Ian Webster
CEO and Co-founder, Promptfoo. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderengineerexecutive@iwebst ↗LinkedIn ↗ianww.com ↗
Ian Webster is the creator and CEO of Promptfoo, an open-source AI evaluation and red-teaming platform. He previously led developer platform and LLM engineering teams at Discord, where he helped develop its AI assistant Clyde.
1shows
1appearances
10statements
0resolved
0supported
0contradicted
Everything Ian Webster said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Webster: AI guardrails are a commodity and easy to build
“Building a business on guardrails really scares me because there are so many incumbents that can come in and eat your lunch. And it's like, It's not actually that hard to build a guardrail. I don't know if I'm gonna make people angry by saying that maybe some …”
Webster: AI evaluation tools are table-stakes commodities facing a feature-parity bloodbath
“I think evals are our table stakes. I think that they're a commodity and everyone should be doing them. And yes, there are companies that are doing great in the eval space, but To me, it just seemed like a bloodbath, you know, like we would just be, had a grea…”
Webster: Meaningful AI red teaming will require internal tracing and observability
“I think especially where, where things are headed, like with more complex rags and agents and so forth, you're going to have to have some type of observability or like internal tracing in order to have, to do meaningful automated red teaming.”
Webster: Enterprises do not want AI models to be maximally helpful
“OpenAI Anthropic, everyone else, they're all building models that are like maximally helpful. And in Actually, most cases in a corporate environment, you don't want that to be maximum. You don't want the model to be like helpful in every way possible.”
Webster: The future of AI security is in CI/CD, not runtime
“So the future is really, like, not in runtime, but Earlier in the software development lifecycle, ideally in CICD or before that.”
Webster: Most corporate MCP implementations are just glorified API wrappers
“The way that a lot of corporates are implementing MCP is just like a glorified API wrapper, not, not like super innovative just kind of checking the box.”
Webster: Over 10% of Fortune 500 companies use Promptfoo
“We have a bit over 10% of the Fortune 500 that, that use PromptFu right now.”
Webster: Finding enterprise AI vulnerabilities is only 20% of the challenge
“The way that I think about it is that if you're in a big company, finding the issue is only, like, 20% of the challenge. And then the rest is you have to triage it. You have to like hook it into your task tracker and your SIM and like all these other systems. …”
Webster: Big enterprises will likely require on-prem MCP tooling
“For the really big companies, something like this would probably have to be on prem, at least in my experience, just because there's, you can get caught up in security reviews and stuff like that for like quarters on, on end.”
Ian Webster: Discord's Clyde was built as a social bot, not a helpful bot
“The interesting thing about Clyde was that it wasn't really meant to be a, necessarily a helpful bot, but instead more of a social bot, like a bot that would just like be in your channel and, you know, help people interact and that kind of thing.”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Ian's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 LATENT SPACELEDGER | CEO and Co-founder, Promptfoo | 1 | 10 | — | full record on Latent Space → |