00:33:28 · Markie Wagner, Nikhyl Singhal
And I know so many people who work at SpaceX and Tesla and Microsoft and Google and from my hometown that they said they would have never done it if they had like taken those classes in high school. And so I get emails probably every week from different people who've gone through it, which is very special. My teachers do a great job of hyping up the work that I did so long ago, but they're the ones doing the day to day of it now. So I think they're the real heroes of this story. And then that program expanded across lots of adjacent schools or the district, parts of the county, etcetera. So, yeah, it was really special. And that's kind of what those articles are talking about that you mentioned. [00:34:07] S0: Yeah. Well, that's a great example of a good quest. I would ask all of our listeners to think about what are the good quests that perhaps are in your community or based on your superpowers. I think that's a little bit of what you noted and that you can really impact. And so we've kind of walked through this sort of grade school, middle school, high school, and each time the sort of blast radius of impact and opportunity has increased exponentially. I'm curious as to what college was like. And college is a pretty structured environment. Was going to a four year college and completing that quest, like always in the cards for you? I'm curious when you're a builder and such a powerful unstructured thinker, what does college mean to you when you're in a sophomore, junior year and thinking about applying?
00:34:53 · Markie Wagner
[00:34:53] S1: After I read all those books, it became very clear to me that a disproportionate amount of the institutions that really characterized the past couple of decades were built out of Silicon Valley and adjacent to Stanford, basically. So I remember telling my family, I'm only going to apply to Stanford or I'm not going to go to college or something to that effect from very early on. And so in high school, the main story is that of the STEM program, but kind of at the same time and in parallel, after mobile, I was always still keeping an eye out for the next kind of wave that would get me excited in the same way that I felt when I held that first iPhone. And about halfway through high school, I had that moment when I was playing around with a super simple kind of template classifier classifying cats from dogs. And for me, I couldn't imagine how that worked. I thought that was just the most amazing, cool thing, a Vagil, that you could just train this model and it could predict on images that I'd never even seen before these different animals. And so that was that same moment for me. I was totally hooked. It was magical. There was that quote, sufficiently advanced technologies indistinguishable from magic. And playing with the silly AI notebooks, that was that moment for me. And so I remember diving in over the weekend and I became very convinced that many of the most important institutions and milestones and moments of history that will happen during my lifetime would be AI related in some way or another or deeply connected to progression in AI. And so decided that I wanted to become world class and do whatever it took to become world class in AI. And I think a lot of the story of what the colleges look like for me were centered around that goal and getting there and what I had wished for. And when I got into Stanford, I was actually only there for about a year and a half or so until COVID happened. But it was just diving and taking all the AI classes. And when I was in school, kind of broadly, I was always working. I was at Google and I was a researcher, an engineer there and at Waymo doing research on campus. So all of my time was spent doing AI stuff, essentially.
00:37:03 · Nikhyl Singhal
[00:37:03] S0: Yeah. And so it sounds like, tell me if this is true, that you always had an inkling that you were going to found or you were going to create new institutions for lack of a better term. And you were also equipping yourself with those kind of concepts. So you equipped yourself with this education, your focus on AI, these internships that you did, but you always had this sort of through line of AI. And then maybe tell us a little bit about Delphi Labs and then what happened and how founding worked with you as both a consultant and an advisor. I just think that it's so obvious from your story you were going to found in some way or associate yourself with founders. How did that all unfold?
00:37:51 · Markie Wagner
[00:37:51] S1: Yeah. So Delphi is a very fun story. I was always working while I was in school, pretty much. From kind of the early days of freshman year, I had gotten to know a lot of founders because I loved startups and IBM companies. And I think that the early days are some of the most interesting fun stories in the world. And so I got to know a lot of founders, seed, series A, series B, series C founders who would really struggle to stand up AI teams for the first time and kind of build any early AI product, often external AI products. So someone come to me and say, hey, we're looking at this $250,000 ARR contract. And to close it, this VP or this buyer really wants recommendations or they really want some kind of like little feature that they requested that somehow involved AI. And they said, frankly, like, I have no idea how to do that. Nobody else on the team does. Could you come and help us figure out how to get that going quickly and also just to make it a competency in house? Because I have been doing AI stuff kind of throughout high school. I started doing that early freshman year and a lot of those pilots and early MEP's went well and ended up providing a lot of value to the customers, to the folks that I would work with. And yeah, I mean, really appreciate a lot of the founders took a bet on me even though I was disproportionately young. They let me go deep into the systems and stand up stuff in prod all the time. So I started doing that at an increasingly high cadence with increasingly large companies. And by the time that I had dropped out of Stanford, I was helping public companies, folks that were about to go public as they set up AI teams for the first time and built out their whole AI orgs, which is really fun. I had been, even the Google and my work bled into like time when I was in school. So there was never really school time and then time for building within the context of companies within Delphi. It was very much all happening at the same time. And so Delphi kind of exploded during the pandemic and during the time where Stanford went online. And so I knew that these were opportunities and products that wouldn't wait for me to go and finish up school. And frankly, I had blasted through a lot of the AI classes that I wanted to take at Stanford. And so it just made sense to make the leap. There's a lot of people working on Delphi too.
00:40:04 · Markie Wagner, Nikhyl Singhal
Expanded. And I went from like fake doing classes to just not doing classes. But my days were still eighteen hours. So it was all the same anyways. And it was just very intense and really special. I think some of my favorite times of my life have been working with the team at Delphi on their very intense sprints. But that was the natural thing to do. It was kind of not really a question when it happened. [00:40:27] S0: Yeah, I'm curious, because AI is the hottest of all hot words that we ever see today. I think everyone, every company, or even my dad asked me like, hey, how do I get into this AI thing? He's in his 80s. And so I remember that happening when web programming was big, mobile programming was big. So we're clearly seeing another wave. You are maybe one of the most serious and seasoned executives from AI, and you've been with it from the beginning of this sort of current wave. And I'm curious just sort of maybe an open question around what's your current take? There's always a hype that may be bigger than the reality, but I'm curious as to... Is AI as transformative as we talk about in the media, and are you as excited about what the next ten years looks like for changes in transforming society with AI?
00:41:24 · Markie Wagner, Nikhyl Singhal
[00:41:24] S1: I am. And so I've obviously been around in AI since even during eras where not much happened. But I do think that large language models in the advent of these large language models and these capabilities that come with having scaled these foundation models to massive scales, it's one of the most important things that has happened in tech since the iPhone, I think. I think it's actually important. I think that while there's a lot of chatter about it and ChatGPT obviously made a massive splash, that doesn't mean, oh, there's so much hype. There must be nothing there. It's like, there's a lot of hype and there is something there. And people might dream beyond its capabilities, but something very important has happened before these language models and after in terms of the capabilities of what people can do. [00:42:08] S0: I'd be curious as to, from your honest opinion, from being in the trenches, what are things that we may think is magic today, like how, say, maps worked back in the day where you had a book that you would look up for an address, and now how everyone assumes you can get there, you don't even give directions. What's like magic today but assuming as standard routine tomorrow? I'm curious as to where is AI going to impact our world and our society?