YouSaid · the spoken record

Joelle Pineau

lines on the record
66
first
2025-11-03
most recent
2025-11-03
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

  1. “Know, I prefer in terms of a barometer of productivity something a little bit different, which is to say, can most of your employees do 10x the amount of work with AI versus on their own? That to me is actually a better barometer. I think human AI have very complementary abilities. So to just like flat out replace a portion of your workforce is actually pretty unrealistic. Some may try and some may be slowing down their hiring, but I actually think”

    2025-11-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cohere's Chief AI Officer on Why Scaling Laws Will Continue | Whether You Can Buy Success in AI with Talent Acquisitions | The Future of Synthetic Data & What It Means for Models | Why AI Coding is Akin to Image Generation in 2015 with Joelle Pineau · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “One of the reasons I'm really excited to be joining COHER actually is because like we're at a stage where AI is really starting to be useful, maybe not as useful as people think it is, but we are there. And by working on AI that's going into enterprise, I feel we're going to get such an interesting signal of what works and what doesn't work. You know, we keep on talking about AGI and AI for the masses and so on. But actually, when you need to sell AI to a business, you get a real signal of what works, what doesn't work. And that's what I'm most curious to see. You know, we've been using these academic benchmarks for many years. You get some signal, but it's not the same as getting this to do productive work. I'm curious to learn out of that. We're going to get new types of data.”

    2025-11-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cohere's Chief AI Officer on Why Scaling Laws Will Continue | Whether You Can Buy Success in AI with Talent Acquisitions | The Future of Synthetic Data & What It Means for Models | Why AI Coding is Akin to Image Generation in 2015 with Joelle Pineau · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “It's certainly the most creative work to be done and the space of ideas is so wide that I would say it's hardest in the sense that you can move in, you know, I'm a researcher at hard, you can move in so many different directions and picking the right one, you don't know the you get there, whether it was the right one or not, it's a little bit like reinforcement learning. So in that sense, I think it's the most interesting one, it's the most frustrating one, it's the most difficult one, certainly from an investor's point of view.”

    2025-11-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cohere's Chief AI Officer on Why Scaling Laws Will Continue | Whether You Can Buy Success in AI with Talent Acquisitions | The Future of Synthetic Data & What It Means for Models | Why AI Coding is Akin to Image Generation in 2015 with Joelle Pineau · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “The scaling laws have been remarkably robust. They don't play exactly as we expect, but still they've been remarkably robust. Lots of people have bet against scaling laws in the past. And I would say overall, you know, we've seen a pretty robust effect. They don't work alone. We also need these algorithmic innovations, but most of the time, you know, I wouldn't bet against it.”

    2025-11-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cohere's Chief AI Officer on Why Scaling Laws Will Continue | Whether You Can Buy Success in AI with Talent Acquisitions | The Future of Synthetic Data & What It Means for Models | Why AI Coding is Akin to Image Generation in 2015 with Joelle Pineau · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “To have a nonlinear effect. The challenge with these algorithmic ideas, though, is that actually it may take a long time to prove themselves out. So like the paper can be sitting out there. There's thousands of papers coming out. The ideas sitting out there. And we may not think to try it with the right data at the right scale, with the right combination of hyperparameters. And so you don't notice that effect for a while. So it's hard to predict and it's nonlinear, more on the algorithmic side than I think on whether it's data, compute, even talent or other things.”

    2025-11-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cohere's Chief AI Officer on Why Scaling Laws Will Continue | Whether You Can Buy Success in AI with Talent Acquisitions | The Future of Synthetic Data & What It Means for Models | Why AI Coding is Akin to Image Generation in 2015 with Joelle Pineau · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I tend to decompose different ingredients that lead to progress. You know, people often talk about the algorithms, the data, the compute. I think in general, compute and data have a more linear effect on progress. You build more compute, you run bigger models, you can typically get better performance, you feed in more data. It's not just quantity. You need to worry about quality and diversity as well. Roughly, it's more linearish with respect to the data. The algorithms are the ones that have the nonlinear effect. And so you can explore lots of ideas and then something like the transformer comes along and just changes the paradigm. And it's not just a transformer, you know, on the optimization side. Suddenly we hit upon Adam, which is a technique to do the optimization of your model changes in the paradigm. Reasoning suddenly we start thinking about how to put that in the loop reasoning and it changes the paradigm. So those ideas”

    2025-11-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cohere's Chief AI Officer on Why Scaling Laws Will Continue | Whether You Can Buy Success in AI with Talent Acquisitions | The Future of Synthetic Data & What It Means for Models | Why AI Coding is Akin to Image Generation in 2015 with Joelle Pineau · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “There's a lot of challenge today, I think, in terms of the economics of AI. I think one of the biggest challenges, the fact that it's very hard to have predictability, everyone wants to know when are we going to hit the breakthrough? Everyone wants to know how many GPUs do I actually need. Everyone wants to know, like, what's the return I can expect? There's just a lot of uncertainty built into the system. A lot of that is because there's a lot we don't know about this technology. And so that means we have to take in quite a bit of risk when you're building out whether you're building out your data center, whether you're building out your workforce, whether you're trying to figure out, you know, how much data to curate. And so that makes it difficult for a lot of people. People want answers. And this is a world where we don't have that level of predictability compared to other industries.”

    2025-11-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cohere's Chief AI Officer on Why Scaling Laws Will Continue | Whether You Can Buy Success in AI with Talent Acquisitions | The Future of Synthetic Data & What It Means for Models | Why AI Coding is Akin to Image Generation in 2015 with Joelle Pineau · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “We're still in the early days of AI adoption in enterprise, so what's good for the client is good for us. Totally, totally get you.”

    2025-11-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cohere's Chief AI Officer on Why Scaling Laws Will Continue | Whether You Can Buy Success in AI with Talent Acquisitions | The Future of Synthetic Data & What It Means for Models | Why AI Coding is Akin to Image Generation in 2015 with Joelle Pineau · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I think there's a lot of different variants. And, you know, if you'll allow, maybe I'll pivot to where I'm going with cohere now, just, you know, I joined Cohere less a month ago. Super exciting company. I think one of the things that Cohere is doing is actually to develop AI models that run on premise. So that means enterprise bring it in, they run it locally. the company has to worry about the training of the models. Obviously, we want world-class models for the needs of enterprise. It doesn't have to worry about the inference. Doesn't have to worry about the inference cost, the client's customers have to figure out what's the right way for them to digest the AI. That means like there's a lot of motivation to have very efficient models so that they can run really efficiently on premise. So, you know, we get caught up into one paradigm, but there are other paradigms as well.”

    2025-11-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cohere's Chief AI Officer on Why Scaling Laws Will Continue | Whether You Can Buy Success in AI with Talent Acquisitions | The Future of Synthetic Data & What It Means for Models | Why AI Coding is Akin to Image Generation in 2015 with Joelle Pineau · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “It's coming down, especially in domains where we have good reward functions. So the place where most people started hearing about RL is around the AlphaGo time, you know, the game of Go, which was sort of one of the goals for AI. Many people thought we were at that time. We were still a decade away from being able to have machines play go at the level of humans. And out comes a team from DeepMind, goes off, plays against the world champion and shows that RL can basically do it. And so I would say in cases where we clearly know what's the goal, we can write down precisely the reward function. We're good. We can make a ton of progress. So that's why you're seeing progress in mathematics, very well-defined reasoning tasks, games, these kinds of things. RL to shape the behavior of models to get them to be social creatures. We have no idea.”

    2025-11-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cohere's Chief AI Officer on Why Scaling Laws Will Continue | Whether You Can Buy Success in AI with Talent Acquisitions | The Future of Synthetic Data & What It Means for Models | Why AI Coding is Akin to Image Generation in 2015 with Joelle Pineau · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Simulator. You need to get the synthetic data. All of that can be really expensive, also. And so we have difficulty getting just a variety of environments in simulation to test RL.”

    2025-11-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cohere's Chief AI Officer on Why Scaling Laws Will Continue | Whether You Can Buy Success in AI with Talent Acquisitions | The Future of Synthetic Data & What It Means for Models | Why AI Coding is Akin to Image Generation in 2015 with Joelle Pineau · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “This is great. I really love it. There's a few reasons. One is the fact that RL is about sequential decision making. So, you know, think about your starting at a point. You need to figure out what you're going to do next. And you might pick the right side of the branch or the wrong side of the branch. And then the road keeps on splitting. So every time you make a mistake, it sort of compounds through the length of the series of actions you're making. So that means like the amount of error you can make can be very, very large and to get it right is quite difficult. Sometimes people compare it to like a needle in a haystack is like finding the right solution and RL. So there's that part. The other part that's hard is the fact that to train the system, to train the models, you have to essentially take actions to learn. You can't learn from static data. You can learn something from static data, but actually to get the right policy, you need to test it out. And so that means you need a”

    2025-11-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cohere's Chief AI Officer on Why Scaling Laws Will Continue | Whether You Can Buy Success in AI with Talent Acquisitions | The Future of Synthetic Data & What It Means for Models | Why AI Coding is Akin to Image Generation in 2015 with Joelle Pineau · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “I'm still super bullish on our L in that, like, the concept itself is so fundamental. You know, this idea of training through a system of rewards, of indicating what's valuable and what's not valuable through numerical values, like that is so fundamental. It's not going away. Now, you know, where we're maybe getting a little bit ahead is thinking that just RL out of the box is going to give us AGI. That part, a lot less so. You know, if you look at the curve of progress, RL is terribly inefficient. And so the amount of signal you need to get in order to really shape the behavior of a model is far from where we are today. And so we'll need to figure out how to really deal with this learning efficiency problem.”

    2025-11-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cohere's Chief AI Officer on Why Scaling Laws Will Continue | Whether You Can Buy Success in AI with Talent Acquisitions | The Future of Synthetic Data & What It Means for Models | Why AI Coding is Akin to Image Generation in 2015 with Joelle Pineau · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Well, I'll give you an example. I've been in research for a couple decades now. I've been working on reinforcement learning for over 20 years. And suddenly everyone's talking about reinforcement learning since they advent of reasoning models, agents, and so on. So, you know, sometimes you have to be a little patient with these ideas. the right algorithmic tweak, the right context, the right problem domains just opens up the magic.”

    2025-11-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cohere's Chief AI Officer on Why Scaling Laws Will Continue | Whether You Can Buy Success in AI with Talent Acquisitions | The Future of Synthetic Data & What It Means for Models | Why AI Coding is Akin to Image Generation in 2015 with Joelle Pineau · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Well, I was there from 2017 to 2025, and you have to see just how much AI changed over that period of time. What we were really focused on is fundamental AI research. One thing that I've learned is just sometimes how long it takes to prove out a hypothesis. We feel like AI is moving at a speed of lightning, but in fact, there's some things that it just takes a few years to mature to get the right optimizer, the right compute, the right data for that to really make a difference.”

    2025-11-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cohere's Chief AI Officer on Why Scaling Laws Will Continue | Whether You Can Buy Success in AI with Talent Acquisitions | The Future of Synthetic Data & What It Means for Models | Why AI Coding is Akin to Image Generation in 2015 with Joelle Pineau · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “The scaling laws have been remarkably robust. There's a lot we don't know yet in terms of the vulnerability of these systems”

    2025-11-03 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Cohere's Chief AI Officer on Why Scaling Laws Will Continue | Whether You Can Buy Success in AI with Talent Acquisitions | The Future of Synthetic Data & What It Means for Models | Why AI Coding is Akin to Image Generation in 2015 with Joelle Pineau · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source