00:28:38 · Aditya Agarwal, Tom McGrath
[00:28:38] S0: I do like the bit about about the deadline. I mean I mean, there is sort of like a practical relationship that just changes to the work. Right? Like, the point of research in in a company is is... Hopefully, it eventually translates through to economically valuable product. Right? The degree of distance from that ultimate product [00:28:56] S1: Yeah. [00:28:56] S0: Sort of is inversely, related to, like, the size of the organization, or is that not the case? [00:29:05] S1: Interestingly, I think it's actually got smaller as we've grown, which is kind of funny. I think perhaps the reason... Maybe there's a sort of confounder here where as we have... We now have this product surface, Silico, where it's, like, very easy to translate stuff. And so that means that rather than there being some sort of relatively long long process of, like, we we have some... We maybe get an idea as a result of some some consulting agreement or some some, like, problem that a customer has with some particular product that we try and develop. We just, like, put the research in there, and it either works or it doesn't. And so that that sort of... That gets rid of a lot of the organizational complexity. So even though we've grown, I think, actually, like, the contact between research and kind of commercial reality has gotten much smaller. I'm not sure if there's something generalizable there, but it seems pretty nice.
00:30:00 · Aditya Agarwal, Tom McGrath
[00:30:00] S0: I mean, it it sort of follows, you know, like, in the sense that if you are a, research oriented startup, if you were a research lab, however you, you know, characterize it, early on, sort of definitionally, the bet is you're trying to figure out some core things Yeah. That should be the foundation for, you know, like a a a product or a series of products or things like that. Right? Which is to say that you have to do that work first. Right? Like, investing into that more... That that that is the core kind of, like, risk Yeah. Early on. Right? It's not, oh, you know, can we build, the... Or, like, do customers wanna pay for this product? So you you don't even know if it works yet. Right? It doesn't... It... Right? It is, the bulk of the risk is in, the sort of open technical or, research questions. [00:30:46] S1: Yeah. [00:30:46] S0: So you would expect that... Yeah. Or, I mean, this is what you see at OpenAI or Anthropic. Right? For years, they were a bunch of researchers and then figured some stuff out, implemented research from the rest of the community, and, like, started to to generate product. Right?
00:30:46 · Aditya Agarwal, Tom McGrath
[00:30:46] S0: So you would expect that... Yeah. Or, I mean, this is what you see at OpenAI or Anthropic. Right? For years, they were a bunch of researchers and then figured some stuff out, implemented research from the rest of the community, and, like, started to to generate product. Right? [00:31:01] S1: Yeah. And just just to cut in there, I think Yeah. I I think one advantage of having a really big vision is if you're gonna do something like that, you have to have something that's, like, big if true. Mhmm. And so if it's like... You know, if you have, like, a medium sized vision for what you're gonna achieve, then you you do get caught... I guess, you get caught in this kind of funny middle ground. If we do need to do some customer validation because it's not like a... It's not like AGI or self driving cars or, you know, a rocket that lands itself or something. And then you can get really in the sort of you can get really in a sort of churn state where you have a lot of research to do, but you also have a lot of market validation to do. If you've got something huge, you can just be like, well, can we do it at all? [00:31:41] S0: Right. Right. Yeah. I mean, if you can reuse rockets and dramatically lower the cost of of launch, definitionally, that will be valuable if there are valuable things to do in space. Yeah, if you can make, intelligence on tap, you know, and and then, like, make that available to everyone, that's probably valuable. So in this case, the... What is the big if true? That we
00:31:41 · Aditya Agarwal, Tom McGrath
[00:31:41] S0: Right. Right. Yeah. I mean, if you can reuse rockets and dramatically lower the cost of of launch, definitionally, that will be valuable if there are valuable things to do in space. Yeah, if you can make, intelligence on tap, you know, and and then, like, make that available to everyone, that's probably valuable. So in this case, the... What is the big if true? That we [00:32:03] S1: can, like, understand how neural networks work and reinvent the way we do machine learning. Like, you should... It's the difference between a kind of craft and engineering science. Like, our claim is that we can get from from kind of bodging it to to, like, really engineering it. [00:32:21] S0: Live training is not a fully inaccurate way of describing it, and you're saying it shouldn't... Especially if it can do things like break out of its sandbox and hack into Hugging Face, it probably should not be based on vibes. Exactly. [00:32:33] S1: Yeah. I think we basically need to, like, fundamentally reinvent the way we do it, at least post training. Maybe pre training can stay for now. You know? [00:32:41] S0: Keep the vibes alive. [00:32:42] S1: There's not... There's next year. But we need to, like, fundamentally reinvent the way we do post trading.
00:32:42 · Tom McGrath, Aditya Agarwal
[00:32:42] S1: There's not... There's next year. But we need to, like, fundamentally reinvent the way we do post trading. [00:32:48] S0: Okay. Last question I wanna end on. Something I... I've been thinking about and asking more and more people recently is, is there an example of, like, science fiction, a book, movie, some some kind of... It doesn't have to be science fiction. It can just be, like, some sort of fiction that, you find yourself sort of, like, returning to as you sort of try to model the future. The example I give is The Player of Games Oh, yes. The culture... The second book in the Culture series, which is not a particularly novel answer. Mhmm. But, like, it it does. It, like, shapes the way I I sort of try to model out what, you know, the radical future might look like. Do you have any examples? That's an [00:33:28] S1: interesting question. I think perhaps the surprising answer might be no. Like, I I love science fiction. I think, like, almost projecting forward seems seems better. Like, we have... I don't know. Yeah. I guess I I... I'm surprised that I don't now that I think about it. Like, I think the Culture series is excellent. Interested in what in Manifest Space [00:33:47] S0: I took you to. [00:33:48] S1: Yeah. There's a... [00:33:49] S0: Yeah. Some some spiral just happened. Right? Like, what is at the end of it?
00:33:49 · Aditya Agarwal, Tom McGrath
[00:33:49] S0: Yeah. Some some spiral just happened. Right? Like, what is at the end of it? [00:33:52] S1: I mean, yeah, sometimes in, like, a pessimistic kind of moves. One of the books in the, like, the the the the Dark Forest series, right, where... You know? But but there's this sort of thing coming to the... Coming... There's this, like, big mysterious thing of some unknown strength coming towards them, they're, like, trying to figure out what to do. Okay. So maybe maybe... [00:34:14] S0: So the trisolarans in this case are AI and and and we are in a a sort of a state of we should probably have some solution to this big thing coming our way. [00:34:26] S1: Yeah. Except they're not coming up from the light. [00:34:28] S0: Does that make you a wall phaser? [00:34:31] S1: No. They don't seem to have very much fun. Oh, this seems like a job. Well, [00:34:38] S0: that's an interesting place to leave this conversation at. Right? I'd like [00:34:41] S1: to say something more optimistic. But I [00:34:45] S0: Maybe maybe we can... We'll we'll say part two at some point. Yeah. Right? The exact context of the moves that... That's been sort of shaping the conversation today probably makes that one a little more top of mind, I imagine. [00:34:57] S1: I guess... I mean, I guess because, like, it seems clear that the upside is so huge. I almost don't need to think about the sci fi side of things. I can just think about what might... What is, like, likely to happen if we get it right. That seems underrepresented in science fiction if I'm just like, okay. Well...