According to OpenAI's former Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew, reasoning and test-time compute will unlock more reliable and capable AI agents— and a clear path to scale to AGI. In this episode of “How To Build The Future,” YC President and CEO Garry Tan sits down with Bob to discuss the lessons learned from his time at OpenAI, scaling laws, his advice for startups, and what all of this means for the jobs of the future. Apply to Y Combinator: https://ycombinator.com/apply Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 - Intro 02:31 - Early OpenAI projects 04:29 - GPT-1 09:30 - Scaling laws 14:08 - AGI levels 18:01 - Startup Advice 21:37 - Palantir And The Early Days 25:07 - Future jobs
Bob McGrew helped build some of the most influential technologies of the past two decades. Bob was an early engineer at PayPal, an early executive at Palantir and was recently Chief Research Officer at OpenAI - where he led the development of ChatGPT, GPT-4 and the o1 reasoning model. During his time at Palantir he was a pioneer of the Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) model, a strategy that is at the heart of the AI boom today. On this episode of The Lightcone, he explains how FDEs became central to today's startups, why "doing things that don't scale at scale" works, and where he sees the biggest opportunities for founders working in AI. Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs Chapters: 00:29 – From PayPal to Palantir to OpenAI 02:19 – The Role of a Forward Deployed Engineer 03:19 – How Palantir Invented It 07:56 – Product Discovery in the Field vs. Sales 09:51 – Echo and Delta Teams Explained 13:34 – Training Ground for Founders 14:35 – Consulting or Real Software? 17:54 – The Birth of Palantir’s Ontology 23:04 – Why AI Companies Adopt It 36:17 – What Success Metrics Look Like 41:14 – Building with Demo-Driven Development 44:56 – Joining the US Army Reserve 47:43 – Opportunities for Founders