[Practical AI] AI Trends: a Latent Space x Practical AI crossover pod!

**Swyx** (0:00)
Hello again, it's Swyx, back again with the second of our crossover episodes.
This time with the Practical AI folks who have been covering the AI space since before. It was cool, as we often like to say. Something that Alessio and I are pretty mindful of every time we take to the mic is that we're pretty new podcasters to this space, and there is a longer history and heritage behind all this, as well as a lot of areas and niches that we'll probably never even touch.
I always like recommending these podcasts with a much longer backlog that actually give you a way to travel back in time, for an oral history of AI, which is very rare and very valuable. These are tokens that are generated in real time, just like we're doing it now for this current wave of AI trends. What we did, podcaster to podcaster, I always love talking to other podcasters because they know what's up, is we went through our respective stats and picked out the crowd-favorite episodes as well as some personal picks. I do have to note that this was recorded just before our George Hotz episode, which obviously is now our top downloaded episode across podcasts, as well as our newly launched YouTube. Go subscribe, please, if you haven't seen it. But anyway, if you're looking for good AI podcasts, these guys have been covering it for a long time, very, very consistently, and covered a lot of topics. Definitely check them out, and please enjoy our special crossover episode with Practical AI in the studio.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:32)
Welcome to Practical AI. If you work in artificial intelligence, aspire to, or are curious how AI-related technologies are changing the world, this is the show for you. Thank you to our partners at Fastly for shipping all of our pods super fast to wherever you listen. Check them out at fastly.com.
And to our friends at Fly, deploy your app servers and database close to your users, no ops required. Learn more at fly.io.

**Daniel Whitenack** (2:07)
Well, hello, we have a very special episode for you today. I got the chance to sit down with the guys from Latent Space, Swyx and Alessio out in San Francisco. They were kind enough to let me into their podcast recording studio, and we got a chance to talk about our favorite episodes of both of our shows and some of the overall takeaways we've had from those discussions. We cover some of the trends that we've been seeing in AI, and they even get a chance to grill me on my opinions about prompt engineering.
So enjoy the show.

**Alessio** (2:41)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO and resident at Decibel Partners.
I'm joined by my cohost Swyx, writer and editor of Latent Space.

**Swyx** (2:52)
And today we're very excited to welcome Dan Whitenack to the studio, welcome Dan.

**Daniel Whitenack** (2:56)
What's up guys, it's great to be here.

**Swyx** (2:58)
This is a podcast crossover, if you recognize this voice, Dan is a host of Practical FM. He's been in my ear on and off for the past five years, covering the latest and greatest in AI, before it was cool.

**Daniel Whitenack** (3:08)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, before the AI hype back in these like weird data science times, whatever that is now.

**Swyx** (3:15)
Yes, everything is merging and converging.
So I'll give a little bit of your background and we can go into a little bit on your personal side. You got your PhD in Mathematical and Computational Physics, and then you spent 10 years as a data scientist, most recently at SIL International, which I actually, I thought it was like an agritech thing. And then I went to the website. It's actually a nonprofit.

**Daniel Whitenack** (3:35)
International NGO, yeah. So they do language related work all around the world. So I spent the last five years building up a team that's been working on kind of low resource scenarios for AI, if people are familiar with that. So doing like machine translation or speech recognition, that sort of thing in languages that aren't yet supported.

**Swyx** (3:53)
Yeah, and we'll talk about this later, but I think episode three on Practical AI was already featuring the global community that AI has and addresses.

**Daniel Whitenack** (4:02)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's been an important theme throughout the whole time, throughout over 200 episodes.

**Swyx** (4:07)
Yeah, yeah. And you recently left SIL to work on Prediction Guard, which we can talk a little bit more about that.
You are also interim Senior Operations Development Director at Deep Candle Co.

**Daniel Whitenack** (4:18)
Yeah, yeah.