Welcome to the first episode of Forward Deployed (YouTube), a podcast exploring the intersection of AI, software development, and the enterprise.
We’re very excited to have you join us as we tackle the wild world of Forward Deployed engineering. We hope to make this a roughly bi-weekly show and look forward to inviting guests in the future. The idea is to dive deep into the realities of making this stuff work in companies, building on our expertise as builders both inside and outside the enterprise.
Thanks for listening, and please let us know what you think.
Thanks,
Noah & Lance
In this inaugural episode, hosts Noah Brier (Co-founder, Alephic) and Lance Martin (Founding Engineer, LangChain) dive deep into one of AI’s most controversial ideas: The Bitter Lesson. They unpack Richard Sutton’s famous essay, debate whether LLMs truly follow its principles, and explore what this means for anyone building with AI today.
Key Topics Covered
The Bitter Lesson: Why more compute beats clever algorithms (or does it?)
Richard Sutton’s surprising take on why LLMs aren’t “bitter lesson pilled”
The evolution from CNNs to transformers through Lance’s journey from Stanford to Uber’s self-driving program to LangChain
Chain of thought prompting vs reasoning models - why your prompts might be breaking
The real challenges of enterprise AI adoption
Why ICs are adopting AI faster than managers
Building for imperfection: Why optimizing for today’s models is a mistake
Timestamps
00:00 - Introductions and backgrounds
00:53 - Lance’s journey: Stanford PhD to Uber self-driving to LangChain
02:49 - Noah’s path from marketing to AI obsession
04:04 - What “forward deployed” really means
09:04 - The Bitter Lesson explained
11:31 - Why Sutton thinks LLMs aren’t following the bitter lesson
23:09 - Chain of thought prompting and the reasoning model revolution
24:19 - Building for future models, not current ones
45:20 - ICs vs managers in AI adoption
About the Hosts
Noah Brier is co-founder of Alephic, an AI consulting company working with enterprise clients like PayPal, EY, Meta, and Amazon on AI-powered content intelligence and competitive analysis. Previously founded and sold Percolate (marketing tech). He also runs the BRXND conference series focused on marketing and AI.
Lance Martin is a founding engineer at LangChain with a PhD from Stanford. Former computer vision lead for Uber’s self-driving truck program.
Links & References
Core References
🎙️ Richard Sutton on Dwarkesh Podcast: “Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead end” (September 26, 2025)
📄 The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks by Andrej Karpathy (2015)
📄 Trading Margin for Moat: Why the Forward Deployed Engineer Is the Hottest Job in Startups (A16Z)
Related Podcast Appearances
🎙️ Noah Brier on Every’s AI & I: “Claude Code Can Be Your Second Brain” (September 10, 2025) - Noah demonstrates his Claude Code-Obsidian setup for research and thinking
Blog Posts from the Hosts
Learning the Bitter Lesson - Lance Martin
Context Engineering for Agents - Lance Martin
Thinking Ahead, Building Ahead - Charles Gallant
The Magic of Claude Code - Noah Brier
Strategic Software - Noah Brier
Things I Think I Think About AI - Noah Brier
Connect with the Hosts
Alephic: alephic.com
BRXND: brxnd.ai
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