The Future of AI: Personal Agents, Taste & Private Data | Lin Qiao & Demi Guo | E9
About this episode
The episode features Lin Qiao and Demi Guo discussing the future of AI, focusing on personal agents and the importance of private data.
This week we sit down with Lin Qiao and Demi Guo on This Week in AI Episode 9. Lin is the co-founder and CEO of Fireworks AI, a frontier inference platform processing tens of trillions of tokens per day, built by seven ex-Meta engineers who created PyTorch. Demi is the co-founder and CEO of Pika, building humanized AI agents for creative work, agents you interact with like a person, not a prompt box. This Week In AI is made possible by: PayPalOpen - One Platform for all Business: https://paypalopen.com/ Timestamps: 00:00 Welcome & intro to Lin Qiao and Demi Guo 02:38 Lin's journey from Meta to Fireworks AI 05:13 Building PyTorch and bootstrapping AI infrastructure 06:58 Who Fireworks competes with and why enterprises need it 08:43 Activating the 95% of private data locked in enterprises 11:31 Demi's journey building Pika and the pivot to humanized agents 16:03 The best interface for creation is a human-like agent 16:42 The AI layoff trap — a prisoner's dilemma for firms 19:00 Cambrian explosion of startups and the hobbyist-to-inventor pipeline 22:07 Flattening organizations and the death of middle management 28:03 Taste, judgment, and why "slop" is the real risk…
People in this episode
Host: Jason Calacanis
Guests: Lin Qiao, Demi Guo
Topics covered
- AI personal agents
- data privacy
- humanized AI
- enterprise AI
- startup culture
- AI infrastructure
Sponsors
PayPalOpen
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Fireworks AI, Pika, Meta
Products: PyTorch
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