Samuel Colvin
Founder & CEO, Pydantic. On 1 show, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveengineer@samuelcolvin ↗LinkedIn ↗pydantic.dev ↗
Samuel Colvin is the creator of Pydantic. He focuses on building AI-native observability tools with Logfire and creating agent frameworks with Pydantic AI.
1shows
2appearances
35statements
6resolved
5supported
0contradicted
83%fully supported
2said about them ↓ Everything Samuel Colvin said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Colvin: Agent framework engineering quality lags far behind Python ecosystem
“Looking in general at the ecosystem of agent frameworks, the engineering quality is far below that of the rest of the Python ecosystem.”
Colvin: LLMs are 100x faster under four specific engineering conditions
“My take is that there are four, four things where if you can cover all four of these things, LLMs are not like three X faster or five X faster. They're like a hundred X faster.”
Pydantic built a VIP issue scorer after closing an OpenAI founder's ticket
“Basically this started off because one of the OpenAI co-founders created an issue on Pydantic. And we just closed it and said it was wrong. And so we have this that, like, injects itself and tries to summarize someone and it gives them a, like, brutal score of…”
Colvin: Agent Frameworks Exist Because AI Models Are Not Clever Enough
“Agents, agent frameworks, graphs, all of this stuff is basically making up for the fact that right now the models are not that clever.”
Colvin: Logfire migrated from ClickHouse to Timescale before choosing DataFusion
“We don't use ClickHouse. We started building our database with ClickHouse, moved off ClickHouse onto Timescale, which is a Postgres extension to do analytical databases. And then moved off Timescale onto Data Fusion, and we're basically now building, it's Data…”
Colvin: Gen AI observability will merge into general-purpose observability platforms
“Web observability stopped being a thing, not because the web stopped being a thing, but because all observability had to do web. If you were talking to people in 2010 or 2012, they would have talked about cloud observability. Now that's not a term because all …”
Colvin: Jupyter Notebooks Are Worse Than or Similarly Bad to Excel
“I have very strong opinions about, you know, proper, like Jupyter notebooks, this idea that like you have to run the cells in the right order. I mean, a whole bunch of things. It's basically like worse than Excel or similarly bad to Excel.”
Colvin: Monty executes Python in single-digit microseconds
“I mean, in a hot loop, we can run, we can go from code to execution result in under a microsecond in like 800 nanoseconds. In reality, it's like single digit microseconds to run code or single digit microseconds to run the next step of a REPL or single digit m…”
Colvin: Deno cannot control memory usage and prevents OOM protection
“Even if you don't allow that Dino does not have any way of controlling memory. So even if someone can't run arbitrary code, they can oom your machine as often as they like.”
Colvin: Monty will never support CPython ABI packages like NumPy
“There's no support for third party libraries just to be installed. There never will be directly as, and you'll never, we'll never be able to speak the C Python ABI and like install Pydantic or install NumPy or something.”
Colvin: Untrusted users prompting cloud AI is equivalent to letting them write code
“If you're running this kind of thing in the cloud and you, and you're gonna have ultimately untrusted people prompting the model, that is effectively the same as letting an untrusted person write the code.”
Colvin: Pydantic AI introduces declarative TOML serializable agents
“One of the things we're doing now in Pydantic AI is where we're about to introduce, I think there's a PR out for this. So I think this is public serializable agents. So basically you can define an agent entirely in a TOML file, everything from the model to the…”
Colvin: Building better GenAI tools is easy compared to replacing Postgres
“To go and implement a database that's better than Postgres is a, like, Sisyphean task, whereas building tools that are better for Gen.ai than some of the stuff that's about now is not very difficult. Putting the actual models themselves to one side.”
Colvin: OpenAI Said Pydantic AI Resembles Production-Ready Swarms
“OpenAI have got in touch with me, and basically, maybe I'm not supposed to say this, but basically said that Pydantic AI looks like what Swarms would become if it was production-ready.”
Colvin: Pydantic AI will be first framework implementing OpenTelemetry GenAI attributes
“I suspect Pedantic AI will be the first agent framework that implements those semantic attributes properly, because again, we control Pedantic AI, and we can say this is important for observability, whereas most of the other agent frameworks are not maintained…”
Colvin: GenAI telemetry carries vastly more sensitive PII than traditional metrics
“With Gen AI, that, that distinction doesn't exist because it's all just like messed up in the text. If you have that same patient asking an LLM how to, what drug they should take or how to stop smoking, you can't extract the PII and not send it to the Observab…”
Colvin: Every Region Outside US and China Is Way Behind on AI
“I think, look, like, everywhere that isn't the US and China knows that we're, like, way behind on AI.”
Colvin wrote 30,000 lines of Rust for Monty over Christmas using AI
“This is a crazy world where you can sit down over Christmas and write 30,000 lines of rust that, that is actually powerful and useful.”
Colvin: Type safety is critical for AI tool execution
“I think type safety is important for humans, but it's critical for AIs.”
Colvin: Pydantic team uses Devin after finding it best off-the-shelf coding agent
“We, so in Pylandsk AI, the guys are using Devon quite a lot. And actually we tried quite a few, nothing else worked, but Devon, well, not nothing else worked, but like having gone through a few different options, Devon seemed to be the best of the off the shel…”
Colvin: There is massive opportunity in an agent optimization state layer
“I think that there is an enormous opportunity for effectively a new layer of state within applications. You could think of it as memory, but it's often a lot more than memory. It's the like current state of agent optimization, some of which will be code, some …”
Colvin: Enterprise AI agent tools are increasingly hosted via MCP
“If I want to go and register arbitrary tools, that's a whole different thing. And this thing breaks down, but often those tools are more and more, at least in enterprise, in packed up and put behind MCP servers.”
Colvin: Pydantic and FastAPI normalized Python type-hint schemas
“Back in 2017, when I first started it, the like different thing it was doing was using type int to define your schema. That was controversial at the time. It was like genuinely disapproved of by some people. I think the success of Pydantic and libraries like f…”
Colvin: Rust-native data storage could yield 3x to 5x Pydantic speedup
“We have plans to move some of the, basically store the data in rust types after validation. Not convert to Python types. So then if you were doing like validation and then serialization, you would never have to go via a Python type. We reckon that can give us …”
The other half of the tape: Samuel Colvin's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 2 times in 1 episode across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
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Latent Space 2
2025 2 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Samuel'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 | Founder & CEO, Pydantic | 2 | 35 | 83% 5/6 | full record on Latent Space → |