DevReal: Max Maximilien Interview
Recording: DevReal: Max Maximilien Interview
hello everybody I'm Alexa kov the founder and organizer of baera eii the longest running deepest technical metup on AI in the world here were on location at Cloud flare at the AI Alliance sponsor met up on agents and with me I have Max Maximillian distinguished engineer at IBM research creator of bii framework I don't know if I'm a Creator Co Creator who is going to talk about it and I know Max for a long time so max tell us a little bit about yourself like how you did you end up doing this what have you been doing Open Source before like would you do you want to know what I would rather be doing uh sure I'd rather be using my camera and shooting but other than that I'm happy to chat with you so um I guess I've been in the barria for almost 20 years now uh I moved after my PhD to work at IBM research at Almaden and then uh I kind of left research to go work on open source so I was one of the people contributing to um Cloud Foundry uh in uh kubernetes and then now I went back to research to work on uh essentially AI which is uh one of the things that we're doing which is the B Forma yeah and uh uh you were also working on postquantum cryptography yes yes yes that that's an interesting thing so part of weas and I I went into like when I became a distinguished engineer they wanted me to help spread open source across the company yes and uh one of the division that needed help on open source was quantum yes so I went there to help create this whole idea of post Quantum cryptography right and you help put together the Coalition of do ex exactly we call it P a postquantum uh cryptography Alliance similar to your AI Alliance so yeah well this is great and now basically you know this uh agic framework is the so that's funny because agents my background is actually my PhD was on that and it was 25 years ago yes and at the time we didn't have the kind of AI that we have now LMS and so on so it was kind of like a pipe dream MH so everybody built their own framework every they build their own agents their own agent models and we not they were all pretty dumb uh they're still dumb somewhat but they very very like not capable like they are today and uh and you would do all kinds of interesting stuff so for me when um when when the AI Revolution let's say happened a couple years ago with chat GPT and so on that kind of put it in the frame it became very clear that now this is the time to actually apply a lot of the stuff that I was doing almost 25 years ago now obviously you know it's not just taking what you were doing the past it's just now we can do it you know that's right it's funny I didn't know about this about you so it actually turns out we're academic brothers so I came to this country right in 1993 to dmouth college so my first paper which you know we coauthor with my adviser J sank who is one of the fathers of De learning was on intelligent agents at the time it was the time when you know a lot of funded research kind of intelligent agents it was all theory was you know hypothetically how would they model this right but how do you actually go build this now we can do this right now now we can actually do it because my papers were about multi-agent system multi syst and then now it's like it's a real thing it's the real thing that's right so everybody's doing Asians right and like like you called uh you you write this we're look forward to your talk but like uh I mean this is the air of asent what's most interesting to you and you're coding it right like what do you like what's your Vibe kind of feeling about it what's what do you like it the most I think we're kind of at to borrow a phrase from Jeff basos we have the Cambrian explosion of you know this this sort of Technology a lot of them are being created every day so at some point a bunch of them will die and then uh hopefully the best one will survive we're kind of at that stage so it's very exciting but it also means that there's no Clarity so I think the main thing I would tell everybody watching this is to you you know at at this point betting the farm on any of this doesn't make any sense however the thing to B the farm on I think is open source yes because then you can especially a agent framework that is open governance where people can contribute it's all open source the decision are made openly because then similar to what happened with llm you're going to see that happen with agent hopefully it's Bai but if it's not B it's going to be hopefully an open version of these Frameworks yeah and I so that's what I would say is most exciting today I personally enjoy the fact that you don't just do python you actually started in typescript yes right and like this runs in the browser this runs everywhere that connects to wasm right so to me it's super interesting like how do you plan to mix these two things we want to keep both M but we definitely uh want to hear from the people this is the beauty of Open Source right people are going to use it tell us what you want and and it is an easy way for you to tell us is you can go and start a project and follow what's going on and give us feedback because in many ways we're going to keep both but obviously if there's one that clearly becomes more dominant let's say in a 6 months to a year then we'll probably focus on that M uh but right now the plan is to is to keep doing both but again it's open source you know tell us what you think you know right so of it so we just talked about it we're going to plan and start AI agents yes a agent meet up yes yes yes yes yes yes good to be a part of this we going to even better partners and and we see each other at L foundation so like this a huge community so what do you want to kind of share with people uh kind of to invite them to the to this medal I I think for me Agent to to I Really this is maybe me going back 25 years ago and the vision for agents is is that the same way we collaborate as people M it's going to be the same way that you build your solution your multi-agent Solutions because the agents the independent agents that build up your solution are somewhat independent and the quot unquote think for themselves so what I'm hoping is that we change the mindset of how we do stuff today which is that you procedurally think you start from one place and then you end another place and instead we'll have goals yes and we'll have kind of like a direction that you want to go and the idea is that you reach the direction but do you exactly know exactly where you go it doesn't matter it's like uh you and I uh we're collaborating on this AI agent meet up with Dave neelson and you know we just agreed on the idea but what happens next we don't necessarily decide the goal is to make create this community correct and I feel like that's the main thing with a make it Thrive make it useful make it fun for people fun for ourselves and then set some maybe some some some expected uh you know uh K kpi if you want or whatever you want to you know some metrics so that we can measure success but we don't have necessarily a plan that says oh you're going to start from a and follow B and C D it's more like you're going to reach this point and how you get there it's fine and that's what I think multi-agent system really helps you achieve because the power in it is that you didn't have to Define everything yes you just said this is where I want to go it's sort of like when you have a team yes you tell them we need to achieve this you don't necessarily go and you're senior engineer it can figure out exactly exactly exactly you know I was do this for several decades my aspirational half joking goal for my community try to guess what it is for the community yeah like what is my kpi for all of my events well it's it's happiness the people come and they happy and they enjoy their time exactly but occasionally people get married and have babies so how many babies we born that's as a longest running you know long you have the number of that I don't exactly but it's more than zero so I think there's another metric that you were telling me about is how many people came here and give a talk yes and then that talk became a startup and start up got bought exactly I have sever I think you have one or two I have several several already okay wow so and I I'll give you guys a way to do this AI by the bay is in November the CP is open ai. by bay. you all submit a talk and between now and then see what happens right miracles do happen uh and uh well we're looking forward to your talk Max look look forward to run the M up and you know hopefully we'll have a good Community growing yeah thank you for having me thank you excuse me