#2156 - Jeremie & Edouard Harris

Edouard Harris (0:04)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Jeremie Harris (0:14)

Oh, you know, not too much. Just another typical week in AI.

Joe Rogan (0:18)

Just the beginning of the end of time. It's all happening right now.

Just for the sake of the listeners, please just give us your names and tell me, tell us what you do.

Jeremie Harris (0:29)

So, I'm Jeremie Harris. I'm the CEO and co-founder of this company, Gladstone AI that we co-founded.

So, we're essentially a national security and AI company. We can get into the backstory a little bit later, but that's the high level.

Edouard Harris (0:40)

Yeah, and I'm Ed Harris. I'm actually, I'm his co-founder and brother and the CTO of the company.

Joe Rogan (0:48)

Keep this, like, pull this up with like a fist from your face. There you go. Perfect.

So, how long have you guys been involved in the whole AI space?

Jeremie Harris (1:00)

For a while, in different ways. So, we actually, we started off as physicists. Like, that was our background. And in, like, around 2017, we started to go into AI startups. So, we founded a startup, took it through Y Combinator, this like Silicon Valley, you know, accelerator program. At the time, actually, Sam Altman, who's now the CEO of OpenAI, was the president of Y Combinator. So, he like opened up our batch at YC with this big speech. And we got some, you know, some conversations in with him over the course of the batch.

Then, in 2020, so this thing happened that we could talk about, essentially, this was like the moment that there's like a before and after in the world of AI, before and after 2020 And it launched this revolution that brought us to ChatGPT. Essentially, there was an insight that OpenAI had and doubled down on that you can draw a straight line to ChatGPT, GPT-4, Google Gemini. Everything that makes AI everything it is today started then.

And when it happened, we kind of went... Well, Ed gave me a call, this like panicked phone call. He's like, dude, I don't think we can keep working like business as usual.

Edouard Harris (2:04)

In a regular company anymore.

Jeremie Harris (2:05)

Yeah.

Edouard Harris (2:07)

So there was this AI model called GPT-3. So like everyone has, you know, maybe played with GPT-4. That's like ChatGPT.

GPT-3 was the generation before that. And it was the first time that you had an AI model that could get that could actually, let's say, do stuff like write news articles that the average person, like in a paragraph of a news article, could not tell the difference between it wrote this news article and a real person wrote this news article. So that was an inflection. That was significant in itself. But what was most significant was that it represented a point along this line, this like scaling trend for AI where the signs were that you didn't have to be clever. You didn't have to come up with necessarily a revolutionary new algorithm or be smart about it. You just had to take what works and make it way, way, way bigger.

And the significance of that is you increase the amount of computing cycles you put against something. You increase the amount of data. All of that is an engineering problem and you can solve it with money. So you've got you can scale up the system, use it to make money and put that money right back into scaling up the system some more money in IQ points come out.

Jeremie Harris (3:29)

That was kind of the 2020 moment like that.

Edouard Harris (3:31)

And that's what we said in 2020 Exactly.

Jeremie Harris (3:34)

I spent about two hours trying to argue mad of it. I was like, no, no, no, like we can keep working at our company because we're having fun. Like we like founding companies.

And yeah, he just like wrestled me to the ground and we're like, shit, we got to do something about this. We you know, we reached out to like a family friend who, you know, he was non-technical, but he had some some connections in government in DOD. And we're like, dude, the way this is set up right now, you can really start drawing straight lines and extrapolating and saying, you know what? The government is going to give a shit about this in not very long, two years, four years. We're not sure, but the the knowledge about what's going on here is so siloed in the frontier labs, like our friends are, you know, all over the frontier labs, the opening eyes, Google DeepMinds, all that stuff, the shit they were saying to us that was like mundane reality, like water cooler conversation.