AI Engineers, Pendants, and Tensions Between OpenAI and Developers with Swyx of Latent Space

**Nathan Labenz** (0:00)
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**Swyx** (0:48)
I would be willing to wear one of those. So I have an aura on me right now. I'd love to log all my conversations and be able to talk with it. These things are coming.
And yes, they will be multimodal. All of us having an effective digital twin that we can talk to and use as at least just a note-taking thing, if not just exposed to the wider world. I'm very excited by it and it will be built by the AI engineer.

**Nathan Labenz** (1:10)
Hello and welcome to The Cognitive Revolution, where we interview visionary researchers, entrepreneurs, and builders working on the frontier of artificial intelligence.
Each week, we'll explore their revolutionary ideas, and together we'll build a picture of how AI technology will transform work, life, and society in the coming years. I'm Nathan Labenz, joined by my co-host, Eric Thornburg. Hello and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. This is Nathan's AI voice, cloned with ElevenLabs. The real Nathan is traveling for a wedding today, but we are both very excited to share this conversation with Swyx. Swyx is a renaissance man in the AI space. He is a builder, an educator, a connector, and an all-around very nice, encouraging, and collaborative person. We cross-posted one of his Latent Space podcast episodes with Linus Lee of Notion AI a couple months back, and I was excited to finally have a proper one-on-one conversation. We talked about Swyx's thought leadership, which has helped define the emerging role of the AI engineer, and also the AI engineer summit that he has organized for October 8th through 10th.
Tickets are sold out, but you can still join online to hear from an impressive lineup of speakers, including a number of past Cognitive Revolution guests. We also covered about the state of AI agents, whether CodePR generators will soon begin to work, the future of the app layer, the possibility that OpenAI and other leading model developers may come to compete with app developers as they add more tools to their platforms and modalities to their APIs, and the possibility of an AI application bundle. As always, if you're finding value in the show, I invite you to leave us a review on the platform of your choice. Now, I hope you enjoy this conversation with Swyx.
Swyx, welcome to The Cognitive Revolution.

**Swyx** (2:58)
Thanks. I've been a long-time listener and very excited to be a first-time caller.

**Nathan Labenz** (3:03)
Well, thank you.
Glad to have you here, and I'm also a big fan of your work with the Latent Space Podcast. The newsletter and also looking forward to what you guys are putting together with the AI Engineer Summit, which is coming up in just a couple of days. So I'm excited to get into all of that with you.

**Swyx** (3:21)
Yeah, happy to dive into that. We did a cross-post, I think, a few months ago, and I really liked your deep dive into the Tiny Stories stuff. That's the one that we featured on our feed. And so I feel like you have the room to go much more in-depth than us.
So I really appreciate the work that you're doing, going these two-hour things with researchers. It's really impressive.

**Nathan Labenz** (3:42)
Thank you very much. I really appreciate it. I guess, for starters, I thought we'd kind of organize this by taking a little bit of a broad-view survey of your work over the last year or so.
As far as I know, you've coined this term AI engineer.
And so I guess I wanted to start off by just kind of asking you, what is an AI engineer? I'm fascinated in general by these new AI jobs, right? We've got the prompt engineer and a few different things have been put forward. It seems like the AI engineer, though, might have more staying power than the prompt engineer. So how do you think about that new emerging role?