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Published · transcript-backed

Shawn Wang: uncertainty

6 Mar 2024 Latent Space Open Source AI is AI we can Trust — with Soumith Chintala of Meta AI

“I don't know if you guys know, but he actually tried to become an animator in his early years and failed or didn't get accepted by Disney and then went and created Pixar and then got bought by Disney and created Toy Story.”

— Shawn Wang

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Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Shawn Wang
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
uncertainty
Recorded
6 Mar 2024
Publisher
Latent Space

Transcript context

…I mean, in a very convoluted way. It reminds me of Ed Catmull. I don't know if you guys know, but he actually tried to become an animator in his early years and failed or didn't get accepted by Disney and then went and created Pixar and then got bought by Disney and created Toy Story. So you joined Facebook in 2014 and eventually became a creator and maintainer of PyTorch. And there's this long story there you can refer to on the gradient. I think maybe people don't know that you also involved in more sort of hardware and cluster decision affair. And we can dive into more details there because we're all about hardware this month. Yeah. And then finally, I don't know what else, like what else should people know about you on a personal side or professional side? I think open source is definitely a big passion of mine and probably forms a little bit of my identity at this point. I'm irrationally interested in open source. I think open source has that fundamental way to distribute opportunity in a way that is very powerful. Like, I grew up in India. I didn't have internet for a while. In college, actually, I didn't have internet except for GPRS or whatever. And knowledge was very centralized, but I saw that evolution of knowledge slowly getting decentralized. And that ended up helping me learn quicker and faster for zero dollars. And I think that was a strong reason why I ended up where I am. So the open source side of things, I always push regardless of what I get paid for, like I think I would do that as a passion project on the side.…

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