Kanjun Qiu

Co-Founder and CEO, Imbue · 1 appearance on the record.

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Kanjun Qiu is the co-founder and CEO of Imbue, an AI research lab developing reasoning and code-generating agents. She previously served as the first Chief of Staff at Dropbox, co-founded the startup Sourceress, and co-authored the computing education book Sew Electric.

11statements → 4claims → 0claims resolved → 3.64/5average certainty → 2.36/5average debate potential →

4 not checkable as stated how the 4 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

2 predictions · 2 assertions · 1 opinion · 6 insights · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 4 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 0 are resolved, and 4 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Kanjun argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

How they sound: not measured why? →

We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Kanjun Qiu on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.

What they said11 Episodes1

Everything Kanjun Qiu said on No Priors that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Prediction Not checkable as stated

Qiu: Pragmatic, smaller models will eventually address the majority of AI workflows

“And I suspect we're going to see something similar where a lot of use cases are going to be able to be addressed by something pretty pragmatic and relatively small.”

Kanjun Qiu Nov 16, 2023 ▶ 10:19 No Priors Ep. 41 | With Imbue Co-Founders Kanjun Qiu and Josh Albrecht

Insight

Qiu: Training a giant monolithic model does not magically solve agent reliability

“It's not like, oh, magical, you know, we train a giant model and stick everything into it and then magically it works. Like it does not work. It'll get better at random parts of the agent loop, but that's not what we want.”

Kanjun Qiu Nov 16, 2023 ▶ 15:06 No Priors Ep. 41 | With Imbue Co-Founders Kanjun Qiu and Josh Albrecht

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Qiu: Imbue trains state-of-the-art AI models with only 13 or 14 people

“We're kind of like training state, state of the art models with like 14, 13 people.”

Kanjun Qiu Nov 16, 2023 ▶ 25:54 No Priors Ep. 41 | With Imbue Co-Founders Kanjun Qiu and Josh Albrecht

Opinion

Qiu: Self-supervised AI may learn representations akin to human cognition

“There's something really interesting here where maybe machines are learning the same kinds of representations or similar representations to what humans are learning. And maybe they can get to a point where they can actually do the types of things that humans a…”

Kanjun Qiu Nov 16, 2023 ▶ 2:09 No Priors Ep. 41 | With Imbue Co-Founders Kanjun Qiu and Josh Albrecht

Prediction Not checkable as stated

Qiu: Software output will explode as programming democratizes to non-coders

“Software is just dramatically underwritten because it's so hard to write code today. So, you know, as we said in the future, like, computers will be able to be programmed by regular people. What that means is, like, we're gonna write way, way, way more softwar…”

Kanjun Qiu Nov 16, 2023 ▶ 30:31 No Priors Ep. 41 | With Imbue Co-Founders Kanjun Qiu and Josh Albrecht

Insight

Qiu: Autonomous AI agents represent a calculator-to-computer leap in technology

“The diff between this, where we are today, and that is kind of like the diff between the first calculator and where computers are today.”

Kanjun Qiu Nov 16, 2023 ▶ 3:47 No Priors Ep. 41 | With Imbue Co-Founders Kanjun Qiu and Josh Albrecht

Insight

Qiu: Chain of thought and tree of thought function as error correction

“Reasoning is one big piece of improving reliability, and second chunk of things is like all of this error correction, and I think like chain of thought, tree of thought, these are error correction techniques.”

Kanjun Qiu Nov 16, 2023 ▶ 7:16 No Priors Ep. 41 | With Imbue Co-Founders Kanjun Qiu and Josh Albrecht

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Qiu: The AI industry hasn't pushed data limits on small models

“We're definitely not pushing the bounds of what we can do with data today on small models, and so, you know, smaller things can work well.”

Kanjun Qiu Nov 16, 2023 ▶ 10:28 No Priors Ep. 41 | With Imbue Co-Founders Kanjun Qiu and Josh Albrecht

Insight

Qiu: Specialized reasoning planners coordinating sub-agents outperform single monolithic models

“You can kind of have this like more general reasoning layer and also a bunch of sub-agents where it, that, That general reasoning layer is actually very specific. It's a specific planner. It's not that good at, like, browsing the web and things like that, but …”

Kanjun Qiu Nov 16, 2023 ▶ 16:52 No Priors Ep. 41 | With Imbue Co-Founders Kanjun Qiu and Josh Albrecht

Insight

Qiu: Evaluating AI models solely on binary correctness loses critical evaluation data

“Part of why a lot of teams try to work on just math or code reasoning is because those are the easiest to evaluate and like the clearest Answers, but just relying on, like, is the output correct or not, that loses a lot of information in the evaluation.”

Kanjun Qiu Nov 16, 2023 ▶ 19:04 No Priors Ep. 41 | With Imbue Co-Founders Kanjun Qiu and Josh Albrecht

Insight

Qiu: Developing AI agents today is comparable to writing code in assembly

“So today, like writing agents feels like writing code in assembly, and that really limits the types of agents we can build and also limits the number of people who can build them.”

Kanjun Qiu Nov 16, 2023 ▶ 21:15 No Priors Ep. 41 | With Imbue Co-Founders Kanjun Qiu and Josh Albrecht

Appearances (1)

Episode	Date	Speaking time
No Priors Ep. 41 \| With Imbue Co-Founders Kanjun Qiu and Josh Albrecht	Nov 16, 2023	12m

Kanjun Qiu

The record, in short

How they sound: not measured why? →

Appearances (1)

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