Latent Space
Deep technical AI engineering content. The go-to podcast for AI builders.
187 episodes curated
Episodes
⚡️The Rise and Fall of the Vector DB Category
Note from your hosts: we were off this week for ICLR and RSA! This week we’re bringing you one of the top episodes from our lightning podcast series, the shorter format, Youtube-only side podcast we do for breaking news and faster turnaround. Please support our work on YouTube! https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWEAb1SXhjlc5qgVK4NgehdCzMYCwZtiB The explosion of embedding-based applications created a new challenge: efficiently storing, indexing, and searching these high-dimensional vectors at scale. This gap gave rise to the vector database category, with companies like Pinecone leading th
⚡️GPT 4.1: The New OpenAI Workhorse
We’ll keep this brief because we’re on a tight turnaround: GPT 4.1 , previously known as the Quasar and Optimus models , is now live as the natural update for 4o/4o-mini (and the research preview of GPT 4.5). Though it is a general purpose model family, the headline features are: Coding abilities (o1-level SWEBench and SWELancer, but ok Aider) Instruction Following (with a very notable prompting guide) Long Context up to 1m tokens (with new MRCR and Graphwalk benchmarks) Vision (simply o1 level) Cheaper Pricing (cheaper than 4o, greatly improved prompt caching savings) We caught up with return
SF Compute: Commoditizing Compute to solve the GPU Bubble forever
We are calling for the world’s best AI Engineer talks for AI Architects, /r/localLlama, Model Context Protocol (MCP), GraphRAG, AI in Action, Evals, Agent Reliability, Reasoning and RL, Retrieval/Search/RecSys , Security, Infrastructure, Generative Media, AI Design & Novel AI UX, AI Product Management, Autonomy, Robotics, and Embodied Agents, Computer-Using Agents (CUA), SWE Agents, Vibe Coding, Voice, Sales/Support Agents at AIEWF 2025 ! Fill out the 2025 State of AI Eng survey for $250 in Amazon cards and see you from Jun 3-5 in SF! Coreweave’s now-successful IPO has led to a lot of question
The Creators of Model Context Protocol
We are happy to announce that there will be a dedicated MCP track at the 2025 AI Engineer World's Fair , taking place Jun 3rd to 5th in San Francisco , where the MCP core team and major contributors and builders will be meeting. Join us and apply to speak or sponsor ! When we first wrote Why MCP Won , we had no idea how quickly it was about to win. In the past 4 weeks, OpenAI and now Google have now announced the MCP support, effectively confirming our prediction that MCP was the presumptive winner of the agent standard wars. MCP has now overtaken OpenAPI , the incumbent option and most direct
Unsupervised Learning x Latent Space Crossover Special
If you’re in SF: Join us for the Claude Plays Pokemon hackathon this Sunday! If you’re not: Fill out the 2025 State of AI Eng survey for $250 in Amazon cards! Unsupervised Learning is a podcast that interviews the sharpest minds in AI about what’s real today, what will be real in the future and what it means for businesses and the world - helping builders, researchers and founders deconstruct and understand the biggest breakthroughs. Top guests: Noam Shazeer, Bob McGrew, Noam Brown, Dylan Patel, Percy Liang, David Luan Full Episode on Their YouTube Timestamps * 00:00 Introduction and Excitemen
The Agent Network — Dharmesh Shah
If you’re in SF: Join us for the Claude Plays Pokemon hackathon this Sunday! If you’re not: Fill out the 2025 State of AI Eng survey for $250 in Amazon cards! For this episode: Thanks to Matija and Dan and Meng Shao for sharing on socials. We are SO excited to share our conversation with Dharmesh Shah , co-founder of HubSpot and creator of Agent.ai . A particularly compelling concept we discussed is the idea of " hybrid teams " - the next evolution in workplace organization where human workers collaborate with AI agents as team members. Just as we previously saw hybrid teams emerge in terms of
Building Snipd: The AI Podcast App for Learning
We are working with Amplify on the 2025 State of AI Engineering Survey to be presented at the AIE World’s Fair in SF ! Join the survey to shape the future of AI Eng! We first met Snipd ( affiliate link! we get a free month, you get a free month. but this is not a sponsored pod, we’ve never done one ) over a year ago, and were immediately impressed by the design, but were doubtful about the behavior of snipping as the title behavior: Podcast apps are enormously sticky - Spotify spent almost $1b in podcast acquisitions and exclusive content just to get an 8% bump in market share among normies. H
⚡️The new OpenAI Agents Platform
While everyone is now repeating that 2025 is the “Year of the Agent”, OpenAI is heads down building towards it. In the first 2 months of the year they released Operator and Deep Research (arguably the most successful agent archetype so far), and today they are bringing a lot of those capabilities to the API: * Responses API * Web Search Tool * Computer Use Tool * File Search Tool * A new open source Agents SDK with integrated Observability Tools We cover all this and more in today’s lightning pod on YouTube ! More details here: Responses API In our Michelle Pokrass episode we talked about the
⚡️How Claude 3.7 Plays Pokémon
Special lightning pod with David Hershey from Anthropic, the person behind Claude Plays Pokémon. Sonnet 3.7 is currently trying to complete Pokémon Red live on Twitch thanks to a special harness that David built so that it can see the screen, navigate through it, remember facts about the game, and more. (Since recording, it has successfully escaped Mt Moon! You can follow along on Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/claudeplayspokemon) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.latent.space/subscribe
Open Operator, Serverless Browsers and the Future of Computer-Using Agents
Today's episode is with Paul Klein, founder of Browserbase. We talked about building browser infrastructure for AI agents, the future of agent authentication, and their open source framework Stagehand. * [00:00:00] Introductions * [00:04:46] AI-specific challenges in browser infrastructure * [00:07:05] Multimodality in AI-Powered Browsing * [00:12:26] Running headless browsers at scale * [00:18:46] Geolocation when proxying * [00:21:25] CAPTCHAs and Agent Auth * [00:28:21] Building “User take over” functionality * [00:33:43] Stagehand: AI web browsing framework * [00:38:58] OpenAI's Operator a
The Inventors of Deep Research
While “LLM-powered Search” is as old as Perplexity and SearchGPT, and open source projects like GPTResearcher and clones like OpenDeepResearch exist, the difference with “Deep Research” products is they are both “ agentic ” (loosely meaning that an LLM decides the next step in a workflow, usually involving tools) and bundling custom-tuned frontier models (custom tuned o3 and Gemini 1.5 Flash). The reception to OpenAI’s Deep Research agent has been nothing short of breathless: "Deep Research is the best public-facing AI product Google has ever released . It's like having a college-educated rese
Bee AI: The Wearable Ambient Agent
Bundle tickets for AIE Summit NYC have now sold out. You can now sign up for the livestream — where we will be making a big announcement soon. NYC-based readers and Summit attendees should check out the meetups happening around the Summit . 2024 was a very challenging year for AI Hardware. After the buzz of CES last January, 2024 was marked by the meteoric rise and even harder fall of AI Wearables companies like Rabbit and Humane, with an assist from a pre-wallpaper-app MKBHD. Even Friend.com , the first to launch in the AI pendant category, and which spurred Rewind AI to rebrand to Limitless
The AI Architect — Bret Taylor
If you’re in SF, join us tomorrow for a fun meetup at CodeGen Night ! If you’re in NYC, join us for AI Engineer Summit ! The Agent Engineering track is now sold out, but 25 tickets remain for AI Leadership and 5 tickets for the workshops . You can see the full schedule of speakers and workshops at https://ai.engineer ! It’s exceedingly hard to introduce someone like Bret Taylor . We could recite his Wikipedia page, or his extensive work history through Silicon Valley’s greatest companies, but everyone else already does that. As a podcast by AI engineers for AI engineers, we had the opportunity
Agent Engineering with Pydantic + Graphs — with Samuel Colvin
Did you know that adding a simple Code Interpreter took o3 from 9.2% to 32% on FrontierMath ? The Latent Space crew is hosting a hack night Feb 11th in San Francisco focused on CodeGen use cases, co-hosted with E2B and Edge AGI ; watch E2B’s new workshop and RSVP here! We’re happy to announce that today’s guest Samuel Colvin will be teaching his very first Pydantic AI workshop at the newly announced AI Engineer NYC Workshops day on Feb 22! 25 tickets left . If you’re a Python developer, it’s very likely that you’ve heard of Pydantic . Every month, it’s downloaded >300,000,000 times, making it
The Agent Reasoning Interface: o1/o3, Claude 3, ChatGPT Canvas, Tasks, and Operator — with Karina Nguyen of OpenAI
Sponsorships and tickets for the AI Engineer Summit are selling fast ! See the new website with speakers and schedules live! If you are building AI agents or leading teams of AI Engineers , this will be the single highest-signal conference of the year for you, this Feb 20-22nd in NYC. We’re pleased to share that Karina will be presenting OpenAI’s closing keynote at the AI Engineer Summit. We were fortunate to get some time with her today to introduce some of her work, and hope this serves as nice background for her talk! There are very few early AI careers that have been as impactful as Karina