Building the AI Powered Internet: Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch

it's very hard to compete with open AI on putting out an better llm than gp4 yeah very expensive so what what's your Innovation opportunity velocity of integration of the API getting it out quickly iterate on it and then connect to the right back ends instead of kind of Reinventing the Wheel from scratch hello fellow dat my guest today is gyo gyo is the founder and CEO of versel a cloud platform for building and deploying web applications he's the creator of several major open source

projects including xjs and socket.io he's also a dual threat CEO he runs a solo VC called r capital uh GMA welcome to World of Das hey thanks for having me really excited now vercel is kind of at the Forefront of a bunch of major Trends in software development and programming right now like Edge Computing and serverless Computing where where do you think like the industry is going yeah there are a lot of Trends to sort of underpin uh a change in how we're building and deploying

applications and to me the thing that relates to kind of my personal history is we're switching toward a front and first way of building applications so I have a background as a frontend engineer uh I kind of grew up in the JavaScript World later the typescript world no JS a lot of projects that sort of had this dream of can we write things in one language and run them everywhere I

actually wrote a book uh many years ago called universal applications and kind of this idea of you can write code that gets deployed to the cloud to the edge to the client and you can have all these kind of potential touch points with the customer experience because it used to be there' be like a JavaScript kind of front-end thing with a front-end team and then there was like maybe the Java or you know guys on the back end or something like yeah maybe they wouldn't

even talk to one another another yeah what we had to do was like the Java team needed some templating language that was kind of AD hog and then there was a JavaScript engineer team and they had to like also figure out how to render that thing because what's happening over time is a lot of the value in new groundbreaking applications is in the user experience right like CBT comes out what is it it's

a great user experience to interface with an AI model that is actually just a small Twist on things that they had been trying in the past in the case of open AI right but like y they just nailed it with the user interface they nailed it with a product overnight you know tens of millions hundreds of millions of users funny enough chpt is built with our framework nextjs and they create

this awesome user experience that has captivated folks right like there had been other AI products dashboards things that they put out but this particular combination of an incredible revolutionary AI technology with the right user interface can scale and travel the world so quickly so what we did with this framework and the versell platform was what if your starting point in how you build and deploy software was the actual user interface the thing that

you're going to deliver and then you work backwards into the back end and what's really interesting is that this kind of revolution is in Ju supposition of another Revolution which has been the cloud in itself and the rise of the API economy right like a lot of the things that we used to build from scratch with that Java team we're just talking about have become off-the-shelf API Services yep and or some some sort of it could be an internal microserver or you know in many ways it's an external service like stripe or something correct so this