20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CEO @ Poolside

""The term AGI is a loaded term. And the way that I like to take the definition is that at some point we are going to be in a world where across all sets of capabilities that we have as human beings, machine intelligence is going to be as capable, if not more capable than us, and surpass us.""

""Think about AlphaGo being deterministic. You think about the other end, the real world being non-deterministic, where does code sit? Code sits a lot closer to being deterministic; it follows a set of rules. Every time it runs, it runs in exactly the same way.""

""What we're really known for is our work in reinforcement learning from code execution feedback. It's the way where we then take a model that we've trained from the ground up and put it in an environment with 130,000 real-world code bases, several orders of magnitude, the largest environment in the world.""

"A lot of people break it down as compute, data, and then algorithms, really... Especially I think post the chat GPT moment, like incredible advancements in the algorithms that are making learning more efficient."

"We are horribly inefficient at learning today. If you think about what drives efficiency of learning, it's the algorithms and it's the hardware itself."

"On the synthetic data side, a lot of people use it as a catch-all for like, ‘oh, we've got a data shortage problem,’ but don't worry, synthetic data is here to save us."

"And what everyone does is that extremely large models, we can run cost efficiently for our end users."

"Every request that you make to that model is not a couple of cents. And so you have to find a way to actually build models that you can actually run for customers."

"We went from the telephone to personal computer to the internet to the mobile phone. Fundamentally what we've been able to do is we've been able to take hard challenges in the world."

"So if we take what's economically valuable, the next thing we need to ask ourselves is what's the gap between models today and human-level capabilities."

"The gap is actually not that large anymore, and we were talking earlier about speech recognition models today being pretty much there... maybe there's a tiny bit left to say."

""Talent is absolutely key in this industry, and in the go-to-market race, it's talent first and foremost, but it's also product and distribution.""

""Can I ask in terms of the compute element that we didn’t discuss, when we think about Compute underpins all of this and a lot of the data challenges that we mentioned?""

""Today interconnecting more than 32,000 GPUs is extremely challenging... but right now we’re starting to be able to possibly interconnect 100,000.""

"If you're a frontier AI company, you need to make decisions about who do you partner with, who do you work with, how much do you do yourself. I'm making decisions today that will impact us on compute in 12 or 18 months from now."

"The world will punish projects that don't make sense. If it doesn't provide economic value or utility, it won't exist in the future tech landscape."

"You will never train a frontier model on the same data centre twice. The evolution of models is now outpacing the development of data centers, and the world has to adapt quickly."

"I think there's a lot of hope on Blackwell because it looks like a 2x performance increase."

"The demand of the world for AI is overwhelming, and it's becoming apparent that this demand will dictate the capabilities of future chips."

"When Blackwell is released, the expectation is that it will be two times more efficient than current options."

"We can build massive advantages on data, talent, which means understanding how knowledge flows between teams and organizations is crucial."

"I think that the nature of large technology companies choosing to invest has changed, and the impact of funding affects the startups' autonomy."

"I would love to spend a day with the current leadership team of every single one of these to determine where I would put my own money."

"I think Sam and OpenAI have understood the importance of compute and have understood the importance of data; these two things are where the outside view seems to matter."

""There's companies in the world that get built that shouldn't have the right to exist... It's companies that get built by being at the right moment at the right time.""

""Elon has done that not once, but multiple times, and it brings me to another quote I heard on an interview from him... When we all worked with Elon we thought he was crazy for taking so much risk.""

""In the software development space, moving forward is going to be a developer-led AI assisted world, which is increasingly AI driven.""

""When we look at that talent, when we think about work ethic, it's one thing which Europe is often chastised for.""

"For AI with regards to regulation, regulation that fundamentally halts progress is detrimental for small companies."

"Yuri has a book or a manifesto you can find it online for free and earlier you heard me reference to looking from one top of the mountain to the next and and that's actually it's a metaphor that I took from Yuri."

"It's the journey and for me the boat kind of allows for all of that. It keeps life simple and it immerses me into what truly matters."

"If we stumble, we lose. If we put our foot off the gas pedal, we lose, and I think in any race there are 101 places you can stumble."

"I think at the end of the day, in any race, it's the people that make it happen. It's not the dollars in the account. Those are the resources and inputs that you need."

What is "20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlene...

In this episode of The Twenty Minute VC, Eiso Kant, CEO of Poolside.ai, discusses the challenges and strategies in the race to develop Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), particularly following Poolside's significant $500 million funding round. He emphasizes the critical need for precise compute resources, advanced algorithms, and high-quality data to improve AI model performance and close the gap between machine and human intelligence. The conversation touches on scaling laws, the need for efficient training models, and the impact of major players like Nvidia on the market. Kant raises concerns about the sustainability of funding levels for startups to compete against tech giants and explores the potential for diminishing returns in model improvements. Additionally, he discusses the importance of talent acquisition and strategic partnerships in navigating this rapidly evolving lands...

What are the key takeaways from "20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominat...

Eiso Kant believes that aggressive funding, such as Poolside's recent $500 million round, is critical for startups to remain competitive in the AGI space. A combination of advanced data, compute resources, and algorithms is essential to push the boundaries of AI and address the current limitations in model performance. Kant expresses skepticism about current funding levels being adequate for smaller players to compete with industry giants like Nvidia.

Which podcast is this episode from?

"20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CEO @ Poolside" is an episode from The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch.