AI Is Crossing the Frontier of Human Knowledge | Kevin Weil

**Kevin Weil** (0:00)
You have no excuse if you got an interesting idea. You can now create anything that you can think of. The models can now solve problems that humans have never solved before. Going beyond the frontier of human knowledge. That's how AI, I think, and AGI will really change our lives. Why not try and accelerate science, bring about the science of 2050, but in 2030 instead?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:21)
Most people think of AI as a productivity tool. Kevin Weil thinks the biggest impact may be somewhere else entirely. Formerly CPO and Vice President of Science at OpenAI, Weil is focused on a future where AI doesn't just help people write documents or generate code, but contributes directly to scientific discovery itself. The idea is ambitious. Use AI to accelerate breakthroughs in mathematics, medicine, materials science, and other fields that shape the future of human progress.
In this conversation, Kevin discusses frontier science, robotic labs, AI reasoning, startup opportunities, and why he believes some of the most important consequences of AI may come from expanding humanity's ability to discover new knowledge.

**Erik Torenberg** (1:08)
All right. This is an incredible time to be alive, I think. You helped build and scale some of the most important technology companies of the last decade, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and now you're doing that at OpenAI. I did ask ChatGBT what it thinks about you.
And so, as you would expect, it was very complimentary, but you're also a very accomplished guy. So Kevin is thoughtful, low ego, and unusually grounded for someone who's been at the center of so many high stakes products. So how did you, as you looked at all those four opportunities, plus many others that were amazing, what gave you the confidence that this is the type of company, this is the team I should be working with?

**Kevin Weil** (1:48)
Yeah. Number one advice, marry up.
It was my wife originally, actually I was in grad school doing a physics degree, and I met my now wife who was a Mayfield fellow at Stanford and actually worked at Andreessen for a little while.
And she was the one that kind of opened my eyes to everything, startups in the Valley and all that. I grew up in Seattle, my dad was an engineer at Microsoft for a long time, so I grew up programming, but still was just like math and physics, as I went through grad school.
And it was my wife Elizabeth, she introduced me to Twitter back in the day, because she and Jessica Verrilli knew each other from Stanford. And after seven years at Twitter as it grew, she and Kevin Systrom were also Mayfield fellows together at Stanford. So that's how that connection happened. And so, you know, a bunch of these things were just my wife, me just following the coattails of my wife. I used to call Sam periodically before whenever I would like be thinking about doing something new. Sam and I didn't know each other super well, but we knew each other well enough to, you know, to do a quick phone call. And because he always has his like hands in lots of different things. He's like doing fusion startups and all of this stuff. I remember talking to him like in 2020 or something. And he was like, you know, AI will not replace blue collar jobs first. It will replace white collar jobs first. Coding is going to be one of the big things for AI. This was 2020 And none of us used AI particularly much, at least not outside of like classical ML models that, you know, ranking your feed and stuff. And I just remember being like, yeah, whatever, dude. You know, sure. But like talk to, let's talk about something. And so anyways, I, the OpenAI thing happened because I called him and this time he was like, actually, you know what? We have this role open. You should come talk to us. As soon as I did, I was just like, I don't like all work for free. I don't just, this is the most interesting thing in the world. And if you give me an offer, I'm coming. So fortunately he did.

**Erik Torenberg** (4:02)
And then the original mandate as CPO with Sam was to what? And what are you sort of most happy with what you accomplished during that time?

**Kevin Weil** (4:12)
Yeah, originally it was CPO, so leading our consumer products, B2B products, developer products, etc.
And I mean, man, I think we grew like a weed. I've never seen anything grow that quickly in my entire life. And I think brought, you know, kind of brought AI to a whole bunch of the world. So very proud of that work. A few months ago, it was getting clear that our models could not just be great inside ChatGPT or inside Codex, which I think is an incredible product, but were at the level that they could start to answer frontier scientific problems. Like the models can now solve problems that humans have never solved before. So a lot of people like the criticism of AI is, oh, well, it's just bringing together different ideas from different places and summarizing them for you to give you an answer. I can't actually do novel thinking, but we've now seen there have been, I don't know, what 10 or 12, just in January, 10 or 12 open mathematics problems solved, mostly by GPT 5.2, now a few recently by Gemini. Models are going beyond the frontier of human knowledge, and I wouldn't claim yet that they are solving problems that humans can't. I think if you took enough people and applied enough mathematicians towards some of these problems, they would have figured it out, but they had not figured it out yet. The model went beyond what we had ever done as humans, and that's pretty cool, and that's today. If there's one thing I've learned over the last few years, it's that you go very quickly from, models could never do this thing. It is beyond the capability of AI today, to models can just barely do this thing, and it kind of sucks at it, and it's wrong most of the time, but you get these glimmers of like, ooh, they can almost do this. Maybe it only works five or 10% of the time, and then six to 12 months later, it's like, models are great at this thing, and I would never, I would always use AI anytime I ever do that again.