Latent Space Chats: NLW (Four Wars, GPT5), Josh Albrecht/Ali Rohde (TNAI), Dylan Patel/Semianalysis (Groq), Milind Naphade (Nvidia GTC), Personal AI (ft. Harrison Chase — LangFriend/LangMem)

**SPEAKER_1** (0:05)
Welcome to the Latentspace Podcast weekend edition. This is Charlie, your AI co-host. Swicks and Alessio are off for the week, making more great content. We have exciting interviews coming up with Alicit, Chroma, Instructor, and our upcoming series on NSFW, Not Safe For Work AI.
In today's episode, we're collating some of Swicks and Alessio's recent appearances, all in one place for you to find. In part one, we have our first crossover pod of the year. In our listener survey, several folks asked for more thoughts from our two hosts. In 2023, Swicks and Alessio did crossover interviews with other great podcasts like the AI Breakdown, Practical AI, Cognitive Revolution, Thursday AI, and China Talk, all of which you can find in the Latentspace About page. NLW of the AI Breakdown asked us back to do a special on the Four Wars Framework and the AI Engineer scene.
We love AI Breakdown as one of the best daily podcasts to keep up on AI news, so we were especially excited to be back on. Watch out and take care.

**NLW** (1:13)
Today on the AI Breakdown, part one of my conversation with Alessio and Swicks from Latentspace.
All right, fellas, welcome back to the AI Breakdown. How are you doing?

**Alessio** (1:23)
I'm good.

**Swyx** (1:24)
Very good. Yeah.

**NLW** (1:25)
The last time we did the show, we were like, oh yeah, let's do check ins monthly about all the things that are going on. Then, of course, six months later and the world has changed in a thousand ways. It's just too busy to even think about podcasting sometimes, but I'm super excited to be chatting with you again. I think there's a lot to catch up on just to tap in, I think, in the beginning of 2024
So we're going to talk today about just a broad sense of where things are in some of the key battles in the AI space and then one of the big things that I'm really excited to have you guys on here for us to talk about, where, what patterns you're seeing and what people are actually trying to build, where developers are spending their time and energy and any trends there. But maybe let's start, I guess, by checking in on a framework that you guys actually introduced, which I've loved and I've cribbed a couple of times now, which is the four wars of the AI stack. Because first, since I have you here, I'd love to hear where that started gelling, and then maybe we can get into, I think, a couple of them that are particularly interesting in light of some recent news.

**Swyx** (2:31)
Yeah, so maybe I'll take this one. So the four wars is a framework that I came up around trying to recap all of 2023 I tried to write sort of monthly recap pieces, and I was trying to figure out what makes one piece of news last longer than another or more significant than another. And I think it's basically always around battlegrounds.
Wars are fought around limited resources.
And I think probably the most limited resource is talent, but the talent expresses itself in a number of areas. And so I kind of focus on those areas first. So the four wars that we cover are the Data Wars, the GPU-Rich-Poor War, the Multi-Modal War, and the Rag and Ops War. And I think you actually did a dedicated episode to that, so thanks for covering that.

**NLW** (3:17)
Yeah, not only did I do a dedicated episode, I actually used it, I can't remember if I told you guys, I did give you big shout outs, but I used it as a framework for a presentation at Intel's big AI event that they hold each year, where they have all of their folks who are working on AI internally, and it totally resonated, so.
That's amazing, that's amazing. So what got me thinking about it again is specifically this inflection news that we recently had, this sort of, basically, I can't imagine that anyone who's listening wouldn't have thought about it, but inflection is one of the big contenders, right? I think probably most folks would have put them just a half step behind the anthropics and open AIs of the world in terms of labs, but it's a company that raised 1.3 billion last year, less than a year ago.
Reid Hoffman's a co-founder, Mustafa Suleiman, who is a co-founder of DeepMind. So it's like, this is not a small startup, let's say, at least in terms of perception. And then we get the news that basically most of the team, it appears, is heading over to Microsoft, and they're bringing in a new CEO. And I'm interested in your take on how much that reflects. Hold aside, I guess, all the other things that it might be about, how much it reflects this sort of the stark, brutal reality of competing in the frontier model space right now, and just the access to compute.