Noam Shazeer

AI Scientist, OpenAI · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

scientistengineerfounderexecutiveauthor@NoamShazeer ↗LinkedIn ↗noamshazeer.com ↗Wikipedia ↗Instagram ↗

He co-authored the seminal 2017 Google paper "Attention Is All You Need," introducing the Transformer architecture powering modern large language models. After early work at Google, he co-founded Character.AI, later returned to Google as Gemini co-tech lead, and subsequently joined OpenAI.

16statements → 10claims → 1claims resolved → 3.69/5average certainty → 2.75/5average debate potential → 4said about them ↓

1 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 9 not checkable as stated how the 10 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

7 predictions · 3 assertions · 1 opinion · 3 insights · 2 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 10 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, and 9 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Noam argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported

Individual compute operations currently cost around $10^-18

“Like operations cost like 10 to the -18 dollars these days”

Noam Shazeer Sep 25, 2023 ▶ 16:47 Universally Accessible Intelligence with Character.ai's Noam Shazeer

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1

none yet certainty 2

50% certainty 3

100% certainty 4

none yet certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

How they sound: speaking style how? →

265 words/min while actually speaking · 22 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Noam Shazeer: no usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 2,183 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

What they said16 What others said4 Episodes1

Everything Noam Shazeer said on the a16z Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Prediction Not checkable as stated

AI capable of curing cancer is only a few years away

“I'd love to get to the point where you can just ask it how to cure cancer or something, you know. I mean, it's, you know, it seems a few years away for now, but, you know, like.”

Noam Shazeer Sep 25, 2023 ▶ 15:43 Universally Accessible Intelligence with Character.ai's Noam Shazeer

Insight

Entertainment is a $2T industry built on imaginary friends

“Entertainment is like this two trillion dollar a year industry. And like the dirty secret is that entertainment Is imaginary friends that don't know you exist.”

Noam Shazeer Sep 25, 2023 ▶ 7:34 Universally Accessible Intelligence with Character.ai's Noam Shazeer

Insight

LLM hallucination is a feature, not a bug, for AI companions

“Like you want to launch something that's a doctor, It's going to be a lot slower because you want to be really, really, really careful about not providing like false information, but friend, you can do like really fast. Like it's just entertainment. It makes t…”

Noam Shazeer Sep 25, 2023 ▶ 8:21 Universally Accessible Intelligence with Character.ai's Noam Shazeer

Prediction Not checkable as stated

AI companion entertainment is ready for immediate explosive adoption

“If I, like, I want to push this technology ahead fast, like, that's what I want to go with, because like, A, it's, you know, it's ready for an explosion, like right now, not like in five years when we solve all the problems, but like, now.”

Noam Shazeer Sep 25, 2023 ▶ 9:11 Universally Accessible Intelligence with Character.ai's Noam Shazeer

Prediction Not checkable as stated

Character.AI aims for AGI by building consumer products at scale

“Our goal is to be like an AGI company and a product first company. And the way to do that is by picking the right product that forces us to work on the right things, things that generalize, make the model smarter, make it, like, do what people, you know, what …”

Noam Shazeer Sep 25, 2023 ▶ 11:00 Universally Accessible Intelligence with Character.ai's Noam Shazeer

Disclosure

Frustration over inability to launch AI products drove Google exit

“You know, some people are motivated by publishing, you know, like, I was frustrated I couldn't launch at Google.”

Noam Shazeer Sep 25, 2023 ▶ 12:29 Universally Accessible Intelligence with Character.ai's Noam Shazeer

Prediction Not checkable as stated

Theory of mind in AI is an emergent property of scale

“Yeah, just make the thing smarter. It's gonna have a better theory of mind, and I think that's definitely something massively, massively important. It seems like one of these emergent properties that just Is gonna, going to come with scale.”

Noam Shazeer Sep 25, 2023 ▶ 13:03 Universally Accessible Intelligence with Character.ai's Noam Shazeer

Prediction Not checkable as stated

AI will improve massively from scaling without new breakthroughs

“And without any breakthroughs, like it's going to get like massively better as everyone just Kind of scales up to use it, and there will be more breakthroughs because now, you know, like all the scientists in the world are like working on like making this stuf…”

Noam Shazeer Sep 25, 2023 ▶ 14:59 Universally Accessible Intelligence with Character.ai's Noam Shazeer

Assertion Not checkable as stated

AI scaling laws show no signs of stopping

“I don't think anyone's seen like these scaling laws, you know, stop. I think as far as anybody has experimented, stuff just gets, keeps, keeps getting smarter.”

Noam Shazeer Sep 25, 2023 ▶ 16:05 Universally Accessible Intelligence with Character.ai's Noam Shazeer

Opinion

Shazeer is not currently afraid of AGI destroying humanity

“No. Not yet. Not yet. I think there's a lot of possibility of you know, a lot of potential benefits and yeah, we're going to work on it as the technology improves.”

Noam Shazeer Sep 25, 2023 ▶ 4:31 Universally Accessible Intelligence with Character.ai's Noam Shazeer

Disclosure

Character.ai's model cost $2M to train, now $500k

“The model we're serving now, we, you know, cost us about, like, two million dollars worth of compute cycles to train last year, and could probably repeat it for, like, half a million now.”

Noam Shazeer Sep 25, 2023 ▶ 5:43 Universally Accessible Intelligence with Character.ai's Noam Shazeer

Prediction Not checkable as stated

Character.ai will launch a significantly smarter model by late 2023

“We're going to launch something, tens of IQ points smarter hopefully by the by the end of the year.”

Noam Shazeer Sep 25, 2023 ▶ 5:53 Universally Accessible Intelligence with Character.ai's Noam Shazeer

Insight

Narrow AI use cases tempt builders into non-generalizable rules

“The more you get to like mission critical, you know, particular use case, the more you get tempted into like writing particular rules and like doing things that will not generalize well.”

Noam Shazeer Sep 25, 2023 ▶ 10:44 Universally Accessible Intelligence with Character.ai's Noam Shazeer

Assertion Supported

Individual compute operations currently cost around $10^-18

“Like operations cost like 10 to the -18 dollars these days”

Noam Shazeer Sep 25, 2023 ▶ 16:47 Universally Accessible Intelligence with Character.ai's Noam Shazeer

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Shazeer: Dialogue is the world's number one pastime

“Dialogue, like it's world's number one pastime”

Noam Shazeer Sep 25, 2023 ▶ 2:43 Universally Accessible Intelligence with Character.ai's Noam Shazeer

Prediction Not checkable as stated

Top-tier AI capabilities will reach academic labs in a few years

“Like, you know, we're going to see like a huge amount of innovation and, you know, what, what's possible in the largest companies now can be possible in, you know, in somebody's academic lab or garage in a few years.”

Noam Shazeer Sep 25, 2023 ▶ 15:16 Universally Accessible Intelligence with Character.ai's Noam Shazeer

The other half of the tape: Noam Shazeer's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 4 times in 4 episodes on the a16z Podcast. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Marc Andreessen 1 David George 1 Alex Rampell 1