#490 – State of AI in 2026: LLMs, Coding, Scaling Laws, China, Agents, GPUs, AGI
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Who are the guests and what is the episode’s focus on the state of AI?
The following is a conversation all about the state of the art in artificial intelligence, including some of the exciting technical breakthroughs and developments in AI that happened over the past year, and some of the interesting things we think might happen this upcoming year. At times, it does get super technical, but we do try to make sure that it remains accessible to folks outside the field without ever dumbing it down It is a great honor and pleasure to be able to do this kind of episode with two of my favorite people in the AI community, Sebastian Rashka and Nathan Lambert. They are both widely respected machine learning researchers and engineers who also happen to be great communicators, educators, writers, and Twitterers, ex-posters.
Sebastian is the author of two books I highly recommend for beginners and experts alike. First is Build a Large Language Model from Scratch and Build a Reasoning Model from Scratch. I truly believe in the machine learning computer science world, the best way to learn and understand something is to build it yourself from scratch. Nathan is the post-training lead at the Allen Institute for AI and author of the definitive book on reinforcement learning from human feedback. Both of them have great ex-accounts, great sub-stacks. Sebastian has courses on YouTube. Nathan has a podcast. And everyone should absolutely follow all of those. And now, a quick few-second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description or at lexfriedman.com.
It is, in fact, the best way to support this podcast. We got a bunch of great sponsors. Box for intelligent content management. Quo for your phone system, like calls, texts, contacts for your business. Uplift Desk, the desk I'm sitting behind, and my favorite, Office Desk. finn for customer service ai agents shopify for selling stuff online code rabbit for ai powered code review element for electrolytes and of course our long time friend perplexity for curiosity driven knowledge exploration choose wisely my friends and now on to the full batteries i try to make them interesting but if you do skip Please do check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. To get in touch with me, for whatever reason, go to lexfreeman.com contact.
If you can't tell, I'm trying to have a bit of a pep in my step. at the moment because I had a long night, didn't get much sleep at all, so I am running on fumes, delirious, happy, unsure of what is reality and what is a dream. In fact, we could right now be living inside of a dream. I have been going through a lot. I have been working insane hours, so much going on. I am so overwhelmed. Of course, as always, truly grateful and happy to be alive, but have not been able to publish as many episodes as I would like, so there's a bunch of sponsors we have to catch up on. Your support truly means the world. Please check out all the sponsors. If you think it might be useful to you, buy their stuff. It really is the best way to support this podcast.
All right, let's go.
First up, this episode is brought to you by Box, a cloud-based platform for content management, file sharing, and all kinds of collaboration, all kinds of content for your businesses. Like with a lot of companies, the big question is, how is AI leveraged to make whatever the business does better? A lot of companies kind of use it for the hype and the label. It's kind of hilarious to watch people just say, like, powered by AI. I don't care if you're a bakery, powered by AI. I don't know. But outside of all of the hype... It is one of the most incredible things that humans have ever created. And so companies that can leverage that well are the companies that win. And of course, Box is legendary for its file and content management, especially when you're talking about scale.
so obviously it's amenable for the utilization of ai to help automate some of the document processing some of the workflow some of the organization and they do that exceptionally well they have a system called as you could imagine box ai that does just that i love it they do an excellent implementation on the interface side on the back end side everything works extremely nicely
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Who are the guests and what is the episode’s focus on the state of AI?
0:00–9:16
2
How did sponsors and early product examples (Box, Quo, Uplift, Finn, Shopify, CodeRabbit) illustrate AI use-cases?
9:16–1:27:25
3
Which companies, models, and architectural trends defined the 2025–2026 AI landscape?
1:27:25–1:29:58
4
How will proprietary data and compensation models shape future domain-specific LLMs?
1:29:58–1:34:06
5
How do RL with verifiable rewards (RLVR) and inference-time scaling improve LLM reasoning?
1:34:06–1:47:54
6
How will tools, continual learning, and long-context methods change LLMs and developer workflows?
1:47:54–3:02:07
7
How will agents and memory management change long-context LLM performance and compaction?
3:02:07–3:06:36
8
What are realistic timelines and milestones for AGI, superhuman coders, and domain-specific breakthroughs?
3:06:36–4:39:44
Speakers
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