Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career

OpenAI researcher on why soft skills are the future of work | Karina Nguyen (Research at OpenAI, ex-Anthropic)

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Feb 9, 2025
Guest
Karina Nguyen
Karina Nguyen, an AI researcher at OpenAI, previously worked at Anthropic and has contributed to groundbreaking products like Canvas and Tasks. In their engaging conversation, she discusses the evolving role of soft skills in the workplace as AI advances. Karina emphasizes the artistic nuances and challenges of model training, highlights the importance of synthetic data, and explores the need for collaboration in product development. She shares insights on how AI is reshaping human tasks, urging a balance between technological innovation and interpersonal skills.
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INSIGHT

Model Training as Art

  • Model training is more of an art than a science, focusing heavily on data quality and debugging similar to software.
  • Models learn by compressing knowledge and modeling the world, not just predicting the next word.
ANECDOTE

Models' Physical Body Confusion

  • Karina Nguyen discovered that models get confused when taught they lack a physical body while also learning physical world actions.
  • This confusion arises from conflicting data, like instructions on setting alarms despite not having a body to do so.
INSIGHT

Beyond the Data Wall

  • The perceived data wall for large language models is a misconception, as post-training with reinforcement learning uses infinite tasks.
  • The bottleneck lies in evaluation metrics, not data, as models saturate existing benchmarks.
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