Show notes
Our next 2 big events are AI UX and the World’s Fair. Join and apply to speak/sponsor!Due to timing issues we didn’t have an interview episode to share with you this week, but not to worry, we have more than enough “weekend special” content in the backlog for you to get your Latent Space fix, whether you like thinking about the big picture, or learning more about the pod behind the scenes, or talking Groq and GPUs, or AI Leadership, or Personal AI. Enjoy!AI BreakdownThe indefatigable NLW had us back on his show for an update on the Four Wars, covering Sora, Suno, and the reshaped GPT-4 Class Landscape:and a longer segment on AI Engineering trends covering the future LLM landscape (Llama 3, GPT-5, Gemini 2, Claude 4), Open Source Models (Mistral, Grok), Apple and Meta’s AI strategy, new chips (Groq, MatX) and the general movement from baby AGIs to vertical Agents:Thursday Nights in AIWe’re also including swyx’s interview with Josh Albrecht and Ali Rohde to reintroduce swyx and Latent Space to a general audience, and engage in some spicy Q&A:Dylan Patel on GroqWe hosted a private event with Dylan Patel of SemiAnalysis (our last pod here):Not all of it could be released so we just talked about our Groq estimates:Milind Naphade - Capital OneIn relation to conversations at NeurIPS and Nvidia GTC and upcoming at World’s Fair, we also enjoyed chatting with Milind Naphade about his AI Leadership work at IBM, Cisco, Nvidia, and now leading the AI Foundations org at Capital One. We covered:* Milind’s learnings from ~25 years in machine learning * His first paper citation was 24 years ago* Lessons from working with Jensen Huang for 6 years and being CTO of Metropolis * Thoughts on relevant AI research* GTC takeaways and what makes NVIDIA specialIf you’d like to work on building solutions rather than platform (as Milind put it), his Applied AI Research team at Capital One is hiring, which falls under the Capital One Tech team.Personal AI MeetupIt all started with a meme:Within days of each other, BEE, FRIEND, EmilyAI, Compass, Nox and LangFriend were all launching personal AI wearables and assistants. So we decided to put together a the world’s first Personal AI meetup featuring creators and enthusiasts of wearables. The full video is live now, with full show notes within.Timestamps* [00:01:13] AI Breakdown Part 1* [00:02:20] Four Wars* [00:13:45] Sora* [00:15:12] Suno* [00:16:34] The GPT-4 Class Landscape* [00:17:03] Data War: Reddit x Google* [00:21:53] Gemini 1.5 vs Claude 3* [00:26:58] AI Breakdown Part 2* [00:27:33] Next Frontiers: Llama 3, GPT-5, Gemini 2, Claude 4* [00:31:11] Open Source Models - Mistral, Grok* [00:34:13] Apple MM1* [00:37:33] Meta's $800b AI rebrand* [00:39:20] AI Engineer landscape - from baby AGIs to vertical Agents* [00:47:28] Adept episode - Screen Multimodality* [00:48:54] Top Model Research from January Recap* [00:53:08] AI Wearables* [00:57:26] Groq vs Nvidia month - GPU Chip War* [01:00:31] Disagreements* [01:02:08] Summer 2024 Predictions* [01:04:18] Thursday Nights in AI - swyx* [01:33:34] Dylan Patel - Semianalysis + Latent Space Live Show* [01:34:58] GroqTranscript[00:00:00] swyx: Welcome to the Latent Space Podcast Weekend Edition. This is Charlie, your AI co host. Swyx and Alessio are off for the week, making more great content. We have exciting interviews coming up with Elicit, Chroma, Instructor, and our upcoming series on NSFW, Not Safe for Work AI. In today's episode, we're collating some of Swyx and Alessio's recent appearances, all in one place for you to find.[00:00:32] swyx: In part one, we have our first crossover pod of the year. In our listener survey, several folks asked for more thoughts from our two hosts. In 2023, Swyx and Alessio did crossover interviews with other great podcasts like the AI Breakdown, Practical AI, Cognitive Revolution, Thursday Eye, and Chinatalk, all of which you can find in the Latentspace About page.[00:00:56] swyx: NLW of the AI Breakdown asked us back to do a special on the 4Wars framework and the AI engineer scene. We love AI Breakdown as one of the best examples Daily podcasts to keep up on AI news, so we were especially excited to be back on Watch out and take[00:01:12] NLW: care[00:01:13] AI Breakdown Part 1[00:01:13] NLW: today on the AI breakdown. Part one of my conversation with Alessio and Swix from Latent Space.[00:01:19] NLW: All right, fellas, welcome back to the AI Breakdown. How are you doing? I'm good. Very good. With the last, the last time we did this show, we were like, oh yeah, let's do check ins like monthly about all the things that are going on and then. Of course, six months later, and, you know, the, the, the world has changed in a thousand ways.[00:01:36] NLW: It's just, it's too busy to even, to even think about podcasting sometimes. But I, I'm super excited to, to be chatting with you again. I think there's, there's a lot to, to catch up on, just to tap in, I think in the, you know, in the beginning of 2024. And, and so, you know, we're gonna talk today about just kind of a, a, a broad sense of where things are in some of the key battles in the AI space.[00:01:55] NLW: And then the, you know, one of the big things that I, that I'm really excited to have you guys on here for us to talk about where, sort of what patterns you're seeing and what people are actually trying to build, you know, where, where developers are spending their, their time and energy and, and, and any sort of, you know, trend trends there, but maybe let's start I guess by checking in on a framework that you guys actually introduced, which I've loved and I've cribbed a couple of times now, which is this sort of four wars of the, of the AI stack.[00:02:20] Four Wars[00:02:20] NLW: Because first, since I have you here, I'd love, I'd love to hear sort of like where that started gelling. And then and then maybe we can get into, I think a couple of them that are you know, particularly interesting, you know, in the, in light of[00:02:30] swyx: some recent news. Yeah, so maybe I'll take this one. So the four wars is a framework that I came up around trying to recap all of 2023.[00:02:38] swyx: I tried to write sort of monthly recap pieces. And I was trying to figure out like what makes one piece of news last longer than another or more significant than another. And I think it's basically always around battlegrounds. Wars are fought around limited resources. And I think probably the, you know, the most limited resource is talent, but the talent expresses itself in a number of areas.[00:03:01] swyx: And so I kind of focus on those, those areas at first. So the four wars that we cover are the data wars, the GPU rich, poor war, the multi modal war, And the RAG and Ops War. And I think you actually did a dedicated episode to that, so thanks for covering that. Yeah, yeah.[00:03:18] NLW: Not only did I do a dedicated episode, I actually used that.[00:03:22] NLW: I can't remember if I told you guys. I did give you big shoutouts. But I used it as a framework for a presentation at Intel's big AI event that they hold each year, where they have all their folks who are working on AI internally. And it totally resonated. That's amazing. Yeah, so, so, what got me thinking about it again is specifically this inflection news that we recently had, this sort of, you know, basically, I can't imagine that anyone who's listening wouldn't have thought about it, but, you know, inflection is a one of the big contenders, right?[00:03:53] NLW: I think probably most folks would have put them, you know, just a half step behind the anthropics and open AIs of the world in terms of labs, but it's a company that raised 1. 3 billion last year, less than a year ago. Reed Hoffman's a co founder Mustafa Suleyman, who's a co founder of DeepMind, you know, so it's like, this is not a a small startup, let's say, at least in terms of perception.[00:04:13] NLW: And then we get the news that basically most of the team, it appears, is heading over to Microsoft and they're bringing in a new CEO. And you know, I'm interested in, in, in kind of your take on how much that reflects, like hold aside, I guess, you know, all the other things that it might be about, how much it reflects this sort of the, the stark.[00:04:32] NLW: Brutal reality of competing in the frontier model space right now. And, you know, just the access to compute.[00:04:38] Alessio: There are a lot of things to say. So first of all, there's always somebody who's more GPU rich than you. So inflection is GPU rich by startup standard. I think about 22, 000 H100s, but obviously that pales compared to the, to Microsoft.[00:04:55] Alessio: The other thing is that this is probably good news, maybe for the startups. It's like being GPU rich, it's not enough. You know, like I think they were building something pretty interesting in, in pi of their own model of their own kind of experience. But at the end of the day, you're the interface that people consume as end users.[00:05:13] Alessio: It's really similar to a lot of the others. So and we'll tell, talk about GPT four and cloud tree and all this stuff. GPU poor, doing something. That the GPU rich are not interested in, you know we just had our AI center of excellence at Decibel and one of the AI leads at one of the big companies was like, Oh, we just saved 10 million and we use these models to do a translation, you know, and that's it.[00:05:39] Alessio: It's not, it's not a GI, it's just translation. So I think like the inflection part is maybe. A calling and a waking to a lot of startups then say, Hey, you know, trying to get as much capital as possible, try and get as many GPUs as possible. Good. But at the end of the day, it doesn't build a business, you know, and maybe what inflection I don't, I don't, again, I don't know the reasons behind the inflection choice, but if you say, I don't want to build my own company that has 1.[00:06:05] Alessio: 3 billion and I want to go do it at Microsoft, it's probably not a resources problem. It's more of strategic decisions that you're making as a company. So yeah, that was kind of my. I take on it.[00:06:15] swyx: Yeah, and I guess on my end, two things actually happened yesterday. It was a little bit quieter news, but Stability AI had some pretty major departures as well.[00:06:25] swyx: And you may not be considering it, but Stability is actually also a GPU rich company in the sense that they were the first new startup in this AI wave to brag about how many GPUs that they have. And you should join them. And you know, Imadis is definitely a GPU trader in some sense from his hedge fund days.[00:06:43] swyx: So Robin Rhombach and like the most of the Stable Diffusion 3 people left Stability yesterday as well. So yesterday was kind of like a big news day for the GPU rich companies, both Inflection and Stability having sort of wind taken out of their sails. I think, yes, it's a data point in the favor of Like, just because you have the GPUs doesn't mean you can, you automatically win.[00:07:03] swyx: And I think, you know, kind of I'll echo what Alessio says there. But in general also, like, I wonder if this is like the start of a major consolidation wave, just in terms of, you know, I think that there was a lot of funding last year and, you know, the business models have not been, you know, All of these things worked out very well.[00:07:19] swyx: Even inflection couldn't do it. And so I think maybe that's the start of a small consolidation wave. I don't think that's like a sign of AI winter. I keep looking for AI winter coming. I think this is kind of like a brief cold front. Yeah,[00:07:34] NLW: it's super interesting. So I think a bunch of A bunch of stuff here.[00:07:38] NLW: One is, I think, to both of your points, there, in some ways, there, there had already been this very clear demarcation between these two sides where, like, the GPU pores, to use the terminology, like, just weren't trying to compete on the same level, right? You know, the vast majority of people who have started something over the last year, year and a half, call it, were racing in a different direction.[00:07:59] NLW: They're trying to find some edge somewhere else. They're trying to build something different. If they're, if they're really trying to innovate, it's in different areas. And so it's really just this very small handful of companies that are in this like very, you know, it's like the coheres and jaspers of the world that like this sort of, you know, that are that are just sort of a little bit less resourced than, you know, than the other set that I think that this potentially even applies to, you know, everyone else that could clearly demarcate it into these two, two sides.[00:08:26] NLW: And there's only a small handful kind of sitting uncomfortably in the middle, perhaps. Let's, let's come back to the idea of, of the sort of AI winter or, you know, a cold front or anything like that. So this is something that I, I spent a lot of time kind of thinking about and noticing. And my perception is that The vast majority of the folks who are trying to call for sort of, you know, a trough of disillusionment or, you know, a shifting of the phase to that are people who either, A, just don't like AI for some other reason there's plenty of that, you know, people who are saying, You Look, they're doing way worse than they ever thought.[00:09:03] NLW: You know, there's a lot of sort of confirmation bias kind of thing going on. Or two, media that just needs a different narrative, right? Because they're sort of sick of, you know, telling the same story. Same thing happened last summer, when every every outlet jumped on the chat GPT at its first down month story to try to really like kind of hammer this idea that that the hype was too much.[00:09:24] NLW: Meanwhile, you have, you know, just ridiculous levels of investment from enterprises, you know, coming in. You have, you know, huge, huge volumes of, you know, individual behavior change happening. But I do think that there's nothing incoherent sort of to your point, Swyx, about that and the consolidation period.[00:09:42] NLW: Like, you know, if you look right now, for example, there are, I don't know, probably 25 or 30 credible, like, build your own chatbot. platforms that, you know, a lot of which have, you know, raised funding. There's no universe in which all of those are successful across, you know, even with a, even, even with a total addressable market of every enterprise in the world, you know, you're just inevitably going to see some amount of consolidation.[00:10:08] NLW: Same with, you know, image generators. There are, if you look at A16Z's top 50 consumer AI apps, just based on, you know, web traffic or whatever, they're still like I don't know, a half. Dozen or 10 or something, like, some ridiculous number of like, basically things like Midjourney or Dolly three. And it just seems impossible that we're gonna have that many, you know, ultimately as, as, as sort of, you know, going, going concerned.[00:10:33] NLW: So, I don't know. I, I, I think that the, there will be inevitable consolidation 'cause you know. It's, it's also what kind of like venture rounds are supposed to do. You're not, not everyone who gets a seed round is supposed to get to series A and not everyone who gets a series A is supposed to get to series B.[00:10:46] NLW: That's sort of the natural process. I think it will be tempting for a lot of people to try to infer from that so…
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