Speak's Andrew Hsu on the CTO's Role in AI Tooling Adoption

The Latent Space podcast had an excellent interview with Andrew Hsu, cofounder and CTO at AI-generation language learning platform Speak. While the main conversation centered around Speak’s story and AI’s role in that story, I was most struck by a side exchange where Hsu explained what he sees his role to be, as CTO, around promoting the use of AI tooling within Speak’s engineering team:

So I think as the CTO, I view it as part of my responsibility to really set expectations, push everyone on the team, show them what’s possible. We’ve been trying everything. And I think we tried to basically set the expectation that the frontier is moving so fast, it’s deeply non-intuitive.

If you’ve tried coding tools six months ago and they weren’t that great, especially if it’s not TypeScript or Python, right? It’s a mode collapse to the most popular languages. That’s all it is. We try to set a culture in the engineering team where usage of these tools as much as possible and as a default path is the expectation.

And in hiring, we are now explicitly asking about this a lot, thinking about what are the types of people that are going to be better, higher agency at trying these types of tools. It’s so important.

This! This is what my life is evolving towards these days as a fractional CTO. More accurately—applying AI in engineering is maybe 50% of my focus. The other is with the CEO and the leadership team, setting the same expectations and approach for non-Engineering application of AI. It’s a fun time to be a CTO …

Here’s the video snip from the interview via the Snipd AI podcast player: