Dror Weiss Of Tabnine On The Future Of Artificial Intelligence

An Interview With David Leichner

Rules of engagement need to be made. Right now, we are in a void of many things simply because this was not a problem until two years ago. Rules and regulations need to be established on a universal level. We need to work towards understanding the role of people in a world where AI gets so powerful and what comes after.

As a part of our series about the future of Artificial Intelligence, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dror Weiss, co-founder and CEO of Tabnine.

Dror Weiss is co-founder and CEO of Tabnine, creators of the industry’s first AI-powered assistant for developers. He is on a mission to help developers and teams create better software faster. Prior to Tabnine, he was with Panaya, most recently serving as Director of Technology.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Can you share with us the ‘backstory” of how you decided to pursue this career path in AI?

I’m a technologist and a product person at heart. I was not interested in AI technology in particular, rather I was interested in solving particular problems and AI was a solution to tap. When I started Tabnine, the problem I was looking to solve was the repetitive work and mundane tasks that thousands of developers have to do that result in so much time and energy spent on the sort of work that’s not differentiated and below the waterline. I wanted to see how we could help get these things out of the way so that developers can focus on the things that matter most. The emerging advances in machine learning and AI technology was the way to accomplish this calling. It was not a “Hey, here’s a new cool thing called AI, what can we do with it?” It was the other way around, I wanted to solve a problem and how could I best leverage tools that existed to address these challenges.

What lessons can others learn from your story?

One takeaway from my success is within Tabnine’s story, and that is that you need to integrate into the workflow. Anything that’s not well integrated into a workflow in a clear way will not be sticky and will not be successful.

Another lesson for us, interestingly, when we started Tabnine we got asked, “Oh, so you make developers more productive? Who cares about it?” It’s crazy to think that at the time no one cared about developer productivity, we took a strong stance and were adamant that this is something the world needs. We knew back in 2012 that this was going to be a growing problem and one that everyone should care about. Fast forward to today and seeing where the market is now, it has shifted our way. This holds a strong lesson of working with first principles and to create real economic value you will find a way to extract value out of the solution.

Can you tell our readers about the most interesting projects you are working on now?

At Tabnine we are focused on improving code quality and developer happiness through generative AI technology to automate the coding workflow. As the leading AI assistant for software development, Tabnine has quickly become a part of many developers’ daily processes with over 1 million monthly users and hundreds of thousands of daily active users. Our team is focused on continuing to expand our offerings beyond code completion into all areas of the software development lifecycle.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

My co-founder and CTO Eran Yahav is one of the people I respect the most in this world. He formed the fundamental theorem of synthesis, which is basically that the cost of asking an AI what you want, plus the cost for you to judge whether what the AI generator is correct, has to be much lower than the cost for you to write or to create anything independently. Otherwise, the economics just doesn’t work. If it’s faster for me to just do the thing myself — or if the AI generates this elaborate wonderful content for me, but it takes me so much time to evaluate — then it is not usually worth it.

What are some things that most excite you about the AI industry? Why?

I’m very much on the optimistic side when it comes to the AI industry, and I think this is the most exciting revolution in my lifetime and maybe even in history — having “quasi-intelligent” machines. For many practical purposes, it is the first time we are able to basically communicate with machines in a free language and have it perform complicated and useful tasks on our behalf. This is living in the future, and as a tech enthusiast, living in the future is the most exciting thing to be a part of. It is very gratifying and humbling to be part of the most important technological revolution that’s happening now.

What are some things that concern you about the AI industry? Why?

Of course there are going to be concerns when you think about the impact it will have on people. I have three daughters and I’m already thinking about how I should advise them for the future and their professional development. There are some questions that we don’t yet know, and a lot of unknowns as to what impact AI will have on the world.

There’s also some concern in our industry about intellectual property; how we are defining legitimate and illegitimate ways to use AI to generate many things and the ways that we utilize and acknowledge previous works, all while being ethical in approach. But as a company, we at Tabnine took it upon ourselves to be an ethical player in this space and are constantly balancing this while still moving fast.

From an enterprise perspective, business leaders need to think about where the data is coming from and the legitimacy of what is being produced as they look to implement technology. It is interesting — both as an entrepreneur and from an economic perspective — to see how AI will impact every industry. What kind of business models exist? What is the value exchange for our product in the long term? How do you charge for intelligence? These are many unsolved challenges within the space and it may not be the easiest to address because we are navigating uncharted territories.

As you know, there is an ongoing debate between prominent scientists, (personified as a debate between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg,) about whether advanced AI poses an existential danger to humanity. What is your position about this?

There are extremists that say AI is going to exterminate us or take all of our jobs and I simply don’t subscribe to that. What we should seriously think about is what autonomy we give to AI and in what areas. AI is going to make increasingly better decisions and we will want to give it more autonomy so they can do more stuff for us without us having to intervene, but at some point we are going to have to pause and take serious consideration.

Rules of engagement need to be made. Right now, we are in a void of many things simply because this was not a problem until two years ago. Rules and regulations need to be established on a universal level. We need to work towards understanding the role of people in a world where AI gets so powerful and what comes after.

How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world? Can you share a story?

One way Tabnine is bringing goodness into the world is with our free plan that over a hundreds of thousands of developers use on a daily basis. Through using our platform, many developers have become successful themselves and deliver their own innovation to the world and create value.

As you know, there are not that many women in your industry. Can you advise what is needed to engage more women into the AI industry?

As someone that was fascinated by software development at a young age, I tried to get my eldest daughter who will be starting high school next year into computer science and tried to entice coding, but it was not something that was of particular interest. I learned to code from books before the internet was a thing, and when I learned that there is a thing such as a software engineer that’s actually getting paid to write code all day, I thought this is too good to be true. So having interest and curiosity is important for anyone wanting to get into the industry but specifically for women, I think it starts at a young age and we need to create more programs that are designed for adolescent girls to help foster that interest.

You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

It would be a movement of bringing people together. Isolation and solitude is something that is increasingly getting worse as technology evolves, especially among the elderly. Recently, I read an article that explained how much time people spend alone versus with others based on age and time, and it’s a very worrying trend to see people spending increasingly more time alone and on social networks, while not having strong support circles — whether that’s from families, friends, or community. I’m thankful to have a tight-knit family close by, but I would love to have more people benefit from strong connections and is something I would happily support.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

Readers can learn more at https://www.tabnine.com/ or follow Tabnine on @tabnine and on LinkedIn.

Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success in your important work.

About The Interviewer: David Leichner is a veteran of the Israeli high-tech industry with significant experience in the areas of cyber and security, enterprise software and communications. At Cybellum, a leading provider of Product Security Lifecycle Management, David is responsible for creating and executing the marketing strategy and managing the global marketing team that forms the foundation for Cybellum’s product and market penetration. Prior to Cybellum, David was CMO at SQream and VP Sales and Marketing at endpoint protection vendor, Cynet. David is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Jerusalem Technology College. He holds a BA in Information Systems Management and an MBA in International Business from the City University of New York.