Prediction Not checkable as stated
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.”
Opinion
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.”
Opinion
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.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Kant: Most vertical software and agents will disappear when AGI arrives
“A whole bunch of vertical software or vertical agents are probably gone.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Kant: Next-token pre-training gains hit a sigmoidal curve and slowed down
“The first paradigm of kind of pre-training of predicting the next token on the web was becoming sigmoidal and was slowing down in terms of the gains that it had.”
Insight
Kant: If AI intelligence commoditizes, only scale and delivery cost matter
“And within this world, if you think that intelligence is going to become less distinguishable between the companies building it, And becomes a commodity probably more like oil or cloud compute than like bread at the bakery, is there's two things that matter, y…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Kant: AI is on track to rewrite $29T of global knowledge work
“I don't think anyone has any doubts anymore that we're now on track to reach human level capabilities and intelligence. And in that world, 29 trillion dollars of knowledge work rewrites itself, right?”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Kant: AI foundation model gross margins will settle near 40%
“I'm not yet convinced that gross margins in our industry will look like a SaaS company, like 80% plus. I think when we're talking about a commodity as intelligence, that we build value added services on top. Right. It's a foundation model company. On one hand,…”
Insight
Kant: Full-stack AI infrastructure ownership cuts token costs 20-40%
“So when you take all those margins out, all of a sudden you can start seeing that you can serve your tokens, 2030, 40% cheaper than someone else.”
Insight
Kant: Internet data lacks the thought processes needed for AGI
“But the reason that never got us to AGI is because, well, the internet never actually included the data set of the thoughts and actions that created it. It's the final piece of code, it's the final article you write, but not the thoughts that you had and actio…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Kant: RL2L will enable model reasoning much earlier in training
“We think we'll push models to a level of reasoning and thought That will happen far earlier in their training than it does today.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Kant: AI training will evolve into continuous learning from real-world agent experiences
“And then the fourth stage of training over time increasingly will become learning, continuous learning from real world experiences of these agents. And so those are kind of the four stages that we think training will go to.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Kant: External software and agent frameworks will collapse into base models
“But we have a phrase at poolside, which is over time, everything collapses into the models.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Kant: AI models will equal top human knowledge workers within 36 months
“I think we have a hard time holding the point of view that models will reach the same level of intelligence and capabilities that the world's most capable people in every field have. And when you take a step back, and don't take the next 12 month view, but jus…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Kant: Neural networks will learn human-level capabilities in our lifetime
“That it's very like that in our lifetime, neural networks will become capable of learning anything and everything that we are capable of as humans.”
Prediction Held up
Kant: Most developers will adopt AI pair programmers within two years
“Well, the first thing that I think is at this point, almost uncontested, but frankly, when I was building source, most people didn't think would happen is the fact that the majority, if not all developers in the next couple of years in the world will adopt som…”
Prediction Held up
Kant: Non-engineers will build software via AI prompts within three years
“We don't think we're more than three years out to that point where a non-engineer, someone with no coding, you know, software development background is able to come and give one of those high level vague things of what they want built, right? Cause that's what…”
Insight
Kant: Programmatic RL can scale magnitudes larger than human feedback
“And it's that RL loop that is very interesting because since it's programmatic, since we have an Oracle of truth, we can scale this up far larger, right? Magnitudes larger than what you can do with human feedback today.”
Disclosure
Poolside built custom distributed LLM training framework from scratch
“We didn't take Megatron or DeepSpeed or kind of the big open source frameworks for training large language models. As our base, we built our own from scratch and we built our own distributed training for our pre-training stage.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Kant: Poolside is training world's largest models using reversible layers
“We've decided to scale up rev nets, reversible layers. So, so to the best of our knowledge, I think we're training the world's largest models using reversible layers that, that we've seen at least that nothing else that we're aware of publicly.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Poolside found top AI talent split 50/50 between North America and Europe
“We went through about 3200 or 3200 people that we ended up putting on the list. And we had this location column, like think genuinely Google spreadsheet, you know, like where's someone based. And at some point we looked at all these locations and we're like, w…”
Insight
Kant: AI labs build general reasoning faster by focusing on single proxies
“To get to highly capable intelligence that can reason, that can do planning, that can understand the world. You're almost better off putting a set of blinders and focusing on, on one proxy for that.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Kant: Frontier AI won't be winner-take-all, but limited to few labs
“I don't think it's a winner takes all market, but it does seem to be that it's a small number of companies who are able to get there.”
