Physics Meets AI: Unraveling Scaling Laws

Jared Kaplan on June 16th, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco.Jared Kaplan started out as a theoretical physicist chasing questions about the universe. Then he helped uncover one of AI’s most surprising truths: that intelligence scales in a predictable, almost physical way.That insight became foundational to the modern era of large language models—and led him to co-found Anthropic.In this talk, he walks through how that discovery reshaped the path to human-level AI, what it means for future models like Claude, and why even the dumbest questions can lead to the biggest breakthroughs. He reflects on memory, oversight, and what’s left to solve as models grow smarter—and longer-horizon tasks come within reach.