In this episode, Nathan sits down with Andrew Lee, founder of Shortwave, an AI-powered email app that describes itself as “the smartest email app on planet earth.” They discuss Shortwave’s RAG stack, how the AI assistant works, the models Shortwave is using, and much more. This is truly a masterclass in RAG app development.

Sponsors : 

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. OCI has four to eight times the bandwidth of other clouds; offers one consistent price, and nobody does data better than Oracle. If you want to do more and spend less, take a free test drive of OCI at https://oracle.com/cognitive

The Brave search API can be used to assemble a data set to train your AI models and help with retrieval augmentation at the time of inference. All while remaining affordable with developer first pricing, integrating the Brave search API into your workflow translates to more ethical data sourcing and more human representative data sets. Try the Brave search API for free for up to 2000 queries per month at https://bit.ly/BraveTCR

Plumb is a no-code AI app builder designed for product teams who care about quality and speed. What is taking you weeks to hand-code today can be done confidently in hours. Check out https://bit.ly/PlumbTCR for early access.

Head to Squad to access global engineering without the headache and at a fraction of the cost: head to choosesquad.com and mention “Turpentine” to skip the waitlist.

TIMESTAMPS:

(00:00) - Intro

(01:07) - Shortwave: AI-Powered Email

(06:22) - Genesis of Shortwave

(15:25) - Sponsors: Oracle / Omneky

(16:46) - Data Processing Pipeline

(21:57) - Choosing a Vector Database

(26:34) - How the AI Assistant Works

(36:24) - Sponsors: Brave / Plumb / Squad

(40:53) - Fine-Tuning & Hosting Models

(45:11) - Email Automation

(47:55) - Email Retrieval

(51:44) - Optimizing AI Performance

(53:20) - Safety & Embedded Ethics

(01:04:51) - Strategic Product Launches

(01:09:58) - Inbox Management

(01:12:24) - The Future of Collaborative AI

(01:18:54) - Scaling Personalized Outreach

(01:26:04) - Closing Thoughts & What's Next