Prediction certainty 3/5 debate potential 3/5

Anthropic's Joseph: Scaling alone likely will not achieve AGI without further paradigm shifts

Nick Joseph · Anthropic Head of Pretraining on Scaling Laws, Compute, and the Future of AI · Y Combinator · Sep 30, 2025 · at 48:15

Nick Joseph, Head of Pre-Training at Anthropic, discusses future challenges and scaling paradigms in AI with Y Combinator's Ankit Gupta.

0:00 / 0:26exact quote · 26.9s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Like I think the sort of shift towards more RL is like one paradigm shift in the field, and I think it's, I think there will probably be more. I think a lot of people sort of argue about like, oh, it's like, you know, current paradigm's enough to get us to EGI, and I'm like, I don't know, maybe. Yeah. Probably, but like, I'm sure there'll be more. It seems like it'd be a really surprising twist if like, the answer is like, you just scale and there's nothing that you realize in the process of going up many orders of magnitude.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Nick Joseph

Insight
Anthropic's Joseph: Compute matters far more than pre-training objective details
“I think that, like, the one sort of general intuition I have is, like, compute is the thing that matters. So, like, I think if you throw enough compute at any of these objectives, you're gonna get something that's probably pretty good, and can kind of be fine …”
Nick Joseph Sep 30, 2025 ▶ 6:57 Anthropic Head of Pretraining on Scaling Laws, Compute, and the Future of AI · Y Combinator
Insight
Joseph: LLM training requires collaborative infrastructure work over publishable research papers
“And to do a project like training a large language model requires a lot of people to collaborate on like a really complicated piece of infrastructure that isn't going to be a paper, right? Like you're not going to publish like, oh, I got a slightly, I got five…”
Nick Joseph Sep 30, 2025 ▶ 14:14 Anthropic Head of Pretraining on Scaling Laws, Compute, and the Future of AI · Y Combinator
Insight
Joseph: Sparsely linked long-tail data may be most valuable for frontier AI
“And it might be that like, that data ends up more valuable because you, everything that's linked to a lot, you've already got. Like at some point, you're maybe like going for the tails, or you're going for the stuff that no one's ever, like, you know, it's onl…”
Nick Joseph Sep 30, 2025 ▶ 33:30 Anthropic Head of Pretraining on Scaling Laws, Compute, and the Future of AI · Y Combinator
Insight
Joseph: Training purely on raw LLM generations cannot produce a better model
“Theoretically, I shouldn't be able to train a better model than that. Like, I'm just going to get the same thing out. So I think that's-”
Nick Joseph Sep 30, 2025 ▶ 34:42 Anthropic Head of Pretraining on Scaling Laws, Compute, and the Future of AI · Y Combinator
Insight
Nick Joseph: Third parties can steer frontier AI labs by publishing evals
“Like, it is the case that, like, the labs right now are really driven by getting good eval scores. And it's hard to make them, and anyone can do it. There's no comparative advantage to having the model to making an eval. So I do think it's actually, like, an i…”
Nick Joseph Sep 30, 2025 ▶ 40:11 Anthropic Head of Pretraining on Scaling Laws, Compute, and the Future of AI · Y Combinator
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Anthropic's Joseph: Certain AI Alignment Pieces Will Move to Pre-Training
“I do think at some point there will be, like, some pieces of alignment that, like, you do want to export back into pre-training because that might be a way to, like, Put them in with more strength, like, more robustness, kind of, or more core to the intelligen…”
Nick Joseph Sep 30, 2025 ▶ 46:03 Anthropic Head of Pretraining on Scaling Laws, Compute, and the Future of AI · Y Combinator
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 300 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.