Noam Shazeer and Jack Rae: Scaling Test-time Compute, Reactions to Ilya & AGI

On the latest episode of Unsupervised Learning, Jacob is joined by two of the most influential minds in AI today. 🔹 Noam Shazeer, co-inventor of the Transformer 🔹 Jack Rae, Research Director at DeepMind and one of the leads behind Gemini’s Flash Thinking We got to ask them all of the top-of-mind questions in AI today about where we are, where we’re headed and what it means for businesses and the world. Some key take-aways: 0:00 Intro 2:07 Exploring Gemini 2.0 4:41 Challenges with Evals and Benchmarks 6:51 Reinforcement Loops and AI Productivity 8:52 Agentic Coding and AI in Development 13:39 Multimodal Capabilities and Applications 15:58 Future of AI: Complexity and Reliability 19:39 Test Time Compute and Data Efficiency 31:57 AI Research Culture and Breakthroughs 39:36 Reflecting on Large Language Models 40:14 The Rise of Vision-Based Models 41:38 Native Image Generation and General Purpose Models 42:12 AI in Healthcare and Specialized Models 44:09 Shifting Timelines and Rapid Adoption 47:25 Open Source Models and Competitive Edge 50:07 AI's Impact on Education and Personal Lives 55:47 AGI Risks and Safety Considerations 58:10 Future of AI Companions 1:02:54 Quickfire With your co-hosts:  @jacobeffron  - Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health  @patrickachase  - Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn  @ericabrescia  - Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare)  @jordan_segall  - Partner at Redpoint