Prediction certainty 4/5 debate potential 3/5

Shazeer: AI Hardware Advances Will Enable Garage Developers to Match Big Tech

Noam Shazeer · Noam Shazeer: How We Spent $2M to Train a Single AI Model and Grew Character.ai to 20M Users | E1055 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Aug 31, 2023 · at 22:44

Noam Shazeer, co-founder and CEO of Character.ai, predicts that hardware improvements will rapidly democratize high-end AI capabilities to small developers and academic labs.

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“The hardware is progressing so fast that what you could do at a big company, you know, one year, a few years later, you're going to be able to do You know, at the university lab or in your garage.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Noam Shazeer

Prediction Not checkable as stated
Shazeer: Character.ai Rejects Product Managers Who Push for Vertical Specialization
“And like, you know, we talked to like some you know, potential product managers early on and they all say the same thing. Oh yeah. Pick your verticals, narrow it down to me, to make it usable. And like, no, we're not going to hire these people. That's like the…”
Noam Shazeer Aug 31, 2023 ▶ 11:00 Noam Shazeer: How We Spent $2M to Train a Single AI Model and Grew Character.ai to 20M Users | E1055 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Shazeer: Users Prefer Video Game Characters Over AI Psychologists for Therapy
“We put up as an example, like a psychologist character, like maybe, maybe you want to, you know, talk to something and feel better, you know, and you know, that gets a little bit of use, but then what we hear a lot more from users is like, I'm talking to a vid…”
Noam Shazeer Aug 31, 2023 ▶ 7:30 Noam Shazeer: How We Spent $2M to Train a Single AI Model and Grew Character.ai to 20M Users | E1055 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Shazeer: Total Computation Is the Single Most Critical Factor in AI Training
“We can get a lot of, we can get a lot of data, but like, really, actually the number one thing that's important is how much computation you do to train it.”
Noam Shazeer Aug 31, 2023 ▶ 17:11 Noam Shazeer: How We Spent $2M to Train a Single AI Model and Grew Character.ai to 20M Users | E1055 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Disclosure
Shazeer: Character.ai Views AI Model Hallucinations as a Feature, Not a Bug
“We consider them a feature or at least, okay, basically, our goal, you know, our strategy is, like, launch something general, let people do what they want with it, and if these models are hallucinating, which we, which they certainly are, and we advertise that…”
Noam Shazeer Aug 31, 2023 ▶ 25:18 Noam Shazeer: How We Spent $2M to Train a Single AI Model and Grew Character.ai to 20M Users | E1055 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Shazeer: AI Research Is Currently Like Alchemy With Unknown Outcomes
“And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that, you know, this field is kind of alchemy. Right now, like no one knows exactly what is going to work.”
Noam Shazeer Aug 31, 2023 ▶ 32:36 Noam Shazeer: How We Spent $2M to Train a Single AI Model and Grew Character.ai to 20M Users | E1055 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Noam Shazeer: Compute and Model Size Constrain AI Progress More Than Data
“Yeah, probably the size of the model is the bigger challenge. We can get a lot of data, but actually the number one thing that's important is how much computation you do to train it.”
Noam Shazeer Sep 15, 2023 ▶ 3:32 20VC: The Biggest AI Leaders on What Matters More; Model Size or Data Size & Where Does The Value in AI Accrue; to Startups or to Incumbents
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