Acorn Labs recently announced its departure from its previous focus of Kubernetes to building GPTScript, a scripting language designed to redefine the way we interact with large language models (LLMs), particularly with OpenAI’s powerful engines. In this episode, Sheng Liang, Co-Founder and CEO of Acorn Labs, talks about the company’s decision behind the shift and what we can expect from the startup in the future. He says, “The cloud-native apps, which we’re all familiar with,are just not growing as fast as AI-enabled apps. That’s why we decided to pivot the company from the old Acorn runtime that’s based on binary containers to GPTScript that’s based on source code.”

Overview of Acorn Labs and its current focus

• Liang talks about the original idea behind Acorn Labs, aiming to build the developer experience for Kubernetes so that developers can build their containers and use them in production without having to learn Kubernetes.
• Liang discusses how far the company went down the path of the original idea and how ChatGPT caused the company to change direction.
• Liang tells us how AI developers preferred source code over binary containers and how this led to GPTScript, a new scripting language for AI-enabled apps.

Pivoting a startup from Kubernetes to AI-powered language model development

• Liang confides that luckily Acorn Labs had made the switch over to GPTScript before the company had paying customers, which would have made the transition more difficult.
• Pivots are common in startups and Liang talks about the different pivots they have made. He feels that the timing of technology is crucial for startups ideally to align with the early stage fast growth of a piece of technology.
• Liang explains that GPTScript is like Javascript but using a natural language you already know.
• Acorn Labs is building libraries comprising AI tools and Liang mentions the potential for these tools to be used in various industries, such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and chatbots.

Acorn Labs’ product development, marketing strategy, and team dynamics

• GPTScript already has a community of users, albeit not paying. Liang talks about the company’s roadmap to build GPT Stack. He hopes to have a turnkey product that enterprise customers will be able to deploy by the end of the year.
• Liang discusses the monetization aspect of GPT Stack saying they may consider offering value-added services, potentially as a SaaS or cloud service that is attached to the open source software.
• Liang emphasizes the importance of building a great product before focusing on marketing the business, and whether to keep the name Acorn Labs.
• Liang shares his vision for building up Acorn Labs, reflecting on his experience with Rancher.
• Acorn Labs’ core team consists of co-founders who have worked together for over 10 years and Liang talks about why the team works so well together.

Guest: Sheng Liang (LinkedIn)
Company: Acorn Labs (Twitter)
Show: Let’s Talk

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.