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Published · transcript-backed

Shawn Wang: uncertainty

12 Feb 2026 Latent Space Owning the AI Pareto Frontier — Jeff Dean

“Like one of my, uh, so I interviewed ETA who was on, who was on that team. Uh, and he was like, yeah, I, I don’t know how they work.”

— Shawn Wang

Source trail

Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Shawn Wang
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
uncertainty
Recorded
12 Feb 2026
Publisher
Latent Space

Transcript context

…I mean, I do think like that IMO with, you know, translating to lean and using lean and then the next year and also a specialized geometry model. And then this year switching to a single unified model. That is roughly the production model with a little bit more inference budget, uh, is actually, you know, quite good because it shows you that the capabilities of that general model have improved dramatically and, and now you don’t need the specialized model. This is actually sort of very similar to the 2013 to 16 era of machine learning, right? Like it used to be, people would train separate models for lots of different, each different problem, right? I have, I want to recognize street signs and something. So I train a street sign. Recognition recognition model, or I want to, you know, decode speech recognition. I have a speech model, right? I think now the era of unified models that do everything is really upon us. And the question is how well do those models generalize to new things they’ve never been asked to do and they’re getting better and better. And you don’t need domain experts. Like one of my, uh, so I interviewed ETA who was on, who was on that team. Uh, and he was like, yeah, I, I don’t know how they work. I don’t know where the IMO competition was held. I don’t know the rules of it. I just trained the models, the training models. Yeah. Yeah. And it’s kind of interesting that like people with these, this like universal skill set of just like machine learning, you just give them data and give them enough compute and they can kind of tackle any task, which is the bitter lesson, I guess. I don’t know. Yeah. I mean, I think, uh, general models, uh, will win out over specialized ones in most cases.…

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