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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

Shownote

Joelle Pineau is the Chief AI Officer at Cohere, where she leads research on advancing large language models and practical AI systems. Before joining Cohere, she was VP of AI Research at Meta, where she founded and led Meta AI's Montreal lab. A professor a...

Highlights

In this insightful discussion, Joelle Pineau, Chief Scientist at Cohere and former VP of AI Research at Meta, shares her perspective on the evolving landscape of artificial intelligence. Drawing from her extensive experience in both academia and industry, she delves into the realities behind AI's rapid progress, the challenges of building sustainable systems, and the importance of long-term thinking in a field often driven by hype.
03:01
AI advancement may be over-hyped; real progress takes years.
04:39
RL requires simulators and synthetic data, making it costly for real-world applications.
10:01
Transformers originated at Google and changed the AI paradigm.
15:54
10x efficiency gains with AI are achievable in the next few years for well-specified tasks.
22:15
Impersonation in AI agents is the new hallucination problem
28:39
The importance of data, which is becoming more expensive, is often underestimated
32:16
The future of AI data services lies in building task-specific environments, not just labeling data.
35:29
Synthetic data can degrade model performance when diversity is lacking
43:13
Evaluations are unit tests for AI systems, not end goals.
51:22
The biggest lesson from working with Zuck is his deep understanding of the work.
54:58
Closing AI systems stifles innovation and idea sharing

Chapters

Introduction to AI Scaling Laws
00:00
How Meta Shaped How I Think About AI Research
03:00
Challenges in Reinforcement Learning
04:36
Is It Possible to be Capital Efficient in AI
10:00
AI in Enterprise: Efficiency and Adoption
15:52
Security Concerns with AI Agents
22:15
Can Zuck Win By Buying the Galacticos of AI
28:34
The Rising Cost of Data
32:15
Synthetic Data and Model Degradation
35:28
Why AI Coding is Akin to Image Generation in 2015
37:22
If Joelle Was a VC Where Would She Invest?
48:46
Quickfire: Lessons from Zuck, Biggest Mindset Shift
52:17

Transcript

Joelle Pineau: The scaling laws have been remarkably robust. There's a lot we don't know yet in terms of the vulnerability of these systems. Harry Stebbings: If you don't need to buy the Galacticos, why do you have, like, an Andrew Tulloch, a Daniel Gross...