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Lex Fridman Podcast / episode intelligence

#490 – State of AI in 2026: LLMs, Coding, Scaling Laws, China, Agents, GPUs, AGI

1 Feb 2026 91 published claims 2 attributable people
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Speakers in the public record

Nathan LambertLex Fridman

Claim mix

belief 66commitment 7recommendation 6uncertainty 5evaluation 4preference 2prediction 1

Evidence policy

Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.

Claim ledger

The useful parts, with receipts.

91 published records

01 / recommendation

Recommends Season of the Witch.

“I think I would say, one of the people I worked with is moving to SF, and I need to get him a copy of Season of the Witch. It’s a history of SF from 1960 to 1985 that goes through the hippie revolution, the culture emerging in the city, the HIV/AIDS crisis, and other things. That is so recent, with so much turmoil and hurt, but also love in SF. No one knows about this. It’s a great book, Season of the Witch; I recommend it. A bunch of my SF friends who do get out recommended it to me. I lived there and I didn’t appreciate this context, and it’s just so recent.”
Speaker
Nathan Lambert
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

07 / belief

I think the question is if the companies can support the valuations. I’d see the AI companies being looked at in some ways like AWS, Azure, and GCP, which are all competing in the same space and all very successful businesses.

“I think the question is if the companies can support the valuations. I’d see the AI companies being looked at in some ways like AWS, Azure, and GCP, which are all competing in the same space and all very successful businesses.”
Speaker
Nathan Lambert
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

08 / belief

I think when you look at China, the biggest reason is that they want people around the world to use these models, and I think a lot of people will not.

“I think when you look at China, the biggest reason is that they want people around the world to use these models, and I think a lot of people will not.”
Speaker
Nathan Lambert
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

09 / belief

I think a lot of that’s happened at labs this year; there are new hot things, whether it’s coding environments or web navigation, and you just need to bring in new data and change your whole pre-training so that your post-training can work better.

“I think a lot of that’s happened at labs this year; there are new hot things, whether it’s coding environments or web navigation, and you just need to bring in new data and change your whole pre-training so that your post-training can work better.”
Speaker
Nathan Lambert
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

15 / belief

I think that dream is actually kind of dying. As you talked about with the specialized models where it’s like… and multimodal is often… like, video generation is a totally different thing.

“I think that dream is actually kind of dying. As you talked about with the specialized models where it’s like… and multimodal is often… like, video generation is a totally different thing.”
Speaker
Nathan Lambert
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

19 / belief

I think that that’s hard but if you want to scope the maximum possible impact with minimum compute, it’s something like that—which is just get very narrow, and it takes learning of where the models are going.

“I think that that’s hard but if you want to scope the maximum possible impact with minimum compute, it’s something like that—which is just get very narrow, and it takes learning of where the models are going.”
Speaker
Nathan Lambert
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

24 / belief

I think OpenAI’s definition is somewhat related to that—an AI that can do a certain number of economically valuable tasks—which I don’t really love as a definition, but it could be a grounding point.

“I think OpenAI’s definition is somewhat related to that—an AI that can do a certain number of economically valuable tasks—which I don’t really love as a definition, but it could be a grounding point.”
Speaker
Nathan Lambert
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

27 / belief

Maybe OpenAI will then be focused on some other sub-topic— —like… They have too many users to go away in the foreseeable future, I think.

“Maybe OpenAI will then be focused on some other sub-topic— —like… They have too many users to go away in the foreseeable future, I think.”
Speaker
Not verified from transcript
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

31 / belief

One other thing I think people are generally curious about, I’d love to get your thoughts: as LLMs are used more and more, if you look at even arXiv or GitHub, more and more of the data is generated by LLMs.

“One other thing I think people are generally curious about, I’d love to get your thoughts: as LLMs are used more and more, if you look at even arXiv or GitHub, more and more of the data is generated by LLMs.”
Speaker
Lex Fridman
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

37 / belief

As opposed to micromanaging the details of the generation and looking at the diff—which you can in Cursor if that’s the IDE you use—you are understanding the code deeply as you progress, versus just thinking in this design space and guiding it at a macro level. I think that is another way of thinking about the programming process.

“As opposed to micromanaging the details of the generation and looking at the diff—which you can in Cursor if that’s the IDE you use—you are understanding the code deeply as you progress, versus just thinking in this design space and guiding it at a macro level. I think that is another way of thinking about the programming process.”
Speaker
Lex Fridman
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

38 / belief

I think that there’s—we’ll get to continual learning later, but there’s a lot of buzz around certain areas of AI, but no one knows when the next step function will really come.

“I think that there’s—we’ll get to continual learning later, but there’s a lot of buzz around certain areas of AI, but no one knows when the next step function will really come.”
Speaker
Nathan Lambert
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

39 / belief

Someone might buy the book and then train on it, which could be argued fair or not fair, but then there are the straight-up companies who use pirated books where they’re not even compensating the author. That is, I think, where people got a bit angry about it specifically, I would say.

“Someone might buy the book and then train on it, which could be argued fair or not fair, but then there are the straight-up companies who use pirated books where they’re not even compensating the author. That is, I think, where people got a bit angry about it specifically, I would say.”
Speaker
Not verified from transcript
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

40 / belief

We saw multiple demos in 2025 of, like, Claude can use your computer, or OpenAI had operator, and they all suck. So they’re investing money in this, and I think that’ll be a good example.

“We saw multiple demos in 2025 of, like, Claude can use your computer, or OpenAI had operator, and they all suck. So they’re investing money in this, and I think that’ll be a good example.”
Speaker
Nathan Lambert
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

42 / belief

For something like math, you can ask it questions and it answers, but if you want to learn a topic from scratch—we talked about this earlier—I think the sweet spot is still math textbooks where someone laid it out linearly.

“For something like math, you can ask it questions and it answers, but if you want to learn a topic from scratch—we talked about this earlier—I think the sweet spot is still math textbooks where someone laid it out linearly.”
Speaker
Not verified from transcript
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

43 / belief

Eventually someone else will still have the idea. So I think that in that way, Jensen is helping manifest this GPU revolution much faster and much more focused than it would be without having a person like him there.

“Eventually someone else will still have the idea. So I think that in that way, Jensen is helping manifest this GPU revolution much faster and much more focused than it would be without having a person like him there.”
Speaker
Nathan Lambert
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

44 / uncertainty

By the way, I don’t know if there’s a representative case: wife waiting in the car, you have to run, unplug the GPU, you have to generate a Bash script.

“By the way, I don’t know if there’s a representative case: wife waiting in the car, you have to run, unplug the GPU, you have to generate a Bash script.”
Speaker
Lex Fridman
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

47 / uncertainty

I guess I don’t know— how bad production codebases are, but I think that within… on the order of a few years, a lot of people are going to be pushed to be more like a designer and product manager, where you have multiple of these agents that can try things for you, and they might take one to two days to implement a feature or attempt to fix a bug.

“I guess I don’t know— how bad production codebases are, but I think that within… on the order of a few years, a lot of people are going to be pushed to be more like a designer and product manager, where you have multiple of these agents that can try things for you, and they might take one to two days to implement a feature or attempt to fix a bug.”
Speaker
Nathan Lambert
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

50 / belief

I could maybe ask an LLM to give me opinions on that, but I wouldn’t even know what to ask. And I think there is still value in reading that article compared to me going to the LLM because you are the expert.

“I could maybe ask an LLM to give me opinions on that, but I wouldn’t even know what to ask. And I think there is still value in reading that article compared to me going to the LLM because you are the expert.”
Speaker
Not verified from transcript
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

51 / belief

On the Manhattan Project thing, one of my funny things looking at them is I think that a Manhattan Project-like thing for open models would actually be pretty reasonable, because it wouldn’t cost that much.

“On the Manhattan Project thing, one of my funny things looking at them is I think that a Manhattan Project-like thing for open models would actually be pretty reasonable, because it wouldn’t cost that much.”
Speaker
Nathan Lambert
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

52 / belief

Also with LLMs, what’s an interesting thing here is I think if we unlock more LLM capabilities, it also automatically unlocks all the other fields because it makes progress faster.

“Also with LLMs, what’s an interesting thing here is I think if we unlock more LLM capabilities, it also automatically unlocks all the other fields because it makes progress faster.”
Speaker
Not verified from transcript
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

53 / belief

Whenever they make a release, they’re always talking about how their GPUs are hurting. And I think in one of these gpt-oss-120b release sessions, Sam Altman said, “Oh, we’re releasing this because we can use your GPUs.

“Whenever they make a release, they’re always talking about how their GPUs are hurting. And I think in one of these gpt-oss-120b release sessions, Sam Altman said, “Oh, we’re releasing this because we can use your GPUs.”
Speaker
Nathan Lambert
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

55 / belief

Like, I think we just have to develop a good taste— —talk about research taste, like school taste about stuff that you should be struggling on— —and stuff you shouldn’t be struggling on.

“Like, I think we just have to develop a good taste— —talk about research taste, like school taste about stuff that you should be struggling on— —and stuff you shouldn’t be struggling on.”
Speaker
Lex Fridman
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

56 / commitment

I think we will still make improvement on long context, but like Nathan said, the problem is for pre-training itself, we don’t have as many long-context documents as other documents.

“I think we will still make improvement on long context, but like Nathan said, the problem is for pre-training itself, we don’t have as many long-context documents as other documents.”
Speaker
Not verified from transcript
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

57 / belief

I think that when they’re close to this automated software engineer, what it will be good at is traditional ML systems and front end—the model is excellent at those—but the distributed ML, the models are actually really quite bad at because there’s so little training data on doing large-scale distributed learning and things.

“I think that when they’re close to this automated software engineer, what it will be good at is traditional ML systems and front end—the model is excellent at those—but the distributed ML, the models are actually really quite bad at because there’s so little training data on doing large-scale distributed learning and things.”
Speaker
Nathan Lambert
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

58 / uncertainty

A lot of it is financial services, so I don’t know what this is. It’s just hard for me to think about the GDP bump, but I would say that software development becomes valuable in a different way when you no longer have to look at the code anymore.

“A lot of it is financial services, so I don’t know what this is. It’s just hard for me to think about the GDP bump, but I would say that software development becomes valuable in a different way when you no longer have to look at the code anymore.”
Speaker
Nathan Lambert
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

59 / belief

I think people are just afraid right now of ruining their reputation or losing users- …because it would make headlines if someone launched these ads.

“I think people are just afraid right now of ruining their reputation or losing users- …because it would make headlines if someone launched these ads.”
Speaker
Not verified from transcript
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

60 / belief

For me, for that same reason—but this could be just momentum— Gemini is the better interface for me. I think because I fell in love with their needle-in-the-haystack capabilities.

“For me, for that same reason—but this could be just momentum— Gemini is the better interface for me. I think because I fell in love with their needle-in-the-haystack capabilities.”
Speaker
Lex Fridman
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

61 / belief

Occasionally, in some layers you might, but it’s wasteful. But right now, I think if you use everything, you’re on the safe side; it gives you the best bang for the buck because you never miss information.

“Occasionally, in some layers you might, but it’s wasteful. But right now, I think if you use everything, you’re on the safe side; it gives you the best bang for the buck because you never miss information.”
Speaker
Not verified from transcript
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

62 / belief

Anthropic, I think, bought thousands of books and scanned them and was cleared legally for that because they bought the books, and that is going through the system.

“Anthropic, I think, bought thousands of books and scanned them and was cleared legally for that because they bought the books, and that is going through the system.”
Speaker
Nathan Lambert
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

66 / belief

I think there’s going to be a lot of unlock using things like that where you don’t necessarily improve the LLM itself, you improve how the LLM is used and what it can use.

“I think there’s going to be a lot of unlock using things like that where you don’t necessarily improve the LLM itself, you improve how the LLM is used and what it can use.”
Speaker
Not verified from transcript
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

68 / belief

I would say you mentioned the DeepSeek moment, and I do think DeepSeek is definitely winning the hearts of the people who work on open weight models because they share these as open models.

“I would say you mentioned the DeepSeek moment, and I do think DeepSeek is definitely winning the hearts of the people who work on open weight models because they share these as open models.”
Speaker
Not verified from transcript
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

69 / belief

The Hugging Face Transformers library is great, but if you want to learn about LLMs, I think that’s not the best place to start because the code is so complex.

“The Hugging Face Transformers library is great, but if you want to learn about LLMs, I think that’s not the best place to start because the code is so complex.”
Speaker
Not verified from transcript
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

70 / commitment

I think the immediate thing we will feel next as a normal person using LLMs will probably be related to something trivial, like making figures.

“I think the immediate thing we will feel next as a normal person using LLMs will probably be related to something trivial, like making figures.”
Speaker
Not verified from transcript
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

71 / belief

I think the leap from the AI singularity to scaling up mass manufacturing in the US because we have a massive AI advantage is one that is troubled by a lot of political and other challenging problems.

“I think the leap from the AI singularity to scaling up mass manufacturing in the US because we have a massive AI advantage is one that is troubled by a lot of political and other challenging problems.”
Speaker
Nathan Lambert
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

72 / belief

I think we’re not saying one actually obvious thing that we’re not realizing, that’s a gigantic thing that’s hard to measure, which is making all of human knowledge accessible… …To the entire world.

“I think we’re not saying one actually obvious thing that we’re not realizing, that’s a gigantic thing that’s hard to measure, which is making all of human knowledge accessible… …To the entire world.”
Speaker
Lex Fridman
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

73 / uncertainty

Distillation can work to some extent, but the biggest problem—and I’m researching this contamination—is we don’t know what’s in the data.

“Distillation can work to some extent, but the biggest problem—and I’m researching this contamination—is we don’t know what’s in the data.”
Speaker
Not verified from transcript
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

74 / belief

I think of the continual learning thing as a research problem where there could be a breakthrough that makes transformers work way better at this and it’s cheap.

“I think of the continual learning thing as a research problem where there could be a breakthrough that makes transformers work way better at this and it’s cheap.”
Speaker
Nathan Lambert
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

76 / commitment

I do think right now it’s mostly on the proprietary LLM side, but we will see more of that in open-source tooling. It is a huge unlock because then you can really outsource certain tasks from just memorization to actual computation—you know, instead of having the LLM memorize what is 23 plus 5, just use a calculator.

“I do think right now it’s mostly on the proprietary LLM side, but we will see more of that in open-source tooling. It is a huge unlock because then you can really outsource certain tasks from just memorization to actual computation—you know, instead of having the LLM memorize what is 23 plus 5, just use a calculator.”
Speaker
Not verified from transcript
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

77 / belief

Linking to what’s happening in big tech, this AI 2027 report leans into the singularity idea where I think research is messy and social and largely in the data in ways that AI models can’t process.

“Linking to what’s happening in big tech, this AI 2027 report leans into the singularity idea where I think research is messy and social and largely in the data in ways that AI models can’t process.”
Speaker
Nathan Lambert
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

80 / belief

I think the interesting, beautiful thing here is that you ask the LLM a math question, you know the correct answer, and you let the LLM figure it out, but how it does it is… I mean, you don’t really constrain it much.

“I think the interesting, beautiful thing here is that you ask the LLM a math question, you know the correct answer, and you let the LLM figure it out, but how it does it is… I mean, you don’t really constrain it much.”
Speaker
Not verified from transcript
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

82 / evaluation

There are now tons of tech companies in China that are releasing very strong frontier open weight models, to the point where I would say that DeepSeek is kind of losing its crown as the preeminent open model maker in China, and the likes of Z.

“There are now tons of tech companies in China that are releasing very strong frontier open weight models, to the point where I would say that DeepSeek is kind of losing its crown as the preeminent open model maker in China, and the likes of Z.”
Speaker
Nathan Lambert
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

83 / prediction

I think that open models will struggle to replicate some of the things that I like to do with closed models, where you can reference a mix of public and private information.

“I think that open models will struggle to replicate some of the things that I like to do with closed models, where you can reference a mix of public and private information.”
Speaker
Nathan Lambert
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

84 / evaluation

I think the tool use point is the one that’s stopping them from being most general purpose because, with something like Claude Code or ChatGPT with search, the autoregressive chain is interrupted with an external tool, and I don’t know how to do that with the diffusion setup.

“I think the tool use point is the one that’s stopping them from being most general purpose because, with something like Claude Code or ChatGPT with search, the autoregressive chain is interrupted with an external tool, and I don’t know how to do that with the diffusion setup.”
Speaker
Nathan Lambert
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

85 / preference

This is why I like the ChatGPT app, because it gives the AI a home in your computer where you can focus on it, rather than just being another tab in my mess of internet options.

“This is why I like the ChatGPT app, because it gives the AI a home in your computer where you can focus on it, rather than just being another tab in my mess of internet options.”
Speaker
Nathan Lambert
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

87 / evaluation

While I’m talking, I’ll say that the Chinese open language models tend to be much bigger and that gives them this higher peak performance as MoEs, whereas a lot of these things that we like a lot, whether it was Gemma or Nemotron, have tended to be smaller models from the US, which is starting to change.

“While I’m talking, I’ll say that the Chinese open language models tend to be much bigger and that gives them this higher peak performance as MoEs, whereas a lot of these things that we like a lot, whether it was Gemma or Nemotron, have tended to be smaller models from the US, which is starting to change.”
Speaker
Nathan Lambert
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

88 / commitment

The idea is, if we are going to get to something that is a true, general adaptable intelligence that can go into any remote work scenario, it needs to be able to learn quickly from feedback and on-the-job learning.

“The idea is, if we are going to get to something that is a true, general adaptable intelligence that can go into any remote work scenario, it needs to be able to learn quickly from feedback and on-the-job learning.”
Speaker
Nathan Lambert
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast
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