“I think the way you solve things is through, through ongoing exploration of what's happening and through, through interaction with the frontier.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading:
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More from Zico Kolter
Opinion
Kolter: Neural network architectures matter less than commonly believed
“I actually think architectures don't matter as much as everyone else thinks they do.”
Zico KolterMay 7, 2026▶ 1:08:15OpenAI Board Member Zico Kolter: Modern AI Is Just 200 Lines of Code
What-if
AI capabilities would have been achieved even without inventing transformers
“I think if we hadn't invented the transformer, we would have gotten there with whatever LSTM you know, state space model, whatever, anything else people were developing, we would have gotten there.”
Zico KolterMay 7, 2026▶ 1:08:19OpenAI Board Member Zico Kolter: Modern AI Is Just 200 Lines of Code
Insight
Kolter: AI models do not get safer automatically by scaling up
“You can't just sort of trust models to get safer by getting bigger. You have to put in the work to actually make them safer. And this is, I think what a lot of AI companies are investing in. This is why we in fact do have models that are improving on these dim…”
Zico KolterMay 7, 2026▶ 15:03OpenAI Board Member Zico Kolter: Modern AI Is Just 200 Lines of Code
Opinion
Kolter: Robotics AI is not yet ready for pure compute scaling
“Certain fields. I think things like robotics is still one. I don't think we're quite at the, let's just scale it up level with robotics yet. Some companies might argue we are. I don't think we are. I think we're still in the let's explore methods to find the r…”
Zico KolterMay 7, 2026▶ 37:38OpenAI Board Member Zico Kolter: Modern AI Is Just 200 Lines of Code
AssertionSupported
Kolter: Adversarial prompts optimized on open-source LLMs break commercial models
“Once we had done that, we found that when you had these weird terms that you sort of flipped around to optimize one, to optimize the response for one model, you could just take those same exact strings you would optimize, paste them into a commercial model, an…”
Zico KolterMay 7, 2026▶ 47:51OpenAI Board Member Zico Kolter: Modern AI Is Just 200 Lines of Code
Opinion
Kolter: AI agent benefits outweigh security risks if deployed with proper guardrails
“Yes, I think so, actually. I think if you run with proper guardrails, you know, we release guardrails for coding agents, for example. If you're on proper guardrails with proper sandboxing, and right now, yes, you probably also take some care to be a little bit…”
Zico KolterMay 7, 2026▶ 58:56OpenAI Board Member Zico Kolter: Modern AI Is Just 200 Lines of Code
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