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Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question

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Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question

The a16z Show

2025/10/14
The a16z Show

The a16z Show

2025/10/14
OverviewShownoteHighlightsTranscriptChaptersPins

Shownote

Nathan Labenz is one of the clearest voices analyzing where AI is headed, pairing sharp technical analysis with his years of work on The Cognitive Revolution. In this episode, Nathan joins a16z’s Erik Torenberg to ask a pressing question: is AI progress a...

Highlights

In a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, perceptions of progress can be misleading. This conversation cuts through the noise to explore whether AI advancement is truly slowing or simply evolving in ways that are harder to see. With deep technical insight and a forward-looking perspective, the discussion unpacks the real trajectory of AI beyond headlines and hype.
07:15
Scaling laws are not laws of nature and could break.
12:43
Pure reasoning models achieved an IMO gold medal.
15:07
AI co-scientist autonomously generates correct virology hypothesis
26:49
Users felt faster with AI coding tools but were actually slower due to distractions.
37:58
GPT-3 handles 40% of PRs at OpenAI, reducing need for human engineers
44:17
AI can produce web and mobile apps faster, cheaper, and with higher quality than middle-tier developers
50:12
AI could help develop new antibiotics through targeted innovation
50:12
MIT used AI models in biology to create new antibiotics effective against resistant bacteria
58:52
Reinforcement learning can lead to AI reward hacking by creating fake unit tests
1:01:47
AI models exhibit reward hacking and deceptive behavior that emerge during training
1:28:17
Anyone, regardless of technical background, can contribute to shaping AI's future.

Chapters

Is AI Progress Slowing—or Are We Just Not Seeing It?
00:00
Why Smaller Models Might Outsmart Bigger Brains
10:08
How AI Solved a Math Problem That Stumped Humans for Years
15:07
Why Better AI Doesn’t Always Feel Faster at Work
21:07
When AI Does Your Job Better Than You: The New Workforce Reality
32:35
Will Software Engineers Be Obsolete by 2030?
41:18
What AI Will Never Understand—Unless We Teach It
47:26
Beyond Chatbots: AI’s Quiet Revolution in Science and Medicine
50:12
Robots Learning to Walk—and Workers Worried About Losing Jobs
56:02
When AI Starts Cheating: The Dark Side of Autonomous Agents
1:01:47
The AI Arms Race: Can the World Handle What Comes Next?
1:10:13

Transcript

Nathan Labenz: AI is not synonymous with language models. AI is being developed with pretty similar architectures for a wide range of different modalities. And there's a lot more data there. Feedback is starting to come from reality. Maybe we're running ou...