Eiso Kant
Co-Founder & CTO, Poolside. On 3 shows, 4 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveengineerinvestor@eisokant ↗LinkedIn ↗poolside.ai ↗
Eiso Kant is the co-founder and CTO of Poolside, an AI foundation model company focused on software engineering. He previously founded Athenian and source{d}, applying artificial intelligence to code analysis and developer tools.
3shows
4appearances
146statements
15resolved
11supported
1contradicted
73%fully supported
7said about them ↓ Everything Eiso Kant said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Kant: Solving knowledge work does not require 2-3 orders of magnitude scaling
“I'm no longer thinking that we need two or three orders of magnitude on the largest models to be able to You know, solve knowledge work the accounting, the legal, the code that we write.”
Kant: Anthropic's MCP and explicit tool calling abstractions are stupid
“I think MCP and tools are stupid.”
Kant: Restricting open-weight AI models at current capability levels will hurt innovation
“We are not at a level of capability right now. That we should start restricting, you know, open models in any way, shape or form. I think it will hurt innovation if we do so.”
Eiso Kant: AI intelligence is going to become a commodity
“I would actually go as far as saying that intelligence is going to become a commodity.”
Kant: Foundation model labs lacking physical infrastructure are 'cosplaying' their business
“If you're a foundation model company, and you're not building physical infrastructure, you're cosplaying your business.”
Eiso Kant: Expert-created rubrics and environments will not scale to AGI
“But the singularly collecting of skills This way by creating environments and experts we don't think will scale to artificial general intelligence.”
Kant: Most vertical software and agents will disappear when AGI arrives
“A whole bunch of vertical software or vertical agents are probably gone.”
Kant: Tesla will inevitably build the most capable full self-driving AI
“And so to me, Elon has one full self-driving. I think it's inevitable that, that the most capable AI for full self-driving is coming out of Tesla because they've been gathering and building up this data set.”
Kant: The vast majority of interesting open AI research comes from China
“The research that still gets published openly, right, that doesn't get held back, that is most interesting, is all coming out of China in vast spades and majorities.”
Kant: China is not years behind the West in AI progress
“No, I think China is at an incredible level of capabilities and in no way should be discarded or thought of as years behind on AI or AGI progress.”
Eiso Kant: AI will recycle world data into synthetic data within years
“And so this is kind of our view and our, if you extend this a couple of years out, and this is where some people will probably have objection with us. We think that this will go so far. That we will kind of recycle all of the world's real data into higher qual…”
Kant: Major AI labs did not prioritize RL for LLMs three years ago
“And the second was that reinforcement learning was going to be the biggest driver for LLM capabilities. Today, very obvious three years ago was not an opinion held or direction held at either OpenAI or Google or Anthropic or others.”
Kant: Open weights alone do not allow developers to recreate AI models
“Weights are a binary. Let's call them what they are. Yes, we can modify it and we can change them, but like, Giving someone the weights does not allow them ultimately to recreate what you're doing.”
Kant: Labs benefiting from Chinese open research have an obligation to give back
“The incredible Chinese lab has done an amazing job at sharing their research, and we have definitely take, like, been on the receiving end of taking advantage of that. So When you're on the receiving end of something coming to you, I think you also have kind o…”
Kant: Catching up to frontier AI labs will soon become unfeasible
“We've got a small window before models are Really impacting recursive self-improvement to a level where catching up otherwise might become unfeasible.”
Kant: Industry will squeeze far more capability from smaller models via behavior
“We are going to be able to squeeze so much more out of smaller models than I think we had imagined in the industry. Because yes, there's intelligence and larger models are more intelligent. Like no doubt about it. We should continue to scale up. But the behavi…”
Kant: Focusing solely on small open-source models is a cop out
“I think we ultimately only succeed if we scale our models as large as our competition. I do not, like, I think we should not put our head in the sand and say we're going to be king of open source small models. I think that's Frankly, it's a cop out.”
Kant: Reinforcement learning will move earlier into LLM pre-training
“I have I would say a not commonly held opinion that reinforcement learning will move earlier and earlier into pre-training.”
Kant: Laguna S outperforms models two to three times its size
“When you look at the benchmarks and start using it, you'll realize that we are outperforming models two or three times their size.”
Kant: Prompts stuffed with dozens of tools will vanish in 12 months
“I think we will in 12 months not see a single system prompt that is stuffed with 20 or 30 or 40 tools anymore.”
Kant: Pre-training compute runs are not the expensive part of AI
“The training run is not the expensive part. The training run is a very anticlimactic event, right?”
Kant: AI will become the world's most demanded commodity with commoditizing margins
“Intelligence is the most in life. You're going to be the world's most demanded commodity. It will more commoditize in margin and price.”
Kant: RL compute cannot scale like pre-training due to task batch constraints
“And RL is batch size constraint, right? So like you are ultimately in your batch size constraint because you don't have infinite tasks, right? When you've got the entire web, you can be much more flexible in scaling up your batch size because you've got the en…”
The other half of the tape: Eiso Kant's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 7 times in 3 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 4
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 4
Latent Space 3
2024 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Eiso's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 MADLEDGER | Co-Founder & CTO, Poolside | 2 | 55 | 50% 2/4 | full record on the MAD Podcast → |
| 20VCLEDGER | Co-Founder & CTO, Poolside | 1 | 48 | 83% 5/6 | full record on 20VC → |
| LATENT SPACELEDGER | Co-Founder & CTO, Poolside | 1 | 43 | 80% 4/5 | full record on Latent Space → |