Douglas: Even AI pioneer Noam Shazeer only sees 10% of ideas work
Sholto Douglas · Sonnet 4.5 & the AI Plateau Myth — Sholto Douglas (Anthropic) · Oct 2, 2025 · at 24:47
Sholto Douglas, an AI researcher at Anthropic, discusses the low success rate of ideas in frontier AI research, quoting Transformer co-author Noam Shazeer.
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“I once asked this question of Noam Chazier. And he was like, yeah, maybe like 10% of my ideas work, and that's not, right? You know, one of the, you know, an absolute genius, one of the best in the field. So if only 10% of his ideas work, then I think that, you know, establishes a bound on on the percentage of ideas work. Most don't.”
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