Alessio Fanelli

Channel and publications

Latent Space began as a newsletter started by swyx in 2022; its podcast followed in 2023, led by swyx with co-hosts including Alessio Fanelli, and records mostly in person. The podcast and newsletter grew out of an informal Discord community that also runs a weekly LLM Paper Club.²

In a 2024 post marking the podcast's first year, Fanelli describes the show's three episode formats: topic-driven "101" episodes without guests, guest interviews timed to news and releases, and recap or emergency episodes with several speakers, including live coverage of events such as OpenAI DevDay and NeurIPS.⁴

Open-source work

Fanelli open-sourced smol-podcaster in 2023, a tool that automates parts of Latent Space's production: transcribing episodes with speaker labels and timestamps, formatting the transcript for publication, and using language models to draft chapters and title ideas. The repository describes it as a podcast production agent and is released under the MIT license.⁵⁶

Earlier in 2023, Fanelli built and open-sourced a web interface for LangChainHub, a collection of prompts for LangChain projects, with a TypeScript and Next.js frontend and a small Ruby backend that indexes the hub's repository.⁷

Career

Decibel's team page lists Fanelli as a partner. Fanelli's own site adds that Fanelli leads early-stage investments in AI, infrastructure software, security and developer tools, and serves as the firm's CTO, leading the development of its internal software platform. In November 2021, Fanelli shared slides from an invited talk on open-source monetization at the Linux Foundation Members Summit.³¹⁸

Work and contributions

• Latent Space podcast Show, channel or publication

  Co-hosts the Latent Space podcast, which records mostly in person, with technical deep dives and a look at the people behind major AI projects and news.¹²

• smol-podcaster Open-source code

  Created and open-sourced this MIT-licensed podcast production tool, which transcribes episodes and uses language models to draft chapters and titles.⁵⁶

Timeline

1. Nov 4, 2021Shared slides from a Linux Foundation Members Summit talk on open-source monetization.⁸
2. 2023The Latent Space podcast launched, led by swyx with Fanelli among its co-hosts.²
3. Jan 24, 2023Launched an open-source web interface for LangChainHub.⁷
4. Aug 9, 2023Open-sourced smol-podcaster, a tool for transcribing and preparing podcast episodes.⁵
5. Feb 20, 2024Published a post reflecting on the first year of the Latent Space podcast.⁴

Where they work

• Latent Space 2 people in the wiki
• Decibel 1 person in the wiki

Related people

• Shawn WangAlso at Latent Space
• Simon WillisonLanguage models · Developer tools
• Antje BarthTeaching and writing · Language models
• Raymond LiLanguage models · Developer tools
• AI ExplainedTeaching and writing · Language models
• Kristian FagerlieTeaching and writing · Developer tools
• Maxime LabonneLanguage models · Teaching and writing
• Nathan LambertLanguage models · Teaching and writing
• Matthew BermanTeaching and writing · Language models
• Shantanu JainLanguage models · Developer tools