Kumar: Good ML taste means avoiding what APIs will soon commoditize
Ankit Kumar · Building the Next Generation of Conversational AI · Mar 15, 2025 · at 14:52
Ankit Kumar, co-founder and CTO of Sesame, discusses machine learning strategy and taste in product development with a16z General Partner Anjney Midha.
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“I think from my perspective, good taste in ML today, because it's such a fast moving field with so many people working across, you know, open source and APIs and big labs and so forth. Really, you're trying to identify What part of the ecosystem or what part of the components of the product you want to build do you have to build yourself? Right. And not work on other things, you know, because if you spend all your resources as a small team building something that some big lab updates their API or an open source drop comes and it just kind of does what you've done, even if it doesn't leapfrog you, even if it just means that the work that you've done is now kind of wasted because it's just there, then You know, you're not gonna efficiently be using your resources.”
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