Supervise the Process of AI Research — with Jungwon Byun and Andreas Stuhlmüller of Elicit

**Andreas Stuhlmüller** (0:05)
Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO in Residence Addesible Partners, and I'm joined by my co-host, Swix, founder of Small AI.

**Swyx** (0:15)
Hey, and today we are back in the studio with Andreas and Jeongwon from Illicit. Welcome.

**Jungwon Byun** (0:20)
Thanks, guys. It's great to be here.

**Swyx** (0:22)
So I'll introduce you separately, but also we'd love to learn a little bit more about you personally. So Andreas, it looks like you started Illicit first, Jeongwon joined later.

**Andreas Stuhlmüller** (0:32)
That's right. For all intents and purposes, the Illicit and also the art that existed before then were very different from what I started. So I think it's fair to say that you co-funded it.

**Swyx** (0:42)
Got it. And Jeongwon, you're a co-founder and COO of Illicit now.

**Jungwon Byun** (0:46)
Yeah, that's right.

**Swyx** (0:47)
So there's a little bit of a history to this. I'm not super aware of the journey. I was aware of odds and Elicit as sort of a non-profit type situation. And recently you turned into a B Corp.

**Andreas Stuhlmüller** (0:57)
Public Benefit Corporation.

**Swyx** (0:59)
So yeah, maybe if you want, you could take us through that journey of finding the problem and obviously you're working together now. So how do you get together to decide to leave your startup career to join him?

**Andreas Stuhlmüller** (1:11)
Yeah, it's truly a very long journey. I guess truly it kind of started in Germany when I was born. So even as a kid, I was always interested in AI. I kind of went to the library. There were books about how to write programs in QBasic. And some of them talked about how to implement chatbots.

**Jungwon Byun** (1:27)
To be clear, he grew up in a tiny village on the outskirts of Munich called Dingle-Scherbin, where it's like a very, very idyllic German village.

**Andreas Stuhlmüller** (1:36)
Important to the story. So basically, the main thing is I've kind of always been thinking about AI my entire life and been thinking about, well, at some point, this is going to be a huge deal. It's going to be transformative. How can I work on it?
And I was thinking about it from when I was a teenager. After high school, did a year where I started a startup with the intention to become rich. And then once I'm rich, I can affect the trajectory of AI. Did not become rich, decided to go back to college and study cognitive science there, which was like the closest thing I could find at the time to AI. In the last year of college, moved to the US to do a PhD at MIT, working on broadly kind of new programming languages for AI because it kind of seemed like the existing languages were not great at expressing world models and learning world models to invasion inference. I was always thinking about, well, ultimately, the goal is to actually build tools that help people reason more clearly, ask and answer better questions. And make better decisions, but for a long time, it seemed like the technology to put reasoning in machines just wasn't there. Initially, at the end of my postdoc at Stanford was thinking about, well, what to do? I think the standard path is you become an academic and do research, but it's really hard to actually build interesting tools as an academic. You can't really hire great engineers. Everything is kind of on a paper-to-paper timeline.
And so I was like, well, maybe I should start a startup, pursue that for a little bit. But it seemed like it was too early, because you could have tried to do an AI startup, but probably would not have been this kind of AI startup we're seeing now.
So then decided to just start a nonprofit research lab that's going to do research for a while until we better figure out how to do thinking in machines. And that was odd. And then over time, it became clear how to actually build actual tools for reasoning.
Then only over time, we developed a better way to... Well, I'll let you fill in some of the details here.

**Jungwon Byun** (3:26)
Yeah, so I guess my story maybe starts around 2015 I kind of wanted to be a founder for a long time, and I wanted to work on an idea that stood the test of time for me, like an idea that stuck with me for a long time.
And starting in 2015, actually, originally, I became interested in AI-based tools from the perspective of mental health. So there are a bunch of people around me who are really struggling. One really close friend in particular is really struggling with mental health and didn't have any support and it didn't feel like there was anything before kind of like getting hospitalized that could just help her. And so luckily she came and stayed with me for a while and we were just able to talk through some things. But it seemed like, you know, lots of people might not have that resource and something maybe AI-enabled could be much more scalable. I didn't feel ready to start a company then, that's 2015 And I also didn't feel like the technology was ready. So then I went into FinTech and like kind of learned how to do the tech thing. And then in 2019, I felt like it was time for me to just jump in and build something on my own. I really wanted to create. And at the time, I looked around at tech and felt like not super inspired by the options. I didn't want to have a tech career ladder or like I didn't want to climb the career ladder. There were two kind of interesting technologies at the time. There was AI and there was crypto.