MCP, Agents and What AI Engineers Are Thinking About Right Now feat. Swyx
What's at the top of AI engineers' minds? Swyx, organizer of the AI Engineer Summit and host of Latent Space, joins us to discuss MCP (Model Context Protocol), the rise of AI agents, and how the role of AI engineers is evolving.
Find our guest online:
https://x.com/swyx
https://www.ai.engineer/
https://www.latent.space/
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AI Engineers, Pendants, and Competition Between OpenAI and Developers with Swyx of Latent Space
In this episode, Nathan sits down with Swyx of Latent Space to chat about AI engineers and tools to check out, competitive dynamics between OpenAI, other foundation model providers, and developers, and if Swyx would wear an AI Horcrux. We also learn that Nathan lived in the same dorm as Mark Zuckerberg back in his college days (and was a late adopter to Facebook…). If you're looking for an ERP platform, check out our sponsor, NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive
Subscribe to the show Substack to join future conversations and submit questions to upcoming guests! https://cognitiverevolution.substack.com/
We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal team on other projects he's incubating. He's hiring a Chief of Staff, EA, Head of Special Projects, Investment Associate, and more. For a list of JDs, check out: eriktorenberg.com.
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TIMESTAMPS:
(00:00) Episode Preview
(00:00:49) AI Nathan’s intro
(00:03:14) What is an AI engineer?
(00:05:56) What backgrounds do AI engineers typically have?
(00:15:51) Sponsors: Netsuite | Omneky
(00:17:13) Swyx’s Discord AI project
(00:20:41) Key tools for AI engineers
(00:23:42) HumanLoop, Guardrails, Langchain
(00:27:01) Criteria for identifying capable AI engineers when hiring
(00:30:59) Skepticism around AI being a fad and doubts about contributing to AI
(00:34:03) AI Engineer Conference speaker lineup
(00:41:14) AI agents and two years to AGI
(00:46:04) Expectations and disagreement around what AI agent capabilities will work soon
(00:50:12) Swyx’s OpenAI thesis
(00:53:03) AI safety considerations and the role of AI engineers
(00:56:24) Disagreement on whether AI will soon be able to generate code pull requests
(01:01:07) AI helping non-technical people to code
(01:01:49) Multi-modal Chat-GPT and the future implications
(01:03:33) Nathan living in the same dorm as Mark Zuckerberg
(01:04:44) Competitive dynamics between OpenAI and other AI model developers
(01:05:39) Play.ht vs ElevenLabs
(01:09:20) The tension between platforms and developers building on top of them
(01:11:40) The best thing startups can do to compete with foundation model providers
(01:16:26) User identity/authentication services like Login with OpenAI
(01:19:20) Google vs the other live players
(01:20:46) AI Horcruxes / Pendants
(01:22:05) The concept of an AI app bundle for consumers and developers
Code Interpreter is GPT-4.5: A Summer AI Technical Roundup [feat. Swyx and Alessio of Latent Space]
Today NLW is joined by Swyx and Alessio, the hosts of the Latent Space podcast to discuss the key technical developments from the last month of AI, including code interpreter; llama 2; the latest in AI agents; growing interest in AI companions, and more.
Latent Space podcast -https://www.latent.space/podcast / https://twitter.com/latentspacepod
Swyx - https://twitter.com/swyx
Alessio Fanelli - https://twitter.com/FanaHOVA
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Learning in Public with swyx
About swyx
swyx has worked on React and serverless JavaScript at Two Sigma, Netlify and AWS, and now serves as Head of Developer Experience at Airbyte. He has started and run communities for hundreds of thousands of developers, like Svelte Society, /r/reactjs, and the React TypeScript Cheatsheet. His nontechnical writing was recently published in the Coding Career Handbook for Junior to Senior developers.
Links Referenced:
“Learning Gears” blog post: https://www.swyx.io/learning-gears
The Coding Career Handbook: https://learninpublic.org
Personal Website: https://swyx.io
Twitter: https://twitter.com/swyx