McGrew: AI founders should build with frontier models first, distill later
Bob McGrew · Bob McGrew: AI Agents And The Path To AGI · Y Combinator · Jan 31, 2025 · at 17:42
Former OpenAI Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew gives strategic advice to AI startup founders on prioritizing iteration speed over inference costs.
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“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 frontier. So start with the very best model that you can, and Get it to work. And once you've gotten it to work, then you can use distillation. You can take a dumber model and you can try prompting it. You can try to have the frontier model, train the smaller model. But you know, the most important thing in a startup is actually your time, right? You don't want to be, unless you have to, you don't want to be like Palantir taking three years to get to market. You want to be able to build that product as quickly as possible. And only once you've actually figured out where the value is probably by iterating with your user, then you can think about cost.”
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