YouSaid · the spoken record

Bret Taylor

lines on the record: 154
first: 2025-04-15
most recent: 2025-04-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I don't know the answer to that question. I'm not an expert in sort of intellectual property, but I think there will be an interesting question of was that your idea, because you used a tool to do it, I think the answer is probably yes, that you used the tool to do it. But I also think that the... In general, like the sort of marginal cost of intelligence will go down a lot. So a lot of the, you know, I think in general, we'll be in this renaissance of new ideas and intelligence being produced. And so I think that's broadly a good thing. And I think the marginal value of that insight that you had might be lower than it was 10 years ago.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Returning a pair of shoes at a retailer, and it's a process that's fairly complicated. And is it within the return window? Do you want to return it in store or do you want to send it? Do you want to print a QR code? Blah, blah, blah, blah. The orchestration of that is as significant as the models themselves. And I actually think as we, just like computers, there's going to be a lot of things where computers are a part of the experience, but it's not like manifesting itself as a computer. So I'm actually equally excited about those. And I think Context Windows is slightly less important than those applications.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I also think that most what I'm excited about in the software industry is not necessarily a large language model with a prompt and a response being the product of AI, but actually end-to-end closed-loose systems that use large language models as pieces of infrastructure. And I actually think that a lot of the value in software will be that. And for many of those applications, the context window size can matter, but often because you have contextual awareness of the process that you're executing, context window is a little bit less important. So I think it matters a lot to intelligence. I can't remember one of the, some researchers said, you know, you put all of human knowledge in the context, Wendy, and you ask it to invent the next thing. It's obviously a reductive thought, but interesting. But I actually, I'm equally excited about sort of the industrial applications of large language models, sort of like my company, Sira. And if you're...”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it could be quite important, especially it certainly simplifies working with an AI. If you can just give it everything and instruct it to do something. And assuming it works, you can extend a context window and it can, the tension can be spread fairly thin. Robustness of the answer can be questionable. So, but assuming, and let's just for argument's sake, you know, perfect robustness, I think it can really simplify the interface to AI. Not all uses, I also think that we're talking about open source models and APIs.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They tend to be cross pollinating very important ideas from a lot of different domains, which I think will be really exciting.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really hope we see more breakthroughs in science. One of the things I have not an expert in, but I've read a lot like a lot as an amateur about is just The slowdown in scientific breakthroughs over the past few decades and some theories that it's because of the degree of specialization that we demand of grad students and things like that. And I hope in general with AI democratizing access to expertise, I have a completely personal theory that it will benefit deep generalists in a lot of ways too because your ability to understand a fair amount in a lot of domains and leveraging AI, knowing where to prompt the AI to go explore and bringing together those domains, it will start to shift sort of the intellectual power from people who are extremely deep to people who actually can orchestrate intelligence between lots of different domains for breakthroughs. I think that'll be really good for society because most scientific breakthroughs aren't.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Times over the past few decades. I think we'll get there soon. And I actually, what's really neat about is most of the Scientists, I know people who are actually like doing sites, like they're the most excited about these technologies. And I they're using them already. And I think that's really neat. And I think we're hopefully going to be.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think we're sort of there, perhaps, with the right tools, but certainly over the next few years. We talked about what does it mean to generalize AI. Certainly in the area of science that are largely represented through text and digital technology, math being probably the most applicable, there's not really anything keeping AI from getting really good at math. There's not really an interface to the real world. You don't need to do a clinical trial to verify something's correct. So I feel a ton of optimism there. It'll be really interesting in like, you know, areas of theoretical physics. You'll continue to have the divide between the applied and the theoretical people, but I think there could be really interesting new ideas there and perhaps some finding logical inconsistencies with some of the fashionable theories which just happened many times.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh no, I just hope soon. I mean, I hope there was a lot of, there's one of the models, I can't remember which one introduced a very long context window. And there's a lot of people on X over the weekend putting in their thesis, you know, like grad school thesis in there. And it was actually critiquing them with surprising levels of fidelity.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Uncomfortable, not really an education where it's just earlier in most people's lives. It's just, I think the pace of change exceeds that of most technology transitions. And I think it's unreasonable to expect most people to change the way they work that quickly. And so I think the next five years, I think, will be for some jobs really disruptive and tumultuous. But if you take the longer view and you fast forward 25 or 50 years, I'm incredibly optimistic. I think it's the change will require from society, from companies, and from individuals like an open-mindedness about reskilling and reimagining their job to the lens of this dramatically different new technology.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where I think the tools that we use to create value in the world will change dramatically. And I think some people who define their jobs by their ability to use the last generation's tools really, really effectively will be disrupted. But I think if we can empower people to reskill and also broaden the aperture by which they define the value they're providing to the world, I think a lot of people can make the transition. The thing that is sort of”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's go back to our discussion with software engineer for a second, but I'll give other examples. If you define your role as a software engineer, how quickly you type into your IDE, the next few years might leave you behind, you know, because that is no longer a differentiated part of the software engineering experience or will not be, but your judgment as a software engineer will continue to be incredibly important, your agency in making a decision about what to build, how to build it, how to architect it, maybe using AI models as a creative foil. And so I think that just in the same way, if you're an accountant using Excel doesn't make you less of an accountant, and just because you didn't handcraft that math equation, it doesn't make the results any less valuable to your clients. And so I think we're going to go through this transformation.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Write in, read in, math, physics, chemistry, biology, not because you need to memorize it, but understand the mechanisms that create the world that we live in is quite important. I do think that there's a risk of people sort of becoming ossified in the tools that they use.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do think learning how to learn and learning how to think will continue to be important. So, I think most of primary and secondary education shouldn't and is not vocational necessarily. Some of it is. I took AutoShop and all of that, and I'm glad I did, but I couldn't fix my electric car today with that knowledge. Things change. And I don't think it needs to be purely non-vocational. But the basics of learning how to think, learning.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In public school systems, I think it's really, I think it'll be a really great win public school systems formally adopt these things so that they lean into tools like ChatGPT as mechanisms to raise the performance level of their classroom and hopefully you'll see it in things like test scores and other things because kids can get the extra time even if the school system can't afford it for everyone. And then most importantly, kids are getting explanations according to their style of learning, which I think will be quite important as well. As it relates to skills, it's really hard to predict right now. And I would say that”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100%. And I'm listening too. You know, it's like you live through your children's curiosity. And my daughter went to high school and came home with Shakespeare for the first time. And she asked me a question. I was like, I felt this is like total inadequacy. I was like, I was very bad at this the first time. And then we put it into ChatGPT and it was the most thoughtful answer. And she could ask follow-up questions. And I actually was with her because I was like, I forgot about that. Didn't even think about that. So I just think it's incredible. And I would like to.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the most incredible thing, humanity. And so I just think education will change for the positive in so many ways because I actually with my kids walking around when they ask, you know, if you have little kids, they ask why, why, why? There's some point a parent just starts making up the answer or being dismissive. And like, we have ChatGPT out. And it's like the best when you're traveling and putting.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe want to more viscerally appreciate why this was a meaningful event rather than this dry piece of history. And all of that, as you said, could be personalized to the way you learn and how you learn. And I think it's just incredibly powerful. And so one of the things I think is neat about AI is it's democratizing access to a lot of things that used to be fairly exclusive. A lot of wealthy people, if their child was having trouble in school, would pay for a tutor, a math tutor, science tutor. And, you know, if you look at kids who are trying to get into big name colleges, if you have the means, you'll have someone prep you for the SATs or help you with your college essays. All of that should be democratized if we're doing our jobs well. And it means that we're not limiting people's opportunity from by their means. And I think that's just the most American thing ever Canadian as well.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it doesn't surprise me, and I don't actually view it as necessarily replacing a teacher, but my view is if you have a teacher with 28 kids in his or her class, the likelihood that they all learn the same way or learn at the same pace is very unlikely. And I can really think of, say, an English teacher or a history teacher or orchestrating their learning journeys through a topic, say AP European history in the United States. There's a curriculum, they need to learn it, how someone will remember something or understand the significance of Martin Luther is very different. And you can generate audio podcast for someone who might be an audio auditorial learner. You can create cue cards for someone who needs that kind of reputation. You can visualize key moments in history for people who just”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll start with the benefits that I think are probably obvious, but I'm incredibly excited about. I think education Can become much more personalized.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's it. And then there's a lot of national security implications too, just because these models are very sensitive, at least the frontier models are. And so, you know, how your place in the geopolitical landscape is quite important. Will research labs and will the US government be comfortable with training happening there and export restrictions and things like that? But I think a lot of it comes down to infrastructure as it relates to policy is my intuition. I think right now so much of AI is constrained on infrastructure that that is the input to a lot of this stuff. And then there's a lot around attracting talent and all that. But as I said, you look at the research labs. It's not that many people actually. It's a lot. But the compute is the limited resource right now.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, especially this is definitely outside of my domain of expertise, but I would say. One of the key ingredients to modern AI is compute, which is a noun that wasn't a noun until recently, but now compute is a noun. And I do think that's one area where policymakers can, because it involves a lot of things that touch federal and local governments like power, land. And then similarly, attracting the capital, which is immense to finance to the real estate, to purchase compute itself, and then to sort of operate the data center. And again, there's really immense power requirements for these data centers as well. And then it's attracting sort of the right researchers and research labs to leverage that. But in general, where there is compute, the research labs will find you.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sort of figuring out how do you exact the robustness and precision out of these models. So it's really fun, but changing rapidly.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here are the key things. So similar to my technique, I want to accompl It's a good technique. I mean, there's lots of engine techniques like that, like self-reflection is a technique where you have a model observe and critique a decision like a chain of thought. So in general, that mechanism of self-reflection is, I think, a really effective technique. You know, at CIRA, we help companies build customer-facing AI agents. So if you're setting up a Sona speaker, you'll now chat with an AI. If you're a Sirius XM subscriber, you can chat with Harmony, who's their AI to manage your account. We use all these tricks, self-reflection to detect things like hallucination or decision-making, generating chains of thought for more complex tasks to ensure that it's, you know, you're putting as much compute and cognitive load into important tricks. So there's a whole industry around.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To sort of like refine and make more complete and specific what I was looking for. And then I would put it into one promote go get my coffee and come back and get it. I'm not sure if that's a viable technique, but it's really interesting because I do think in the spirit of AI being the solution to more problems in AI, having a lower latency, simpler model help refine essentially. I like to think of it as like you're like a product manager and you're asking an engineer what to do. Is your product requirements document complete and specific enough? And waiting for it is sometimes slower than so I like doing it in stages like that. So that's my trip at some point. There's probably someone from OpenAI listening who's going to like roll their eyes, but that's just a hive.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I often with the reasoning models which are slower will use a faster model first GBT40 to refine my prompts. So over the holidays partly because I was thinking about the future of software engineering, I've written a lot of compilers in my time. I'm like written enough that I'm easy for me. So I decided to see if I could have O1 Pro mode generate end-to-end a compiler front end parsing the grammar, checking for semantic correctness, generating an intermediate representation, and then using LLVM, which is sort of a compiler collection that's very popular to actually do, you know, run, run it all. And I would spend a lot of time iterating on”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Factor to absorb it that you just talk to it. So, I think it's great, and especially as I think about the mission of OpenAI, which is to ensure that AGI benefits humanity, what a simple, accessible form factor. There's free tiers of it, like what a kick-ass way to benefit humanity. So I really think that will be central to what we come as a society to define as AGI.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“ChatGPT, you get a legal opinion. If you get lab results from your doctor, you can get a second opinion on ChatGPT. Clay and I use the 01 Pro mode for criticizing our strategy at CIRA all the time. And so for me, what's so remarkable about ChatGPT, which was this quirkily named research preview that has come to be synonymous with AI, is I do think that it will be the delivery mechanism for AGI when it's produced and not just because the main researchers at OpenAI, but because of the amazing utility it's become from individuals. And I think that's really neat because I don't know if it would have been obvious if we were having this conversation three years ago, and you were talking about artificial general intelligence, I'm not sure either of us would have envisioned something so simple as a form of”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first, I think OpenAI, I believe, will play a huge part in it because there's both the technology, which I think OpenAI continues to lead on, but also ChatGPT, which has become synonymous with AI for most consumers. But more than that, it is the way most people access AI today. And so one of the interesting things, like what is AGI? We talked about opinions on what the definition might be. But the other question is, how do you use that? What is the packaging? And some of intelligence will be simply the outcomes of it, like a discovery of a new drug, which would be remarkable and hopefully we can cure some illnesses, but others will be just how you as an individual access it. And most of the people I know, like if they're signing an apartment lease, will put it in.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or hosted and leased. So it's, I think broadly speaking for developers, it's kind of an amazing time right now because you have like a menu of options that's incredibly wide. And I actually think of it as, you know, just like in cloud computing, you'll end up with a price performance quality trade-off. And for any given engineering talents, you'll have a different answer. And that's appropriate. And some people use open source Kafka. Some people work with Confluent. Great. That's just the way these things work. So you don't.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You could talk to a smart engineer and they'll tell you, oh, yeah, have you built your own servers, you'll spend less than renting them from, say, Amazon Web Services or Azure. That's sort of true in absolute terms, but misses the fact, like, do you want someone in your team building servers? Oh, and in fact, if you change the way your service works and you need a different SKU like you all of a sudden are doing training and you need NVIDIA H100s, now all of a sudden your built servers like this asset that's worthless. So I think with a lot of these models, the presence of open source is incredibly important and I really appreciate it. I also think like the economics of AR pretty complex because the hardware is very unique. The cost to serve is much higher. Techniques like distillation have really changed the economics of models, whether or not it's open source.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's different players with different incentives all investing so much. And I think it is really furthering the cause of like bringing these amazing tools to society. But a lot changes. I mean, if you look at the price of GPT 40 mini, it is so much higher quality than the highest quality model two years ago and much cheaper. I haven't done the math on it, but it's probably cheaper to use that than to host self-host any of the open source models. So even the existence of the open source models, it's not free. I mean, inference costs money. And so there's a lot of complexity here. And actually, I have the email even being relatively closest stuff. Like, I have no idea where things are going.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now you've got Musa and Facebook too. So that was what it was called. Unless you were. Know the company has always really embraced open source. And if I look at really popular things from React to now the Lama models, it's always been a big part of their strategy to court developers around sort of their ecosystem. Mark articulated some of the strategy there. And I'm sure there's elements of commoditizing your complement, but I also think that if you can attract developers towards models, there's a strength. I'm not really on the inside there, so I don't really have a perspective on it other than I actually think it's really great that”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actually will take Marquette's word. And that post he wrote about open source, I think, was very well written and encouraged people to read it. I think that's a strategy. And if you look at Facebook.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look at the revenue scale of something like an open AI and what I've read about places like Anthropic, let alone Microsoft and Amazon, it's pretty incredible as well. And so you can't really, if you're one of those firms, you can't afford to sit on the sidelines as the world transforms. But I would have a hard time personally funding a startup that says, I'm going to do pre-training. I don't really know what's your differentiation in this marketplace. And I think a lot of those companies you're already seeing them consolidate because they have the cost structure of a pharmaceutical company, but not the business model. But this is just it, though.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Versus a frontier model or an open source one from Meta. And as a consequence of that, I think we have probably have too many people building models right now. There's already been some consolidation, actually, of companies being folded into Amazon and Microsoft and others. But I do think it will play out a bit like the cloud infrastructure business where a very small number of companies with very large CapEx budgets are responsible for both building and operating these data centers. And then developers and consumers will use things like ChatGPT as a consumer or as a developer you'll license and rent one of these models in the cloud. How it will play out is a really great question. I think I heard one investor talk about these as like the fastest depreciating assets of all time. On the other hand,”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And these frontier models are being built by labs who are trying to build AGI that benefits humanity. And I think if you're deciding whether you're building a foundation model and what your business models around it, it's very different business than I'm going to go pursue AGI. Because if you're pursuing AGI, really there's only one answer, which is to build and train and move to the next horizon because if you can truly build something that is AGI, the economic value is so great. I think there's a really clear business case there. If you're pre-training a foundation model that's the fourth best, that's going to cost you a lot of money. And the return on that investment is probably fairly questionable because why use your fourth best large language model?”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who have a broad range of use cases. And I think that leads in the same way that data center builders having a lot of data centers enabled you to have the capital scale to build more data centers. I think the same will largely be true of building the huge clusters to do training and things like that. Foundation models, I think, are somewhat distinct from frontier models. And frontier models, I think it's a term credited to Reed Hoffman, but I may be mistaken on that, but that's where I heard it from. And these are the models that are usually like the one or two that are clearly the leading edge 03. As an example from OpenAI.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a really complicated business to be in, just given the CapEx required to build a frontier model. But let me just start with a couple definitions of terms that I think are useful. I think most large language models I would call foundation models. And I like the word foundation because I think it will be foundational to most intelligent systems going forward. And most people building modern models, particularly if they involve language image or audio, shouldn't start from building a model from scratch. They should pick a foundation model, either use it off the shelf or fine-tune it. And so it's truly foundational in many ways. In the same way, most people don't build their own servers anymore. They lease them from one of the cloud infrastructure providers, I think foundation models will be something trained by companies that have a lot of CapEx and leased by a broad range of customer.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Better fitting in humanity, all the other stakeholders whose interests that they're accountable for, and ensuring that the West remains competitive. And I think that's a really nuanced thing. And I think my view is it's very important that the West leads in AI. And I'm very proud of the fact that OpenAI is based here in the United States and we're investing a lot in the United States. And I think that's very important. And I also, you know, having sort of seen the insight of, I think we're really focused on benefiting humanity. So I tend to think that it needs to be a multi-stakeholder dialogue, but I think there's a really big risk that some regulations could have the unintended consequence of slowing down this larger conversation. But I don't say that to be a dismissive of it either. It's actually just impossibly hard problem. And I think you're seeing it play out, as you said, in really different ways.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As it relates to regulation, there's two not conflicting forces, but two forces that exist somewhat independently but relate to each other. One is the pace of progress in AI and ensuring that the folks working in frontier models are ensuring those models do benefit humanity. And then there's the sort of geopolitical landscape, which is, you know, do you want AGI to be created by the freedom sort of the West by democracies? Or do you want it to be created by more totalitarian governments? And so I think the inherent tension for regulators will be a sense of obligation to ensure that the technology organizations creating AGI are in fact focusing enough on”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How it manifests in society, and you could imagine taking a very well aligned AI system and a human operator directing it towards something that would objectively hurt society. And there's a question of who gets to decide who's accountable. And it's a perennial question. I mean, it's whether you're deciding should you use your smartphone in school, who should decide that. And there's parents who will tell you, hey, it's my decision. It's my kid. And then there's principals who will tell you it's not benefiting the school. And I'm not sure that's going to be my place or our place, but there'll be a number of those conversations that are much deeper than that question that I think we'll need to answer.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just look at whether it's the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington or Three Mile Island or these intersections where we've engineered these at the time people hoped would be positively impact humanity, but something went horribly wrong. Sometimes it's engineering, sometimes it's bureaucracy, sometimes it's a lot of things. And so I don't think when I think about safety I don't just look at the technical measures of it, but how does this technology manifest in society? How do we make decisions around it? And you could take, put another way, technology is rarely innately good or bad at sort of what we do with it. And I think those social constructs and matter a lot as well. So I think it's a little early to tell because we don't have this kind of superintelligence right now. And I think it won't just be a technology company defining”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it can be meaningful things like misalignment or more subtle things like unintended consequences. Intellectual and ethical standpoint as well. If I look at what was the bridge in Canada that fell down where it motivated the ring that a lot of engineers were. Yeah.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With safety, but I actually like thinking about it more broadly because I think at the end of the day, benefiting humanity is the mission. And safety is a prerequisite, but it's almost like going to my analogy, the Hippocratic Oath, a doctor's job is to cure you. First, do no harm, but then to cure you. And a doctor that did no harm but didn't cure you wouldn't be great either. So I really like to think about holistically. Again, Zika or Sam might have a more complete answer here, but broadly I think about does the system that represents AGI align with the intentions of the people created it and the intentions of the people operating it so that it does what we want and it's a tool that benefits humanity, a tool that we're actively using to affect the outcomes that we're looking for. And that's kind of the way I think about safety.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really like OpenAI's mission, which is to ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity. That isn't only about safety. And I believe intentionally so, though obviously the mission was created prior to my arrival because it's both about safety, kind of Hippocratic oath, first do no harm. And I don't think one could credibly achieve that mission if we created something unsafe. So I would say that's the most important part of the mission. But there's also a lot of other aspects of benefiting humanity. Is it universally accessible? Is there a digital divide where some people have access to AGI and some don't? Similarly, you could argue that are we maximizing the benefits and minimizing the downsides clearly AI will disrupt some job, but it also could democratize access to healthcare, education, expertise. So as I think about the mission, it starts.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you think about More advanced models. We need to be developing not only more and more advanced safety measures and safety harnesses, but also using AI to supervise AI and things like that. So it's probably my colleague on the board Ziko Culture is probably a better person to talk through some of the technical things, but there's a lot of prerequisites to getting that point. And I'm not sure it's simply like the availability of the technology just because it is that at the end of the day, we are accountable for the safety of the systems we produce, not just open AI, like every engineer. And that's a principle that should not change.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's a question that's there's so much nuance to answer. I'm not sure how to answer because I'm not sure you'd want to necessarily. I think for some software applications, that's important. But when we brought up, we were talking about the active software development, people have to be accountable for the software that they produce. And that means if you're doing something simple like a software as a service application, that it's secure, that it's reliable, that the functionality works as intended for something as meaningful as an agent that is somewhat autonomous. Does it have the appropriate guardrails? Does it actually do what the operators intended? Is there safety measures? So I'm not sure there's really any system where you'd want to turn a switch and go get your coffee. But I do think to the point on these broader safety things is I think that.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it might reflect back to our software engineering discussion, but broadly, this is the area of AGI around self-improvement, which is meaningful from an improvement standpoint, but also obviously from a safety standpoint as well. So I don't know when that will happen, but I do think by some definition, you could argue that it's happening already in the sense that every engineer in Silicon Valley is already using coding agents and platforms like Cursor to help them code. So it's contributing already. And I imagine as coding assistants go to coding agents in the future, most engineers in Silicon Valley will show up in the morning.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And at each one of those, because you have so many smart people working on them, you often have people discovering a breakthrough in each of them. And so as a consequence, I really do feel optimistic about the progress towards HEI because one of those plateaus might extend a while if we just don't have the key idea that we need to break through. The idea that we will be stuck on all three of those domains feels very unlikely to me. And in fact, what we've seen because of the potential economic benefits of AGIs, we're in fact seeing breakthroughs in all three of them. And as a consequence, you're just seeing just the blistering pace of progress that we've seen over the past couple years.”
2025-04-15 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source