"the Scroll prize, which is where we'll start  this conversation. Do you want to tell the   audience about what the Scroll prize is? We're calling it the Vesuvius challenge.   It is just this crazy ..."

"it was a very thick layer. Those towns were buried  and forgotten for hundreds of years. No one even   knew exactly where they were, until the 1700s. In  1750 a farm worker who was digging a well in t..."

"than 1% of all the writing from that period. It was an enormous discovery to find these   hundreds of papyrus scrolls underground. Even  if they were not in good condition but still   present. On a fe..."

"to physically unroll these things because so  many were destroyed. In fact, some attempts   to physically unroll the scrolls continued  even into the 200s and they were destroyed.  The current situati..."

"lost information from the past And I waited for  the news that they had been decoded successfully.   That was 2020 and then COVID hit, everybody  got a little bit slowed down by that.   Last year, I f..."

"that I've heard. So that would be significant.  We don't know what's in there, we've got a few   Philodemus texts, those are of some interest. But  there could be lost epic poems, or God knows what.  ..."

"he finally got on the phone with me and we got  to zoom. And he's like, why are you interested   in this? I love Brent, he's fantastic and I think  we're friends now. We found that we think alike   ab..."

"also know when they were discovering these papyrus  scrolls that they found basically one little   room where most of the scrolls were. And these  were mostly these Philodemus texts, at least,   that'..."

"I got it because I wanted to understand what  these artifacts that we're working with. So we   made an attempt to simulate carbonizing a  few of these. We basically took a Dutch oven,   because when y..."

"You had the best, crazy idea for what could be in  there, which was text which was GPT watermarks.   That would be a creepy feeling. I still can't get over just   how much of a plot of a sci fi nove..."

"was able to do two things. First, the ink gave a  great X-ray signature. It looked very different   from the papyrus, it was high contrast. And  then second, he was able to segment the wines   of the ..."

"how? People may not even use machine learning.  We think that's the most likely approach for   recognizing the ink but they may find some  other approach that we haven't thought of.   One question pe..."

"movies and games like Uncharted or Indiana  Jones is bigger than the actual budget to   do real world archaeology. But I was talking  to some of the people before this interview,   and that's one thin..."

"fail so you keep at it. I think that's it. The efficiency point, do you think that's   particularly true just of things like  California YIMBY or this, where there   isn't a direct monetary incenti..."

"We don't have non-competes. And so they'd have to  change the culture, get everybody their own house,   and move to Connecticut and then maybe  it'll work. I think ML engineer salaries   and compensat..."

"scrapable have been shutting those down, so get  your scraping in now if you need to do it. But   that's just on the margin. I still think there's  quite a lot that's out there to work with. Look,   t..."

"that. I thought it was great. But to be honest, I  didn't actually expect or plan to spend more than   a year or so there. But when I got in there,  I got exposed to what Satya was doing and just   th..."

"for all the other products that we do. And  to my surprise, Satya replied in like six or   seven minutes and said, I think this is very  good thinking. Let's meet next week or so and   talk about it. ..."

"That's actually one of the things I want to  ask you about. Often when something succeeds,   we kind of think it was inevitable that it would  succeed but at the time, I remember that there was   a hu..."

"what happens before I migrate off. And then my  first day as CEO after we got the deal closed,   at 9 AM the first day, I was in this room and  we got on zoom and all the heads of engineering   and pr..."

"Yeah, it is true. Most acquisitions are  destructive of value. What is the value   of a company? In an innovative industry, the  value of the company boils down to its cultural   ability to produce ne..."

"because until ChatGPT it was the most widely  used application of the modern AI models.   What are the parts of the story  you're willing to share in public?   Yeah, I've talked about this a little ..."

"And I think Kevin Scott deserves a lot of credit  for really advocating for that aggressively.   I think Sam Altman did a good  job of building that partnership   because he knew that he needed access..."

"wrong. It's not a great product experience. And so then we started thinking about code   synthesis. Our first attempts at this were  actually large chunks of code synthesis,   like synthesizing whole ..."

"lot of energy and you're not getting a lot out,  sort of frustrating. Once we had that sort of   single line completion working, I think Alex had  the idea of saying we can use the cursor position   i..."

"Okay. Sounds very similar to the Gmail story,   right? It's an incredibly valuable inside and  then maybe it was obvious that it needs to go   outside. We'll go back to the AI stuff in  a second. But ..."

"end up at a great start up. I mean, I know a lot  of people who deliberately pursued the strategy of   building reputation in open source and then got  the sail up and the wind catches you and you've ..."

"in public. And I think that's not going away. Other than that, I mean, we talked about this a   little bit, but what has been the  impact of developers being more   empowered in organizations, even..."

"extremely efficiently. I think the more  digitized the world has become, the more valuable   software becomes, and the more valuable  the developers who can create it become.   Would 25-year-old Nat..."

"making that pledge. That was quite crazy. Oh, that's really interesting. It wasn't that   there was some business or strategic reason. More  so it was just like an idea whose time had come.   Wel..."

"I think Richard is strongly in the former camp. What is the most underrated license by the way?   I don't know. Maybe the MIT license is still  underrated because it's just so simple and bare.  ..."

"of – Gosh, it's such a pain to coordinate with  tons of people who all sort of feel like they   have a right to try to push the project in  one way or another. Whereas in a hierarchical   corporation ..."

"I think the thing you need to do though to build a  good end user application is not only have a good   aesthetic and idea, but somehow establish a tight  feedback loop with a set of users. Where you ..."

"acquisitions in the past until I got into a big  company and started trying to do acquisitions.   I saw that there are strong elements of  the internal dynamics to make it hard.   It's easier to spend..."

"was really an honor for me but it was time for  me to go do something. I was always a startup   guy. I always liked small teams, and I wanted to  go back to a smaller, more nimble environment.   Oka..."

"Many of those projects fail. For example, there  were a lot of attempts to bring the internet to   Africa by large and wealthy tech companies and  American universities. I won't say they all had no   ..."

"Here's another one and this is under  the EMH section. In many cases,   it's more accurate to model the world as 500  people than 8 billion. Now here's my question,   what are the 8 billion minus 500 ..."

"don't know if Albert Einstein, as a patent clerk,  wouldn't he have just been on Twitter just getting   the same ideas as everybody else? What do you  have as decorrelated ideas? I think the internet ..."

"Okay, here's another one. Large scale  engineering projects are more soluble in   IQ than they appear. And here's my question,  does that make you think that the impact of   AI tools like co-pilot wil..."

"I think we're going to see enormous amounts  of change in software development.   Another one – The cultural prohibition  on micromanagement is harmful,   great individuals should be fully empowered..."

"empower individuals who have great judgment. Yeah. There's a quote about Napoleon that if he   could have been in every single theater of every  single battle he was part of, that he would have   n..."

"I would rather have those more high variance  outcomes and I think it's a worthy trade.   Okay, let's talk about AI. What percentage  of the economy is basically text to text?   Yeah, it's a good q..."

"a lot more demand for it. I guess we'll see. At what point does that happen? GPT-3 has been   a sort of rounding error in terms of  overall economic impact. Does that   happen with GPT-4, GPT-5, wh..."

"case for something I'm very bullish about. No, that's why I asked you to make the bear   case because I know about you. I want to ask  you about these foundation models. What is the   stable equili..."

"How different will these models be? Will it  just be sort of everybody chasing the same   exact marginal improvement leading to the same  marginal capabilities or will they have entirely   different r..."

"When I was scheduling my interview with Ilya,  it was originally supposed to be around the   time that chatGPT came out and so their comm’s  person tells me – Listen, just so you know,   this intervie..."

"All right. So let me ask you some questions  that we got from Twitter. This is former guest   and I guess mutual friend Austin Vernon.  Nat is one of those people that seems   unreasonably effective. ..."

"I think that's truly how I feel. I'm an insecure  overachiever, I don't really feel good about   myself unless I'm doing good work, but I also have  tried to cultivate a forward-looking view where I  ..."

"So yeah, I wanted to, on the margin, invest in  people doing alignment. It seems like that's   important. I thought Sydney was a kind of an  example of this. You had Microsoft essentially   released a..."

"Yep. Final question from Twitter. Will asks “What  historical personality seems like the most kindred   spirit to you”. Bookshelves are all around us  in this room, some of them are biographies.   Is ..."