Ep 92: xAI Co-Founder Unpacks the Future of Model Development

**Jacob Effron** (0:00)
Welcome back to Unsupervised Learning. I'm Jacob Effron. We had an awesome episode today with Igor Babuschkin. Igor has been at all the right places, at all the right times, leading a lot of really interesting AI work. He was at DeepMind, where he led a lot of the work around StarCraft, as well as AlphaCode. He was at OpenAI, doing the early work on reasoning. Then he was a co-founder of XAI, where he did some of the heroic work on Colossus, as well as helped get the models up to where they are today.
It was awesome to get to talk to Igor about his new company, River AI, the bets they're making around personal AI for companies, for consumers, as well as local hardware. We talked about all his takes on where the ecosystem is headed, what's required to improve models beyond coding into non-verifiable domains, and when he thinks we'll get there. We talked about why he thinks the closed-source model providers are actually in a really hard place right now as businesses. We hit on his reflections on what AI models mean for the future of the world and the policy implications of this as well. Just awesome to talk to someone who's at the forefront of the space on all the questions that are top of mind. I think folks will really enjoy Igor's perspective. Without further ado, here he is.
Igor, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Really excited to have you here.

**Igor Babuschkin** (1:14)
Thank you for the invitation, Jacob. We're excited to chat with you.

**Jacob Effron** (1:17)
You've pioneered so much important research in your time at DeepMind, OpenAI, XAI. You were early to like so many of the things that I feel like define this year we have today. There are Firebase Reasoning, Inference Time Search, and you recently left XAI to start your own company, River, really focused on personal AI. I feel like there's so many things that our listeners are going to be excited about to get your take on the episode. I want to make sure they understand River, they get your reflections on being at the epicenter of all these things that have happened in AI as well as your predictions for where we're going. As I was thinking about where to begin, one thing I found really compelling is that you wrote some really interesting fiction earlier this year. For those that haven't seen, one piece was this dystopian look at how models ended up uncontrolled, running the world, and had this really interesting ending where your protagonist realizes that they dreamed all of this and none of this has happened yet, but they still make the decision to take that first step and begin. Then the interesting contrast, your second piece was really this love letter to the machines that come next.
Maybe to start, I'm curious, what inspired you to write these?

**Igor Babuschkin** (2:21)
Yeah, I think that's something pretty big that happened to all of us software engineers, AI researchers around November, December of last year, which is that the coding agents suddenly became so powerful that you can't ignore them. Previously, some people used them, some people didn't use them. But from that point on, with the latest iteration of Cloud Opus models, suddenly everybody agreed that, yes, these models are very powerful, yes, they make our jobs much, much easier, and also, while they're doing so much of the software engineering, now that we used to do that, we used to enjoy it. So it was a real transformation for all of us. And like many folks, I spent a large part of December rewriting all of the coding projects that I've ever wanted to do in my life or have done using the coding agents. And you get this incredible sense of like, well, is anything's possible now? And also these agents are going to continue to improve, they're going to continue to get more capable. And what will happen with the world at large as these models are getting stronger and stronger, and that kind of inspired the story, is very much a modern version of the Sorcerer's Apprentice.
So the Sorcerer's Apprentice is very fascinated with magic and starts to use it, but then it kind of runs away from him.
So kind of like in the Disney short or in the original poem. So it's very much a version of that in my mind. And I think we're all becoming the Sorcerer's Apprentices now. It's LLMs and agents becoming more and more capable. And I think it's not going to stop at coding. So I'm very, very interested in figuring out where our agent is going to go next, what else is going to be transformed. And the more I think about it, the more it feels like everything will be transformed. All of computing really is a potential, is up for grabs when it comes to agents because the ability to deeply understand what's happening in your life, at your workplace, what's happening in the world at large, and then taking action based on that, is something that you can apply to any problem, to any kind of thing you might want to do as a business, as a consumer. So that's why I'm so interested in personal AI, because I think that's the next iteration, that's the next manifestation of what the agents are going to be able to do for us. The impact will only grow from here.