{"id":346,"date":"2026-02-01T10:46:43","date_gmt":"2026-02-01T02:46:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/connectword.dpdns.org\/?p=346"},"modified":"2026-02-01T10:46:43","modified_gmt":"2026-02-01T02:46:43","slug":"490-state-of-ai-in-2026-llms-coding-scaling-laws-china-agents-gpus-agi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/connectword.dpdns.org\/?p=346","title":{"rendered":"#490 \u2013 State of AI in 2026: LLMs, Coding, Scaling Laws, China, Agents, GPUs, AGI"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nathan Lambert and Sebastian Raschka are machine learning researchers, engineers, and educators. Nathan is the post-training lead at the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) and the author of The RLHF Book. Sebastian Raschka is the author of Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch) and Build a Reasoning Model (From Scratch).
\nThank you for listening \u2764 Check out our sponsors: https:\/\/lexfridman.com\/sponsors\/ep490-sc<\/a>
\nSee below for timestamps, transcript, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex, etc.<\/p>\n

Transcript:<\/b>
\nhttps:\/\/lexfridman.com\/ai-sota-2026-transcript<\/a><\/p>\n

CONTACT LEX:<\/b>
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SPONSORS:<\/b>
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OUTLINE:<\/b>
\n(00:00) \u2013 Introduction
\n(01:39) \u2013 Sponsors, Comments, and Reflections
\n(16:29) \u2013 China vs US: Who wins the AI race?
\n(25:11) \u2013 ChatGPT vs Claude vs Gemini vs Grok: Who is winning?
\n(36:11) \u2013 Best AI for coding
\n(43:02) \u2013 Open Source vs Closed Source LLMs
\n(54:41) \u2013 Transformers: Evolution of LLMs since 2019
\n(1:02:38) \u2013 AI Scaling Laws: Are they dead or still holding?
\n(1:18:45) \u2013 How AI is trained: Pre-training, Mid-training, and Post-training
\n(1:51:51) \u2013 Post-training explained: Exciting new research directions in LLMs
\n(2:12:43) \u2013 Advice for beginners on how to get into AI development & research
\n(2:35:36) \u2013 Work culture in AI (72+ hour weeks)
\n(2:39:22) \u2013 Silicon Valley bubble
\n(2:43:19) \u2013 Text diffusion models and other new research directions
\n(2:49:01) \u2013 Tool use
\n(2:53:17) \u2013 Continual learning
\n(2:58:39) \u2013 Long context
\n(3:04:54) \u2013 Robotics
\n(3:14:04) \u2013 Timeline to AGI
\n(3:21:20) \u2013 Will AI replace programmers?
\n(3:39:51) \u2013 Is the dream of AGI dying?
\n(3:46:40) \u2013 How AI will make money?
\n(3:51:02) \u2013 Big acquisitions in 2026
\n(3:55:34) \u2013 Future of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, xAI, Meta
\n(4:08:08) \u2013 Manhattan Project for AI
\n(4:14:42) \u2013 Future of NVIDIA, GPUs, and AI compute clusters
\n(4:22:48) \u2013 Future of human civilization<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nathan Lambert and Sebastian R…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":347,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-346","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/connectword.dpdns.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/connectword.dpdns.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/connectword.dpdns.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/connectword.dpdns.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/connectword.dpdns.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=346"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/connectword.dpdns.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/connectword.dpdns.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/347"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/connectword.dpdns.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/connectword.dpdns.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/connectword.dpdns.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}