Why engineering leadership matters more than ever | Manoj Mohan

**Andrew Zigler** (0:06)
Welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Andrew Zigler.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (0:10)
And I'm your host, Ben Lloyd Pearson.

**Andrew Zigler** (0:12)
This week, I'm sitting down with the season executive, Manoj Mohan, to discuss why AI should be viewed as an intern rather than a replacement for engineers. He shares his optimistic view of this new industrial revolution and breaks down his framework for deploying responsible AI at scale.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (0:28)
First, we have some great news stories to cover today, starting with federal AI regulations, AI agents at the Linux Foundation, why scale is all you need is dead, and why whimsical tool names confuse everyone. Andrew, let's just start at the top with these new AI regulations.

**Andrew Zigler** (0:45)
Yeah. So the United States president signed an executive order establishing a single national regulatory framework for artificial intelligence. The goal of this is to override state level regulations that can cause patchwork interruptions for companies that are expanding their AI domain into those areas.
We're talking about creating an AI litigation task force to challenge state AI laws that go in against this executive order and doing so by withholding billions of dollars in broadband program funding. Of course, this type of broad action would require legislative action, but this is the work of many large tech companies as well to ensure that their road to an AI rollout is smooth and paved and not going to be stopped at every state along the way in terms of legislations and rollout confusion. This is a really interesting order from the White House in regards to how the power makers that may be are shaping AI legislation within our country and enabling all of us to work with this tool. But Ben, what do you think about this type of broad sweeping executive order?

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (1:51)
Yeah. Well, I've been expecting something like this to come along for a while now.
We're kind of in a wild west phase with AI right now. That reminds me a lot of the early days of the web. Over time, the web consolidated around centralized providers and had more regulatory frameworks that were implemented on it. So I think it's totally reasonable to expect that AI will go through a similar process. But I also think that it makes a lot of sense to regulate this at the national level rather than having a patchwork of state laws. If you think about it, AI is trained on data that is created by people all over the world. The engineers who build AI tools live all over the world. The data centers that train the models and provide them as a service are also located all over the world. So when you're in this world where all the aspects of what goes into providing AI as a product or a platform is distributed across many geographies, it makes perfect sense that the federal government would regulate it under something like the Interstate Commerce Clause. But with that said, it seems like so far the approach of the executive branch has been of the US federal government is to lessen restrictions on AI rather than actually creating some sort of regulatory framework. I'm kind of personally not really a big fan of this, like calling the global competition some sort of race to something, because a race implies that there's some sort of end state that we're trying to reach for, like getting to the moon first, for example. And I don't really think that's like how AI is developing. It's more like an ongoing progression that continuously improves at an incremental rate, and it just gets better and better and more robust. And my opinion is that we should really be more focused on raising the tide, so that all boats are lifted. That would be things like publicly available training sets, like what if everyone in the world could build powerful AI models, rather than being forced to have centralized providers, because they're the only ones that have access to the data that makes it possible. And I know we have lots of non-American listeners out there, but I think it's really important to cover, because a lot of the legal frameworks that get established for things like technology in the US often get adopted in parts of the other world too. And it's kind of challenging to cover American politics right now, because things change so dramatically week to week. But this is certainly something that we'll be keeping our eyes on as it develops, because AI regulation will impact everyone that uses it, including software engineering teams.

**Andrew Zigler** (4:21)
Indeed.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (4:22)
All right, so let's talk about what's happening over the Linux Foundation, Andrew.