Malte Ubl (CTO, Vercel) — The AI Explosion: Building and Growing Your AI Application #TOA23

foreign thanks for having me my name is Malta I'm the CTO first cell the front and cloud provider and the Creator and maintainers of next year is the most popular react framework I'm originally from Germany I don't live there anymore I live in California for many years but it's always amazing to be back uh I've also been a web developer for 25 years and I've been kind of been part of kind of pushing the web forward and redefining web development and with that I think it's safe to say that we're kind of in a

middle of a transformation where the web will be different in the next 10 years in a way that we haven't seen before and in fact that's kind of in the middle of economic turbulence but web development and we fortunately see this in our business is thriving we're pushing the web forward and unprecedented speeds in fact the fastest ever growing app is a web app um this is chat gbt and it happened on your laptop this is really interesting

right like in this like mobile dominated world the value of this app was so amazing the just growth from people using it on their desktop computer led to something that is absolutely unprecedented um you know and that kind of shows also that we're in a new era of of application development where we don't pick a paradigm like mobile development but people kind of just go where they want to be right um I think many of us have witnesses like I'm seeing chat gbt use it for sale every day we use it for stuff like

making marketing copy but even more interesting like I have these like super experience super high powered engineers and they use chat gbt to be more creative about finding solutions to problems so with that you know we have this like new environment there's a better time to build with an incredible opportunity ahead of us in fact the only way how I can like personally describe what's currently happening on our platform is is this complete Cambrian explosion of creativity for something very much new

is happening and I think it's really interesting to take a look as to why but some data here so this is the API calls from Versailles platforms to open AIS apis right um it basically was nothing just a few months ago and I exploded 5000 acts in just two months and now it's one of the you know most popular API backends and our pretty much in a very skilled um you know platform so the question is why is this happening right why are we seeing this Cambrian

exposure as mentioned in the intro before joining resell I was at Google for almost 12 years right and I actually personally I was building AI applications right like this was happening in fact thinking back to 2019 at Google I O Sunda pichai on stage the Google CEO was saying we're now an AI first company right but I don't think that many of you like it doesn't change anyone's life in any particular way right so so what changed like what is different now

take a look at you know what actually changed so even just a year ago if you wanted to build an AI application you needed a bunch of phds right the AI Community was this tight-knit research-centered community of experts who are building stuff there were like hundreds of them or like maybe thousands right but like something like that right like a you know just a bunch of people working on this where they were all experts fast forward to today open AI introduce AI apis so when I

asked the audience who here has either used an API or worked on a project that's used in API yeah it's everyone right like every single person that's how you build modern apis right and now there's Ai apis and that means that every software engineer can be um an application developer for AI applications right the barrier went down to basically nothing and that's why we're seeing this Cambridge explosion because the the pool of people who can build AI application is now every uh