Eugene Cheah: Open-Source AI and the Future of Work - E686
episode
BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech: Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand & Malaysia Startups, Founders & Venture Capital VC (English)
52 min
1 speaker
6 chapters
transcribed 17 days ago
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What is Eugene Cheah’s background and how did he transition from UIlicious to AI research?
I look outside my window and I see someone. Stop AI, you are the devil. You are doing the end of the world. I was like, oh yeah, okay, I realize why. Because AI is very political with how open source AI is gaining momentum. Whether we like it or not, it will be developed. And the most common question is: how do I prevent my industries from being completely crushed? When we did the NATKIM math and the GPU required, we was like, you need an entire apartment. For energy, it consumed more energy than my office block to just click a button. But that technology I was working on, RWKV, as I made improvements in it within the open source community, we released RWKV47B. You're telling me this architecture that we were developing, and I was only using it for UI testing, has the potential to completely replace existing transform models like an LEV replacing a light bulb.
And all I I'm doing is UI testing. There will always be a very capitalistic argument that if you kept it close source.
You
could have gained a larger percentage of your user to pay you. But the counter-argument is that if you do well in open source, your pool of users will be even larger than your closed source. Everyone is extremely excited about AI. And what we have here is the potential replacement for it the next generation.
Welcome to Brave. Learn from Southeast Asia's best tech leaders. Build the future. Learn from our past and stay human in between. No BS on success. I'm Jeremy Al, Venture Capitalist, Sierra Founder, Harvard MBA, Science Fiction Nerd, and Dad of Two Daughters. Every week, we debate startup news, interview change makers, answer listener questions, and share personal insights. Join our movement of over 40,000 members and get transcripts, resources, and community at www.bravesdea.com. Command. Stay well and stay brave. Hey Eugene, welcome back. You were last year on episode 232 and now you know we're pretty much at the 700 mark. So good to see you. Yeah, good to see you again. So much has changed since we last talked.
The last time we talked, the pandemic is still in action. Now everybody's all walking around and handshaking. You also built a new company, which is why we're here to talk about the new company Featherless, which is so many questions I have. For those who don't know yet, could you introduce yourself?
I'm Eugene, CEO and co-founder of LS AI. I primarily work on next generation AI architecture that lowers inference costs by 1,000x. We also apply pieces of this technology to scale AI inference at a global scale. So we're talking about bringing 12,000 models online today with 10x global inference costs. And we are together with AMD and Hugging Face scaling this to all 2 million and 3 million AI models so that any AI models in open source on Huginface
Fantastic. So we won't go too much into your early background. If not, they can check out episode 232. And if not, they can always read it on the transcript and everything that's on the website. So what's interesting is that when we last talked, you were the co-founder for UIlicious. Correct. And UIlicious was a UI testing automation component to make that UI testing piece. So how do you get from UILicious to today building a new company at a high level?
So if you refer to the previous podcast, I think at the time we were interviewing about UI which's new AI features. And the thing is, originally when we started our main thesis was always about: hey, a lot of things about automated UI testing is rather simple, it's like checklist-driven. This could be fully automated from a scripting point of view and eventually from an AI to generate it. So from the get-go, we always had an interest in getting AI to automate. UI Destiny. One of the things that spurred this interest was that in university, I created a project called GP Dirty, which was a project to run JavaScript on the GPU. It somehow dragged me into the world of AI because when I did it, it was just for fun, but it turns out to be good for matrix multiplication.
And people were using it as the bedrock to run AI models in the browser.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is Eugene Cheah’s background and how did he transition from UIlicious to AI research?
0:00–10:07
2
How does the RWKV model differ from traditional Transformers and why is it important?
10:07–18:58
3
Why did Eugene spin out Featherless AI as a new company and what problem does it solve?
18:58–29:04
4
How did Eugene raise a $1 M seed round in San Francisco without a pitch deck?
29:04–38:18
5
What are the main arguments for open‑source AI versus closed‑source AI?
38:18–47:08
6
How is China’s open‑source AI strategy shaping the global AI race?
47:08–52:24
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech: Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand & Malaysia Startups, Founders & Venture Capital VC (English)
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