Decision Transformers

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I just wanted to briefly talk about your decision transformers work. You know, we try not to retread stuff that people have talked about elsewhere too much on this show. So I will just say for starters, that you covered this in pretty good depth on a podcast called Talk RL, middle of last year. And then I have a couple kind of, you know, update questions like, is there any news in the kind of decision transformer world that you think is worth flagging? Yeah, so decision transformer, basically readings reinforcement learning, that's just a single transformer. Read for the learning is like decades of work done on how to build algorithms that optimize the reward given the previous states

We talked to Aravind Srinivas about competing with the tech giants, Perplexity's product philosophy and obsession with maximizing value delivered to the user per unit time, and the features that makes Perplexity unique.

We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal team on other projects he's incubating. He's hiring a Chief of Staff, EA, Head of Special Projects, Investment Associate, and more. For a list of JDs, check out: eriktorenberg.com.

(0:00) Preview

(1:31) Introduction & Context

(08:06) Aravind’s vision for Perplexity as the world’s most truth-centric company

(9:29) Raising the average IQ of the world

(12:00) Aravind’s favorite tech entrepreneur

(15:12) “Anthropics” - Building your own model vs user experience

(33:00) Why is perplexity free

(43:00) Talking shop: Perplexity’s tech stack and speed

(1:06:00) Perplexity’s stance on guardrails on search

(1:19:48) Forecasting weakly general AGI: The four criteria

(1:28:00) Aravind’s perspective on OpenAI and the future of AGI

(1:39:00) The Cognitive Revolution’s rapid fire questions: Neuralink implant? Most used AI tools? AI hopes and fears?

Twitter handles:

@CogRev_Podcast

@AravSrinivas (Aravind)

@labenz (Nathan)

@eriktorenberg (Erik)

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References & Shownotes:

Flamingo: https://www.deepmind.com/blog/tackling-multiple-tasks-with-a-single-visual-language-model

Decision Transformer Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.01345

Aravind on TalkRL Podcast: https://www.talkrl.com/episodes/aravind-srinivas-2

Weakly General AGI Criteria: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/3479/date-weakly-general-ai-is-publicly-known/

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