What-if
Google would have crushed OpenAI by giving Noam Shazeer half its TPUs
“That muscle did not exist during my time at Google. And I think had they had it, what they would have done would be say, hey, Noam Shazir, you're a brilliant guy. You know how to scale these things up? Like, here's half of all of our TPUs. And then I think the…”
Insight
Luan: AGI means performing any task a human can do on a computer
“I think agents are just absolutely the correct long-term direction, right? You just go to find what AGI is, right? You're like, hey, like, Well, first off, actually, I don't love AGI definitions that involve human replacement because I don't think that's actua…”
Insight
Luan: LLMs shortcut evolutionary RL by behaviorally cloning all human knowledge
“Like de novo RL is like a pretty terrible way to get there quickly. Why are we rediscovering all the knowledge about the world? Like years ago, I had a debate with a Berkeley professor as to like what will it actually take to build HCI? And his view is basical…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Luan: AI will converge into a universal byte model across all modalities
“Multimodal models are becoming more of a thing, we're behavioral cloning the visual world, but really what we're just going to have is this like universal byte model, right? Where like tokens of data that have high signal come in, and then all of those pattern…”
Insight
Luan: Augmentation develops core AI capabilities faster than full automation
“I actually think that being an augmentation company Forces you to go develop your core AI capabilities faster than someone who's saying, ah, ok, my job is to deliver you a lights off solution for X.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Luan: Future AI value will shift from base models to agents
“In a world where foundation models are looking more and more commodity. And if, and I think a huge amount of gain is going to happen from how do you use foundation models as like the, like well learned behavioral cloner to go solve agents.”
Prediction Held up
Multimodal models will completely supplant text-only large language models
“I actually think like it's really clear today. Multimodal models are the default foundation model, right? It's just going to supplant LLMs. Like why did you just train a giant multimodal model?”
Insight
Real-world computer workflows with end-to-end API coverage are close to zero
“If you go itemize out the number of things you want to do on your computer for which every step has an API those numbers of workflows add up pretty close to zero.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Pure-play foundation model companies will be commoditized by Llama and big tech
“I think pure play foundation model companies are just gonna be pinched by how good The next couple of llamas are going to be, and the next, like, what next good open source thing, and then seeing the really big players put ridiculous amounts of compute behind …”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Luan: Training foundation models for robotics via behavioral cloning will work
“One, I'm so excited for someone to train a foundation model of robots. Like, it's just, I think it's just gonna work. Like, I will die on this hill. I mean, like, again, this whole time, like, we've been on this podcast, just continually saying, you know, like…”
Insight
Luan: Frontier AI advantages come from unpublished, non-academic scaling knowledge
“There's a collection of really hard-wanted knowledge that you get only by being at the frontiers of scale. And that hard-wanted knowledge, a lot of it's not published. A lot of it is, like, stuff that, like, it's actually not even easily reducible to what look…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Luan: Everyone will have an AI teammate at work within years
“I think in a couple years everyone's going to have access to, like, an AI teammate that they can delegate Arbitrary tasks do at work, and then also be able to, you know, use it to the sounding board and like just be way, way, way more productive”
Insight
Luan: Agent failures often stem from unreliable actuators, not models
“Everyone under values the importance of really good sensors and actuators. And actually a lot of what's helped us get a lot of reliability is like a really strong focus on like, actually, why does the model not do this thing? And the non-trivial amount of time…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Luan: Product-model co-evolution will drive AI progress over next years
“The number one driver of AI progress over the next couple of years is going to be the deep co-design and co-evolution of like product and users for feedback and actual technology.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Altman and Luan pitched Microsoft's top leadership before the OpenAI investment
“The last meeting we did with Microsoft, Before Microsoft invested in OpenAI, Sam Altman, myself, and our CFO flew up to Seattle to do the final pitch meeting. And I'd been a founder before, so I always had like a tremendous amount of anxiety about partner meet…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Brockman and Sutskever handed Luan their direct reports to do IC work
“I think second or second or third day of my time at OpenAI Greg and Ilya pulled me in a room and were like, hey you know, the you should take over our directs and we'll go mostly do IC work.”
