[AI Breakdown] Summer AI Technical Roundup: a Latent Space x AI Breakdown crossover pod!

**Swix** (0:00)
Hey, listeners, this is Swix. Latent Space is off this week because I've been traveling and we've been scheduling some guests, but we have some really exciting guests coming, talking about the future of Transformers and then deploying in all sorts of environments.
And it's a little runtime mini-series that Alessio has been lining up, which I'm pretty excited about.
But in the meantime, we've actually done a couple of podcast jobs, Practical AI, Cognitive Revolution. These are basically just friends and other podcasts that we recommend and we listen to that strongly recommend.
And today we have a third podcast drop with the AI Breakdown, which is a relatively new podcast that is daily.
So NLW has been doing the breakdown for a number of years now and recently focused on AI. And it's just a really interesting conversation. We're delighted to be his first guest. And it's also nice for Alessio and I to take a step back and talk about trends over the summer, which has been very hot. We talked a lot about Code Interpreter. We talked about Lama2, AI agents and AI companions. He calls it companions. I call it waifus and hasbundles. But basically just everything that is interesting and hot in AI, we get a chance to step back from being host of the podcast to becoming guests. And so whenever we get the chance to do that, I just love having discussions between podcasters too, just because we know what people are talking about and we get to sit back and take a high level perspective about what's interesting and what people are discussing in the space. So enjoy, this is NLW, Alessio and I on the AI Breakdown.

**NLW** (1:31)
Today on the AI Breakdown, I'm joined by the hosts of the Latent Space Podcast to discuss everything that happened in AI last month from a technical and developer perspective. From llama to code interpreter to open source debates and beyond, this is your summer technical AI roundup. The AI Breakdown is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. Go to breakdown.network for more information about our YouTube, our newsletter and our Discord.
Welcome back to the AI Breakdown.
Today, I am very excited to be collaborating with the hosts of Latent Space. Latent Space is a podcast focused on AI development and AI engineering. It's hosted by Alessio, who is also a VC investing in AI and other frontier spaces, and Sean, better known as Swix, who is an AI developer and entrepreneur.
Now, one of the things that makes the AI space interesting is that among the people paying attention right now, say the types of folks that are interested enough and focused enough to be listening to a daily AI news analysis show like the AI Breakdown, even among those who are not developers themselves, they are still actively paying attention to technical developments in the field. There's an understanding, I believe, that when it comes to getting an edge in what's coming next, GitHub is much more important than Twitter for understanding what's coming down the pipeline. With that in mind, Latent Space and the AI Breakdown are hoping to do these technical news roundups at a pretty regular clip, and we kick off looking back at a month that had some serious action. We're gonna be talking about open source developments, the latest in the agent space, why AI companions are getting more attention, and of course, breaking down the significance of Code Interpreter and Llama 2 It's a great conversation. I think you'll learn a lot. So let's dive in.
All right, what is going on? How's it going, boys? Great to have you here.

**Alessio** (3:12)
Hey, good. How are y'all?

**Swix** (3:14)
Great to be on.

**NLW** (3:15)
Good. I'm excited for this. Yeah, no, I'm super excited. I think, you know, we were just talking a little bit before this that the AI audience right now is really interesting.
It's sort of, on the one hand, you have, of course, the folks who are actually in it, who are building in it, who are, you know, or dabbling because they're in some other field, but they're fascinated by it and, you know, are spending their nights and weekends building. And then on the other hand, you have the folks who are, you know, what we used to call non-technical, perhaps, but who are actively paying attention in a way that I think is very different to the technical evolutions of this field because they have a sense or an understanding that it's so fast moving that the place that they have to be paying attention to is what's changing from the standpoint of developers and builders. So what we wanna do today is kind of reflect on the month of July, which had a couple of, I think, really keystone events in the context of what it means for the technical development of the AI field and what, you know, where it leads, how people's frameworks are changing, how people's sort of sense of things have changed over the last month.