Longtime machine-learning researcher, and University of Washington Professor Emeritus, Pedro Domingos joins a16z General Partner Martin Casado to discuss the state of artificial intelligence, whether we're really on a path toward AGI, and the value of expressing unpopular opinions. It's a very insightful discussion as we head into an era of mainstream AI adoption, and ask big questions about how to ramp up progress and diversify research directions.

Here's an excerpt of Pedro sharing his thoughts on the increasing cost of frontier models and whether that's the right direction:

"if you believe the scaling laws hold and the scaling laws will take us to human-level intelligence, then, hey, it's worth a lot of investment. That's one part, but that may be wrong. The other part, however, is that to do that, we need exploding amounts of compute.

"If if I had to predict what's going to happen, it's that we do not need a trillion dollars to reach AGI at all. So if you spend a trillion dollars reaching AGI, this is a very bad investment."

Learn more:

The Master Algorithm

2040: A Silicon Valley Satire

The Economic Case for Generative AI and Foundation Models

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Pedro Domingos

Martin Casado

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