AGI is Being Achieved Incrementally (OpenAI DevDay w/ Simon Willison, Alex Volkov, Jim Fan, Raza Habib, Shreya Rajpal, Rahul Ligma, et al)

**Swyx** (0:05)
Hey, everyone, this is Suix, coming at you live from The Newton, which is in the heart of the Cerebral Arena. It is a new AI co-working space that I and a couple of friends are working out of. There are hot desks available if you're interested. Just check the show notes.
But otherwise, obviously, it's been 24 hours since the OpenAI Dev Day, a lot of hot reactions and a long-standing tradition. One of the longest traditions we've had on the Latent Space pod is to convene emergency sessions and record the live thoughts of developers and founders going through and processing in real-time. I think a lot of the roles of podcasts isn't as perfect information delivery channels, but really as an audio and oral history of what's going on as it happens while it happens.
So this one's a little unusual. Previously, we only just gathered on Twitter spaces and then just had a bunch of people. The last one was the code interpreter one with 22,000 people showed up. But this one is a little bit more complicated because there's an in-person element and then a online element.
So this is a two-part episode. The first part is a recorded session between our Latent Space people and Simon Willison and Alex Volkov from the ThursdAI pod, just kind of recapping the day. But then also as the second hour, I managed to get a bunch of interviews with previous guests on the pod who we're still friends with and some new people that we haven't yet had on the pod, but I wanted to just get their quick reactions because most of you have known and loved Jim Fan and Div Garg and a bunch of other folks that we interviewed. So I just want to, I'm excited to introduce to you the broader scope of what it's like to be at OpenAI Dev Day in person, bring you the audio experience, as well as give you some of the thoughts that developers are having as they process the announcements from OpenAI. So first off, we have the Latent Space pod recap, one hour of OpenAI Dev Day.

**Alessio** (2:00)
Hey, everyone.
Welcome to the Latent Space Podcast, an emergency edition after OpenAI Dev Day. This is Alessio, Partner and CTO of Residents at Decibel Partners, and as usual, I'm joined by Squix, founder of SmallAI.

**Swyx** (2:12)
Hey, and today we have two special guests with us covering all the latest and greatest. We love to get our band together and recap things, especially when they're big. And it seems like that every three months, we have to do this.
So Alex, welcome from ThursdAI. We've been collaborating a lot on the Twitter spaces and welcome Simon from many, many things, but also I think you're the first person to not make four appearances on our pod.

**Simon Willison** (2:37)
Oh, wow, I feel privileged.

**Swyx** (2:38)
So welcome. Yeah, I think we're all there yesterday. How do we feel? Like, what do you want to kick off with? Maybe Simon, you want to take first and then Alex.

**Simon Willison** (2:46)
Sure, yeah. I mean, yesterday was quite exhausting, quite frankly. I feel like it's going to take us as a community several months just to completely absorb all of the stuff that they dropped on us in one giant, giant batch. It's particularly impressive considering they launched a ton of features, what, three or four weeks ago, ChatGPT voice and the combined mode and all of that kind of thing. And then they followed up with everything from yesterday. That said, now that I've started digging into the stuff that they released yesterday, some of it is clearly in need of a bit more polish.
You know, the reality of what they released is I'd say about 80% of what it looked like it was yesterday. Which is still impressive, you know, don't get me wrong. This is an amazing batch of stuff. But there are definitely problems and sharp edges that we need to file off. And there are things that we still need to figure out before we can take advantage of all of this.

**Swyx** (3:33)
Yeah, agreed, agreed. And we can go into those sharp edges in a bit. I just want to pop over to Alex, what are your thoughts?

**Alex Volkov** (3:39)
So, interestingly, even folks at OpenAI, there's like a several booths and a help desk. So you can go in and ask people like actual changes and people who like, they could follow up with like the right people in OpenAI and like answer you back, et cetera. Even some of them didn't know about all the changes. So I went to the voice and audio booth and I asked them about like, hey, is Whisper 3 that was announced by Sam Altman on stage just like briefly? Will that be open source? Because I love using Whisper. And there's like, oh, do we talk about Whisper 3? Like some of them didn't even know what they were releasing. But overall, I felt it was like very tightly run event. Like I was really impressed. Sean, we were sitting in the audience and you like pointed at the clock to me when they finished. They finished like on 45 on that, I think, right? And this was after like doing some extra stuff.