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Published · transcript-backedSpeaker unverified: belief
1 Feb 2026 Lex Fridman Podcast #490 – State of AI in 2026: LLMs, Coding, Scaling Laws, China, Agents, GPUs, AGI
“Now you have pre-training, mid-training, and post-training. So I think right now we are in the post-training focus stage.”
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- Recorded
- 1 Feb 2026
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- Lex Fridman Podcast
Transcript context
…Can you build up an intuition for people? Because sort of when you zoom out and look at it, there’s so much rapid advancement in the AI world, and at the same time, fundamentally the architectures have not changed. So where is all the turbulence, the turmoil of the advancement happening? Where are the gains to be had? So there are the different stages where you develop or train the network. You have pre-training. Now back in the day, it was just pre-training with GPT-2. Now you have pre-training, mid-training, and post-training. So I think right now we are in the post-training focus stage. I mean, pre-training still gives you advantages if you scale it up to better, higher quality data. But then we have capability unlocks that were not there with GPT-2, for example. ChatGPT is basically a GPT-3 model. And GPT-3 is the same as GPT-2 in terms of architecture. What was new was adding the supervised fine-tuning and the Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback. So, it’s more on the algorithmic side rather than the architecture. I would say that the systems also change a lot. I think if you listen to NVIDIA’s announcements, they talk about things like, “You now do FP8, you can now do FP4.” And what is happening is these labs are figuring out how to utilize more compute to put into one model, which lets them train faster and lets them put more data in. And then you can find better configurations faster by doing this. So you can look at the tokens per second per GPU as a metric that you look at when you’re doing large-scale training. And you can go from, like, 10K to 13K by turning on FP8 training, which means you’re using less memory per parameter in the model. And by saving less information, you do less communication and you can train faster. So all of these system things underpin way faster experimentation on data and algorithms. It’s this kind of loop that keeps going where it’s kinda hard to describe when you look at the architecture and they’re exactly the same. But the code base used to train these models is gonna be vastly different— …and you could probably… the GPUs are different, but you probably train gpt-oss-20b way faster in wall clock time than GPT-2— …was trained at the time.…
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