TLexDR

Often discussed alongside

AI competition 1 Chinese AI ecosystem 1 Reinforcement Learning 1 scaling laws 1

Voices on open weight models

Standout quotes from every episode that touches this concept.

"I don’t think nowadays, in 2026, that there will be any company having access to a technology that no other company has access to."
"DeepSeek is definitely winning the hearts of the people who work on open weight models because they share these as open models."
"Honestly, building an LLM from scratch is a lot of fun and a lot to learn."
"The idea of scaling laws came when people figured out that that was a very predictable relationship."
"I think we’ll slowly push it out as AI solves more compelling tasks—like the likes of Claude Opus 4.5 making Claude Code just work for things."
"The only fair way to evaluate an LLM is to have a new benchmark that is after the cutoff date when the model was deployed."
"I think the trick with the book is basically to understand how the LLM works."
"I think there will be some other big multi-billion dollar acquisitions, like Perplexity."

All episodes

State of AI in 2026: LLMs, Coding, Scaling Laws, China, Agents, GPUs, AGI | Lex Fridman Podcast #490

2026-01-31 ▶ 4h 25m