This AI:AM highlights cut brings together Cameron Berg, David Duvenaud, Michiel Bakker, Shawn “swyx” Wang, and Bing Xu to examine what we understand about frontier AI systems and what happens as more decisions move into their hands. Berg grounds model-consciousness debates in experiments on architecture, agency, valence, and welfare, while Duvenaud argues that even well-aligned AI could gradually disempower humans through ordinary economic choices. Bakker frames Europe’s AI challenge as a sovereignty problem, and swyx turns to practitioner stakes around agents, evals, maintainable code, and who owns the system of record. Xu closes the loop at the infrastructure layer, arguing that self-improving compute and GPU-kernel automation may deepen rather than weaken the CUDA moat.
For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:
https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/ai-am-4-cameron-on-model-consciousness-duvenaud-s-gradual-disempowerment-swyx-s-ai-eng-alpha/
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CHAPTERS:
(00:00) About the Episode
(00:38) Special Sponsor
(02:26) Model consciousness indicators
(10:47) Valence inside models (Part 1)
(17:09) Sponsor: Claude
(19:01) Valence inside models (Part 2)
(19:01) Misalignment and uncertainty
(25:16) Gradual disempowerment threat
(35:10) Slow zones and successors
(47:41) Europe's AI bind
(55:13) Frontier code benchmarks
(01:01:59) Routing and memory
(01:10:42) Agent infrastructure strain
(01:16:25) Self improving infrastructure
(01:27:56) Routing compute costs
(01:35:39) Sovereign AI financing
(01:42:24) Judging AI judges
(01:47:26) Building AI DNA
(01:52:38) Episode Outro
(01:55:09) Outro
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The great Simon Willison joins SWYX and I to talk about everything we learned about LLMs in 2024, and what the state of AI is generally, as we go into 2025.
Here is Simon's blog post we keep referring to:
https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/31...
00:00 The State of AI in 2025
10:05 The Evolution of AI Models
19:54 Challenges in AI Agents
30:07 The Future of AI in Creative Industries
38:29 The Rise of AI Influencers
40:54 Credibility in the Age of AI
43:15 The Future of User Interfaces for LLMs
51:17 Local LLMs and Desktop AI Applications
55:17 AI Tools and Applications for Everyday Use
01:01:26 The Future of OpenAI and AI Regulation
01:08:08 The Need for Better Criticism of LLMs
01:10:41 The Future of Wearables and AI Integration
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Shawn “swyx” Wang is back to talk with us about the state of DevRel according to ZIRP (the Zero Interest Rate Phenomenon), the data that backs up the rise and fall of job openings, whether or not DevRel is dead or dying, speculation of the near-term arrival of AGI, AI Engineering as the last job standing, the innovation from Cognition with Devin as well as their mis-steps during Devin’s launch, and what’s to come in the next innovation round of AI.
Join the discussion
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1Password – Build securely with 1Password - 1Password simplifies how you securely use, manage, and integrate developer credentials. Manage SSH keys and sign Git commits. Access secrets stored in 1Password. Automate administrative tasks. Integrate with third-party tools. Also, check out our INFRASTRUCTURE.md file for more details on how we do secrets with 1Password.
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Featuring:
Shawn Wang – Website, GitHub, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
DevRel’s Death as Zero Interest Rate Phenomenon
Measuring Developer Relations
pandas
Jasper AI
Writer.com
harvey.ai
Cognition.ai
Anthropic
Changelog Interviews #594: Microsoft is all-in on AI: Part 2 (with Mark Russinovich, Eric Boyd & Neha Batra)
The Rise of the AI Engineer
AI News
von Neumann probes (Self-replicating spacecraft)
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
NLW is back with Part 2 of his conversation with the hosts of Latent Space. In this segment they hone in on the trends Swyx and Alessio are seeing in what developers are building.
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NLW is joined today by the hosts of the Latent Space podcast for part one of a wide-ranging conversation about the changes and shifts in the AI market in early 2024.
Find our guests online:
https://twitter.com/swyx
https://twitter.com/fanahova
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Daniel had the chance to sit down with @swyx and Alessio from the Latent Space pod in SF to talk about current AI trends and to highlight some key learnings from past episodes. The discussion covers open access LLMs, smol models, model controls, prompt engineering, and LLMOps. This mashup is magical. Don’t miss it!
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Typesense – Lightning fast, globally distributed Search-as-a-Service that runs in memory. You literally can’t get any faster!
Featuring:
Shawn Wang – Website, GitHub, X
Alessio Fanelli – Website, GitHub, X
Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X
Show Notes:
Latent Space podcast
Featured Latent Space episodes: Benchmarks
Reza Shabani
MosaicML and MPT
Segment Anything
Mike Conover
Featured Practical AI episodes: From notebooks to Netflix scale with Metaflow
Capabilities of LLMs 🤯
ML at small organizations
Prediction Guard
Data Dan
Upcoming Events:
Register for upcoming webinars here!
Our big AI discussion with @ReamBraden and @swyx.
Shawn just posted this new essay drawing on what we discussed here:
Every Google vs OpenAI Argument, Dissected
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To wrap up the year we’re talking about what’s breaking the internet, again. Yes, we’re talking about ChatGPT and we’re joined by our good friend Shawn “swyx” Wang. Between his writings on L-Space Diaries and his AI notes repo on GitHub, we had a lot to cover around the world of AI and what might be coming in 2023.
Also, we have one more show coming out before the end of the year — our 5th annual “State of the log” episode where Adam and Jerod look back at the year and talk through their favorite episodes of the year and feature voices from the community. So, stay tuned for that next week.
Join the discussion
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InfluxData – With its data collectors and scripting languages, a common API across the entire platform, and highly performant time series engine and storage, InfluxDB makes it easy to build once and deploy across multiple products and environments. InfluxDB’s new storage engine allows developers to build real-time applications even faster and with less code. Sign up for the InfluxDB Beta program to give it a try.
Retool – The low-code platform for developers to build internal tools — Some of the best teams out there trust Retool…Brex, Coinbase, Plaid, Doordash, LegalGenius, Amazon, Allbirds, Peloton, and so many more – the developers at these teams trust Retool as the platform to build their internal tools. Try it free at retool.com/changelog
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com
Featuring:
Shawn Wang – Website, GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
AI Notes
Why “Prompt Engineering” and “Generative AI” are overhyped
Multiverse, not Metaverse
The Particle/Wave Duality Theory of Knowledge
OpenRAIL: Towards open and responsible AI licensing frameworks
Open-ish from Luis Villa
ChatGPT for Google
The Myth of The Infrastructure Phase
ChatGPT examples in the wild
Debugging code
TypeScript answer is wrong
Fix code and explain fix
dynamic programming
Translating/refactoring Wasplang DSL
AWS IAM policies
Code that combines multiple cloud services
Solving a code problem
Explain computer networks homework
Rewriting code from elixir to PHP
Turning ChatGPT into an interpreter for a custom language, and then generating code and executing it, and solving Advent of Code correctly
Including getting #1 place
“I haven’t done a single google search or consulted any external documentation to do it and I was able to progress faster than I have ever did before when learning a new thing.”
Build holy grail website and followup with framework, copy, repsonsiveness
For ++ subscribers
Getting Senpai To Notice You
Moving to Obsidian as a Public Second Brain
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
In this supper club episode of Syntax, Wes and Scott talk with Shawn Wang about his thoughts on developer experience, why DX is important, and the importance of learning in public.
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Show Notes 00:32 Welcome
01:56 Guest introduction
swyx.io
Why Temporal?
06:09 What is Developer Experience?
Sarah Drasner
08:35 Is VS Code considered DX?
09:28 Why is internal DX important?
Vercel
NextJS
11:44 Is DX helpful to small organizations as well?
15:27 Parsimony
Parsimony
16:43 Is productivity the main focus?
21:09 Sponsor: Hasura
22:48 What are your thoughts on React?
27:31 Designing for API success
30:44 Sponsor: LogRocket
32:07 What is external developer experience?
36:05 Learning in public
40:46 Supper Club questions
dx.tips
Retreon VS Code Theme
Agnoster ZSH Theme
freeCodeCamp
Frontend Masters
QConf
Learn in Public
××× SIIIIICK ××× PIIIICKS ××× Scott: The Stormlight Archive
Shameless Plugs Scott: LevelUp Tutorials
Wes: Wes Bos Tutorials
Tweet us your tasty treats Scott’s Instagram
LevelUpTutorials Instagram
Wes’ Instagram
Wes’ Twitter
Wes’ Facebook
Scott’s Twitter
Make sure to include @SyntaxFM in your tweets
In 2020, Shawn (swyx) Wang wrote:
Every 10 years there is a changing of the guard in JavaScript. I think we have just started a period of accelerated change that could in thge future be regarded as the Third Age of JavaScript.
We’re now in year three of this third age and Swyx joins us to look back at what he missed, look around at what’s happening today, and look forward at what might be coming next.
Join the discussion
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Sourcegraph – Move fast, even in big codebases. Sourcegraph is universal code search for every developer and team. Easily search across all the code that matters to you and your organization: find example code, explore and read code, debug issues, and more. Head to info.sourcegraph.com/changelog and click the button “Try Sourcegraph now” to get started.
Featuring:
Shawn Wang – Website, GitHub, X
Jerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Nick Nisi – Website, GitHub, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
Reactathon
swyx’s talk at Reactathon
The Third Age of JavaScript
Lydia Hallie’s talk on rendering patterns
analytics.usa.gov
The Birth and Death of JavaScript
The Rise of WebAssembly (Infoworld)
Ryan Dahl on JavaScript containers
swyx on The Changelog #467
The other thing I like about esbuild is that it’s a static Go binary, so I feel more confident that I’ll be able to get it to work in the future than with tool written in Javascript, just because I understand the Javascript ecosystem
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Swyx is known for learning in public, and he joins the party to teach Ali and Nick about what he’s been working on with Temporal IO, what it is, and why he’s excited about it. We also talk about his role as Director of Developer Experience, including what developer experience is, how to do it, and what goals to set.
Join the discussion
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Featuring:
Shawn Wang – Website, GitHub, X
Nick Nisi – Website, GitHub, Mastodon, X
Ali Spittel – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Show Notes:
Changelog 467: Connecting the dots in public
Temporal
Sidekiq
React
Netlify functions
Serverless
Jamstack
The All Powerful Front End Developer - Chris Coyier
RabbitMQ
Guillermo Rauch on Twitter
React Suspense
React Server Components
AWS SQS
Collision Installation
JavaScript Temporal Proposal
Temporal TypeScript API
Swyx thread on Temporal
The Web is the only modern programming platform
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Today we’re joined by Shawn “swyx” Wang, also known as just “swyx” — and we’re talking about his interesting path to becoming a software developer, what it means to “learn in public” and how he’s been able to leverage that process to not only level up his skills and knowlege, but to also rapidly advance his career. We cover Swyx’s recent writing on the light and dark side of the API economy — something he calls “living above or below the API,” his thoughts on Cloudflare eating the cloud by playing Go instead of Chess, and we also talk about the work he’s doing at Temporal and how’s taking his frontend skills to the backend.
Join the discussion
Changelog++ members get a bonus 13 minutes at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!
Sponsors:
Fly.io – Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs.
Teleport – Securely access any computing resource anywhere. Engineers and security teams can unify access to SSH servers, Kubernetes clusters, web applications, and databases across all environments. Try Teleport today in the cloud, self-hosted, or open source at goteleport.com
Square – Develop on the platform that sellers trust. There is a massive opportunity for developers to support Square sellers by building apps for today’s business needs. Learn more at developer.squareup.com to dive into the docs, APIs, SDKs and to create your Square Developer account — tell them Changelog sent you.
LaunchDarkly / TrajectoryConf – Software powers the world. LaunchDarkly empowers all teams to deliver and control their software. DevOps and feature management are reimagining how we build and release new products. On November 9th and 10th, LaunchDarkly is hosting Trajectory Conference 2021 — a two-day event for software innovators who want to break orbit, not systems. Trajectory is a fully-virtual conference that focuses on the technology, people, and processes that continuously deliver better user experiences and more powerful software. Register for free at trajectoryconf.com
Featuring:
Shawn Wang – Website, GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
Learn in Public
The Light and Dark Side of the API Economy
Eating the Cloud from Outside In
The Coding Career Handboox (this link includes an embedded coupon code for 30% off)
Cloud Operating Systems and Reconstituting the Monolith
No Zero Days: My Path from Javascript Newbie to Full Stack Developer at Age 30
freeCodeCamp.org
#Doccies (we’re planning to do something around this soon, stay tuned in 2022)
Cloud Distros and the Deployment Age of the Cloud
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Today, we're continuing the discussion of learning in public with guest, Shawn Swyx Wang.
Swyx is best known for being the Reactjs subreddit mod, and recently released the book, "The Coding Career Handbook".
In this part 2 with Swyx, we focus in on productivity, strategy and tactics of senior vs. junior engineers and what beginning engineers can do to level up in their career.
🌎 Swyx on the Web
Swyx Twitter
Swyx Personal Website
Swyx on GitHub
The Coding Career Handbook use code DEVTEA30 at checkout to enjoy 30% off
LearninPublic.org
✨ Sponsor: New Relic
Thank you to New Relic for sponsoring today's episode!
Make managing and analysis of complex digital architectures work for you. Check them out at NewRelic.com to become a full access user with 100GB per month totally free.
📮 Ask a Question
If you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com.
🧡 Leave a Review
If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you.
This week, we continue the discussion of learning in public with guest, Shawn Swyx Wang.
Swyx is best known for being the Reactjs subreddit mod, and recently released the book, "The Coding Career Handbook".
In this part 1 with Swyx, we discuss his background and how he got started in engineering.
🌎 Swyx on the Web
Swyx Twitter
Swyx Personal Website
Swyx on GitHub
The Coding Career Handbook use code DEVTEA30 at checkout to enjoy 30% off
LearninPublic.org
✨ Sponsor: Linode
Thank you to long time sponsor and friends of the show Linode for sponsoring today's episode!
Simplify your cloud infrastructure with Linode’s Linux virtual machines and develop, deploy, and scale your modern applications faster and easier.
Listeners of Developer Tea can now enjoy $100 in free credit! You can find all the details at linode.com/developertea.
📮 Ask a Question
If you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com.
🧡 Leave a Review
If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you.
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