Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
28 transcript-backed records
01 / belief
“I think serverless is probably one of the most important unlocks for us because it sort of allows us to bound failure into something that doesn't require restarting servers or restarting Linux processes.”
02 / belief
“Exactly, as a load balancing mechanism to have that same user experience with more complicated deployments. But I think that in some ways, maybe a small fish in that pond, but I think that the ease of actually a single endpoint is, it sounds obvious or whatever, but it's not.”
03 / belief
“There's one where it doesn't seem hard for a founder, and I think in those scenarios, it ends up being much harder for everyone else.”
04 / belief
“At Impira, I think our primary technical advantage was the fact that if you were extracting data from PDF documents, which ended up being the flavor of unstructured data that we focused on, back then you had to assemble thousands of examples of a particular type of document to get a deep neural network to learn how to extract data from it accurately.”
05 / belief
“I think there are a lot of caveats, especially around access to the newest models.”
06 / belief
“The space is very competitive. And so I think I'm hoping, although I'm not 100% sure about this, but I'm hoping we didn't leave anyone totally out to pasture.”
07 / belief
“Not to be too cheeky about it, I would say almost all of the products in the space are spreadsheet plus plus.”
08 / belief
“The thing I would say is not debatable is whether or not fine-tuning is a business outcome or not.”
09 / belief
“I was saying, I think while in the short term there may be opportunities to scale agents by doing silly things, it feels super clear to me that in the long term, anything you might do to work around that limitation of an LLM will be pushed into the LLM.”
10 / belief
“I think no one knows how durable that revenue is, but all else equal, if a company has some traction and they have the opportunity to build relationships with customers, I think independent of whether their margins erode for one particular product offering, they have the opportunity to build higher margin products.”
11 / belief
“I think the market is very dynamic and it's interesting because almost every company cares.”
12 / belief
“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.”
13 / belief
“Are you competitive? And what I think is like, cursor is taking AI and making traditional software engineering insanely good with AI.”
14 / belief
“I think, to me, it seems very unlikely that you and me sort of like sipping an espresso and thinking about how different personified roles of people should interact with each other and stuff.”
15 / belief
“At Impira, while we were having an existential revelation, if you will, we realized that the debates we were having about what model and this and that were really hard to actually prove anything with.”
16 / disagreement
“Where I disagree is that something that feels like an overpriced toy, I mean, I viscerally remember playing with GPT-3 and it was very silly at the time, which is kind of annoying if you're doing document extraction.”
17 / belief
“I'm open to debate, and I might be totally wrong, but I think one of the things that felt obvious to me and somewhat vindicated by O1 is that there's a lot of code and paths that people went down with GPT-4.”
18 / belief
“Bear in mind that I'm now eight years removed from SingleStore, so they've done a lot of stuff since I left, but maybe the meta thing, I would say, or the meta learning for me is that, even if you build the most sophisticated or advanced technology in a particular space, it doesn't mean that it's something that everyone can use.”
19 / prediction
“Then I'd say probably the remaining 25% are what I would say are advanced agents, which are things that you can maybe run for a long period of time or have a loop or do something more than that simple but effective paradigm.”
20 / evaluation
“I think I with databases and just in general, I've always taken pride in being able to work on the most leading version of things and maybe it's a little bit too personal, but one of the things I struggled with post-single store is there are a lot of data tooling companies that have been very successful that I looked at and was like, oh my god, this is stupid.”
21 / recommendation
“One is that it's very important to have a history of the evals that you've run and make it easy to share them and publish in Slack channel, stuff like that, because that becomes a reference point for you to have discussions among a team.”
22 / evaluation
“Ultimately, we built it in a way that just supports Node, which I think Vercel has sort of embraced as well.”
23 / evaluation
“There's a lot of people, it should be fairly obvious if you look at our customer list, who they are, but I won't call them out specifically, that are doing CodeGen and running the code that's generated in arbitrary environments, but they have also morphed their code into this dumb pattern that I'm talking about, which is like, I'm going to write some code that calls an LLM, it's going to write some code, I might show it to a user or whatever, and then I might just run it.”
24 / preference
“I think practically speaking, I am very passionate about this variant-type issue that we've talked about because I now work in observability, where that is a cornerstone to the problem.”
25 / disagreement
“But really the goal is automatic optimization. And I think automatic optimization is a really valid goal, but I don't think fine-tuning is the only way to achieve it.”
26 / commitment
“There are a lot of things that I took for granted that I later learned at Impira that I had taken for granted, and the most exciting thing is I got to run the engineering team, which was a great opportunity to learn about tech on a larger stage, recruit a lot of great people, and I think, for me personally, set me up to do a lot of interesting things after.”
27 / preference
“As someone who works in observability, I dearly miss the variant type that I used to use in Snowflake. It is, without any question, at least in my experience, the best implementation of semi-structured data and sort of solves the problem of storing it very, very efficiently and querying it efficiently, almost as efficiently as if you specified the schema exactly, but giving you total flexibility.”
28 / evaluation
“There were a few strategic bets that we made early on at Braintrust that I think helped us a lot.”