The Future of AI Agents: Insights and Innovations

This is a special double weekend crosspost of AI podcasts, helping attendees prepare for the AI Engineer Summit next week. After our first friendly feedswap with the Cognitive Revolution pod, swyx was invited for a full episode to go over the state of AI Engineering and to preview the AI Engineer Summit Schedule, where we share many former CogRev guests as speakers.

For those seeking to understand how two top AI podcasts think about major top of mind AI Engineering topics, this should be the perfect place to get up to speed, which will be a preview of many of the conversations taking place during the topic tables sessions on the night of Monday October 9 at the AI Engineer Summit.

While you are listening, there are two things you can do to be part of the AI Engineer experience. One, join the AI Engineer Summit Slack. Two, take the State of AI Engineering survey and help us get to 1000 respondents!

Links

* AI Engineer Summit (Join livestream and Slack community)

* State of AI Engineering Survey (please help us fill this out to represent you!)

* Cognitive Revolution full episode with Nathan

* swyx’s ai-notes (featuring Communities in README.md)

* We referenced The Eleuther AI Mafia

* This podcast intro voice was AI Anna again, from our Wondercraft pod!

Timestamps

* (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?

* (00:17:13) 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