The AI Architect — Bret Taylor

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Hello, AI engineers. We're excited to bring you a special conversation with Brett Taylor, CEO of Sierra, the conversational AI platform now worth $4.5 billion, as well as chairman of the board of OpenAI, which needs no introduction. He has had a long established career in tech, including co-creating Google Maps and the Facebook Like button, starting Quip, and serving as co-CEO of Salesforce and chairman of Twitter, Inc. Through all his dizzying accomplishments, Brett is an AI engineer at heart and is incredibly passionate about the future of software development, arguing that we are moving forward from the autopilot era of software engineering to the autonomous era. He's also equally at ease talking about the internals of JavaScript React Web Apps, as he is talking about the human side of negotiating high-stakes situations like the OpenAI board drama of 2023
He's observed the rise of the specialist AI architect role, which is a more senior technical AI leader, complimenting the AI engineer, in the various high-level conversations with senior technology leaders in his roles at Sierra and OpenAI. Throughout Brett's career, we observed a strong formula of his success, being the tight integration of product management and engineering in small teams, aligned with customers by outcomes, rather than exposing implementation details on the pricing chart. We organized this conversation in the lead, up to the AI leadership track at the AI engineer summit in New York City on February 20th, where we have gathered CTOs and VPs of AI of major companies from Bloomberg to LinkedIn to talk about their AI strategy with a close grounding on technical detail. This is our last call for AI leadership attendees to join us. The engineering track has now sold out, and we expect our leadership slots to close soon. Apply for an invite at apply.ai.engineer. See you in two weeks. Watch out and take care.

**Alessio** (2:10)
Hey, everyone, welcome to the Lydian Space Podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO at Decibel Partners, and I'm joined by my co-host Swiggs, founder of Small AI.

**swyx** (2:19)
Hey, and today we're super excited to have Brett Taylor join us. Welcome.

**Bret Taylor** (2:23)
Thanks for having me.

**swyx** (2:24)
It's a little unreal to have you in the studio. I've read about you so much over the years, like even before OpenAI, effectively. I mean, I use Google Maps to get here.
So like, thank you for everything that you've done. Like, your story history, like, you know, I think people can find out what your greatest hits have been. How do you usually like to introduce yourself when, you know, you talk about, you summarize your career? How do you look at yourself?

**Bret Taylor** (2:49)
Yeah, it's a great question. You know, we, before we went on the mics here, we're talking about the audience for this podcast being more engineering. And I do think depending on the audience, I'll introduce myself differently because I've had a lot of corporate and board roles. I probably self identify as an engineer more than anything else, though. So even when I was co-CEO of Salesforce, I was coding on the weekends. So I think of myself as an engineer and then all the roles that I do in my career sort of start with that just because I do feel like engineering is sort of a mindset and how I approach most of my life. So I'm an engineer first, and that's how I describe myself.

**swyx** (3:26)
You majored in computer science like 1998

**Bret Taylor** (3:29)
I was in high school actually. My college degree was O2, undergrad, O3, masters. Not that old.

**swyx** (3:35)
Yeah, I was going like 1998 to 2003 But engineering wasn't a thing back then. We didn't have the title of senior engineer. It was just you were a programmer, you were a developer maybe. What was it like in Stanford? What was that feeling like?
Were you feeling on the cusp of a great computer revolution or was it just like a niche interest at the time?

**Bret Taylor** (3:58)
Well, I was Stanford as you said from 1998 to 2002 1998 was near the peak of the.com bubble. So this was back in the day where most people that they're coding in the computer lab just because there was these Sun Microsystems Unix boxes there that most of us had to do our assignments on. And every single day there was a.com like buying pizza for everybody.
I got free food like my first two years of university. And then the.com bubble burst in the middle of my college career. And so by the end, there was like tumbleweed going to the job fair. It was hard to describe unless you were there at the time. The level of hype and being a computer science major at Stanford was like a thousand opportunities. And then when I left, it was like Microsoft, IBM, and then the two startups that I applied to were VMware and Google. And I ended up going to Google in large part because a woman named Marissa Meyer, who had been a teaching assistant when I was what was called a section leader, which was like a junior teaching assistant kind of for one of the big intro CS classes. She had gone there and she was recruiting me and I knew her and it sort of felt safe. You know, like, I don't know, I thought about it much, but it turned out to be a real blessing. I realized like, you know, you always want to think you d pick Google if given the option, but no one knew at the time. And I wonder if I d graduate in like 1999, where I've been like, mom, I just got a job at pets.com.