Bob McGrew
15 statements across 2 episodes · 8 bullish · 3 bearish · 1 people on the record · first statement Jan 31, 2025 by Bob McGrew · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Bob McGrew's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Everything said about Bob McGrew, oldest first
Jan 31, 2025 bearish
Jan 31, 2025 positive
McGrew: Frontier labs will increasingly rely on model distillation for smaller models
“I think over the last year, the big frontier labs and a lot of other people have figured out the tricks to take big models. And, you know, take a very particular distribution of user input and train a model that is almost as good as the big model, but much, mu…”
Jan 31, 2025 bearish
Jan 31, 2025 negative
McGrew: Academia's obsession with individual credit inhibits collaboration
“I think academia is good for this very narrow thing of, you know, small groups, you know, trying out crazy ideas, but academia has a lot of incentives that prevent people from collaborating. And in particular in academia, there's this obsession with credit.”
Jan 31, 2025 bullish
McGrew: Future human jobs will bifurcate into 'genius' and 'manager'
“I think that the role that we're going to be playing, You know, one, I think there's going to be two roles. One will be something like a lone genius. You know, the Alec Radford of the world working alone at his computer, coming up with some crazy idea, but now…”
Jan 31, 2025 neutral
McGrew: OpenAI authored early robotics paper as 'OpenAI' to avoid credit disputes
“And one of the early robotics papers, we actually said site as open AI because we didn't want to get into a fight. You know, the first author is the one who, you know, gets cited and their name shows up every single time. So we said, you know, we're not going …”
Jan 31, 2025 positive
McGrew: AI founders should build with frontier models first, distill later
“Yeah, I would say if you're a founder, the right approach is to start with the very best model you can, because, you know, your startup is only going to be successful if it exploits some, something about AI that realistically is going to be on you know, the fr…”
Jan 31, 2025 positive
McGrew: Learning to code builds critical thinking even if AI writes code
“And I think the answer is that like right now we still have to, like, this is how you learn how to do critical thinking. And, you know, I think back to Paul Graham's idea of the resistance of the medium, like even once You know, the computer can do the program…”
Jan 31, 2025 bullish
McGrew: LLMs have entered a pure scaling regime toward AGI
“And now that that has been cracked at this point, I think we actually have a very clear path to just focus on scaling. You know, we were, you know, talking about that you know, the zero to one part, that's not about scaling. I think there's a really strong cas…”
Sep 8, 2025
McGrew: Forward-deployed domain experts must be 'heretics' rejecting existing workflows
“So the echo team, you know, a classic Profile for someone to join your echo team would be someone from the domain you're working in. So, you know, possibly a former army officer or someone who worked deeply in healthcare. So they have deep domain knowledge, bu…”
Sep 8, 2025 positive
McGrew: Platform teams must treat internal FDEs as their key customers
“You want to focus on, on the user experience and you have to do that, but you also have to remember your other key customer is the FDE. Your product should be, you know, ultimately delivering a good thing to the user after FDE customization, but it should be d…”
Sep 8, 2025 positive
McGrew: FDE strategy succeeds by growing contract sizes rather than cutting customization
“In the product market fit strategy, you want to be doing less work for every customer, you want to be driving down costs, you want to keep the contract size the same. In the FTE strategy, you want to drive the contract size up. So you're doing more and more va…”
Sep 8, 2025 positive
McGrew: Palantir's FDE model relied on Echo analysts and Delta engineers
“The two key roles are those of what we call the echo team and the Delta team. The echo team were Embedded analysts. So they would go to the customer site. They would speak to the users. They would try to figure out what demo or what use case really made sense …”
Sep 8, 2025
McGrew: Forward deployed engineering is ideal training for startup founders
“What you're doing you know, in each of these new environments at each of these customer sites, Is a little bit like being a startup founder, but you're a startup founder where you have access to some very powerful piece of product leverage that makes your job …”
Sep 8, 2025
McGrew: Forward deployed engineers must be rapid prototypers, not code craftsmen
“And then for your deltas you want someone who's really good at prototyping. So the wrong profile for a Delta would be someone who's a craftsman who really loves, you know, making sure the abstractions are exactly right. That, you know, they're building softwar…”