People of AI Season 5 - Shaping the agentic future with Clement Farabet
Jul 24, 2025
Clement Farabet, VP of Research at Google DeepMind, shares insights on AI's evolution from early neural networks to the latest advancements in large language models. He dives into how AI development has changed, emphasizing the collaboration between research and product teams. The conversation also addresses accountability in deploying AI agents and the need for ethical frameworks. Clement highlights the practicality of AI tools like Gemini in enhancing work processes and simplifying application development, all while reflecting on the future of autonomous work agents.
AI Snips
Chapters
Transcript
Episode notes
Early AI Startup Journey
- Clément Farabet started in AI with a passion for solving complex tasks using neural nets and custom hardware.
- He co-founded a startup selling video content search technology to Twitter, merging research with real-world product applications.
Transformers Accelerated Inevitable Progress
- Transformers accelerated AI progress but the fundamental scaling approach was inevitable.
- Compute growth would have led to similar advances but with a delay of a couple of years.
From Self-Driving Cars to LLMs
- Clément joined NVIDIA to work on self-driving car AI, leveraging large-scale GPU platforms.
- He shifted focus back to large language models as their product potential became apparent.