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’s blog and Twitter

• Shortwave

• Introducing Ghostwriter

• Everything we shipped for AI Launch Week

• A deep dive into the world’s smartest email AI

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