Malte Ubl - Vercel

so now I join Vel and I can of see the this process actually being used and like you can't seriously work like [Music] this hello everyone welcome back to another episode of powod brought to you by no Ram today I'm joined by my CTO Pepe Martinez as well as the versel CTO Malta obla Malta really nice to meet you

glad to have on the show how you doing today I'm great thanks for having me really really excited and pepe thank you for joining as well thank you for having me for sure so yeah just to give a quick introduction of Malta he lead a development and delivery of the company's sweet tools and features prior to joining verel he was the principal engineer for Google search rendering an engineering director for Google's search on laptops tablets and desktop top Malta has also created the front-end infrastructure for a number of Google

web apps and web at large and is also the founder and curator of JS comyu so ton of stuff you've done really exciting background and yeah Pepe I'd love for you to get right into it I guess um to start off I have a question from a talk you gave actually 11 years ago where it was at a nexcom and you talked about how when you first started programming you got think C++ and and you just wanted to

build a Latin to German translator app but you described it as you know basically being given the raw Parts uh and a Welding Tool to a bicycle so I guess I wanted to ask you know things have changed a lot over the last 11 years um and I guess two main things one the easiness of deploying on brel nowadays uh and then even like let's say the AI package you guys came out with recently you know a young Monte could have built this uh in a weekend or two weekends you know Latin to German translating apps so how do you feel about when you first started to today how easy it is to maybe set something like this up yeah I'm probably going to

AG myself but it's it's a very long time since young Malta was like straight up in the middle of the 90s and it was such a different world right I think I had the internet probably just coming up to having the internet and and I was you know this is literally the first program I ever wrote in my life and you know C spot is not necessarily known as the best string manipulation language on the planet so I was struggling with every every single bit about it right and but this is an interesting question because I think if you I mean even yeah I guess

10 years ago there would have been better programming languages there had been like lots of research international language processing I would have been a much better programmer uh but it still would have been like somewhat difficult to actually deploy these ads if you had asked me maybe three years ago now you know platforms like weell on the market it's so easy to just get started do a quick weekend Sprint have something running no like this year especially for this particular problem space right like there's problem spaces that are like

basically the same way there are three years ago but like llms are really good at translations and especially you know with something as as formal as Latin where the input space is somewhat constrained you're really like no one writes any new Latin anymore it's technically you could have just like a database of all possible translations but like it's yeah the the solution space has like opened up right and and now you could specialize a know lrm and

and and and have it go yeah no it's crazy how I mean things have changed obviously a lot but I would agree like just this problem space in particular over the last year it's been it's been crazy I mean I don't even you don't even need that many prompts or anything like the prompt can be eight words translate this from Latin to German user input and uh yeah right and you because all the I mean this is again this a bit of a special case because all the literally every single Latin text ever is going to be in the model but then even if that's not the case um we have actually like just over like you know now we're