Are We Misreading the AI Exponential? Julian Schrittwieser on Move 37 & Scaling RL (Anthropic)
By The MAD Podcast with Matt Turck
Summary
## Key takeaways - **AI's exponential progress is underestimated**: AI progress is doubling task length every 3-4 months, a rate difficult for humans to intuitively grasp, leading to underestimations of its rapid advancement. [00:06], [01:58] - **2026-2027: Autonomous agents and expert-level breadth**: By mid-2026, AI agents are predicted to work autonomously for a full day, and by 2027, they will frequently outperform human experts across many tasks. [04:46], [06:49] - **Move 37: AI's potential for novel insights**: The 'Move 37' moment in AlphaGo demonstrated AI's capacity for truly novel and creative insights, a capability that extends to modern LLMs, though usefulness and interest are key challenges. [10:50], [13:51] - **Pre-training + RL is the path to productivity**: The current paradigm of pre-training followed by reinforcement learning is likely to achieve significant productivity gains and accelerate scientific progress, rather than requiring entirely new architectures. [19:08], [20:52] - **RL unlocks robust agents beyond pre-training**: Reinforcement learning is crucial for developing robust AI agents because pre-training data lacks examples of failure and interaction, whereas RL allows agents to learn from their own behavior and correct errors. [48:02], [50:15] - **Goodhart's Law applies to AI benchmarks**: AI benchmarks, when treated as targets, cease to be good measures of true performance, necessitating internal, task-specific evaluations to avoid 'leaderboard theater'. [54:26], [56:08]
Topics Covered
- Public Fails to Grasp AI's Exponential Progress
- Could AI Win a Nobel Prize by 2027?
- MuZero: Learning to Act Without Perfect World Simulation
- Goodhart's Law: Why AI Benchmarks Can Be Misleading
- AI: A Complementary Tool, Not a One-for-One Job Replacement
Full Transcript
The talk about AI bubbles seemed very
divorced from what was happening in
frontier labs and what we were seeing.
We are not seeing any slowdown of
progress. We are seeing this very
consistent improvement over many many
years where every say like you know 3 4
months is able to like do a task that is
twice as long as before completely on
its own. It's very hard for us to
intuitively understand these exponential
trends. If you manage to make everybody
in society 10 times more productive you
know what kind of abundance can we
achieve? What will we be able to unlock
in the next 5 years? I think we can go
extremely far.
>> Welcome to the Matt podcast. I'm Matt
Turk from First Mark. Today my guest is
Julian Shitwezer, one of the world's
most impressive AI researchers. Julian
was a core contributor to DeepMind's
legendary AlphaGo Zero and Muse projects
and he is now a key researcher at
Enthropic. We covered the exponential
trajectory of AI and his predictions for
2026 and 2027, the frontier in
reinforcement learning and AI agents and
the science behind AI creativity and the
famous move 37 from Alph Go. Please
enjoy this fantastic conversation with
Julian.
>> Hey Julian, welcome.
>> Hey Matt, thanks for having me. A couple
of weeks ago, you wrote uh an incredible
blog post uh that broke the internet
entitled failing to understand the
exponential again. What is it that so
many people are missing about the
current trajectory of AI?
>> Yeah, it's funny that you bring up that
blog post. I really didn't expect it to
blow up that much. I actually had the
idea when I was on holiday in Kyrgyzstan
a few weeks ago on a very long car ride
and then I started thinking about this
and like all the talk about oh AI
bubbles I seen on X and like you know
this discussion and it seemed very
divorced from was you know what was
happening in frontier labs and what we
were seeing and that made me start to
wonder a bit like is it that things are
moving so fast that people maybe
struggle a bit to extrapolate and
understand intuitively.
Oh, you know, maybe it's far away now,
but you know, it's doubling every so
many months, which means that once it
gets close to us, it's going to move
past and become really good very
quickly. And that reminded me a lot in
like a different way, but like what
happened during early
>> co
>> where we had a similar situation where,
you know, at the beginning it's like
very few cases. It's like, wow, you
know, it's never going to happen. It's
only a few hundred people. Who cares?
But if you understand the math and if
you look at it, right, it's like, oh,
it's going to double every, you know,
week, two weeks. Clearly, it's going to
be a massive scale. But it's it's very
hard for us to intuitively understand
these exponential trends because it's
just not what we're used to in our
normal environment. And so that's what
got me thinking oh is something similar
happening here with AI right
>> we are clearly if if you're looking at
many benchmarks we have many evaluations
we have we are seeing this very
consistent improvement over many many
years where every say like you know 3 4
months is able to like do a task that is
twice as long as before completely on
its own and so we we can extrapolate
this right and we see that oh in a year
from now maybe two years from now It's
the top models are going to be able to
work completely on their own for like a
whole day or more. Combined with this,
combined with the fact that there's a
huge number of knowledge based jobs in
the economy, knowledge based tasks and
combined that in the frontier labs we
are not seeing any slowdown of progress.
Just extrapolating those things together
over a very short time like you know
half a year, one year already that is
enough to know that there is going to be
massive economic impact. That means if
you look at current like if you look at
OpenAI if you look at Enthropic if you
look at Google
those evaluations
those revenue numbers are actually
fairly conservative. I think some more
thoughts, some things more I've seen
more recently is that it's maybe
actually even more interesting and more
complex that you know while those
frontier labs and frontier models are
clearly very capable and on like an
extreme trajectory,
there are like a lot of other
companies, right, that are trying to
follow into the same AI sphere that may
also have very high evaluation but not
necessarily the revenues to support it.
And so it's possible that there may
simultaneously be like some sort of
bubble in you know the wider ecosystem
while at the same time the frontier labs
on a very solid trajectory having a lot
of revenue making a lot of money. I
think that may be quite of an unusual
situation
>> that in the past you know maybe in the
com bubble maybe people were talking
about like you know the railroad rush
and stuff like this we did not see this
bifocation. So I think it yeah I've been
thinking about this more and I think
it's it's getting more and more
interesting the situation.
>> Fascinating. So you alluded to some of
your predictions or extrapolations for
26 and 27. Do you want to unpack that?
You had you had three of those.
>> Maybe you know calling it my prediction
is giving myself too much credit, right?
I will just say this. If you look for
example at meter eval and you very
naively
extrapolate the linear fit, that's what
you would expect to happen. And so I'm
just going to be humble, right, and say
like, "Oh, most of the time, right, I'm
not going to be smarter than statistical
models, statistical extropolation of
past trends that have been very
consistent. So I'm just going to be very
humble and like despite, you know, what
I might know all about research and
what's happening." Probably like, you
know, the most likely the best
prediction I can make is actually just
follow that data, that extrapolation and
see where it's going to take us. And
yeah, in that case, if you if you roll
this out, if you look at other
benchmarks, I think we would have
something like next year, maybe the
models will be able to work on their own
for a whole day worth of tasks. If you
think of software, right, you might say
like, oh, implement this entire feature,
build out this entire set of the app. If
you think of knowledge work, right, if
maybe do like a whole research report,
this kind of scale. The reason I think
why task length specifically is
interesting is because that's
what allows you to delegate more and
more work to language models to agents.
Even if you have a very clever model,
but if it needs feedback or the
interaction with you very often, then it
really limits what you can delegate to
it. If you need to talk to it every 10
minutes, right? Versus if you have
something that can go for hours at a
time, obviously, right? Then you cannot
just have one copy of it. you can have a
whole team that you delegate tasks to
and manage them. And so I think that's
why it's really critical that the models
are actually smart enough, the agents
are smart enough to work on their own to
correct their own errors to you know
iterate because that's really what
allows you to delegate indeed. Uh test
length and time to complete as the
metric for progress. So by mid206 you
mentioned agents can work all day
autonomously. late 2026 at least one
model matches industry experts across
many occupations and then by 2027 models
frequently outperform experts on many
tasks. So is so it's more time running
and then generalization across the
economy and you mentioned GDP val the
the open AI metric as um as as a
benchmark to to um uh already see the
progress towards multiple professions.
Yeah, I think the GDP is like a super
cool evaluation from OpenAI where they
collected a lot of like you know real
world tasks from real domain experts to
make sure it is actually representative
of what you might do in the economy and
then they evaluated a lot of models on
those tasks. They compared them against
real experts performance to give us like
a really good indication of you know how
close how far are we from having
significant economic impact. So I think
that's that's like a super cool
evaluation. The sort of obvious question
is that GGB val and meter are carefully
uh designed benchmarks. How do they
predict production value once you add
compliance, liability, messy data, the
messy world, tool friction and and all
the things.
>> So I think like messiness and task
length like you know time duration that
you're able to work independently are
very similar or very correlated.
So I think that's why it's interesting
that meter tries to measure how long can
the model go on its own because if you
know if you think about like you know
how do you come up with a task that you
know takes a human 8 hours 16 hours
right
you will have to include all these
messiness and all this real world mess
to even be able to measure it but I
think you know ultimately to go further
we really want benchmarks we really want
evaluations that come from the actual
users whether it's the industry whether
it's private users
because that's that's what ultimately
matters, right? Like is the model
helpful to you? Do you get something out
of it, does your paperwork, helps you
write something, fixes your codes, helps
you study, right? I think that's the
real proof. If you release a new model,
right, do people start using it more? Do
they really enjoy it?
>> Is there anything that would change your
mind? any kind of signal whether that's
real world adoption or benchmark
performance something that would make
you more um cautious about um that
exponential is there anything that would
change your mind
>> I mean many things yes I think like you
know many of these things are like you
know internal only right I might look at
our model pre-training I might look at
our fine tuning I might look at RL
things you know how do new runs go
compared to past runs do they match our
expectations the scaling continue then
you know I might look at more public
things of like are people actually able
to use those models to be more
productive for example at the beginning
right there's always some adaptation
period of oh you have like a new tool
like cloud code takes you some time to
figure out how to use it but then in the
medium term in the long term do people
keep using it are they getting more and
more productive using it I think that's
like you know one of the things I look
at many many signals I think when you do
RL when you do research
I think you get very much in the habit
of like looking for signals to prove
yourself wrong because you know you
often have ideas that you get attached
to, but that's not a good way to do
research, right? You most of your ideas
are not good and they're not going to
work.
>> So you really want to figure out as
quickly as possible whether this idea is
any good or whether it's actually wrong.
So if you really get into this habit of
like oh finding the fastest thing that
will show that oh no this is actually
not true. So by 2026 2027 in your
extrapolation framework AI becomes as
good as humans. A key question of the
moment is um can it be to which extent
can it become better than than humans?
There's um uh some chatter these days
around uh move 37 and uh whether AI can
create those like alien new path to
think and solve hard problems. So first
of all maybe remind the audience what
move 37 is and then do you think that AI
in its current state uh is is going to
be increasingly able to to provide move
37 type thinking?
>> Yes. So I guess yeah to give background
move 37 that was when we were building
AlphaGo AI program to play the game of
go that was like in the year 2016 I
think and we're playing one of the best
players in the world at the time because
at that time you know no AI program no
computer program had ever beaten the top
human players at go and it was
considered to be you know one of the
most difficult board games sort of like
you know a real test of intelligence.
Move 37 happened during the second game
of the 5K match where Alph Go played
like a really unexpected unconventional
move that surprised many professional Go
players. I think you know the
commentator said it was you know truly
creative unexpected and then ultimately
Algo ended up winning that game. And so
I think that was for many people an
early sign that
AI is not just you know purely
calculating following an optimal path
but it can also do something that is
truly novel and creative that you might
not expect you know just from imitating
his training data. Yeah, I think I think
that's very relevant in a modern context
as well, right? Because as you alluded
to, there is a lot of discussion of, oh,
are LM just paring the training data?
Can they actually do novel things? For
me, as somebody who has been doing
research a long time, I think it's
pretty clear that these models can do
novel things. And that's why they are so
useful to many people whether it's you
know writing code for you because
obviously right you're not just writing
code that you already have that wouldn't
be very interesting or like helping you
you know write a paper or the way those
models are trained they're literally
trained to generate a whole probability
distribution which means that when we
sample from them we can generate you
know infinite amount of novel sequences
from them. for the question of something
like move 37.
I think there it really comes down to
like you know is it something that is
sufficiently creative and impressive
that we can easily recognize it in the
game of go right that was pretty ideal
conditions because it's you know very
clean very abstract you can really each
move is a very impactful so you can
really see it clearly I think to have
the equivalent for our modern models you
need the combination of a task that is
like sufficiently difficult and
interesting and a model that is both
able to create sufficiently diverse and
creative ideas and also able to evaluate
accurately how good they are so that it
can go down you know increasingly novel
path while making sure that this novel
path is actually you know interesting
and useful. Creating novel things is
actually very easy with language models.
The hard part is creating novel things
that are useful and interesting.
>> Extrapolating this further, there's the
idea of creating novel science. So not
just one move but like a whole new ID,
new concept. What's your current take on
on this? So I think alpha code and alpha
tensor proved that you can discover
novel programs and algorithms. Uh very
recently I think last week there was
some news of uh Google de mind and yell
uh in the biomedical uh field coming up
with with brand new things as well. So
do you think that's uh accelerating and
that AI is in the process of discovering
novel science?
>> So I think we're absolutely at the stage
where you know it is discovering novel
things and we're just moving up the
scale of how impressive how interesting
are the things that it is able to
discover on its own. And so I think it's
highly likely that sometime next year
we're going to have some discoveries
that people pretty you know anonymously
agree that you know this is super
impressive. I think at the moment we're
more at the stage of you know oh it came
up with something but there's debate
about and like but yeah I'm not very
worried because I see this process
continuing and then once it gets clear
enough
there's less need to argue about it. How
far do you think we are from an AI
winning the Nobel Prize?
>> Yeah, I think that's a really
interesting question, right? Because we
had a Nobel Prize for AI with Alpha
Fold, of course. And so I think the next
very interesting point is going to be
when can AI on its own make a
breakthrough that is so interesting that
it would win a Nobel Prize. And I think
my guess for that level of capability
might be maybe 2027.
I think we're we're probably not going
to find out for quite some time
afterwards
because of the delay in getting prices,
but I think by 2027 2028, I think
extremely likely that the models will be
smart enough and capable enough to
actually have that level of insight on
that level of discovery.
>> Amazing. I
>> think yeah Nobel Prize, right? It's like
the Fields Medal for math and all these
kind of like advances. I think you know
that's that's what I'm truly excited
about actually is like AI that can help
us advance science and really unlock you
know both all the mysteries of the
universe and all the improvements in
living standards and abilities for us
that we could have if we understood the
world better.
>> All right. So extrapolating this even
further then we get into the AI 2027
thing that that you you you probably
saw. So this general idea of um if AI uh
can create novel science then AI can
create uh AI researchers and basically
AI can create itself which um
effectively leads to a discontinuity
moment. So I don't know if that in the
blog post that's the singularity or
whatever. uh but does that strike you as
somebody who's uh you know as deep in
the field as possible as something that
is possible in the short term or are
they counterbalancing forces that makes
that path to discontinuity uh harder as
you get closer? Yeah, I think a true
disconnectuity is extremely unlikely
from you know obviously AI researchers
are already using AI to accelerate
themselves and so what's what's already
happening and like what is likely to
continue to happening is that we see
like a smooth improvement of
productivity
and then the main open question is how
does the difficulty of improving AI keep
scaling because a very common effect in
a very common issue in many scientific
fields is that we find all the easy
problems first
and then you know as we continue
exploring the problem the field it gets
more and more difficult to make
advances. So in my mind the main
question is do these two trends balance
each other out so that you know the AI
makes us increasingly more productive so
that as it gets more difficult to make
advances we just sort of about stay on
trend and then we keep improving roughly
linearly or it is still too difficult
and then you know eventually after some
time we still see a slowdown but it
seems quite unlikely to me that we
improve in productivity so much that we
can actually accelerate That would be
very unlike any other scientific field.
The normal course in many scientific
fields is that we actually need to
exponentially increase the research
effort just to keep making progress and
find new insights. For example, if you
look at pharmarmacology discovering new
drugs, it's nowadays in the range of
billions of dollars to discover a new
drug versus you know maybe 100 years ago
a single scientist could discover the
first antibiotic right by accident. It's
not that we will be surprised by sudden
takeoff in progress where you know oh
we're just doing our research and
suddenly our model is like 10x better.
We will be seeing advanced signs of oh
we're making faster progress every
single week. we can see something is
happening. Maybe we decide to pause if
you don't understand what's happening.
>> Do you think the current approach to
modern AI systems which effectively is
pre-training plus RL does that take us
to
where we want to be? Whether we call it
AGI SI, it's unclear what any of the
things mean. But um do you feel that
this paradigm is the right one or do we
need to come up with a different
architecture all together post
transformers or otherwise?
>> I think that's a great question and I
think it hugely depends on what you mean
by where do we want to be. So I think if
you're thinking of oh we want some kind
of system that can perform at roughly
human level in basically all tasks that
we care about productivity wise then I
think yeah it's extremely likely that
the current approach pre-training or you
know transformers is going to get us
there. If what you care about is oh we
want to have a model of intelligence
that is conscious in the same way we are
or you know more abstract qualities like
this I think that's maybe more uncertain
right and I think this is where a lot of
the confusion and disagreement comes
from as you alluded to know AGI ASI like
you know people talk about very
different things and they have very
different things in mind when they say
oh the current paradigm is going to get
there it's not going to get there I
often yeah like to not use the term AI
or ASI and just talk very concretely
about you know what problem are we
solving what task are we solving what
quality are we interested in because I
find that often makes the actual dis
disagreement much more obvious but yeah
I think if you're just thinking of in
terms of like is this going to help us
be massively more productive
is this going to massively accelerate
scientific progress then I think
definitely the current approach we'll
get there
>> and given how extremely deep you are in
I cannot resist asking you sort of the
the the the trendy question uh duour uh
based on Richard Sutton's recent
appearance on Dorish podcast uh do you
think that the models of the future will
be trained in RL from scratch and that
actually having pre-training
um in addition to RL is the wrong way to
go?
>> Personally, I think that's unlikely. Not
not because pre-training is strictly
necessary. I think we may well be able
to train something completely from
scratch as we've been able to do in
other domains.
But more because pre-training
on this vast data sets we have just
brings us so much value that we would
from a practical point of view not want
to give it up.
So we, you know, we might well do some
agents that are trained from scratch out
of scientific interest. It could be very
interesting to learn about what would a
non-human intelligence look like.
But from a programmatic point of view, I
definitely think we would keep using
pre-training data. not just from an
efficiency point of view as well, but
also I think there is interesting safety
angles because by pre-training on you
know all this human knowledge we're
implicitly creating an agent that has
similar values as we do and I think that
is quite valuable for aligning
uh you know highly intelligent agent if
you already start out by caring about
sort of you know the same rough set of
values that makes things much easier
then you create an you know arbitrary
alien intelligence that may have
completely different values. Despite
having, you know, done a bunch of from
scratch RL in the past, I think I'm
often quite pragmatic about this.
>> I'd love to put a pin in that specific
discussion about um alignment uh and
what we do to ensure safety to later in
the conversation because I think that's
a super interesting uh vein. Um, but
maybe to switch tacks uh for for a
minute. Um, I'd love to go into a little
bit of your uh story and then uh the
monumental body of work that you've done
uh at Google Deep Mind before joining
anthropic around uh Alpha Go Alpha Zero
M0. Uh so maybe uh just the 3 4 minute
version of of your personal story from
when you were a kid. What was the path
that led you to become a world-class AI
researcher?
>> Yeah, actually when I was a kid, I
didn't have any expectations of becoming
an AI researcher. I was always very
interested in computers and I grew up in
the Austrian countryside in a small
village. So, you know, it's not like
there was a huge amount of things
happening, but computers were always
very interesting to me. You know, it's
like this connection to the wider world
to all these other interesting things.
And I was very interested in computer
games as well. And I think that's the
first time I became interested in
programming because I wanted to make my
own games
which I think is very common in people
who get into programming. But I somehow
I always got distracted by the technical
aspect of I'm going to build a very
general game engine that you know can
run any kind of game. And so I never
actually ended up making any game. I
learned a lot about making game engines
and different technologies and that's
how I ended up studying computer science
eventually in Vienna. Yeah, there was
like a classical computer science degree
and then by chance after my first year
in my first summer holidays I had an
internship with Google
and that's when I realized oh wow these
guys are doing really interesting things
they you know that's where their big
clusters the tens of thousands of
machines are that's first time I
radically changed my plans from wanting
to stay in academia and you know I had
originally thought oh maybe I do a PhD
That's when I changed, oh no, actually I
just want to join these guys at Google
and I will finish my degree as quickly
as possible. And so that's actually yeah
when I got my full-time position at
Google, finish my degree the next year
and then move to London. So I was just
working as a normal software engineer at
Google working actually like in
advertising which I wasn't super excited
or interested in.
So like the technology was interesting,
right? is like these huge systems and
Google has you know famously great
technology but actually after you know a
yearish of this I was pretty
done on board of advertising and so I
was actually planning to leave Google
and thinking of maybe joining a hedge
fund going into finance when by chance I
saw an email in my work inbox that this
guy Demis was going to come to the
office and give some talk about Atari
and video games and AI
And it was actually a day off because I
was visiting a friend somewhere else in
England.
>> But that email looked so intriguing that
I was like, "Oh no, I'm going to have to
like take the train back to the office
right now and like see this talk."
>> And yeah, like I'm really glad like that
I saw this email and I did go back
>> because that's like the moment where I
decided, oh no, like no, I'm not going
to go into finance. I'm going to move to
Deep Mind.
>> I'm going to join these guys because
this looks clearly, you know, super
interesting, super amazing. They are
doing really interesting research.
>> All right. Tell us a story of um Alph
Go, Alph Go Zero, Alpha Zero, Mu0.
Uh because it's it feels like it's
fundamental AI knowledge that everybody
who has an interest in the space should
know about should understand the
progression in in particular. So um
starting with the beginning of Alph Go,
you alluded to it a second ago, but like
what did it do? what how was it trained
and then how that how did that evolve
with each version
>> alpha
>> go I think at that moment in time go in
the machine learning community was this
really big target where everybody felt
like oh you know it's this big unsolved
challenge
image ImageNet had just happened before
so clearly you know models were starting
to do something with images and being
able to recognize them and predict them
and if you look at the go board you know
the right way it looks a lot like one of
those images that you classify. So there
was a lot of momentum around using
neural networks to somehow play go and
then at the time David Silver and Ashang
deep had been working on go I think like
both of them had been working on go for
quite a while had published some very
interesting papers
and that's when the idea of using Monte
College research with deep networks came
together so the idea was that to train a
deep null network to predict which moves
you might want to play
and you know whether you're winning or
losing the game and then use the tree
search to really make a big plan of what
are all the possibilities in the game.
How would it go for you if you chose a
certain move or a different move? How
would the opponent respond?
>> And to explain this in super plain
English, uh the term search in this case
is as you said is research is not what
people normally think of search which is
searching a corpus. This is searching a
series of options effectively. Is that
is that the right way to think about it?
>> Yes. It's it's quite literally what you
might do when you play a game of chess
when you play any board game. It's quite
literally thinking of you know what move
am I going to do? What move is my
opponent going to do in return and then
thinking about many possible moves like
that and mapping out all the
possibilities in the future.
>> So deep learning plus search. What was
Alph Go trained on?
>> Initial training phases of Alph Go were
on some human amateur games if I
remember correctly.
>> Mhm.
>> So basically just predicting if you have
humans playing many games of go try to
predict at each turn in the game what
move would they have played? And it
turns out that you know if you train a
deep network to do that you can get
something pretty decent like amateur go
level.
>> Mhm. Mhm. but not good enough to
actually beat a really strong player.
>> And by the way, just for the lore of it,
uh did you guys have any uh sense that
uh was going to crush Lee Doll? So, the
the famous Go player that you mentioned
earlier in the conversation? Was it was
it obvious before? Was that a surprise?
>> We thought we had a pretty good chance,
but we were very nervous about like, you
know, are we going to win? Are we not
going to win? Are we going to lose?
Yeah. We actually had some bets
beforehand of like how many games we're
going to win or lose. Like I think it
was very ambitious to put the match as
early as we did. If we had wanted to be
a bit more safe, we may have like tried
to do a few months later. And I think if
you had done it a few months earlier, we
would have probably lost.
So it was very knife edge of I guess
which also made it much more interesting
for us, right? Because
>> it really means that each game is like a
nailbiter of oh what's going to happen?
Are we going to win? Are we going to
play you know dumb move? What's going to
happen? So that was very exciting.
>> Alph Go Zero which was I believe the
year after. How was that different? What
was the progression?
>> Main change between Alph Go and Alpha Go
Zero was to remove all the human Go
knowledge. So instead of starting by
imitating human go games, we were
training it just from scratch playing
only against itself and rediscovering
basically all go completely figuring out
from scratch how to play.
>> Did you give it the rules of the game?
>> We didn't give the rules of the the game
to the network per se, but we used the
rules of the game to score the result.
So basically you know he would play and
he would tell it you know who won who
lost or you know you cannot make this
move.
>> So the next hop was uh alpha zero which
was a year or two later. How is that
different? So alas zero the idea was
well obviously go is really beautiful
game but ultimately we would like to do
something more general right so can we
remove anything that is go specific and
verify that the algorithm can actually
solve more problems and in that case we
did that by trying to solve both chess
go and shroggy which is a Japanese chess
basically with the same algorithm you
know the same network structure
just by running it in different games
and also making it you know much
simpler, elegant and faster. So
basically that was really laying the
groundwork for applying the algorithms
to solve real problems. And then the
next um stop in the journey was Mu0 and
and just to bring it home for uh people,
you were uh I believe second author on
AlphaGo Zero and you were the lead
author on M0 which um in the world of of
I'm I'm sure you're going to be very
humble about it, but like in the world
of AI is like as as big a deal as it
gets. So um I'll say it so you don't
have to say it. Um so Mero, what was the
next um what was how was that different?
So the main motivation I had for making
M0ero was that if you want to solve many
real world tasks, you have no way of
perfectly simulating what's going to
happen. And you know, if you play a
board game, obviously you know if you
make this move, you know what's going to
happen. It's like the piece is going to
go there, it's going to take a piece,
whatever, right? But if you actually
want to solve something like a robotics
task
or anything more complicated,
it's impossible for you to simulate
what's going to happen accurately. And
also we as a human we don't do this
right we just imagine in our head of oh
if I'm going to say this then he's
probably going to respond in that way
this meant that alpha zero as it was
could not be applied to such problems
because it required some way of you know
simulating the game scoring the outcomes
and the idea with m0 was that well we
already have a deep neural network right
these networks can learn a lot of things
so why not let it why not teach it to
predict the future of the environment,
the future of the world.
Why not make the model be able to learn
for itself, what is going to happen
after each action it takes?
>> After that, you also uh applied this to
uh code and math. So that was alpha code
and alpha tensor. So like zooming out a
little bit that evolution of um
reinforcement learning in games and then
code and then math. What did you learn
about the general power of search and
learning that is today relevant in
modern agentic AI systems? How did that
that whole body of work translate to
what uh you are doing today?
>> So games are a really good sandbox to
learn very quickly about a lot of the
reinforcement learning science. you know
the algorithms that work well, the kind
of problems that we encounter,
the even from a technical point of view,
how do we build a learning system that
spans, you know, many data centers, uses
tens of thousands of machines because
games are very clean sandbox, very clean
environments, so we can make many good
experiments. And then now that we have a
much more general model, right, the
language models can do almost any task,
but they're much more complicated.
They're much slower to experiment with,
we can apply those same lessons of ah,
you know, we know how to build a really
robust reinforcement learning
infrastructure. And now we can build the
same one for language models or like you
know we know if you do this kind of RL
then the model will learn how to exploit
the reward and so we can apply the same
lessons the same mitigation techniques
to the language models.
>> If I understand correctly I think Muse
had um a learn world model.
>> Mhm.
So basically sort of rehearse the future
for for lack of a better expression. Uh
so do do modern LM agents have have
anything like that? Do they have an
internal world model that lets them
preview actions before they commit? So I
think yes I would say that language
models have an not an explicit world
model but they do have an implicit model
of the world because to be able to
predict you know what is the next likely
word in this sentence how is this
paragraph going to continue they need to
internally model you know what is the
state of the world that makes this
person say that thing and so it's it's
actually somewhat similar to m0 in the
sense that mu0 zero also only had an
implicit world model. You know, it was
never trained to predict, you know, what
does the screen actually look like if
you take an action.
It was also only trained to implicitly
predict if I take this action, you know,
what is the next action I should take or
is it going to be good or bad for me. So
in both those cases, you have an
implicit representation of the world in
your model that you can use to make
predictions, but you're not actually
reconstructing the full state of the
world because
reconstructing the full state of the
world, you know, that can be very
expensive and complex.
>> If you think about, you know, super high
resolution video, audio signals is a
very large amount of data that probably
you don't actually need. If you think of
human attention,
we are only aware of a very small subset
of what's actually going on all around
us all the time because that's you know
the most relevant information that we
actually need to make decisions and that
goes back to the the prior discussion
about so retraining. So the reason why
pre-training and RL work well together
is that you have that world model that's
um implicitly embedded into the the the
the corpus. Although the argument
against it is that it's what humans
think the world model is uh as uh
embodied by language versus what the
world model actually is. And that's that
that's my understanding of the of the of
the of the debate. I mean for the debate
I think different people have different
points of view so I don't want to speak
for anybody but
>> yes yes yes
>> but yes I think like pre-training on
this rich knowledge gives you some
representation of the world already so
that when you actually start to act and
interact with the world you can very
quickly make you know meaningful
decisions meaningful actions I yeah I
like to think of it you know in the
similar way if if you look many animals
when they are born they very quickly
know how to move how to run even Right?
If you look at gazels for example in the
savannah in a way that is like you know
clearly they did not have time to really
learn this from scratch right few
minutes or hours and you know in their
cases they did not do pre-training but
they have some evolutionary encoded
structure in their brain
>> because clearly it is very beneficial to
have some sort of knowledge to make your
learning more efficient.
>> Yeah. just RL in nature would uh would
lead to not so good results. Like if
you're a gazelle and like you have to AB
test whether to run towards the lion or
away from the lion.
>> Exactly.
>> It's like the you know thousands of
generations of gazels acquired this
knowledge over time.
>> Y
>> it was encoded in their genes and their
brain structure in some way right and
then you get to start on top of that. I
think the main you know the main
challenge or the main thing you need to
watch out for is that you don't
overenccode or you don't restrict your
search base too much. If if your
pre-training if your prior knowledge
prevents you from exploring something
that might be the correct course of
action that will be bad. So there you
know there is some danger there you have
to be aware of.
>> So this general idea of making
pre-training and RL work together in
modern AI systems seems to be the the
big idea or topic of 2025. Although of
course I know it's it's it's been years
in the making. Uh why did it take so
long? U
it feels like RL you know progressed uh
in in in its own direction and then
pre-training worked in its own direction
and those were slightly separate. Why
did it take take so long to put them
together? Is that just purely practical
and economic or or anything else?
Scaling up the language models to the
massive degree that we scaled them up
took a lot of effort on its own. And
from a science point of view, from an
engineering point of view, retraining
and supervised training is more stable
and sort of easier to debug
because you don't have this feedback
cycle. you basically, you know, have a
fixed target and you're trying to learn
this target and so then you can focus on
like, you know, is my training working
and like is my infrastructure working
and then, you know, does it scale as a
fallover
versus if you compare to RL in RL you
have this feedback cycle of oh I learn
something and then I use that to
generate my new training data and then I
learn from that training data and now if
you have you know something is not
working it's very hard to figure out
where in this cycle your problem is
coming from. No, maybe your training
update was bad and that's why you
suddenly started behaving badly
or maybe the way you decided, you know,
the way you select actions to behave is
not correct and so you generate a bad
training data and that's what messed up
everything.
>> So it's just much more complicated to
get working correctly. And so I think it
makes a lot of sense to you know first
scale up the pre-training the
architectures figure out something that
works pretty well especially if you can
already get pretty far by some fine
tuning some prompting and then when you
know when it's clear that these models
are really general they are really
useful and we have them in pretty stable
state then you know you can ramp up RL
and take them even further even in our
own work right if you look at alpha go
alpha zero we always follow a similar
split as well when we first set up the
architecture of the network, the
training using fixed supervised data.
And only when we had that working really
reliable, only then did we do the full
RL loop and the full training just
because like debugging all of it at the
same time, you're just setting yourself
up for failure. It's really useful to be
able to isolate the component and say
like, you know, I have known good data
over here. I have a known good target
there.
If the thing in between is not working,
I can isolate it. And then, you know, we
can isolate all parts of the system. How
compute intensive is it to scale RL and
are there scaling laws for RL the same
way you do in pre-training?
>> There's less published literature about
it.
But I think if you if you look at all
the RL literature over time, we see very
similar returns on compute in
pre-training and in RL where we can
invest exponentially more compute in RL
and keep getting benefits. There's going
to be some interesting research to come
to figure out what are the trade-offs
between pre-training and RL compute. we
know how what what should be the split
for a big model for example it could be
50/50 should be like 1 to 10 which way
should it be 1 to 10 so I think that's
going to be extremely interesting but so
far yeah we definitely see good returns
on both
>> what's the latest stateofthe-art or or
thinking uh in the field of um rewards
so in what you described uh for alpha
zero alpha go that was basically win
loss as a reward board. Then it sort of
feels like we went into kind of like
fuzzy human matching. This is good, this
is not good. And now that we expand um
as as as per the the above into more
general fields where it's sort of
unclear whether you win or lose, uh how
does how does that work? What what parts
of the evolution are you working on? Are
you excited about?
>> Personally, I don't work that much on
reward modeling. I mostly work on sort
of reasoning, planning, search time,
search compute, ways of making the model
smarter by spending more computation.
Yeah, thinking about rewards.
I think the reinforcement learning
process per se doesn't really care where
the reward comes from. The algorithms
are very happy to use any source of
reward. Whether that's like a human
feedback signal, it's like some
automated signal from like you know
winning, losing the game or passing a
test. Whether it's something more model
generated for example anthropic we had
this paper about constitutional AI to
you know have the model itself score
whether you're following some
guidelines.
>> Mhm.
>> So it can be very flexible to what kind
of reward you follow. the RLVR like all
all the things are those those are at
this stage um stuff that that you see
commonly common commonly uh used um any
any many any thoughts
>> yeah I think we're seeing like huge mix
of rewards and environments and I think
it's very much much people working very
hard in figuring out what are the best
reward sources and how do we scale it up
and how do we you know get more rewards
more reliable rewards that will be one
of the key ingredients in scaling up RL
further.
>> And so switching from from rewards uh
what is the latest thinking uh in terms
of uh data training data for RL uh again
following the uh evolution from like
AlphaGo where it used to be human data
and then like self selfplay uh what how
does that uh how does that work where
does the data uh come from and what kind
of data works best to train modern RL
>> yeah I guess the great thing about RL is
that the data is generated by your model
itself.
So the smarter our models become, the
better RL data we can generate,
the more interesting and complex tasks
they can solve, which then gives us more
and more data that we can train on cuz
like you know the more the more complex
the task, the longer it takes to solve
the task and the more data it generates
that we can then use for training. I
think part of the challenge is to find
tasks that are really representative of
what people actually want to do with the
model because now language models are so
general people are using them for so
many different things. There's more and
more of a challenge of you know we need
to cover as many of those as possible in
a to make sure that you know the model
is actually able to do this diverse set
of tasks. What uh matters more for
training data? Is that quality? Is that
quantity? Is that recency?
>> I think that's like a very interesting
question that
maybe doesn't have like a super clear
answer yet or it's maybe still
interesting research to be done. I think
we've seen papers arguing for different
things or we've seen different benefits,
right? Like clearly we see pre-training
as we scale up the data. we can keep
improving but we've also seen very
interesting fine-tuning results papers
published for with a very small amount
of examples you can teach the model how
to do an interesting skill and I think
we don't have any good scaling laws yet
that tell us the trade-off especially I
think because it's very hard to measure
what is the quality of a data point
right like how good is this example
compared to this other example without
being able to measure this it's very
hard to quantify the trade-off in any
Okay, I think intuitively it's
definitely true that if you have bad
data, RL doesn't work that well and if
you have very high quality data, it
becomes much more stable. For example, I
think that was like a it's very clear in
like Alpha Zero days where you we spend
Alpha Zero spends a lot of computation.
It does a lot of planning and search to
decide which move to take and so that
generates very high quality data to
train on which then resulted in RL
training that was incredibly stable. So
you know you can run it across
continents
take a long time to generate the data
and then train on it and is very robust
versus in modern RL with language
models. You know the difference in how
good is the model and what data it
generates that we then train on is not
so large.
because we more directly sample from the
model and then train it
which then results in reinforcement
learning that is less stable. And so one
direction of scaling RL and making it
more stable
is by improving this by for example
putting more reasoning into your
language model to generate much more
high quality training data that can then
give us training that is much more
stable and that we can scale up much
more easily. I'd love to spend uh a
little bit of time now on the general
topic of RL and agents. So the famous
augent AI that everybody's been talking
about uh you know breastlessly for the
last year. Uh so for people listening
and you know as as often in an effort to
make this broadly accessible by by by
you know a group of general people in
tech um could you drive home the the uh
sort of intersection and overlap between
RL and and and agents? Does RL power
agents? How does that work?
>> Yeah. So I guess like maybe first let's
take a step on what do we actually mean
by agent?
>> Yes.
>> As compared to like as like a general
language model, right? The second most
debated question after agisi is what is
an agent? Yes,
>> I guess. Yeah, for our purposes, let's
just say that an agent is an AI that can
act on its own. You know, maybe take
some actions on a computer,
save some files, edit some files, send
an email, whatever you want, right? But
the main characteristic is that it
doesn't have to interact with the user
all the time. It can do things on its
own. The reason why RL is very important
for this actually connects back to
pre-training
because our pre our pre-training data is
not very agent-like. If you think of the
pre-training data right there is like
websites and books and you know all
kinds of recent text
that has a lot of information
but it doesn't have a lot of actions.
It doesn't really capture how the humans
actually interact with the world. So if
you take a raw pre-trained model, it's
not a very good agent.
You know, maybe you can prompt it a bit
and like, you know, sort of push it in
the right direction, but it's not going
to be very good at interacting and
especially it's not going to be very
good at
correcting for its own errors because
the pre-training data has no examples at
all of how is our agent going to fail.
And that's exactly where reinforcement
learning comes in because in RL we can
take our agent let it interact with the
environment and then directly train on
that interaction. So for example, if the
agent did well, we can reinforce those
actions. And if the agent did badly, we
can push it away from those actions. And
if the agent sort of did badly at the
beginning, but then recovered and
managed to well, then we can also
reinforce that recovery. And so that's
super important because it allows the
agent to actually learn from, you know,
its own distribution of behavior.
>> Mhm. And that just makes it much more
robust because now he doesn't have to
generalize to something he has never
seen before. He can actually learn you
know on the actual problem that is
trying to solve. And that's why you know
RL is really unlocking so much agentic
capabilities. Now
>> if I'm an AI builder today building an
AI app and I I build it on top of
anthropic. Uh anthropic is whatever
model is going to come with some of this
sort of batteries included. uh but as a
builder on top do I need to do my own RL
uh there is this emerging space of like
RL as a as a service where you know for
this task or that task that I build on
top of a general model that sort of like
offers you ability to do RL or or can I
do a lot of damage just through prom or
like maybe like supervised fine-tuning
first
>> I think nowadays with the capabilities
of like you know topic cloud models top
OpenAI GPT models. You don't need to do
any fine tuning. You can take the model
as is,
write your own tools, your own harness,
and benefit from that agentic training
because doing good agentic fine tuning
is actually very hard. And so it's it's
quite hard to do better than the top
frontier models that you might get. But
on the contrary, coming up with good
tools and a good represent
representation of your task makes a huge
difference. So like you know depending
on how you express your problem for the
model can make it way harder or way
easier and so you can get a lot of
mileage out of that.
>> What's currently missing to achieve the
big dream of a gentic AI? Is it model
capabilities at the core or is it sort
of like boring uh quote and of quote
engineering around reliability tool use
safety uh what needs to happen? I think
we have sort of there's basically
improvements needed around the whole
space.
Make you know the model better able to
correct its own errors. Make the model
better able to continue going for long
times without getting distracted.
Making the model just smarter in
general. Maybe making the model faster.
Like there's basically like, you know, a
whole set of things that we know that we
can improve.
There's probably yeah not one individual
blocker
and that's why we will continue to see
sort of smooth incremental progress over
model releases but sort of given
how many things we know there are that
we can do better on and improve. Yeah,
I'm quite excited about where models are
going to end up. I think that's
actually, you know, one of the reasons
why AI is a very fun field is that there
are so many lowhanging fruits that, you
know, you can do much better on, but
already the current models are so good
that it's very fun to work on it. It's
like, oh, I can fix this thing. It'll be
even better
>> versus, you know, if you're in a place
where everything has already been solved
and it's like really hard to figure out
how to make it better, it's a very
different story. Let's spend a minute on
on eval uh and um we we we touch upon
this a little bit but just to give it
some some some proper space. So there
was um you know in your blog post that
we talked to at the very beginning of
this conversation this this this concept
of external benchmark and then you
quoted your piece goodart law. Uh so
what does first of all what is good hard
law and then uh how should labs compare
results uh so that it doesn't end up
with this kind of leaderboard theater
that we've seen a little bit in the last
you know couple of years.
>> Yeah. As a good law basically says that
any measure that becomes a target stops
being a good measure and you know you
can think of that intuitively that if
you start paying for example programmers
based on how many lines of code they
write well suddenly they will discover
many ways to add more lines of comments
which is you know completely useless and
this is a very yeah general effect that
obviously right if you give people an
incentive that they should optimize they
will try very hard. Yes.
>> And we also see this with language model
benchmarks. Of course, people want to
get promoted. They want to launch their
model. So any benchmark that is too
easily measured or that has a lot of
attention on it, people will optimize
very hard for it. Which means that
probably the model will look very good
at that benchmark. But if you then use
it for your own task, you might get
different performance. Yeah. You ask
about like how what do we do about this?
It's very hard to prevent people from
optimizing on the benchmark.
So one possibility is just periodically
create completely new held out
benchmarks
that nobody has seen before
and that gives you a fairly you know
good estimate of model performance.
So I know for example like a lot of
researchers have their own toy problems
that they use to test all the models
precisely for that reason. So that you
know this is a problem a set of problems
that nobody has seen. you have a pretty
good guess that it's going to give you
an unbiased estimate. If you're like,
you know, an individual of your company
trying to decide which model to use,
it's probably, you know, something
similar. Just make your own internal
benchmark that really represents what
you care about and then measure on that.
And I think that's likely to be the most
objective, most accurate way of
measuring
>> internally. What does that look like at
a place like anthropic or previously uh
deep mind? Uh is there um I mean I know
there there are teams that are focused
on on on evals. How do you how do you
think about what works, what doesn't in
terms of internal evals?
>> It definitely used to be easier to have
good evals. You know 5 years ago the
tasks were doing I think it was easier
to measure model performance. I think
nowadays it's much more difficult and I
think we try to not over rely on evals
so much because it's quite hard for
example to measure you know how good is
this model really at writing code. Yeah,
I think it's one of the big unsolved or
very important problems in the field of
you know making really good evals that
are
both cheap to run
reliable and accurate because
it's easyish to make an evil that takes
one of those but to get all three is
quite hard for example like you know in
the beginning we were talking about open
GDP evol GDP evol and that one is like
you know it's very accurate and unbiased
but it's very expensive to because what
it actually involves is like taking
human experts having them do the task
>> and then compare the model task to the
experts and like you know rate it with
multiple people. So it's very accurate
but it's like extremely expensive to do.
>> And related to that topic of of evals
what what's the latest in terms of our
ability or I should say your ability uh
to truly understand
uh how models work. to the general field
of mechanistic interpretability. You
alluded to the fact earlier that um RL
if I understood correctly sometimes make
it a bit harder because it does uh
things occasionally in a more
inscrutable way. My my words maybe not
not yours. Um so what is the latest and
indeed does RL make things harder or
easier? Oh, so what I meant before is
that debugging RL in general know
completely unrelated to interpretability
>> is harder because there are more moving
parts. But it is also true that if
you're not careful with RL,
you can make interpretability harder.
For example, one
common thing with modern models is they
they do reasoning with the train of
thought. You could look at the chain of
thought to you know see what are the
model internal thoughts and then you
could also have a thought that oh maybe
I should use that as a reward signal in
RL and punish the model if it thinks the
wrong thing but then suddenly you
completely destroyed your
interpretability angle. So you sort of
have to be careful that yeah you don't
do RL on the signals that you want
actually want to use to interpret what
the model is thinking of doing. That
said I think yeah there's some extremely
exciting interpretability things
happening including mechanistic
interpretability. I think like actually
last year I think before Johnic maybe
even there was a super cool golden gate
claw model where you know they found the
neurons in claw that were responsible
for the golden gate concept and then
modified them to make a version of claw
that really love the golden gate bridge
in San Francisco and so that's like a
really vivid example of ah you know we
really understand what's happening in
this model and like you know what better
way is there to verify that
understanding than actually changing the
behavior of the model and so I think
that's like a super important direction
for safety. As the models get smarter,
we really need to be able to understand
what is the model thinking internally.
You know, what is the values it has? Is
it lying to us? Is it actually genuinely
following the instructions? And so I
think like you know definitely extremely
important area to invest in and work in.
I think that especially if like you know
people interested in working AI or doing
AI research, I think interpretability is
a great area to get into. Yeah, perfect
segue for last for the last part of this
conversation. I'd love to to zoom out
and and talk about um the impact of AI.
So if we think that we are on the
exponential and that things are going to
only accelerate from here, what does
that mean? Uh and certainly safety and
alignment which is a core value at
anthropic hopefully in other parts of
the field as well, but like anthropic is
particularly uh vocal about safety and
alignment, let's say. um how how does
that actually manifest? So we just
talked about interpretability. What what
uh for people who are concerned that
this is going too fast and that we
collectively are creating a a monster
quote end of court. Can can you give us
a glimpse into the kind of work uh that
is done for alignment and safety at a
place like anthropic? Yeah, I think like
the focus on sort of safety alignment
pervades all of anthropic and there's
very rigorous processes where we train a
model whenever we want to release a
model both to you know analyze the
capabilities of the model verify the
alignment of the model. Ensure that it
you know does not do harmful things on
its own. ensure that it does not enable
you know malicious users to do harmful
things and to the point where if we are
unsure about the safety of model we will
delay the launch and like you know until
we're sufficiently sure that is actually
harmless
we will not launch and release a model
which you know may you know
I guess shows that you know people take
the safety much more seriously than any
financial return or revenue. I think
yeah also in terms of research and
resources
the teams working on safety and
interpretability are a big focus of the
company
which you know gives me a lot of
confidence that we're actually care
about this and put a lot of effort into
it. and at a more technical level and to
uh tie back an earlier part of the
conversation um around uh when when
we're discussing the you know
pre-training and and and and safety. So
is safety and alignment an RL problem?
Uh and by that I mean uh the the beauty
of having pre-training uh is that you
import that world model as we're
discussing but arguably you also import
into your brain uh a lot of bad stuff if
you collect data from the internet as we
know uh there's good things but also a
lot of toxic content. So is uh alignment
largely using RL to get rid of the bad
stuff that is built into the
pre-training.
>> We can definitely use RL to like shape
the model behavior and ensure that for
example given adversarial given bad
input it sort of behaves safely or knows
that he can refuse or is you know robust
who attempts to pack the model. Yeah, I
wouldn't view it alignment just like an
RL problem. I think it sort of it goes
throughout the whole stack. You might
you know for example filter the
pre-training data in some way. You might
after training you might have
classifiers
that like you know look at the model
monitor the model behavior to ensure
that it is actually aligned.
You might when you write the system
prompt for the model that you use. You
might put safety guidelines in there. So
I think safety alignment it really
pervades the whole of research and the
whole of you know product and deployment
it's not just isolated into any one part
>> and then another super interesting topic
in the same vein of like the impact of
AI is obviously the discussion around
jobs. So if as per the GDP discussion
the uh agents are becoming just as good
or better than humans obviously what
does that mean uh for all of us in terms
of our jobs? what what have you learned
um after the experience of Alpha Zero,
Alpha Go uh that that could give us a
glimpse into uh what may happen once we
all have super powerful agents do our
jobs.
>> So I think the first thing that we
didn't talk about yet so far is that
artificial intelligence
is quite I mean this may sound a bit
simplistic but it's quite different than
human intelligence. So we can see that
right that the model may be much better
at us on some tasks like you know
calculation obviously and like much
worse than us at other tasks.
So it is not I don't think it is at all
going to be any like one for one
replacement. It's going to be much more
complimentary of you know the model is
really good at something that maybe I
really don't like doing or I'm not
interested in or I'm very bad at and
then I'm much better than the model as a
mother part. And so I think it's going
to be like a gradual process of we're
all going to incrementally start using
models more and more to improve our own
productivity
rather than you know have a model that
one for one is able to do exactly the
set of things we can do. And so for
example you know I use cloud all the
time to for example you know refactor
code or maybe write some front end code
that I don't want to write or at the
same time there's other parts where I'm
clearly much better putting than cloud
still. So there is a synergy of you know
use the best most productive skills I
think I guess economists call it like
comparative advantage but like there is
this you know long process of we'll both
sort of improve our productivity
incrementally and I think that process
is going to give us some time of figure
out politically and figure out
economically how do we want to you know
benefit from this massive productivity
increase you know even independently
from AI, right? The promise of
technology has long been that, oh, we're
going to be all so productive, so
wealthy that we need to work much less.
>> Yet, mysteriously, right, we all have
like 40 hours working week for decades.
And so, you know, I think it's much more
like a political social problem of like
figuring out how do we actually benefit
from all these improvements and like,
you know, bring the increases in wealth
and productivity to everybody and it's
much less a technological problem.
>> Mhm. also means that we can't really
solve it with technology.
We have to solve it at like a sort of a
democratic political level. How do we
spread these benefits?
>> Do you think that that uh increases
inequality? So, uh as you think about
the impact of Alph Go and and and and Mu
Zero, what happened to the top go
players and what happened to the top
chess players? Did they do they
disappear or did they get enhanced and
better? Yeah, I think at least in the
case of chess and go there has been like
more interest and it has become much
easier for people to study how to play
go how to play chess cuz now you don't
need to find you know an expert tutor
you anybody can practice on their own
right spend a lot of time and I guess
like chess streamers are very popular on
Twitch right here and similarly right
like a lot of students are using
language models to study I think also
for coding right
cloud code these agents they raise the
bar of what anybody who has an idea can
accomplish on their own. I think you
know the larger picture whether it
increases or decreases inequality is
quite hard to forecast. It both sort of
raises the floor of what any person can
accomplish but it also gives
very productive people an ability to be
even more productive. It's possible that
we see quite a difference between
countries depending on the taxation
social redistributive system that they
have in whether inequality increases or
decreases for example overall I'm quite
excited that it is very much nonzero sum
is very much you know increases the
total wealth available in society I
think if you think about progress if you
think about prosperity that is the most
important thing like redistributing the
pie is kind of a losers game. To get
more wealthy, we really need to grow the
pie. You know, if you think of the
agricultural revolution, the industrial
revolution, the reason why we have much
better lives nowadays
is because, you know, we're so much more
productive. We have so much more wealth.
And so that's the key step we want to
unlock. If we manage to ma make
everybody in society 10 times more
productive
you know what kind of abundance can we
achieve? I think that's the key
question, right? What advances does that
unlock in medicine? You know, curing
diseases, halting aging. What does it
unlock in terms of energy? Obviously,
right, we have like climate crisis. We
need more energy rights to sustain our
lifestyle.
What advanc advances in material science
can we have? All of those are basically
bottlenecked on how much intelligence we
have access to and how can we apply it.
So I'm yeah incredibly optimistic about
like what will we be able to unlock in
the next 5 years.
I think we can go extremely far.
>> Well that feels like a a wonderful place
to leave it. Uh thank you so much
Julian. This was absolutely fantastic.
Thank you for spending time with us.
>> Yeah thank you for all the exciting
questions and uh giving me the time.
Hi, it's Matt Turk again. Thanks for
listening to this episode of the Mad
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