Nathan Lambert

speaker

1,814 appearances 3 recordings 2 series first heard Feb 2025 last heard 1 Feb

Nathan Lambert’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.

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Lex Fridman Podcast · #490 – State of AI in 2026: LLMs, Coding, Scaling Laws, China, Agents, GPUs, AGI · 1 Feb 2026 podcast

There's still a lot of upward mobility working in language models if you're focused.

And the outcomes is like, look at these jobs.

But from a research perspective, the transformative impact in these academic awards is like be the next Yann LeCun is from not working, not caring about language model development very much.

So I get to work with some awesome students and they're like, should I go work in an AI lab?

And I'm like, you're getting a PhD at a top school or you're going to leave to go to a lab?

I'm like, I don't know.

Like,

If you go work at a top lab, I don't blame you.

Don't go work at some random startup that might go to zero.

But if you're going to open AI, I'm like, it could be worth leaving a PhD for.

The two gradients are the more closed, the more money you tend to get, but also you get less credit.

So in terms of building a portfolio of things that you've done, it's very clear of what you have done as an academic and you have done this.

And versus if you are going to go trade this fairly reasonable progression for being a cog in the machine, which could also be very fun.

So I think it's very different career paths.

The opportunity cost for being a researcher is very high because PhD students are paid essentially nothing.

So I think it ends up rewarding people that have a fairly stable safety net and they realize that they can operate in the long term, which is they want to do very interesting work and get a very interesting job.

So it is a privileged position to be like, I'm going to see out my PhD and figure it out after because I want to do this.

And I think a lot of academics...

At the same time, the academic ecosystem is getting bombarded by funding getting cut and stuff.

So there's just like so many different trade-offs where I understand plenty of people that are like, oh, I can't deal with this funding search.

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