Evidence receipt / belief
Published · transcript-backedNathan Lambert: belief
1 Feb 2026 Lex Fridman Podcast #490 – State of AI in 2026: LLMs, Coding, Scaling Laws, China, Agents, GPUs, AGI
“If scaling laws are fundamental in deep learning, I think the Bitter Lesson will always apply, which is compute will become more abundant.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Nathan Lambert
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- belief
- Recorded
- 1 Feb 2026
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
Transcript context
…Yeah. I wonder if the Bitter Lesson holds true for the next 100 years, and what that looks like. If scaling laws are fundamental in deep learning, I think the Bitter Lesson will always apply, which is compute will become more abundant. But even within abundant compute, the ones that have a steeper scaling law slope or a better offset—like, this is a 2D plot of performance and compute—even if there’s more compute available, the ones that get 100x out of it will win. It might be something like literally computer clusters orbiting Earth with solar panels.…
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