Latent.Space 2024 Year in Review
Applications for the 2025 AI Engineer Summit are up, and you can save the date for AIE Singapore in April and AIE World’s Fair 2025 in June.
Happy new year, and thanks for 100 great episodes! Please let us know what you want to see/hear for the next 100!
Full YouTube Episode with Slides/Charts
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Timestamps
* 00:00 Welcome to the 100th Episode!
* 00:19 Reflecting on the Journey
* 00:47 AI Engineering: The Rise and Impact
* 03:15 Latent Space Live and AI Conferences
* 09:44 The Competitive AI Landscape
* 21:45 Synthetic Data and Future Trends
* 35:53 Creative Writing with AI
* 36:12 Legal and Ethical Issues in AI
* 38:18 The Data War: GPU Poor vs. GPU Rich
* 39:12 The Rise of GPU Ultra Rich
* 40:47 Emerging Trends in AI Models
* 45:31 The Multi-Modality War
* 01:05:31 The Future of AI Benchmarks
* 01:13:17 Pionote and Frontier Models
* 01:13:47 Niche Models and Base Models
* 01:14:30 State Space Models and RWKB
* 01:15:48 Inference Race and Price Wars
* 01:22:16 Major AI Themes of the Year
* 01:22:48 AI Rewind: January to March
* 01:26:42 AI Rewind: April to June
* 01:33:12 AI Rewind: July to September
* 01:34:59 AI Rewind: October to December
* 01:39:53 Year-End Reflections and Predictions
Transcript
[00:00:00] Welcome to the 100th Episode!
[00:00:00] Alessio: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO at Decibel Partners, and I'm joined by my co host Swyx for the 100th time today.
[00:00:12] swyx: Yay, um, and we're so glad that, yeah, you know, everyone has, uh, followed us in this journey. How do you feel about it? 100 episodes.
[00:00:19] Alessio: Yeah, I know.
[00:00:19] Reflecting on the Journey
[00:00:19] Alessio: Almost two years that we've been doing this. We've had four different studios. Uh, we've had a lot of changes. You know, we used to do this lightning round. When we first started that we didn't like, and we tried to change the question. The answer
[00:00:32] swyx: was cursor and perplexity.
[00:00:34] Alessio: Yeah, I love mid journey. It's like, do you really not like anything else?
[00:00:38] Alessio: Like what's, what's the unique thing? And I think, yeah, we, we've also had a lot more research driven content. You know, we had like 3DAO, we had, you know. Jeremy Howard, we had more folks like that.
[00:00:47] AI Engineering: The Rise and Impact
[00:00:47] Alessio: I think we want to do more of that too in the new year, like having, uh, some of the Gemini folks, both on the research and the applied side.
[00:00:54] Alessio: Yeah, but it's been a ton of fun. I think we both started, I wouldn't say as a joke, we were kind of like, Oh, we [00:01:00] should do a podcast. And I think we kind of caught the right wave, obviously. And I think your rise of the AI engineer posts just kind of get people. Sombra to congregate, and then the AI engineer summit.
[00:01:11] Alessio: And that's why when I look at our growth chart, it's kind of like a proxy for like the AI engineering industry as a whole, which is almost like, like, even if we don't do that much, we keep growing just because there's so many more AI engineers. So did you expect that growth or did you expect that would take longer for like the AI engineer thing to kind of like become, you know, everybody talks about it today.
[00:01:32] swyx: So, the sign of that, that we have won is that Gartner puts it at the top of the hype curve right now. So Gartner has called the peak in AI engineering. I did not expect, um, to what level. I knew that I was correct when I called it because I did like two months of work going into that. But I didn't know, You know, how quickly it could happen, and obviously there's a chance that I could be wrong.
[00:01:52] swyx: But I think, like, most people have come around to that concept. Hacker News hates it, which is a good sign. But there's enou
