Ankur Goyal: belief

Transcript context

…Wow. DSPy is a step in that direction. Omar has decided to join Databricks and be an academic. And I have actually asked who's making the DSPy startup. Somebody should. There's a few. My personal perspective on this, which almost everyone, at least hardcore engineers, disagree with me about, but I'm okay with that, I think DSPy, I think there's two elements to it. One is automatic optimization. And the other is achieving automatic optimization by writing code. In particular, in DSPy's case, code that looks a lot like PyTorch code. And I totally recognize that if you were writing only TensorFlow before, then you started writing PyTorch. It's a huge improvement. And, oh my god, it feels like so much nicer to write code. If you are a TypeScript engineer and you're writing Next.js, writing PyTorch sucks. Why would I ever want to write PyTorch? And so I actually think the most empowering thing that I've seen is engineers and non-engineers alike writing really simple code. And whether it's simple TypeScript code that's auto-completed with cursor, or it's English, I think that the direction of programming itself is moving towards simplicity. And I haven't seen something yet that really moves programming towards simplicity. And maybe I'm a romantic at heart, but I think there is a way of doing automatic optimization that still allows us to write simpler code. Yeah, I think that people are working on it, and I think it's a valuable thing to explore. I'll keep a lookout for it and try to report on it through Latentspace.…

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