The Winds of AI Winter (Q2 Four Wars Recap) + ChatGPT Voice Mode Preview

**Charlie** (1:08)
Welcome back, listeners. This is your AI co-host, Charlie. It's been a few months since we took a step back from the interview format and talked about the show. We're happy to share that we have crossed one million downloads and two million reads on Substack. Woohoo. We are really grateful to those of you who keep tuning in and sharing us with your friends, especially if who watch and comment on our new YouTube channel where we are trying to grow next. For a special millionaire edition, Swyx and alessio are finally back in person in sunny Singapore to discuss the big Vibe Shift in the last three months that we are calling The Winds of AI Winter. We also discuss my nemesis, ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode, with a special treat for those who stay till the end. Now, more than ever, watch out and take care.

**Alessio** (2:01)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is alessio, Partner, and CTO in residence and Decibel Partners. And today we're in the Singapore studio with Swyx.

**Swyx** (2:11)
Hey, this is our long-awaited one-on-one episode. I don't know how long ago the previous one was. Do you remember? Three, four months?

**Alessio** (2:20)
Yeah, it's been a while.

**Swyx** (2:21)
A minute. People really enjoyed it. It's just really odd. I think our travel schedules have been really difficult to get this stuff together. And then we also had like a decent backlog of guests for a while. I think we've kind of depleted that backlog now and we need to build it up again. But it's been busy and there's been a lot of news. So we actually get to do this sort of rapid fire thing. I think some people, you know, the podcast has grown a lot in the last six months. Maybe just reintroducing like what you're up to, what I'm up to and why we're here in Singapore and stuff like that.

**Alessio** (2:51)
Yeah, my first time here in Singapore, which has been really nice. This country is really amazing. I would say, first of all, everything feels like the busiest part of the city. Everything is skyscrapers. There's like plants and all the buildings, or at least in the areas that have been in, which has been awesome. And I was at one of the offices, kind of on the south side and from the 30th floor, you can see indonesia on one side and you can see Malaysia on the other side. So it's quite small. One of the people there said their kid goes to school at the border with Malaysia, basically, so they could try to Malaysia every day. So they go pick her up from school. Yeah, and we came here, we hosted with you, the Sovereign AI Summit, wednesday night. We had a lot of...

**Swyx** (3:30)
NVIDIA, Goldman, Temasek, Singtel.

**Alessio** (3:34)
And we're going to talk about this trend of Sovereign AI, which maybe we might cover on another episode. But basically, how do you drive, if you're a country, how do you drive productivity growth in a time where populations are shrinking, the workforce is shrinking, and AI can kind of supplement a lot of this. And then the question is, okay, should I put all this money in foundation models? Should I put it in data centers and infrastructure? Should I put it in GPUs? Should I put it in agents and whatnot? So we'll touch on some of these trends in the episode. But it was a fun event. And I did not expect some of the most senior people at the largest financial institution in Singapore ask about state space models and some of the alternatives. So it's great to see how advanced the conversation is sometimes.

**Swyx** (4:15)
Yeah, I think that that is mostly people trying to listen to jargon that is being floated around as like, what could kill Transformers? And then they jump straight there without actually exploring the fundamentals, the basics of what they will actually put to work. That's fine. It's a forum to ask questions. So you want to ask about the future. But I feel like it's not very practical to spend so much time on those things. You know, part of the things that I do in lanespace, especially when I travel, is to try to ask questions about what countries that are not the US and not San Francisco can do because everyone feels a bit left out. You feel it here as well. And I'm trying to promote alternatives. I think AI engineering is one way that countries can capitalize on the industry without building a $100 billion cluster, which is one-fifth GDP of Singapore.
And so, you know, my pitch at the summit was that we would sample with the AI engineer nation. We're also working on bringing the AI engineer conference to Singapore next year together with ICLR. So, yeah, we're just trying my best. And, you know, I'm being looped into various government meetings to try to make that happen.