuSign? You, you send a PDF, they say like, oh, yeah, sign, they give you a certificate, ooh, that's it.

• 44:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:21Speaker 00

  Right? And they, they send, they charge you something like ten dollars per, per PDF or for signature or something, for envelope, they call it, you know? And like, yeah, I, I, there's an open source DocuSign and I hosted it for myself. And you know what's the difference? Like because I have my own drive and I have my own DocuSign, the moment that the DocuSign is signed, it goes straight into the correct folder on the drive.

• 44:43Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, because you integrate this together.

• 44:45Speaker 00

  Yes, and that does not exist in DocuSign.

• 44:48Speaker 01

  Right, right, yes.

• 44:49Speaker 00

  Right? So like my data room has directly the DocuSigns or everything that I didn't have to touch because it already has.

• 44:56Speaker 01

  Right, yeah. My one thing special about DocuSign is created like because it was built a long time ago and it creates a network effect that everyone joins the network, everyone using it. Are you still thinking it's a mode for this kind of software?

• 45:09Speaker 00

  Fuck, no.

• 45:09Speaker 01

  No?

• 45:10Speaker 00

  No. Electronic signatures are legally enforceable everywhere. And it's, DocuSign has no patent on it. I can do, I can do my electronic signature. What, the, the network is the email address. That's it.

• 45:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:22Speaker 00

  It, it is so stupid. And like, I can keep going about why I made each of, each of those things. It doesn't matter. It's not like I'm encouraging everyone to do this. I think that whatever problem you face in your business or your life, you really can find open source version of it.

• 45:36Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 45:36Speaker 00

  Host it for yourself, customize it, integrate. Okay, I want this plus this, boom, they just work because I fucking use them all the time. I copy here, paste there, copy here, paste there. Inside of every one million copy paste, I think there is a fantastic startup and product to be built.

• 45:52Speaker 01

  Great. And I guess next question or next show, I'm actually quite interested about your conversation with Diego from Jeff. Because also it was actually a really also a very hotly discussed topic and product.

• 46:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, what, what is the Chinese developers thinking about it?

• 46:08Speaker 01

  I think it just, you know, um, just, you know, creates a new way of thinking about using like L M's from a totally different angle.

• 46:19Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 46:19Speaker 01

  And then I even heard that, you know, one podcast, podcaster from China, she didn't know anything about coding, but she, she used Jeff to judge, you know, the clips from their podcast, whether it would go viral. And then Jeff gives, you know, gives the answer and, and then he will post it on

• 46:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:36Speaker 01

  on the network. So I found out so many great use cases based on Jeff. So I just wonder what's your take with, with there and what probably.

• 46:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, so uh for those who didn't listen to the podcast, we were the first podcast.

• 46:49Speaker 01

  You are the first one.

• 46:49Speaker 00

  Because I, I forced him because I, I friends with him for four years and say, if you don't, if you don't give me the first part, I'm gonna kill you. No, he's, he's, he's obviously like very, very accomplished. He was the co-author on, on the Instruct G P T, which became Chat G P T. And I think the interesting thing about Jeff is that it is the kind of the original vision of A I engineering for me. Which is that instead of right now, A I engineering is, is what we talked about, is a big harness.

• 47:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:20Speaker 00

  Around a model. And it's like, I'll do a bunch of work and then I'll hand off to a model and say, please, God model, give me the right answer and, and you can take ten days to think about it. Jeff is like, well, no, models are for us. We don't work for the model.

• 47:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:37Speaker 00

  And so I will reduce the scope of the model to only one thing, which is to make choices or to estimate probabilities. And I will, I will put it in the line of path of my critical work. So if you think about what is the failure mode of, of what the L M, current L M paradigm is, is that you have the big traditional SaaS and then your L M is this window that's a chatbot.

• 47:59Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 47:59Speaker 00

  Right? That is basically what everything is. Or you are, you look like Codex or Chat G P T, your cloud.

• 48:04Speaker 01

  Agent.

• 48:05Speaker 00

  And it's like chat window here.

• 48:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:07Speaker 00

  Menu here, that's it. For what Jeff represents and what System One models represent, this is why he doesn't call it decision model. He calls it System One models. It is that they are in the path of code. You write it as casually as you write an if statements inside of a normal programming language. And I think that is really what he means by smarter software, which I really, really endorse. Which is like, your software should just be at every point smarter instead of at one point smart and then everything else is dumb.

• 48:36Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 48:36Speaker 00

  That's really dumb.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 48:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think the, the speed stuff is almost secondary to the reliability, which is what he really is trying to say. That's why the company is called Type Safe. But yeah, the speed is nice.

• 48:49Speaker 01

  I just found out that Diego himself also a very, you know, such a character and, and he's really passionate about what he's been doing. So I just wonder, you know, you, you've talked to a lot of like researchers and developers or, you know, A I engineers. What do you think? Why was Diego that made the Jeff? Was it something special or different from other kinds of researchers or people that you've um talked with? Because I find it quite special about, about him talking to the what he's building and what he's believing.

• 49:21Speaker 00

  He has a non-traditional background himself. He didn't go to like Stanford P H D and all that kind of things. So he has that sympathy with the regular developer, but he also worked on Chat G P T.

• 49:33Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 49:34Speaker 00

  And I think that a lot of people who maybe they went through the traditional M L researcher path, you go to a top university and then you work on some interesting paper and then you get hired into a lab and you work on a lab. They're in the big models cult. Everything will be solved by making our model bigger, by having more, more flops in our training run and more parameters and more, more, more, more, more.

• 49:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 49:59Speaker 00

  Right? Um, and so it takes someone who doesn't come from that mold to really say, well, actually, there's another way to do this, which is smaller stuff that is sprinkled everywhere instead of one big one.

• 50:12Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 50:13Speaker 00

  And I think that is, by the way, Diego was not the first to do that. There's been thousands of people who've tried to say smaller models good.

• 50:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 50:23Speaker 00

  Faster, cheaper, better, whatever. But somehow Diego worked. One, because he has the credibility of OpenAI. Two, he made it into a System One versus System Two thing, which I think was, makes the communication very clear. To the point where you can play Doom or whatever was, was, there's some game demo that he, that he showed in the launch post. That was very clear, like there's no way you will ever use L M to do this.

• 50:46Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 50:47Speaker 00

  And I think that showmanship, that he wears the pink jacket, he, he's so passionate, he's talking. That showmanship plus the technical capability is again, like similar to the learning public. Like I'm a small version of that, right? Like I'm technically capable and I can talk. But for him, he's like ten X on both dimensions. And I think that really comes through in a short term.

• 51:08Speaker 01

  And also, I guess my next question is about your, your roles on advising other startups, because that's just you mentioned. I'm just really curious, you know, for, for us, as a advising role, like uh exactly what kind of devices that you are working with those

• 51:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:25Speaker 01

  startups and how is that?

• 51:27Speaker 00

  I'm also curious what, can you, for your listeners and for me?

• 51:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:30Speaker 00

  What do you do for other companies?

• 51:32Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. So we are actually a community that started three years ago. We found out a lot of uh Chinese-based founders want to go global.

• 51:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:40Speaker 01

  And then uh I think uh they were pretty good at building uh or shipping products quickly, but they found a huge gap between uh, you know, go to market, marketing and understanding the market.

• 51:53Speaker 00

  Okay, if you're a Chinese founder trying to make it in the U S, you suck at this.

• 51:59Speaker 00

  You are very good at your tech.

• 52:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:01Speaker 00

  And you suck at marketing.

• 52:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:02Speaker 00

  And you better talk to someone who's good. Because you cannot do it yourself.

• 52:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:06Speaker 00

  That's it.

• 52:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. Yeah, so that's. That's how I truly found out that there's a huge gap. Between, you know, understanding the local market. And, you know, and then ship the product correctly or find your PMF.

• 52:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that's basically, we hold a lot of meetups and then working with some advisors here. And then try to provide different workshops and adversaries to those founders really start to find a little bit there. You know, on the right track of BMF, but still lack some talents and, you know, help from, from the go to market side.

• 52:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's interesting. We also host meetups. So Diogo, actually, before he launched Jev. He was actually here in this, in this room.

• 52:49Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 52:49Speaker 00

  Uh, we hold this like sort of writers meetup thing where people can show their work. And I will give commentary on it, on it. And so the, the sort of Type Safe Manifesto came out of that. But I, I think it's very similar to, to that, except that I would, for some people, some of them will do it for equity. Most of it I do it for free. And then some of them, they want to have a, like a recurring call. Or they, or something, then they offer some equity. It's just easier to do that. And it turns out it's worth a lot of money if it, if the company does very well.

• 53:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 53:23Speaker 00

  So I think that is interesting in terms of like a job, because it's. You cannot eat equity. And like, maybe they never sell. Like Databricks is like, whatever, fifteen years old and worth two hundred billion dollars and it's like, I have my equity, I was like, what is it? But I think it's, it's very useful to be able to test your theories on a number of different companies. So when you work as an employee in one company, you only see one example and your advice only works in one company. But now that I have done thirty something, thirty-five, thirty-six different companies. I can really see the universal truths among all of them. And I'm, I'm better as an advisor to all of them. Because I've tried everything.

• 54:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 54:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, I talk to everyone, like, and I, I understand the different scenarios of like. Okay, my advice is not going to work for you here because I tried it at this other company and, and, and, you know, your situation is like clearly very different. And like, I, I, I feel like actually almost all domain subject matter experts. Like, I happen to own developer marketing, right? That's my thing. But if you work in, I don't know, you're strategic finance or you're working in like GPU compute acquisition or whatever. And you, and you are trying to be a global number one in that. You kind of have to go through a tour of duty of just advising everyone. So you can just take, fucking test everything.

• 54:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:53Speaker 00

  Some of it doesn't work. But so, but sometimes, I mean, some of them is clearly going to work. And then you will learn. And that's the only, like, your sample size has to be more than one. And most people's sample size is like five. But like, you know, if you can get it up to like fifty, then like you probably are one of the top in the field anyway.

• 55:11Speaker 01

  And I can share with you some, you know, some, something that I find quite similar in, in those, you know, go global Chinese founders because. Right now, more and more came from engineering background, even research background.

• 55:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:22Speaker 01

  And.

• 55:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:23Speaker 01

  They, they think that they're building the best products because they have.

• 55:27Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 55:27Speaker 01

  Like best harness skill or, you know, technical skills and knowledges, et cetera. But actually, there's still sometimes a huge gap between, you know, what the customer actually wants, that the skills. And the product you offer. And sometimes, like, different local markets have, even have different, you know, demands and have used in a similar thing.

• 55:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 55:47Speaker 01

  On those technical founders, research founders, because I've found that there are also a lot of founders from the same background.

• 55:54Speaker 00

  There's a bunch of ways to, to survey this or to tackle this. The, the most important thing to recognize is that if you are, if you have something smart and like, you think it's valuable and you're global number one. Really, like, you are world best at one thing. Like, that's the most important thing. So everything else is, I always call it.

• 56:14Speaker 01

  Ding ding.

• 56:16Speaker 00

  Right? Like, you have the long. Okay, I will help you with the ding, but like you have the long. That's the most, you know, and most people don't have the long. Right? So like, that's, that's good. I think that there are some percentage of people who don't even have the long and they think they have the long. And like, then it's like, okay, it's like an arrogance equal thing, right? But let's assume that you are genuinely have a very good product. And I think the, the important thing actually here is that you should not treat marketing as the last mile of like, hey, I did everything. It is the last night before the blog post. Can you review my blog post and change it? There's nothing I can do. Like, you already did everything. But if you involve marketing earlier in the process, right down, down to like, before it's really built to respect out.

• 56:58Speaker 00

  Like, what, what is the way we're going to pitch? What part of the segment of the market we're going to go? Then you have more GTM built into the product in the first place. And I think that a lot of engineer or researcher defined audiences don't have that GTM brain that early. They usually put it all the way at the end.

• 57:17Speaker 01

  After, yeah.

• 57:18Speaker 00

  The, the most junior part of the company is this GTM organization. It's like some interns, like some twenty-two year old person who is like. Running social media. No. Like, actually try to be serious about your, the, who, what customer is supposed to use this thing? And how, where do they hang out? What problems do they face? What words do they use to describe their problems? And how is their life going to be better after they see your, your thing?

• 57:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 57:40Speaker 00

  Uh, and so, uh, very simple things, most, and researcher, engineer founders have not thought about this. But if they have a GTM partner, I think that that is often very useful. I think the other thing that I, and then it comes to more to developer, developer tools. I find a lot of Chinese founders are robotics.

• 57:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 58:00Speaker 00

  Um, and robotics is also a very interesting space because it is much longer time horizon. And still very early days, right? Like, how come all of these Chinese robotics founders, they all do full laundry? Right? Like, Unity is the best. And, uh, at least, like, but there's still, Unity is still doing Unity things. And.

• 58:22Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 58:23Speaker 00

  I would like them to see things that you never expected Unity to ever do. But right now, you know, the, the, the thing they, they just launched this week, they're doing Kung Fu moves.

• 58:31Speaker 01

  Kung Fu, yeah.

• 58:32Speaker 00

  But like, okay, I've seen that before. You know, like, show me something that I haven't seen. And then, then I'm really going to pay attention. You know, I think that's, that's something that is hard to show in robotics. But I think with models, you can do that still, because it's still so early days. And with innovative, like, uh, product ideas for, like, for consumer experiences, you can do that. So I think to show the demo, I think is very important. Which is why, again, obviously Type Safe is like very recent, but also very good. It is not the, Diogo did not come out with the Doom demo, but the Doom demo is what everyone talks about. Doom demo is done by Devra, like GTM. And that, that is, that is something that just is a core principle in marketing, which is show, don't tell, right?

• 59:17Speaker 00

  Like, show me this thing having the benefits, but don't tell me in bullet points what this is. Don't give me a PDF, a slide, a presentation PowerPoint that tells me all these things. Just show me.

• 59:28Speaker 01

  And maybe just a follow-up is about the taste. Because, you know, everyone is talking about the taste and then I think go to market and building the product also needs the taste.

• 59:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's probably very true.

• 59:41Speaker 01

  Actually, I just have, becoming a little bit hard for me to define what a taste is, because investors talk about. So I just wonder your view, like, how do you define the taste seen from those engineers or even founders?

• 59:52Speaker 00

  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. To the set of possibilities that when you look back is immediately obvious is good. So when you're, 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?

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:18Speaker 00

  The brute force, you can brute force. You can try one thousand of them and then you find a good one. But a tasteful person can say, yeah, obviously these are bad. I don't, I cannot explain it. I cannot explain. But obviously these are bad. This one looks, this, this tool looks interesting. And then at the end of the journey, they will pick one and you look back and you're like.

• 1:00:38Speaker 01

  What that is?

• 1:00:39Speaker 00

  Yeah. What do you mean we're considering the other nine hundred and 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, uh, for a long time, this, this, the smartphone had a keyboard. And it took Steve Jobs to say, no. We will do whatever it takes to have touchscreen and virtualized screen because it look, needs to look like a screen that's a flat slab. And it, that took ten years to R and D, because there was a company called General Magic that tried to do this and failed. And, but like, obviously now every phone in the world looks like this. That is, that is taste. In nineteen ninety, when people were starting to have smartphones, you could do a number, a huge number of things.

• 1:01:23Speaker 01

  Fun fact.

• 1:01:24Speaker 00

  But it takes the, the person with taste to say like, yeah, this is what we want and I'm going to say no to everything else. And my first phone I shipped was going to be this.

• 1:01:32Speaker 01

  If you're looking back at all those AI products, could you share an example that you think, uh, you find it has taste?

• 1:01:40Speaker 00

  I actually think that everything that Curse does has a lot of taste. Because they were first to the VS Code thing, they first, because, and now they're, they're doing Grokbot, 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 like, you know you have taste when other people copy the thing that you just shipped.

• 1:01:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:59Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:02:13Speaker 00

  Legora, you know, in the legal field.

• 1:02:15Speaker 01

  The legal.

• 1:02:16Speaker 00

  They have this sort of like document review process that's like massively parallel.

• 1:02:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:20Speaker 00

  And like, once you see that, you're like, I don't want to do my work anywhere else. I have to do it in Legora. And like, again, like, anyone could have come up with it. Any ideas are cheap.

• 1:02:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:30Speaker 00

  But you didn't do it.

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:31Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:02:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think coming to an end, and I think probably we've talked about AI is arriving, arrives in Shanghai like two, two weeks later. I just wonder, you know, what do you hope to to see or to learn from the builders or develops there? What kind of topics actually are you most interested at?

• 1:03:01Speaker 00

  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 B SaaS bubble, but Shanghai, you, you guys use Comfy UI? We don't use it here.

• 1:03:18Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:03:19Speaker 00

  We like our Canva, we like our Fable AI.

• 1:03:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:24Speaker 00

  Don't use, don't use Comfy. Like Comfy is more of like an open source tool. And it's same, same for OpenClaw. OpenClaw had more traction here than Comfy. But OpenClaw is really traction.

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  Really traction, yeah. I bet you heard that.

• 1:03:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, of course I know, but like, I haven't seen that kind of energy myself.

• 1:03:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:45Speaker 00

  And I think it's very different. Like, you know, for you, a medium sized community is one million people. That's huge in here.

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

  A million is already the top in China as well.

• 1:03:58Speaker 00

  I've seen those kind of like, you know, Chinese like influencer farms, like, it's like all these Chinese girls like doing this and the phone. It's like the scale in China is just so different and it's so competitive, right? Like, people say they do nine nine six in San Francisco. They don't really. Like Saturday, Sunday, they're still kind of chilling, but in China, they are really nine nine six.

• 1:04:19Speaker 01

  Well, it's kind of normal in startups and also the big tech.

• 1:04:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, but I think that, I think that's really intense. People don't like头条 and like美团. Right?

• 1:04:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:32Speaker 00

  Intense.

• 1:04:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:04:33Speaker 00

  Right? And like, people here don't work that hard.

• 1:04:37Speaker 01

  I heard that engineers or startup from this work that hard.

• 1:04:40Speaker 00

  I work that hard because I have no equity, but like employees.

• 1:04:43Speaker 01

  Employees.

• 1:04:43Speaker 00

  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, and I'm sure they're not working as hard as China. There's BAT, there's like the first generation, then there's like second.

• 1:04:58Speaker 01

  Second generation.

• 1:04:58Speaker 00

  Whatever the thing is. Yeah, I mean, like those guys, oh my god, like.

• 1:05:03Speaker 01

  How did you learn, did you?

• 1:05:05Speaker 00

  They're such good founders.

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:05:07Speaker 00

  They're such good, like, if they, 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.

• 1:05:19Speaker 01

  Also the SaaS, I mean, the software as well.

• 1:05:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, even, even like, okay, so when I did my study abroad in Beta in two thousand and seven, 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. People love BYD here.

• 1:05:36Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 1:05:37Speaker 00

  BYD is taking over the US. It's crazy. And like, I would never have thought, never, that BYD would ever come here. It's insane. And I, I don't know, I don't know what conclusion I say this. 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, there'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

• 1:06:20Speaker 00

  Western audiences like to consume them, so they don't have the same reach, right? Ali did like, Aliun did like this thing where they presented the whole Alibaba roadmap with the Quan and everything.

• 1:06:30Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:06:31Speaker 00

  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, for the US audience. But like, just do it with me, right? Just do it on AI and they will see it.

• 1:06:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:46Speaker 01

  And also I saw that's already there's some open source like model companies attended AI this year in San Francisco, Minimax, yeah.

• 1:06:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I mean, we, we hope to have representation from everybody. And I, I think that there's a lot of people interested in, in that cross cultural exchange that are not interested in the politics.

• 1:07:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:07:04Speaker 00

  Like, we will not do politics, we will only do tech.

• 1:07:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:07Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:07:07Speaker 01

  That's great and really, really look forward. And so I guess this is all my question, but I still have like three quick fire questions. Anything just first pop up in your mind, but first is, you know, what AI development or are you most excited about right now? And actually, what actually worries you most?

• 1:07:27Speaker 00

  AI developments 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.

• 1:07:40Speaker 01

  Interaction model?

• 1:07:41Speaker 00

  Uh, so this is something that Thinking Machine is doing for people who have, 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.

• 1:08:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I saw the demo by.

• 1:08:05Speaker 00

  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. 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. Which obviously doing very well, 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.

• 1:08:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:43Speaker 00

  Winter, summer, winter. If we ever have a winter, when is it going to happen? And am I going to go bankrupt? Which, yeah, so it's a real concern for a conference company that relies on hype. You know, 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. 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.

• 1:09:25Speaker 00

  The most extreme version of this is bioweapons, right? Like, oops, like I have invented COVID two. Yeah, what if it's worse than that? So, so the way that we phrase it in, on the podcasts 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 one thousand times faster than us. And so at some point, it's going to be more advanced and then we have to figure out what to do there.

• 1:10:01Speaker 01

  Oh, cool. Yeah, and, and the second question will be, well, just a bit like one is that what kind of other newsletters and podcasts or the contents they recommend?

• 1:10:11Speaker 00

  I have a list, it's called the Good AI Newsletters and Podcasts list.

• 1:10:15Speaker 01

  Okay, is it on?

• 1:10:15Speaker 00

  It's, it's on my GitHub, but actually for the more recent one, you can check A E O dot latent dot 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 and I transcribe it and I put it in a ranking.

• 1:10:32Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:10:32Speaker 00

  I asked two hundred of these questions. What is the best payment startup? What is the best bank? What is the best financial advisor? What is the best database? What is everything? Every, every, every question.

• 1:10:42Speaker 01

  That's why you call it A E O?

• 1:10:44Speaker 00

  Yes, because I'm agent optimizing for what the models answer. But it's probably a pretty decent proxy for what the people who choose the data sets in the, in the labs choose, and they choose latent space.

• 1:10:55Speaker 01

  Okay, the, the top, the first one.

• 1:10:57Speaker 00

  It, it does very well. It's either number one or number, between number one, number three. And, and yeah, so that's, that's the answer.

• 1:11:03Speaker 01

  Cool, cool, cool. I guess I'll just leave the last question for you to ask me if you have any questions.

• 1:11:08Speaker 00

  What are your hopes for AI Shanghai?

• 1:11:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course, I, I hope to listen to more topics about, like you said, some more infrastructure stuffs. For example, like, like the safety, the payments, or the things that coming to unlock more applications in the world that's coming from different like infrastructure, agent infrastructure. I, I'm just really curious about those topic because it's kind of a bit less discussed about in China. But I found out that especially spending few, few weeks here, I find more people talking about. And also probably RSI or those some frontline researchers. So, and I hope that it could be a great conversations between the East and the, and the Western, like the researchers here and then the, the people in China as well.

• 1:11:53Speaker 01

  And I hope it can be a successful one and then we can come up for, continue to host it on next year.

• 1:12:00Speaker 00

  I hope so too. You know, I, I wish, I wish the, the team a lot of luck. Doing the first one of anything, the first one is the hardest.

• 1:12:08Speaker 01

  Right, agree.

• 1:12:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm, I'm so impressed that they're doing it.

• 1:12:12Speaker 01

  Thank you so much, Sean.

• 1:12:13Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:12:14Speaker 01

  Thank you.