E14: The Reasoning Revolution with Ought's Jungwon Byun and Andreas Stuhlmüller

We've looked forward to today's episode since we launched the show! Andreas Stuhlmuller and Jungwon Byun are the co-founders of Ought, a product-driven research lab that develops mechanisms for delegating open-ended thinking to advanced machine learning systems. Their flagship product, Elicit (elicit.org), is an AI research assistant that helps researchers accelerate time-consuming workflows, starting with literature review.

We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal team on other projects he's incubating. He's hiring a Chief of Staff, EA, Head of Special Projects, Investment Associate, and more. For a list of JDs, check out: eriktorenberg.com.

LINKS REFERENCED IN EPISODE: Ought: https://ought.org/ Elicit: https://elicit.org/

TIMESTAMPS: (0:00) Preview (2:00) Nathan introduces the founders of Ought (4:20) Why doesn't AI serve better reasoning? (6:55) What limits the current paradigm (8:40) Reflections on the last six years of Ought’s research experiments of "composable thinking" (13:10) Error elimination mechanism is a shared challenge between human and AI systems (16:45) Sponsor: Omneky (18:00) Interpretability by construction product philosophy (25:00) Nathan’s personal experience using Elicit as a research assistant (30:00) Explicit concerns about model reasonings, and the importance of going a step further (36:00) What customers of OpenAI Foundry should consider (43:15) Evaluation challenges (48:15) Embeddings challenges (51:00) Vision for a knowledge work assembly line corporate paradigm (56:00) Ought's short-term approach to building: Understanding human ways of teaching the model to be more helpful (59:00) Wishful thinking versus real helpfulness (1:03:00) What's next for Elicit: expansion and new workflows (1:17:00) Zapier for reasoning (1:23:00) What are the most fundamental "magic questions" for all domains? (1:31:43) Significant impact of GPT4 (1:36:00) How people are using Elicit (1:44:00) AI Uncertainty and reason for hope (1:48:00) 3 lightning-round questions

TWITTER: @CogRev_Podcast @jungofthewon @stuhlmueller @labenz (Nathan) @eriktorenberg (Erik)

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More show notes and reading material released in our Substack: https://cognitiverevolution.substack.com/

Release date

Lydbog: 6. april 2023