Prior to founding Hex in 2019, McCardel worked as a deployment strategist at Palantir Technologies and led operations at TrialSpark. At Hex, he built an AI-integrated collaborative workspace combining SQL, Python notebooks, and reporting tools.
What the tape says about how Barry argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable supported claim
PredictionHeld up
Barry McArdle: Hex enforces a rule to never automatically run AI code
“We have a rule as we're building these features. It's like, we don't run the code for you. Like we will generate the code. We will show it to you, but we want to keep the human in the loop.”
Barry McArdleJun 2, 2023▶ 23:35Embedded AI: The Questions Every CEO is Asking
Barry McArdle: Context building and model chaining are AI's hardest work
“And I think that is really actually the hard work in many ways of Incorporating AI into your product, right? Like it feels really simple. Like you can go get an API. Anyone listening to this today could go to the open air website and get an API key. It's every…”
Barry McArdleJun 2, 2023▶ 25:41Embedded AI: The Questions Every CEO is Asking
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Barry McArdle: AI foundation models and API calls are already commodities
“I think the models themselves and being able to send a request to one of them is, is already a commodity.”
Barry McArdleJun 2, 2023▶ 27:32Embedded AI: The Questions Every CEO is Asking
Disclosure
Barry McArdle: Hex does not use customer code to train AI models
“We're not using it to train models. I should be very clear. Like that's one thing we've been very upfront with our customers about, like we're not training models where they would expect to ever have like some code they've written be a completion for someone e…”
Barry McArdleJun 2, 2023▶ 27:52Embedded AI: The Questions Every CEO is Asking
PredictionHeld up
Barry McArdle: Hex enforces a rule to never automatically run AI code
“We have a rule as we're building these features. It's like, we don't run the code for you. Like we will generate the code. We will show it to you, but we want to keep the human in the loop.”
Barry McArdleJun 2, 2023▶ 23:35Embedded AI: The Questions Every CEO is Asking
Insight
Barry McArdle: Passing too much context into LLM prompts confuses the model
“I think we've been, we were tempted early on to try to shove as much context as we could in. You kind of figure like the more I can tell this model, the better. And you realize you can pretty easily confuse a model in terms of the amount of context you're pass…”
Barry McArdleJun 2, 2023▶ 25:04Embedded AI: The Questions Every CEO is Asking
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Barry McArdle: Strict retention policies eliminate valuable organizational knowledge
“A lot of companies intentionally delete their data. Like people will have retention policies on emails or slack, but by doing that, you're Eliminating knowledge and that knowledge could be useful”
Barry McArdleJun 2, 2023▶ 38:09Embedded AI: The Questions Every CEO is Asking
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