Evidence receipt / belief
Published · transcript-backedJeff Dean: belief
12 Feb 2026 Latent Space Owning the AI Pareto Frontier — Jeff Dean
“I mean, I think, uh, general models, uh, will win out over specialized ones in most cases.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Jeff Dean
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- belief
- Recorded
- 12 Feb 2026
- Publisher
- Latent Space
Transcript context
…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. Uh, so I want to push there a bit. I think there’s one hole here, which is like, uh. There’s this concept of like, uh, maybe capacity of a model, like abstractly a model can only contain the number of bits that it has. And, uh, and so it, you know, God knows like Gemini pro is like one to 10 trillion parameters. We don’t know, but, uh, the Gemma models, for example, right? Like a lot of people want like the open source local models that are like that, that, that, and, and, uh, they have some knowledge, which is not necessary, right? Like they can’t know everything like, like you have the. The luxury of you have the big model and big model should be able to capable of everything. But like when, when you’re distilling and you’re going down to the small models, you know, you’re actually memorizing things that are not useful. Yeah. And so like, how do we, I guess, do we want to extract that? Can we, can we divorce knowledge from reasoning, you know?…
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