In episode 118 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Andrew Lee.
Andrew is co-founder and CEO of Shortwave, a company dedicated to building a better product experience for email, particularly by leveraging AI. He previously co-founded and was CTO at Firebase.
Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here or reach Daniel at editor@thegradient.pub
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Outline:
(00:00) Intro
(01:43) Andrew’s previous work, Firebase
(04:48) Benefits of lacking experience in building Firebase
(08:55) On “abstract reasoning” vs empirical capabilities
(10:30) Shortwave’s AI system as a black box
(11:55) Motivations for Shortwave
(17:10) Why is Google not innovating on email?
(21:53) Shortwave’s overarching product vision and pivots
(27:40) Shortwave AI features
(33:20) AI features for email and security concerns
(35:45) Shortwave’s AI Email Assistant + architecture
(43:40) Issues with chaining LLM calls together
(45:25) Understanding implicit context in utterances, modularization without loss of context
(48:56) Performance for AI assistant, batching and pipelining
(55:10) Prompt length
(57:00) On shipping fast
(1:00:15) AI improvements that Andrew is following
(1:03:10) Outro
Links:
Andrew Lee: How AI will Shape the Future of Email