Al Engineering 101 with Chip Huyen (Nvidia, Stanford, Netflix)

**Chip Huyen** (0:00)
Our question that got asked a lot and a lot is, how do we keep up to date with the latest AI news? Why do you have to keep up to date with the latest AI news? If you talk to the users and understand what they want, what they don't want, look into the feedbacks, then you can actually improve the application way, way, way more.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:14)
A lot of companies are building AI products. A lot of companies are not having a good time building AI products.

**Chip Huyen** (0:19)
We are in an ideal crisis. Now we have all these really cool tools. You have to do everything from scratch. It can help you design, it can help you write code, it can help you build websites. In theory, we should see a lot more. But at the same time, people only somehow stop. They don't know what to build.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:33)
All this AI hype, the data is actually showing most companies try it. It doesn't do a lot, they stop. What do you think is the gap here?

**Chip Huyen** (0:38)
It's really hard to measure productivity. So I do ask people to ask their managers, would you rather get everyone on the team very expensive, coding agents, subscriptions, or you get an extra head guy? Almost everyone, the managers, would say head guy. But if you ask VP level, or someone who manage a lot of teams, they would say one AI assistant. Because as managers, you are still growing. So for you, having one HR head guy is big. Whereas for executive, maybe you have more business metrics that you care about, so you actually think about what actually drive productivity metrics for you.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:11)
Today, my guest is Chip Huyen. Unlike a lot of people who share insights into building great AI products and where things are heading, Chip has built multiple successful AI products, platforms, tools. Chip was a core developer on Nvidia's Nemo platform, an AI researcher at Netflix, she taught machine learning at Stanford, she's also a two-time founder, and the author of two of the most popular books in the world of AI, including her most recent book called AI Engineering, which has been the most read book on the O'Reilly platform since its launch. She's also gotten to work with a lot of enterprises on their AI strategies, and so she gets to see what's actually happening on the ground, inside a lot of different companies. In our conversation, Chip explains a lot of the basics, like what exactly does pre-training and post-training look like? What is RAG? What is reinforcement learning? What is RLHF? We also get into everything she's learned about how to build great AI products, including what people think it takes and what it actually takes. We talk about the most common pitfalls that companies run into, where she's seeing the most productivity gains, and so much more. This episode is quite technical, more technical than most conversations I've had, and is meant for anyone looking for a more in-depth conversation about AI. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. And if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of 16 incredible products, including Devon, Lovable, Replit, Bolt, N8N, Linear, Superhuman, Descript, Whisperflow, Gamma, Perflexity, Warp, Granola, Magic Patterns, Recast, JP or DN, Mobbin. Head on over to lennysnewsletter.com and click Product Pass. With that, I bring you Chip Huyen, after a short word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by D.Scout. Design teams today are expected to move fast, but also to get it right. That's where D.Scout comes in. D.Scout is the all-in-one research platform built for modern product and design teams. Whether you're running usability tests, interviews, surveys, or in-the-wild field work, D.Scout makes it easy to connect with real users and get real insights fast. You can even test your Figma prototypes directly inside the platform. No juggling tools, no chasing ghost participants. And with the industry's most trusted panel, plus AI-powered analysis, your team gets clarity and confidence to build better without slowing down. So if you're ready to streamline your research, speed of decisions, and design with impact, head to dscout.com to learn more. That's dscout.com, the answers you need to move confidently. Did you know that I have a whole team that helps me with my podcast and with my newsletter? I want everyone on my team to be super happy and thrive in their roles. JustWorks knows that your employees are more than just your employees, they're your people. My team is spread out across Colorado, Australia, Nepal, West Africa, and San Francisco. My life would be so incredibly complicated to hire people internationally, to pay people on time and in their local currencies, and to answer their HR questions 24-7. But with JustWorks, it's super easy. Whether you're setting up your own automated payroll, offering premium benefits, or hiring internationally, JustWorks offers simple software and 24-7 human support from small business experts for you and your people. They do your human resources right so that you can do right by your people. JustWorks, for your people.