In this episode of the Autopilot podcast, host Will Summerlin interviews Russell D'Sa, the founder of LiveKit, a company building critical infrastructure for real-time audio and video communication, used by OpenAI to voice ChatGPT.

Russ shares his journey from growing up surrounded by technology in Silicon Valley to founding LiveKit, and discusses the complex challenges of delivering reliable, high-quality audio and video at scale. They discuss the future of multimodal interactions and explore how technologies like LiveKit are enabling more natural human-AI interfaces.

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X/SOCIAL:

@WillSummerlinAI (Will)

@dsa (Russel)

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TIMESTAMPS:

(00:00:00) Episode Preview

(01:51) Early career and Silicon Valley influence

(03:46) First foray into entrepreneurship

(08:06) Lessons from Y Combinator

(10:41) Founding LiveKit: The vision and challenges

(17:01) The role of LiveKit in AI and real-time communication

(20:41) Technical challenges in real-time audio and video

(25:22) Handling high traffic and failures

(27:54) The buy vs build dilemma

(28:15) LiveKit's open source and commercial offerings

(29:34) Scaling and deployment strategies

(32:51) AI infrastructure challenges

(37:48) Future of multimodal AI

(43:52) Vision Pro and AR/VR future

(47:49) Closing thoughts and contact information