Evidence receipt / belief
Published · transcript-backedEdwin Chen: belief
7 Dec 2025 Lenny's Podcast The 100-person AI lab that became Anthropic and Google's secret weapon | Edwin Chen (Surge AI)
“I think people don't realize that there's a big difference between moving from 80% performance to 90% performance to 99% performance to 99.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Edwin Chen
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- belief
- Recorded
- 7 Dec 2025
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
Transcript context
…Okay, cool. So more reason to stress about AGI. "We don't need these folks anymore." I can't not ask just... People that work closely with this stuff, I'm always just curious. What's your AGI timelines? How far do you think we are from this? Do you think we're in like a couple years or is it like decades? So I'm certainly on the longer time horizon front. I think people don't realize that there's a big difference between moving from 80% performance to 90% performance to 99% performance to 99. 9% performance, and so on, and so on. And so in my head, I probably bet that within the next one or two years, yeah, the models are going to automate 80% of the average LL6 software engineer's job. It's going to take another few years to move to 90%, and another fewer to 99%, and so on, and so on. So I think we're closer to a decade or decades away than [inaudible 00:23:03]. You have this hot take that a lot of these labs are kind of pushing AGI in the wrong direction and this is based on your work at Twitter, and Google, and Facebook. Can you just talk about that?…
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