Transcript
A (0:00)
Foreign. Hello, welcome to the Nvidia AI Podcast. I'm your host, Noah Kravitz. Before we begin, a quick reminder. If you're enjoying the podcast, take a second to follow us wherever you get your podcasts. It helps us out and it helps you out by making sure you never miss an episode that just show up in your feedback. My guest today is Shanaya Levin. Shanaya is the co founder and CEO of Impromptu AI. They're focused on helping non technical folks create AI products, which is, as Sinead and I were just saying before we hit record, it's where a lot of focus is these days. So this is going to be a great conversation and let's get into it. Shanaya, thank you for joining the podcast. So happy to have you.
B (0:50)
Thank you so much for having me. It's been such an honor.
A (0:52)
So let's start with a little bit about your background, if you don't mind. And then getting into, you know, what inspired you to, to co found and build Impromptu and tell us what it's all about.
B (1:02)
Absolutely. So background is I studied business and computer science and then I spent some time at Google working on developer tools for Google Home and Android, helping, you know, build Android applications for millions of developers all over the world. And then I spent some time at ebay working on both ads and more traditional machine learning, which was super fun. And then I got tired of just working at big companies so I was like, I'm going to try this startup thing. And I then went on to Cloudflare and then I was senior director product at Docker and then I was head of product at a series C company, startup company. And then I decided to go out on my own. I built a company called Code C which was helping developers to master the understanding of their code bases, which back in 2019 was revolutionary.
A (1:59)
It's like the BT before transformer era or something, I don't know if we.
B (2:03)
Can call it exactly. I've been doing this a really long time, helping people to understand their code. And we built something called Code cai which basically allowed you to chat with your code base. So I was in the GPT2 beta way early in the process and so we were building this generative system back then and then Coty got acquired and I decided to take some time off and travel around the world.
A (2:28)
Fantastic.
B (2:29)
I ended up really starting off building just a very simple app with Lovable. Tried to do that. And of course being the technical person that I am, I really broke it. I just full, full on broke it. And then I Put a pause on that. I ended up taking a role for a short amount of time at a subsidiary of Fox Sports to help them with their AI. And right around the same time, I ended up meeting Sean, Dr. Sean Robinson, who is my co founder. And I ended up. He ended up saying, I invented this thing to get up to 98% accurate outputs out of AI. And I looked at him and I said, what? Wait, what? Like, you can get, like, can we bottle this immediately? Like, what is going on? And so I was like, I needed that. In a number of places. At Cozy, it's really hard to get code, like, right. Really hard to get AI outputs to be accurate. And that is the next frontier. And so we decided to really team up and build impromptu together. He is a computational physicist and a researcher, and we're always inventing new things. And it's been really one of the highlights of my entire life to be able to build this company for people.
