Insight
McGrew: There is no limit to neural network capability with enough compute and data
“If you could figure out how to pour enough compute and pour enough data into a neural network, there's really no limit to how, how good it could get.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
McGrew: OpenAI models are improving, contrary to user reports of degradation
“Ah, we think it's actually getting better over time that, you know, some of the reports are sort of confounding various different things.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
McGrew: AI scaling will keep working without hitting an asymptote
“The way I think about it is that we are still pretty far away from the level of scale that is the human brain. And so there's no reason for there to be an asymptote. I think it just keeps working.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
McGrew: Human-level multi-agent AI will create its own civilization
“When you push this to the level where AI is at the human level, I mean, they're basically going to be creating their own civilization.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
McGrew: GPT-5 will render current AI infrastructure solutions completely obsolete
“I'm always a little worried about the infrastructure work, because I think, you know, you're solving the problems as they exist today, and when GPD 4.5 and GPD five come out, you know, they're gonna have fundamentally different use cases and fundamentally diff…”
Opinion
McGrew: We understand neural networks much better than the human brain
“I, at this point, I think we understand neural networks a lot better than we understand the brain. So whenever someone talks to me about the brain, I always think, well, what does a neural network do? And then probably actually the brain does that.”
Insight
McGrew: GPT-3 and GPT-4 must be prompted to act smart or dumb
“Well, that's actually one of the cool things that we've discovered with GPT-III and GPT-IV, Is that the model, so the models are trained on the internet and they're reading everything, right? Then they try to act like what they've seen, right? They're predicti…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
McGrew: Nobody but creator Aditya Ramesh believed DALL-E would work
“There's this researcher, Aditya Ramesh. He built a model called DALI, which allowed you to take a description and build an image out of it. He spent two years working on that. Wow. For most of those two years, no one other than him believed it would work.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
McGrew: OpenAI solved simulated robotic Rubik's cube in two weeks
“The Dota II team, Jakub Pachoki, who was doing this, had developed a
A technique that allowed you to put lots of data and compute into solving the problem. And it was really working for Dota. And he came over and started doing this for robotics. And we went f…”
Opinion
McGrew: Dota 2 was the last major game left for AI to solve
“I think Dota two is the last one.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
McGrew: Robotics will probably require AI to figure out robot manufacturing
“Robotics are probably going to need AI to write that, to figure out how to build robots for us.”
Insight
McGrew: Recent AI progress is just a series of engineering tricks
“Like the difference between neural networks and linear regression was really big. And the difference between neural networks now and neural networks two years ago is just a sequence series of tricks.”
Insight
McGrew: AI bias mitigation should prioritize workplace professionalism over political correctness
“And so I think a lot of, like near-term safety, a lot of these discussions about bias, like they really are about the fact that the model has learned all of these things, which it's learned a lot of true facts, it's learned a lot of things that are inaccurate,…”
Disclosure
McGrew: OpenAI uses thousands of human trainers scoring prompts to counter model bias
“Well, there's actually thousands of AI trainers behind the scenes who are, you know, we, we're, we give them prompts and they have to score the prompts. And so, you know, I think for better or worse, they bring their biases to it, but we try to make it so the …”
Opinion
McGrew: Teachers should design homework that requires AI use
“I think I don't want my kids using it for their homework, but what I want is I want teachers figuring out how to make homework that It requires you to use AI.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
McGrew: ChatGPT launched as a side project with zero press outreach
“And again, it was a side project. We called it a low-key research preview. We didn't do any press on it, and it just blew up.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
McGrew: AI scaling will ultimately be constrained by power and chips
“You know, the interesting thing about AI is, in the end, it's going to be limited by things like power. You know, if you're, and, you know, chips, and if you're trying to build these really massive clusters in 10 years or whatever.”
Insight
McGrew: Intelligence software cannot follow standard UX customer-interview playbooks
“And so instead of, you know, all the, you know, all the UX books that you interview your customers, you sort of find out what their problems are and you build them to solve their problems. And we couldn't do that. And so basically what we had to do was we had …”
Insight
McGrew: Great engineers struggle with uncertainty on long unproven projects
“This is one of those things about the really great engineers, is that a really great engineer wants certainty, right? They don't want to, you know, they've been doing something for three years, they, all they can see are all the problems that are in it”
Assertion Supported
McGrew: Vision models have specific neurons that activate for individual people
“Yeah, and at some point, there's a Joe Lonsdale neuron that, you know, is out there, you know, and individual people, you can actually find these neurons in the networks.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
McGrew: OpenAI's 2017 thesis was that neural networks could reach AGI
“So I think that the thesis behind open AI when I joined in 2017 was that neural networks were the final architecture that could take AI all the way to human level intelligence or AGI.”
Insight
McGrew on Palantir CEO Karp's rule: Great engineers are artists
“And I remember, you know, carp always used to talk about this, that the best engineers were artists, right? And if you want to keep an engineer happy, what you actually have to do is just let him do his art, just get out of his way, let him do his thing.”
Assertion Contradicted
McGrew: OpenAI secretly trained GPT-4 in first half of 2022
“We had already then secretly trained GPT-IV. So this was the first half of last year.”
Opinion
McGrew: It is very hard to bet against Nvidia in AI hardware
“I think what everybody has seen so far is that Nvidia has just been able to continually do better and better and better because they have, you know, the big market and a lot of capital to throw at it. So I think it's pretty hard to bet against Nvidia.”
