Michael Royzen
Co-Founder & CEO, Phind · 1 appearance on the record.
computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →
Michael Royzen is the co-founder and CEO of Phind. He builds AI search tools to help developers solve technical questions and implement code.
21statements → 13claims → 5claims resolved → 60%fully supported → 3.76/5average certainty → 2.48/5average debate potential → ≈4.0/5argument clarity, estimated →
3 supported 2 partly supported 0 contradicted 1 not yet assessed 7 not checkable as stated how the 13 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
3 predictions · 10 assertions · 3 opinions · 3 insights · 2 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 13 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 5 are resolved, 1 is not yet assessed, and 7 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Michael 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
Royzen: Phind built the first internet-scale LLM RAG search in 2022
“And to the best of my knowledge, I think that's the first example that I'm aware of a LLM search engine model that's effectively connected to, like, a large enough index that I would consider, like, an internet scale. So, so I think we were the first to releas…”
Expressed certainty vs assessment result
weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet
How they sound: not measured why? →
We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Michael Royzen on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Michael Royzen said on Latent Space that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Royzen: AI dev tools do not need to own the IDE
“Somewhere where I disagree with him is that you need to own the IDE. I think like he made kind of some good points about, you know, not having platform risk in the long term, but some of the, you know, features that were mentioned, like suggesting diffs, for e…”
Royzen: Fine-tuned open source models will beat proprietary in 2024
“So I think that even if a delta exists, in twenty-twenty-four, the delta between proprietary and open source won't be large enough that a startup like us, with a lot of data that we've collected, can take the data that we have, fine-tune an open source model, …”
Royzen: GPT-4 was trained on HumanEval, proving data contamination
“GPT-IV itself has been trained on human eval, and we know this because GPT-IV is able to predict the exact doc string in many of the problems. I've seen it predict, like, the specific example values in the doc string, which is extremely improbable for it to ju…”
Royzen: Phind built the first internet-scale LLM RAG search in 2022
“And to the best of my knowledge, I think that's the first example that I'm aware of a LLM search engine model that's effectively connected to, like, a large enough index that I would consider, like, an internet scale. So, so I think we were the first to releas…”
Phind CEO: Future Programming Will Just Be Problem Solving, Delegating Implementation to AI
“In the future, you know, in the future, I think programming is just going to be really just the problem solving. Like you come up with an idea, you come up with like the basic design for the algorithm in your head, and you just tell the AI, hey, just like, jus…”
Royzen: Users switch to Phind when ChatGPT-4 fails on code
“What really shocks us is that a lot of the people who do that they're coming from ChatGPT. So they tried it in ChatGPT with ChatGPT-IV. It didn't work. Maybe it required like some multi-step reasoning. Maybe it required to like, Some internet context or someth…”
Royzen: The leap from GPT-4 to GPT-5 will be smaller
“I think that GPT-IV, my hypothesis is that the jump from four to 4.5, or four to five, will be smaller than the jump from Three to four.”
Royzen: Large context windows outperform RAG chunking for code
“Like, I think it's generally been shown that if you have the space to just put The raw files inside of a big context window. That is still better than chunking and retrieval. It just is.”
Royzen: Training on code unlocked general spatial and temporal reasoning
“We've seen emerging capabilities in the find model, whereby training it on high quality code, it can actually, like, reason better. It went from not being able to solve like, World problems where like riddles where like with like temporal and like low, like pl…”
Royzen: Smart Lens worked better than Google Lens v1 at launch
“It worked so well that it actually worked better than Google Lens which released its V-One around the same time.”
Royzen: AI code startups are ultimately competing with ChatGPT
“Really who everyone's competing with is ChatGPT which only has, like, that one web interface, and, like, ChatGPT is really the bar.”
Royzen: Phind Leads BigCode Leaderboard by 10 Points in Multi-Language Code
“All of our models are at the top of the big code leaderboard by far. It's not close, particularly in languages other than Python. We have a 10 point gap between us and the next best model on Java, JavaScript, I think C-sharp multilingual.”
Royzen: Users prefer text-to-image generation over image captioning
“I was also looking into image captioning, where like you give a model an image, and then it tells you what's in the image, but it turns out that what people want is the exact opposite. People want to give a description of an image, and then have the AI generat…”
Royzen: BigScience's T-Zero predated InstructGPT in large-scale instruction tuning
“I think T-Zero is the first model that did large-scale instruction tuning from diverse data sources in the fall of twenty-twenty-one. This is before InstructGPT. This is before Flan T-Five, which came out in twenty-twenty-two. This is, I think, the very, very …”
Royzen: Paul Graham personally chose the company name 'Phind'
“Paul Graham actually picked it for us.”
Royzen: NVIDIA Remains Cloud-Agnostic Because It Wins Regardless
“At NVIDIA, They know that they're going to win regardless. So they don't care where you get the GPUs from. They're like, they're truly neutral, unlike various sales reps that you might encounter at various like clouds and, you know, hardware companies, et cete…”
Royzen: INT8 quantization offers storage optimization without guaranteed inference speedups
“But with int eight, there's not necessarily a Speed increase. It's just the storage optimization.”
Royzen: Quantized LLMs currently underperform unquantized baselines in quality
“So we have these great quantization libraries that, you know, for the most part are able to get the size down with not that much quality loss, but there is some, like the quantized models currently are actually worse than the non-quantized ones.”
Phind Plans Native Code Interpreter Features to Recursively Iterate on Code
“And Replit is great, and people use that feature. But yeah, I think there's more we can do in terms of, like, having something a bit closer to code interpreter where it's able to run the code and then, like, recursively iterate on it.”
Royzen: NVIDIA Built Custom FasterTransformer Feature for Phind
“They actually implemented a custom feature for us in Faster Transformer which is one of their libraries... They implemented streaming generation for T-Five-based models, which we were running at the time up until we switched to GPT in In February, March of thi…”
Royzen: Phind focuses on developer reasoning engines over general search
“So as, I think there's always an opportunity for us to become more general if we wanted. But We've been along this path of, like, what is the best, most advanced reasoning engine that's connected to your code base, that's connected to the internet, that we can…”
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| Beating GPT-4 with Open Source Models - with Michael Royzen of Phind | Nov 3, 2023 | 1h 2m |