Andrew Lee: How AI will Shape the Future of Email

In episode 118 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir (twitter.com/spaniel_bashir) speaks to Andrew Lee (twitter.com/startupandrew).
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 (forms.gle/YNKGko9LCGNp1rhU7) 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 (startupandrew.com/about) and Twitter (twitter.com/startupandrew?lang=en)
* Shortwave (shortwave.com)
* Introducing Ghostwriter (shortwave.com/blog/introducing-ghostwriter-ai-…)
* Everything we shipped for AI Launch Week (shortwave.com/blog/everything-we-shipped-for-a…)
* A deep dive into the world’s smartest email AI (shortwave.com/blog/deep-dive-into-worlds-smart…)

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