RAG Is A Hack - with Jerry Liu from LlamaIndex

**Alessio** (0:10)
Hey, everyone, welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, Partner and CTO of Residence and Decibel Partners, and I'm joined by my co-host, Swix, founder of Small AI.

**Swix** (0:20)
And today we finally have Jerry Liu on the podcast. Hey, Jerry.

**Jerry Liu** (0:23)
Hey, you guys. Hey, Swix and Alessio. Thanks for having me.

**Swix** (0:26)
It's so weird because we keep running each other in San Francisco AI events. So it's kind of weird to finally just have a conversation recorded for everybody else.

**Jerry Liu** (0:34)
Yeah, I know. I'm really looking forward to this.
Let's have further questions.

**Swix** (0:38)
So I tend to introduce people on their formal background and then ask something on the more personal side. So you are part of the Princeton gang.

**Jerry Liu** (0:46)
I don't know if there is like official Princeton gang.

**Swix** (0:49)
I attended your meeting. There was like four of you.

**Jerry Liu** (0:51)
Oh, cool.

**Swix** (0:53)
With Prem and the others.

**Jerry Liu** (0:54)
Oh, yeah.

**Swix** (0:55)
Well, you did Bachelors in CS and Certificate of Finance. That's also fun. I also did finance and I think I saw that you also interned at Two Sigma where I worked in New York.
You were a machine learning engineer. Yeah. Very briefly.

**Jerry Liu** (1:07)
I didn't know that.

**Swix** (1:09)
That was my first proper engineering job before I went into DevRel. Wow.
Then you were a machine learning engineer at Quora. Yeah. I researched scientists at Uber for three years and then two years machine learning engineer at Robust Intelligence before starting LlamaIndex. So that's your LinkedIn. What's not on your LinkedIn that people should know about you?

**Jerry Liu** (1:27)
I think back during my Quora days, I had this three-month phase where I just wrote a ton of Quora answers. So I think if you look at my tweets nowadays, you could basically see that as the V2 of my three-month Quora stint where I just went ham on Quora for a bit.
Actually, I think I was back then, actually, when I was working on Quora. I think the thing that everybody was fascinated in was just general deep learning advancements and stuff like GANs, and generative images, and just new architectures that were evolving. It was a pretty exciting time to be a researcher, actually, because you were going in really understanding some of the new techniques.
So I kind of used that as a learning opportunity, basically. Just read a bunch of papers and then answer questions on Quora. And so you can kind of see traces of that, basically, in my current Twitter, where it's just really about framing concepts and trying to make it understandable and educate other users on it.

**Swix** (2:16)
Yeah, I've said, so a lot of people come to me for my Twitter advice, but I think you are doing one of the best jobs in AI Twitter, just explaining concepts and just consistently getting hits out.

**Jerry Liu** (2:26)
Thank you.

**Swix** (2:27)
I didn't know it was due to the Quora training. Just a side note on Quora, a lot of people, including myself, kind of wrote of Quora as one of the Web 1 sort of question and answer forums, but now I think it's becoming, it's seeing a resurgence obviously due to PoE, and obviously Adam and D'Angelo has always been a leading tech figure, but what do you think is kind of underrated about Quora?

**Jerry Liu** (2:46)
Well, I mean, I really like the mission of Quora when I joined. In fact, I interned there in 2015, and I joined full-time in 2017
One is they had and they have a very talented engineering team and just really, really smart people. And the other part is the whole mission of the company is to just spread knowledge and to educate people.
And to me, that really resonated. I really like the idea of just education and democratizing the flow of information. And if you imagine, kind of back then, it was like, okay, you have Google, which is for search, but then you have Quora, which is just user-generated, grassroots-type content. I really like that concept because it's just like, okay, there's certain types of information that aren't accessible to people, but you can make it accessible by just surfacing it. And so, actually, I don't know if most people know that about Quora, and if they've used the product, whether through SEO or kind of actively, but that really was what drew me to it.

**Swix** (3:39)
Yeah, I think most people's challenges with it is that sometimes you don't know if it's a veiled product pitch, right?