#490 – State of AI in 2026: LLMs, Coding, Scaling Laws, China, Agents, GPUs, AGI

**Lex Fridman** (0:00)
The following is a conversation all about the state of the art in artificial intelligence, including some of the exciting technical breakthroughs and developments in AI that happened over the past year, and some of the interesting things we think might happen this upcoming year. At times, it does get super technical, but we do try to make sure that it remains accessible to folks outside the field without ever dumbing it down. It is a great honor and pleasure to be able to do this kind of episode with two of my favorite people in the AI community, Sebastian Raschka and Nathan Lambert. They are both widely respected machine learning researchers and engineers who also happen to be great communicators, educators, writers, and Twitterers, ex-posters. Sebastian is the author of two books I highly recommend for beginners and experts alike. First is Build a Large Language Model, From Scratch, and Build a Reasoning Model, From Scratch. I truly believe in the machine learning, computer science world, the best way to learn and understand something is to build it yourself, from scratch. Nathan is the post-training lead at the Allen Institute for AI and author of the definitive book on reinforcement learning from human feedback. Both of them have great X accounts, great sub-stacks, Sebastian has courses on YouTube, Nathan has a podcast, and everyone should absolutely follow all of those. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor, check them out in the description or at lexfridman.com. It is, in fact, the best way to support this podcast. We got a bunch of great sponsors, Box for Intelligent Content Management, Quo for your phone system, like call stacks, contacts for your business, Uplift Desk, the desk I'm sitting behind, and my favorite, Office Desk. Thin for customer service AI agents, Shopify for selling stuff online, Code Rabbit for AI-powered code review, Element for electrolytes, and of course, our longtime friend, Perplexity for curiosity-driven knowledge exploration. Choose wisely, my friends. Now, on to the full ad reads. I try to make them interesting, but if you do skip, please do check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. To get in touch with me, for whatever reason, go to lexfridman.com/contact. If you can't tell, I'm trying to have a bit of a pep in my step at the moment, because I had a long night, didn't get much sleep at all, so I am running on fumes, delirious, happy, unsure of what is reality and what is a dream. In fact, we could right now be living inside of a dream. I have been going through a lot. I have been working insane hours, so much going on. I am so overwhelmed. Of course, as always, truly grateful and happy to be alive, but have not been able to publish as many episodes as I would like, so there's a bunch of sponsors we have to catch up on. Your support truly means the world. Please check out all the sponsors. If you think it might be useful to you, buy their stuff. It really is the best way to support this podcast. All right, let's go. First up, this episode is brought to you by Box, a cloud-based platform for content management, file sharing, and all kinds of collaboration, all kinds of content for your businesses. Like with a lot of companies, the big question is, how is AI leveraged to make whatever the business does better? A lot of companies kind of use it for the hype and the label. It's kind of hilarious to watch people just say like, Powered by AI, I don't care if you're a bakery, powered by AI, I don't know. But outside of all of the hype, it is one of the most incredible things that humans have ever created. And so companies that can leverage that well are the companies that win. And of course, Box is legendary for its file and content management, especially when you're talking about scale. So obviously, it's amenable for the utilization of AI to help automate some of the document processing, some of the workflow, some of the organization. And they do that exceptionally well. They have a system called, as you could imagine, Box AI that does just that. I love it. They do an excellent implementation on the interface side. On the backend side, everything works extremely nicely. Help scale AI across your organization today and go to box.com/ai. That's box.com/ai to learn more. This episode is also brought to you by Quo, spelled Q-U-O. Also happens to be a company name with just three letters that will help you win at Scrabble. Are you allowed to use company names in Scrabble? How many points is Q? How many points is U? I'm imagining a lot. That was one of the big confusions to me when I was first learning the English language. It always felt like Q should be at the end of the alphabet. Maybe like QZ. It was always surprising to my limited brain capacity that Q was earlier on in the alphabet. What is it? OPQ? I can't even actually localize letters in the alphabet. I'm sure that's the case for a lot of people without reading the alphabet in my head sequentially. All of this has to do with short-term and long-term memory access, the functioning, the limitation of human cognition, and maybe cognitive systems in general. All of it relevant to this particular episode and not so relevant to the awesomeness of quo formerly known as open phone that I should be talking about. Of course, as is always the case, I think the point here and at the point everywhere in the point of life is to talk from the heart about whatever you want. And that's what I try to do with everything. And to generalize that even more, to talk whenever I want and to shut the F up whenever I want and listen. And I prefer that more often than I prefer to talk. Insert clever transition here because talk is somehow relevant. It is. So Quo, formerly known as Open Phone, helps over 90,000 businesses manage phone calls, texts, contacts, all kinds of phone related stuff for business. You have a bunch of customers, a bunch of incoming calls, a bunch of people on the business side that have to answer those calls, have to manage it. What's the status of this particular request? Voicemails, transcripts, all that kind of stuff. And obviously, really nice, effective utilization of AI to make that really efficient. But really, what's really important for things like this is that the interface is good, that team collaboration is good, and Quo delivers on that. Try Quo for free, plus get 20% off your first six months when you go to quo.com/lex. That's Q U o.com/lex. Tell your friends about it, because it just might help them win at Scrabble. Speaking of Scrabble, you usually want to play Scrabble on a table. It's such a magical experience. I just had a vision from a distant past of me sitting with a friend and playing Scrabble at a table. What is this life full of beautiful memories and that it's over too soon? Yeah, that melancholy feeling is beautiful, I think. Insert another clever transition, a la Mark Norman maybe, because the name of this next company is Uplift Desk.