Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
Al Engineering 101 with Chip Huyen (Nvidia, Stanford, Netflix)
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On Russian, they got asked a lot and a lot is how do we keep up to date with the latest AI news? Why do you have to keep up to date with the latest AI news? If you talk to the users, you understand what they want because they don't want looking to sit back, then you can actually improve the application way, way, way more. A lot of companies are building AI products. A lot of companies are not having a good time building AI products. We are in an ideal crisis. Now, we have all this really cool tools you have to do everything from scratch. And have your desire, it can have your right code, you have your website. So in theory, you should see a lot more. But the same time, it will somehow stop. They don't know what to do. All is AI hype, the data is actually showing most companies try it, doesn't do a lot, they stop. What do you think is the gap here? It's really hard to measure productivity. So I do ask people to ask their managers, "Would you rather have to get everyone on the team very expensive, calling Asians subscriptions?" Or, "You get an extra headcount?" Almost everyone, the managers would say headcount. But in the US VP level, or someone who managed a lot of teams, they would say it's one AI assistant. Because as managers, you are still growing. So for you, having one HR headcount is big. Whereas for executive, maybe you have more business metrics that you care about. So you actually think about what actually drive productivity metrics for you. Today, my guest is Chip Huan. Unlike a lot of people who share insights into building great AI products and where things are heading, Chip has built multiple successful AI products, platforms, tools. Chip was a core developer on NVIDIA's Nemo platform. An AI researcher at Netflix, she taught machine learning at Stanford, she's also a two-time founder, and the author of two of the most popular books in the world of AI. Including her most recent book called AI Engineering, which has been the most read book on the O'Reilly platform since its launch. She's also gotten to work with a lot of enterprises on their AI strategies. And so she gets to see what's actually happening on the ground inside a lot of different companies. In her conversation, Chip explains a lot of the basics. Like, what exactly does pre-training and post-training look like? What is RAG? What is reinforcement learning? What is RLHF? We also get into everything she's learned about how to build great AI products, including what people think it takes and what it actually takes. We talk about the most common pitfalls that companies run into, where she's seeing the most productivity gains, and so much more. This episode is quite technical,
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