Ilya & I discuss SSI’s strategy, the problems with pre-training, how to improve the generalization of AI models, and how to ensure AGI goes well.

Watch on YouTube; read the transcript.

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Timestamps

(00:00:00) – Explaining model jaggedness

(00:09:39) - Emotions and value functions

(00:18:49) – What are we scaling?

(00:25:13) – Why humans generalize better than models

(00:35:45) – SSI’s plan to straight-shot superintelligence

(00:46:47) – SSI’s model will learn from deployment

(00:55:07) – How to think about powerful AGIs

(01:18:13) – “We are squarely an age of research company”

(01:30:26) – Self-play and multi-agent

(01:32:42) – Research taste

As part of this interview, Satya Nadella gave Dylan Patel (founder of SemiAnalysis) and me an exclusive first-look at their brand-new Fairwater 2 datacenter.

Microsoft is building multiple Fairwaters, each of which has hundreds of thousands of GB200s & GB300s. Between all these interconnected buildings, they’ll have over 2 GW of total capacity. Just to give a frame of reference, even a single one of these Fairwater buildings is more powerful than any other AI datacenter that currently exists.

Satya then answered a bunch of questions about how Microsoft is preparing for AGI across all layers of the stack.

Watch on YouTube; read the transcript.

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Timestamps

(00:00:00) - Tour through Fairwater 2

(00:03:20) - Business models for AGI

(00:12:48) - Copilot

(00:20:02) - Whose margins will expand most?

(00:36:17) - MAI

(00:47:47) - The hyperscale business

(01:02:44) - In-house chip & OpenAI partnership

(01:09:35) - The CAPEX explosion

(01:15:07) - Will the world trust US companies to lead AI?

In this lecture, military historian Sarah Paine explains how Russia—and specifically Stalin—completely derailed China’s rise, slowing them down for over a century.

This lecture was particularly interesting to me because, in my opinion, the Chinese Civil War is 1 of the top 3 most important events of the 20th century. And to understand why it transpired as it did, you need to understand Stalin’s role in the whole thing.

Watch on YouTube; read the transcript.

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Timestamps

(00:00:00) – How Russia took advantage of China’s weakness

(00:22:58) – After Stalin, China’s rise

(00:33:52) – Russian imperialism

(00:45:23) – China’s and Russia’s existential problems

(01:04:55) – Q&A: Sino-Soviet Split

(01:22:44) – Stalin’s lessons from WW2