Imbue CTO Josh Albrecht on Creating AI Agents for Reasoning, Reliability, and Robustness

**Josh Albrecht** (0:00)
And so over the next year or two, I think we are going to start to see systems that are a lot better at doing kind of longer term things. Like the longer term actions, they kind of need to be right. If you're right 80 percent of the time, and you do 10 things in a row, you're actually fairly likely to fail, right? And so if you kind of have to get that up to like 90, 99, 99.9, if you really want to be taking much longer sequences of actions. But I do think that we're going to start to see a lot of that performance happening over the next year or two. And that's going to be a pretty interesting, weird world where these things are actually working like kind of like we would expect as people.
We're not using reinforcement learning to learn this, right? Like that's not how you get a PhD. You don't try getting a PhD 10,000 times. And then you finally get it and you say, Oh, I guess I should do more of that to get my PhD. Like that's not at all how we do almost everything, right? We're mostly planning, we're mostly thinking and anticipating and like using this kind of logical reasoning stuff. And so that's why we've kind of shifted our focus towards those types of tasks, towards the like coding tasks, reasoning tasks, tasks in your browser, desktop, where the planning piece is there. There's a lot of complexity in the real world.
Like, you know, you think about like Stripe or something. It's like, how can there be so many people working in Stripe? Like all you're doing is paying for a thing online. How hard can that be? Turns out really hard. It turns out there's a lot of details to that kind of stuff, right? It turns out everything is like that.
And so if we have a system that can more automatically break these things down and like actually start solving these problems and putting them back together properly again, I think it's going to look, you know, broad strokes kind of similar. But in a sense, it'll be quite different because this can happen dynamically. This can change over time.
You might be able to come back to the system and say, you know, we're using this language model here, but it's doing something stupid. Like we're just doing addition. Let's just call Wolfram Alfar. Let's just use a calculator.
OK, great. Now it's a lot faster. And so once this is kind of more dynamic, it's going to be more evolving. It's going to be able to like optimize and like, you know, continually improve in a way that's much, much harder for like a self-driving car system that's been made by, you know, whole huge teams of people.

**Nathan Labenz** (1:48)
Hello and welcome to The Cognitive Revolution, where we interview visionary researchers, entrepreneurs, and builders working on the frontier of artificial intelligence. Each week, we'll explore their revolutionary ideas, and together we'll build a picture of how AI technology will transform work, life, and society in the coming years. I'm Nathan Labenz, joined by my co-host Erik Torenberg. Hello and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today my guest is Josh Albrecht, founder and CTO of Imbue, a research company dedicated to building practical AI agents that can accomplish larger goals and safely work for us in the real world. Which, despite being pre-product, recently raised $200 million from investors including Nvidia, a significant part of which will go toward a cluster of 10,000 H100 GPUs.
Imbue is a fascinating company that I honestly struggled to make sense of at first. I did my usual prep, I read through their research papers and their public writing, and I also listened to a couple of recent interviews, but still I came away without a coherent sense of the company as a whole. In this conversation, we cover the company's diverse outputs, which range from virtual world simulators for reinforcement learning, to a cost-aware hyperparameter optimizer, to theoretical research papers. And there are a lot of great nuggets in here, including a few moments where Josh challenges some of my assumptions. But it was only on listening back to this conversation, and really trying to zoom out from the details, that I feel like I began to understand the imbue thesis from an investor perspective. And to be clear, this may not be quite how imbue sees themselves, but after taking it all in and chewing on it for a while, I understand imbue as one of a small but growing class of company, which could prove extremely important depending on how a few key questions in AI end up being answered.