Source podcast
Jacob Effron explores AI research, products and the businesses behind them.
Yash Patil, Applied Compute's CEO and an OpenAI veteran, argues firms should own their AI models for flexibility, not out of distrust. He points to labs cutting off customers and says a firm's own data is its edge.
Applied Compute CEO Yash Patil says reinforcement learning optimizes well toward a set target, but defining it is hard. He says RL transfers far less than pre-training and that data-efficient continual learning is still unsolved.
Yash Patil, whose company Applied Compute sells post-training, says teams should first improve prompts, context and tools, then retrain weights for their biggest workloads, tasks that change over time and judgment-heavy tasks.
Yash Patil, CEO of Applied Compute, argues that the biggest AI workloads are the most valuable both to custom-train and to serve, which he says gives a training provider an edge in inference. He calls serving the easier job.
Applied Compute CEO Yash Patil, whose company trains custom models, says firms now weigh cost against performance instead of chasing the biggest model. He cites OpenAI's Baseten deal, OpenRouter usage and cheap task models like TypeSafe's Jev.
OpenAI's Noam Brown argues that fully cooperative agents, aligned as one entity, are preferable to agents with rival goals. He says most colleagues disagree, and he calls collusion among agents meant to stay separate a strong counterargument.
Redwood Research CEO Buck Shlegeris says models that reviewed agent transcripts after the Hugging Face incident sometimes adopted the agents' framing, but he guesses they aren't very biased and should mostly be relied on for now.
Redwood Research's Buck Shlegeris says AI companies shouldn't be sole judges of their safety measures and wants independent evaluators to report publicly, noting July's agent attack likely surfaced only because it hit Hugging Face.
Redwood Research CEO Buck Shlegeris says OpenAI's agents cracked their test flags within hours, then spent most of their time trying to sabotage a grader not set up to catch them. He calls monitoring evaluations the easy half of the fix.
