Teach the primitives or watch your competitor define them | Baseten’s Philip Kiely

**Andrew** (0:05)
And today, I'm joined by Philip Kiely, and Philip is the head of AI Education at Baseten, and the author of the new book, Inference Engineering, which we're going to talk about some today. And Philip and I, you know, we share a background in developer advocacy and around education, and developer advocacy itself has always been about empowering developers. And we've talked a lot on our show about how right now, this is something that we all need to rise to the occasion for in terms of teaching ourselves, but also teaching others about the new norms of engineering and the way that we all get our work done. And especially now today, we're certainly starting to see a lot of folks in titles that are more AI native and focused on the AI front that's unfolding in front of all of us. And so we're going to talk about what it means to be in an AI education role, what that means to up level your game as a developer advocate and enter this new world of agentic engineering and the engineers that are here building. And we're also going to explore a little bit about the connections between all of this education, engineering, product, and how it creates that sweet, sweet motion of go to market that we're also obsessed with.
And it's frankly roles as well at, you know, head of AI or at AI education or AI platform. Like these are brand new roles, but now they're in many cases becoming so essential. So Philip, welcome to the show. We're really excited to dig in with you today.

**Philip Kiely** (1:23)
Hey, thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here.

**Andrew** (1:26)
Amazing. Well, I'm going to dive right into talking about your role in developer advocacy.
I'm curious, like, when you talk about your role as head of AI education, how do you describe it? What is it that is most important to you?

**Philip Kiely** (1:41)
It's a great question. I've always been very dismissive of titles. I've not been super into labels and definitions when it comes to my work, because my ultimate goal is just to be Philip at Baseten, where I have a good understanding of the things I like to do and the things that are valuable to the company, and I just do those. But of course, you have to communicate to the rest of the organization as well as to the rest of the world, what you're working on in a succinct way. Just like maybe the title of a book is the most efficient version of the thesis of the book, the title of a person should be the most efficient thesis of the value of their work.
What we found is that there are a couple different types of go-to-market motions right now in the AI industry. One is a very traditional sort of market capture, where you're trying to go after existing workloads, you're going after people who know exactly what they want and trying to move them over to your platform. The other opportunity though, the potentially more exciting motion, I think, is more of a terraforming market development type motion, where you're going out and introducing people to new concepts that they're going to need to learn in the next months and years to effectively do their job, and you're making sure that from the first moment they experience these concepts, they're thinking about them in a way that's conducive to the way you do business. So that's really my mission right now, is to introduce a bunch of developers to AI concepts in a way that gets them thinking about the problems of influence and the problems of building reliable AI native tools in the same way that we do. Because if they think about the problems the same way we do, they're going to naturally come to us as the solution.

**Andrew** (3:30)
Yeah, you're actually going to do something that's really exciting, I think, right now, working in a role where you're kind of educating, informing, and empowering people about new stuff. That you're just putting new ideas in their head that are going to sit there for a while. They're going to kind of like, you're planting the seed of thought, right? With the idea that over time, this demand, this knowledge, and what people can leverage from it is only going to compound and grow. So, the earlier you're there in their mind share, and you're able to kind of set them on the right path, then the more they're going to attribute so much of that back to you. You're kind of part of the nucleus of the thought, which is like what you hit on. What's something that's really exciting right now? Because it's like, you're putting these new ideas of engineering in their head, and then you're seeing how people are able to run with it.