The FDE Playbook for AI Startups with Bob McGrew

章节 1：从贝宝到帕兰提尔，再到 OpenAI

📝 本节摘要：

主持人介绍鲍勃·麦格鲁的职业经历，并引出前向部署工程师模式。鲍勃指出，AI 智能体领域尚无成熟的主导产品，仍有大量产品探索空间，因此企业需要深入客户现场，逐步发现需求、提升交付价值，并推动合同规模增长。

[原文] [Bob McGrew]: With AI agents, there is no incumbent product. And so that, I think, is why you're seeing the FDE model taking off, because there's so much product discovery to do. You want to drive the contract size up. So you're doing more and more valuable work for this customer and also for future customers. The FDE model effectively is doing things that don't scale at scale. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of The Light Cone. Gary wasn't feeling great today and couldn't be here, but we're thrilled to be joined by Bob McGrew. Bob was an early engineer at PayPal, an early executive at Palantir, and was recently chief research officer at OpenAI, where he led the development of ChatGPT, GPT-4, and the o1 reasoning model. Now he's exploring the future of AI and has an exciting new role with the U.S. Army that we'll get to in a bit. Bob,

[译文] [Bob McGrew]: 在 AI 智能体领域，目前还没有成熟的主导产品。我想，这就是前向部署工程师（FDE）模式兴起的原因，因为还有大量产品需求有待探索。我们希望提高合同金额，也就是为当前客户和未来客户创造越来越大的价值。FDE 模式本质上是在规模化地做那些无法规模化的事。大家好，欢迎回到《The Light Cone》。Gary 今天身体不太舒服，没能到场，不过我们很高兴请到了鲍勃·麦格鲁。鲍勃早年在贝宝（PayPal）担任工程师，后来成为帕兰提尔（Palantir）的早期高管，最近还担任 OpenAI 首席研究官，领导了 ChatGPT、GPT-4 和 o1 推理模型的开发。现在，他正在探索 AI 的未来，并在美国陆军担任一个令人期待的新职务，我们稍后会聊到。鲍勃，

[原文] [Speaker B]: Thanks so much for being here. It's

[译文] [Speaker B]: 非常感谢你来参加节目。

[原文] [Bob McGrew]: Great to be here.

[译文] [Bob McGrew]: 很高兴来到这里。

[原文] [Speaker B]: So, Bob, I've been particularly excited to sit down with you to talk about the forward deployed engineer model, because this is a topic that keeps coming up in our lives. It is a really hot topic in Silicon Valley right now, especially among the AI agent companies that we've talked about a lot on this podcast. You were in the room when it all got started, so you're exactly the right person to explain it. You were actually telling me a funny story. You were at an AI conference that YC organized a few months ago, and you expected all the founders would come up to talk to you about inventing ChatGPT. Instead, all of these AI startup founders wanted to talk to you about the Palantir forward deployed engineer model.

[译文] [Speaker B]: 鲍勃，我特别期待和你坐下来聊聊前向部署工程师模式，因为这个话题最近总是在我们身边出现。它现在是硅谷的热门话题，尤其受到我们在节目中多次聊到的那些 AI 智能体公司的关注。这个模式刚起步时你就在现场，所以你正是最适合解释它的人。你刚才还讲了个有趣的故事：几个月前，你参加了 YC 组织的一场 AI 大会，原以为创始人们会来找你聊 ChatGPT 是怎么发明的。结果，那些 AI 初创公司的创始人全都想跟你聊帕兰提尔的前向部署工程师模式。

[原文] [Bob McGrew]: Well, and it's really true. It hasn't just been that one conference. As I've been advising startups this last year, I would say a lot of them are pretty much exclusively trying to learn how the FDE strategy works.

[译文] [Bob McGrew]: 确实如此，不只是那一场大会。过去一年我一直在给初创公司提供建议，可以说，其中很多公司几乎只想弄明白 FDE 策略是怎么运作的。

[原文] [Speaker B]: Yeah, so there's this intense fascination, and it's super timely because it's actually become, I think, the dominant way that AI agent startups are organizing themselves. I was looking earlier today, and if you look at the YC job board, there are over 100 YC startups hiring for a job with the title “forward deployed engineer,” up from basically zero three years ago. Perhaps before we get really into it, for anybody who doesn't already understand, can you just explain what a forward deployed engineer is and how it's relevant today?

[译文] [Speaker B]: 是啊，大家对这个模式非常着迷，而且现在聊它正是时候，因为我觉得它已经成了 AI 智能体初创公司组织团队的主流方式。我今天早些时候看了一下 YC 的招聘板，招聘“前向部署工程师”的 YC 初创公司已经超过 100 家，而三年前几乎一家都没有。在深入讨论之前，能不能先给还不了解的人解释一下：什么是前向部署工程师？它如今为什么重要？

[原文] [Bob McGrew]: So, a forward deployed engineer is someone, typically a technical person and engineer, who sits at the customer site and fills the gap between what the product does and what the customer needs.

[译文] [Bob McGrew]: 前向部署工程师通常是技术人员或工程师，他们驻在客户现场，填补产品现有功能与客户实际需求之间的差距。