Avalon Benchmark

In episode 49 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Kanjun Qiu and Josh Albrecht.

Kanjun and Josh are CEO and CTO of Generally Intelligent, an AI startup aiming to develop general-purpose agents with human-like intelligence that can be safely deployed in the real world. Kanjun and Josh have played these roles together in the past as CEO and CTO of AI recruiting startup Sourceress. Kanjun is also involved with building the SF Neighborhood, and together with Josh invests in early-stage founders at Outset Capital.

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Outline:

* (00:00) Intro

* (02:00) Kanjun’s and Josh’s intros to AI

* (06:45) How Kanjun and Josh met and started working together

* (08:40) Sourceress and AI in hiring, looking for unusual candidates

* (11:30) Generally Intelligent: origins and motivations

* (14:55) How Kanjun and Josh think about understanding the fundamentals of intelligence

* (17:20) AGI companies and long-term goals

* (19:20) How Kanjun and Josh think about intelligence + Generally Intelligent’s approach-agnosticism

* (22:30) Skill-acquisition efficiency

* (25:18) The Avalon Environment/Benchmark

* (27:40) Tasks with shared substrate

* (29:00) Blending of different approaches, baseline tuning

* (31:15) Approach to safety

* (33:33) Issues with interpretability + ML academic practices, ablations

* (36:30) Lessons about working with people, company culture

* (40:00) Human focus and diversity in companies, tech environment

* (44:10) Advice for potential (AI) founders

* (47:05) Outro

Links:

* Generally Intelligent

* Avalon: A Benchmark for RL Generalization

* Kanjun’s homepage

* Josh’s homepage