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Published · transcript-backed

Shawn Wang: belief

11 Apr 2024 Latent Space Supervise the Process of AI Research — with Jungwon Byun and Andreas Stuhlmüller of Elicit

“In fact, I think you're doing an offsite and we're actually organizing our biggest AI UX meetup around whenever she's in town in San Francisco.”

— Shawn Wang

Source trail

Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Shawn Wang
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
belief
Recorded
11 Apr 2024
Publisher
Latent Space

Transcript context

…And on the question of will models do their own research, I think one feature that most currently don't have that will need to be better there is better world models. I think currently models are just not great at representing what's going on in a particular situation or domain in a way that allows them to come to interesting, surprising conclusions. I think they're very good at coming to conclusions that are nearby to conclusions that people have come to. They're not as good at kind of reasoning and making surprising connections maybe. And so having deeper models of what are the underlying structures of different domains, how they're related or not related, I think will be an important ingredient for models actually being able to make novel contributions. On the topic of hiring more expert humans, you've hired some very expert humans. My friend Maggie Appleton joined you guys I think maybe a year ago-ish. In fact, I think you're doing an offsite and we're actually organizing our biggest AI UX meetup around whenever she's in town in San Francisco. How big is the team? How have you sort of transitioned your company into this sort of PBC and sort of the plan for the future? Yeah, we're 12 people now. About half of us are in the Bay Area and then distributed across US and Europe, a mix of mostly kind of roles in engineering and product. Yeah, and I think that the transition to PBC was really not that eventful because I think we're already, even as a nonprofit, we are already shipping every week, so very much operating as a product. Very much at the start, yeah. Yeah. And then I would say the kind of PBC component was to very explicitly say that we have a mission that we care a lot about. There are a lot of ways to make money. We think our mission will make us a lot of money, but we are going to be opinionated about how we make money. We're going to take the version of making a lot of money that's in line with our mission. But it's like all very convergent. Like illicit is not going to make any money if it's a bad product, if it doesn't actually help you discover truth and do research more rigorously. So I think for us, the kind of mission and the success of the company are very intertwined. We're hoping to grow the team quite a lot this year. Probably some of our highest priority roles are in engineering, but also opening up roles more in design and product marketing, go to market. Yeah. Do you want to talk about the roles?…

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