SO MANY THINGS need to go right just so you can watch a TikTok! | E2215

You know, what engineers do is troubleshoot, fix problems. They create problems and then they fix the problems they created. There's a lot of interest now in how to use AI, especially Gen AI, and how that can ease the burden of IT operations. The moment you get on a phone and you're looking at a TikTok video, I mean the number of layers that are involved to deliver that, notwithstanding the physical infrastructure to deliver the audio and video content, but the infrastructure, software and physical infrastructure that it takes to store the media. It's a very complex environment and people want more of this faster.

Just for fun, can you walk me through some of the software that goes into making a TikTok appear on my phone, for example? The videos have to be stored somewhere. So there's some quality control. So there's software associated with that. And then when the video gets edited and uploaded and stored, you want to make sure that there's no data loss, no integrity compromise on the video.

And then the distribution aspect of it, and then there's edge caching. You don't want somebody looking at the video to hit the back-end server each time, and so there's what's called content distribution networks involved. This week in startups is brought to you by Uber. Bad data equals bad AI. Your AI is only as good as the data it learns from.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (76 minutes, 16,519 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 5 episodes for $3.49, and monthly plans are cheaper still.