Shawn Wang: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, well I'm kind of a little bit in a wandering phase here and trying to take this time in between ventures to see what's out there in the world and some of my wandering took me to the Elicit team. And found that they were some of the folks who were doing the most interesting, really deep work in terms of taking the capabilities of language models and applying them to what I feel like are really important problems. So in this case, science and literature search and, and, and that sort of thing. It fits into my general interest in tools and productivity software. I, I think of it as a tool for thought in many ways, but a tool for science, obviously, if we can accelerate that discovery of new medicines and things like that, that's, that's just so powerful. But to me, it's a. It's kind of also an opportunity to learn at the feet of some real masters in this space, people who have been working on it since it was, before it was cool, if you want to put it that way. So for me, the last couple of months have been this crash course, and why I sometimes describe myself as an internal journalist is I'm helping to write some, some posts, including Supporting James in this article here we're doing for latent space where I'm just bringing my writing skill and that sort of thing to bear on their very deep domain expertise around language models and applying them to the real world and kind of surface that in a way that's I don't know, accessible, legible, that, that sort of thing. And so, and the great benefit to me is I get to learn this stuff in a way that I don't think I would, or I haven't, just kind of tinkering with my own side projects. I forgot to mention that you also run Ink and Switch, which is one of the leading research labs, in my mind, of the tools for thought productivity space, , whatever people mentioned there, or maybe future of programming even, a little bit of that. As well. I think you guys definitely started the local first wave. I think there was just the first conference that you guys held. I don't know if you were personally involved. Yeah, I was one of the co organizers along with a few other folks for, yeah, called Local First Conf here in Berlin. Huge success from my, my point of view. Local first, obviously, a whole other topic we can talk about on another day. I think there actually is a lot more what would you call it , handshake emoji between kind of language models and the local first data model. And that was part of the topic of the conference here, but yeah, topic for another day.…

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