Unlocking the Power of AI with Vercel SDK ft Nico Albanese

all right so in this video we're talking about AI specifically the verel AI SDK the version 4.0 is released and there are ton of cool new features added every day I'm joined by Nico from the AIS SDK team so niik thank you for joining me on this session happy to be here awesome so we want to cover some basics for to just create some common grounds of you different terms that you would hear in di world and different models you use prompting and whatnot then we'll jump into the aisk give some examples of

creating a chatbot really quickly but then extend it with tools which is really interesting the new schemas and the new functionality that uh folks have added to the AIS SDK here makes it really easy to just take a simple AI chatbot way further if we have time we may also look into PDF support at least we would mention it or maybe we follow this up with the second series so there's a lot to cover but before we jump into the AI and the SDK and all

that Nico why don't you tell us a bit about yourself what you do now and how you got into this world of AI what are you working on day today and then we'll just jump into your uh thing absolutely well again thanks thanks for having me here so my name's Nico you can find me on Twitter or X or blue sky or any of these places at Niko Alban 10 and I have been at forel for uh a little under a year now working on the AIS SDK and before before that I had kind of

a nontraditional entry to to this space I actually went to I grew up wanting to be a professional football player I'm from London I'm from the UK I wanted to be a professional football player hurt myself which at the time was not great but was the greatest thing that has in retrospect ever happened to me um ended up going off to school to to study business and went into venture capital of all things worked at an early stage preed fund investing in really exciting

businesses at the intersection of tech and and creativity but funny enough I've I've been programming ever since I was a kid I really have loved apple and and and in particular quite an apple Fanboy and I remember like many the the really incredible moment when the iPhone was first announced and I I wanted one more than anything but I knew that I was never going to be able to afford one thankfully I had access to a Mac and I found out about the developer tools and in particular the simulator so you could have this iPhone on your computer and

and so I downloaded the whole SDK and and that kind of led to okay I've got this working simulator on my computer but it's got no apps on it and that introduced me to xcode and and building apps uh from a from a pretty young age I think I was eight or nine at the time and uh learned just by like YouTube tutorials and going through documentation a little bit of objective c started just making ideas that I had

from school projects all the way through to little games and even went through deploying and and getting things on the App Store and so from I guess that early age I I had almost no barrier in terms of oh I've got an idea let me make an app on my computer for it and put it up on the App Store and apple manages all of the distribution and and all that kind of stuff anyway this was all the preamble to saying that at my last job I started seeing issues that were frustrating in terms of our daily

process of managing the fund and I started having ideas of how we could build manyi apps to be able to scale and automate these things and so that led me to building a few little websites um here in there and I actually discovered nextjs in that time that was probably five or six years ago started building some little nextjs applications to automate how we were reviewing inbound deal flow and and automate how we were communicating with investors and that kind of thing and this just led me to building a lot going from this idea of