Launching AI products with Braintrust’s CEO Ankur Goyal

Today on No Priors, Elad is joined by Ankur Goyal, founder and CEO of Braintrust. Braintrust enables companies like Notion, Airtable, Instacart, Zapier, and Vercel to deploy AI solutions at scale by efficiently evaluating and managing complex, non-deterministic AI applications. Ankur shares his insights into emerging trends in the use of AI tooling and coding languages, the rise of open-source, and the future of data infrastructure. Ankur also reflects on building resilient AI products, his philosophy on coding as a CEO, and the importance of a startup’s initial customer base. 

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Show Notes: 

(0:00) Introduction

(0:38) Ankur’s path to Braintrust

(3:05) Braintrust’s solution

(5:46) AI tooling trends 

(7:58) Instruction tuning vs. fine-tuning

(8:57) Open-source AI adoption 

(10:42) Future of data infrastructure and synthetic data

(14:45) Designing technical interviews

(18:04) Rethinking agent-based approaches

(19:34) Building out an AI team

(23:35) Typescript as the language of AI

(25:12) The shift away from using frameworks

(26:02) Vendor consolidation among enterprises 

(27:16) Coding as a CEO 

(30:16) Collaborating with customers

(33:00) Future of Braintrust and evals