Opinion
Qiu: Reasoning is the single biggest blocker for AI agents
“Reasoning is actually, we believe the biggest blocker to agents or systems that can do these larger goals.”
Insight
Qiu: Models lack reasoning because the internet lacks explicit reasoning data
“And models today, they're not optimized for reasoning. It turns out that there's not actually that much explicit reasoning data on the internet.”
Insight
Qiu: Synthetic code data can improve reasoning better than human code
“Code also is a big piece of improving reasoning. So yeah generated code is not That much worse than, like, regular human written code. You might even say it could be better in a lot of ways.”
Insight
Qiu: Pure reinforcement learning cannot deliver planning and reasoning
“The second thing we learned is that reinforcement learning is not a good vehicle. Like, pure reinforcement learning is not a good vehicle for planning and reasoning.”
Insight
Kanjun Qiu: Most autonomous AI agents do not work well today
“So to your question of, like, what agents work well and what doesn't work well, like, most of the agents don't work well, and we're slowly making them work better by improving the underlying model and improving these.”
Disclosure
Qiu: Imbue generates specific reasoning data rather than relying on web data
“So I think internally, yeah, we have a lot of thoughts on what reasoning is, and we generate a lot more specific data. We're not just like, oh, it'll figure out reasoning from this black box or like, it'll figure out reasoning from the data that, that exists.”
Insight
Kanjun Qiu: Chat is a skeuomorphic, primitive interface for AI agents
“Chat as an interface is skeuomorphic. So in the early days, when we made word processors on our computers, they had notepad lines because that's what we understood you know, these like objects to be chat. Like texting someone is something we understand. So tex…”
Opinion
Kanjun Qiu: Standardizing agent protocols is premature because agents don't work yet
“Part of why I think it's early is because the issue with agents is it's not quite like the internet where you could like make a website and the website would appear. The issue with agents is that they don't work. And so it may be a bit early to figure out what…”
Insight
Qiu: RAG is inadequate for scientific AI reasoning and cumulative synthesis
“I don't think RAG is enough for that kind of thing. But RAG is certainly enough for, like, user preferences and things like that.”
Insight
Kanjun Qiu: Agent reliability's final 20% is as hard as self-driving cars
“Agents haven't been productized yet for, partly for this reason, is that, like, the abstractions are very leaky. You know, we can get, like, 80% of the way there, but, like, self-driving cars, like, the remaining 20% is actually really difficult.”
Insight
Qiu: RL algorithms do not work at all without a curriculum
“One is with no curriculum, RL algorithms don't work at all.”
Insight
Qiu: Code is the most explicit reasoning curriculum for AI models
“Code is the most explicit example of reasoning data on the internet. Yeah. And it's not only structured, it's actually very explicit, which is nice. You know, it says this variable means this and then it uses this variable and then the function does this. Like…”
Insight
Qiu: Recruiting software suffers high churn because success halts hiring
“Recruiting is a market that is endogenously high churn. Which means, because people start hiring, and then we hire the role for them, and they stop hiring.”
Insight
Qiu: AI will provide free intellectual energy like the Industrial Revolution
“And what's happened over the last 150 years since the Industrial Revolution is we've kind of gotten free energy. Like, energy is way more free than it was a 150 years ago. And so, as a result, we've built all these technologies, like the stove, and the dishwas…”
Opinion
Qiu: Language reasoning in agents is primarily for human inspectability
“I personally think of it as it's much more important for us, the human user. So I think you probably could get end to end agents that work and are fairly general at some point in the future. But I think you don't want that. Like, we actually want agents that w…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Kanjun Qiu: Agent development will evolve beyond bare metal to higher abstractions
“And I think it's basically a similar route here where we're like in the like bare metal phase of agent building, and we will eventually get to something with much nicer abstractions.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Qiu: Memory limitations block AI agents from handling complex, long-running tasks
“I think what we'll see is we'll get like relatively simplistic agents pretty soon, and they will get more and more complex. And there's like a future wave in which they are able to do these like really difficult, really long running tasks. And the blocker to t…”
Assertion Supported
Kanjun Qiu: Larger models fine-tune faster and with higher sample efficiency
“As models get bigger, they fine tune faster. So they're more sample efficient as they get bigger.”
Assertion Partly supported
Imbue built an AI agent to analyze 20,000 Commerce Department policy proposals
“We built an agent that helped us analyze the, like, 20,000 pages of policy proposals submitted to the Department of Commerce request for AI policy proposals, and we, like, looked at what were the problems people brought up, and what were the solutions they pre…”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Imbue's CARBS hyperparameter optimizer originated from plasma physics concepts
“CARBS, our hyperparameter optimizer, came from Abe trying to automate his own research process doing hyperparameter optimization, and he actually pulled some ideas from plasma physics, he's a plasma physicist, to make the local search work.”
Kanjun Qiu