Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, I think there's a very powerful notion where it helps people just achieve their ideas in a much cooler way. Something we haven't gotten into that I think is really interesting is just the story of how you got to starting Surge. You have a really unique background. I always think about these... Brian Armstrong, the founder of Coinbase, once gave this talk that has really stuck with me where he kind of talked about how his very unique background allowed him to start Coinbase. He had a economics background, he had a cryptography experience, and then he was an engineer. And it's like the perfect Venn diagram for starting Coinbase, and I feel like you have a very similar story with Surge. Talk about that, your background there, and how that led to Surge. Going way back, I was always fascinated by math and language when I was a kid. I went to MIT because it's obviously one of the best places for math and CS, but also because it's the home of Noam Chomsky. My dream in school was actually to find some underlying theory connecting all these different fields. And then I became a researcher at Google, and Facebook, and Twitter, and I just kept running into the same problem over and over again. It was impossible to get the data that we needed to train our models. So I was always this huge believer in the need for high quality data, and then GPT-3 came out in 2020. And I realized that, yeah, if we wanted to take things to the next level and build models that could code, and use tools, and tell jokes, and write poetry, and solve [inaudible 00:54:12], and cure cancer, then yeah, we were going to need a completely new solution. The thing that always drove me crazy when I was at all these companies was we had a full power of the human mind in front of us, and all the data students out there were focused on really simple things like image labeling. So I wanted to build something focus on all these advanced, complex use cases instead that would really help us build our next generation models. So yeah, I think my background in kind of across math, and computer science, and linguistics really informed what I always wanted to do, and so I started Surge a month later with our one mission to basically build the use cases that I thought were going to be needed to push the frontier of AI.…

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