Google DeepMind's AI playbook for engineering at hyperspeed | Philipp Schmid

**Andrew Zigler** (0:06)
Welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Andrew Zigler.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (0:09)
And I'm your host, Ben Lloyd Pearson.

**Andrew Zigler** (0:12)
This week, we're looking at how Cloudflare is using agentic AI, an interesting new partnership between AI and consumer culture, how developers really feel about their code assistance, and a special anniversary that only nerds can celebrate. Ben, what catches your eye?

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (0:31)
Well, I think I'll save the celebration for last. So maybe let's start with the new partnership with AI. Yes.

**Andrew Zigler** (0:38)
So there's been some interesting news in the last week of OpenAI partnering with, of all companies, Mattel to create and design new products without necessarily licensing the toy maker's intellectual property, key detail. This isn't a partnership of Mattel somehow giving training data to OpenAI, although I'm not sure how useful that would really be. But instead, this is a partnership to create an end consumer product, the creation of digital assistance based on Mattel characters or games that are more interactive within the Mattel universe. We're all pretty familiar with Mattel's recently branched out into things like mobile games and even making movies. You might remember the Barbie movie that came out in recent years. And OpenAI has also been courting companies that help them enhance their product. So it's an interesting collaboration between two companies that you wouldn't necessarily expect to work together and their first collaborative release is expected to come out later this year.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (1:33)
Yeah, you know, recently I've been thinking a lot about why is it software engineering that's getting all of the focus with AI disruption? We have like all these companies, like the company that built Cursor, like they're rumored to be generating half a billion dollars in revenue, which is like pretty pretty crazy. But at the same time, like there are so many other fields out there that have way more potential for disruption, potentially even faster than software development. Andrew, just think about the amount of content that we produce here at Dev Interrupted, like that has been completely transformed by AI already, yet there aren't a whole lot of products that are coming out, and there's not a whole lot of focus on that market for some reason. So this story is a little bit outside of the typical beat here at Dev Interrupted. It's not about engineering or anything like that, and it's certainly not about producing higher volumes of code with AI. But I think what's really happening here is that we're seeing all these stories about how AI companies are fighting in courts over intellectual property ownership. And I think the future is really going to be built, at least in AI, by companies that have good training data. The better your training data is, the better your models are going to be. If you have poor training data, your models are going to reflect that. So I can easily imagine a future that we may be moving towards, where there's new regulations, new laws around the use of intellectual property within generative AI.
I think what's happening is OpenAI is trying to use IP to establish a moat. Like if they build these partnerships with third parties and get access to their commercial data, that actually starts to build a bit of a moat for them, where they have high quality training data that they potentially are the only ones that are able to use. So, you know, in the meantime, it might take a world to see if I can, you know, maybe work with ChatGPT to come up with some really cool car designs with my four-year-old, because that does seem like a really fun application of this.

**Andrew Zigler** (3:28)
Were you a Hot Wheels kid, Ben?

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (3:30)
You know, I was the gigantic box of cars that were collected through many generations of children.

**Andrew Zigler** (3:37)
I was also that kind of kid, but I had a lot of Hot Wheels. And in fact, this is full circle for me because my very first computer was the Windows 98 Hot Wheels computer, the very iconic one. I had all of the accessories. My dad got it for me for Christmas. It probably honestly sparked all of my downstream interests in technology and probably without having that Hot Wheels computer, I don't know if I'd be on this podcast. So it's really fun to see it all come full circle. Hot Wheels and Barbie computers and their users unite.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (4:08)
I never would have thought that eight-year-old Andrew Zigler could make me year old Ben jealous, but here we are.

**Andrew Zigler** (4:17)
It was truly really a formative experience having that computer. Wow.