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We've looked forward to today's episode since we launched the show! Andreas Stuhlmuller and Jungwon Byun are the co-founders of Ought, a product-driven research lab that develops mechanisms for delegating open-ended thinking to advanced machine learning systems. Their flagship product, Elicit (elicit.org) is an AI research assistant that helps researchers accelerate time-consuming workflows, starting with literature review.

Also, check out the debut of Erik's new long-form interview podcast @UpstreamwithErikTorenberg whose guests in the first two episodes were Balaji Srinivasan and Marc Andreessen. This coming season will feature interviews with Ezra Klein, David Sacks, Katherine Boyle, and more. Subscribe here: https://www.youtube.com/@UpstreamwithErikTorenberg

LINKS REFERENCED IN EPISODE:
Ought: https://ought.org/
Elicit: https://elicit.org/


TIMESTAMPS:
(0:00) Preview
(2:00) Nathan introduces the founders of Ought
(4:20) Why doesn't AI serve better reasoning?
(6:55) What limits the current paradigm
(8:40) Reflections on the last six years of Ought’s research experiments of "composable thinking"
(13:10) Error elimination mechanism is a shared challenge between human and AI systems
(16:45) Sponsor: Omneky
(18:00) Interpretability by construction product philosophy
(25:00) Nathan’s personal experience using Elicit as a research assistant
(30:00) Explicit concerns about model reasonings, and the importance of going a step further
(36:00) What customers of OpenAI Foundry should consider
(43:15) Evaluation challenges
(48:15) Embeddings challenges
(51:00) Vision for a knowledge work assembly line corporate paradigm
(56:00) Ought's short-term approach to building: Understanding human ways of teaching the model to be more helpful
(59:00) Wishful thinking versus real helpfulness
(1:03:00) What's next for Elicit: expansion and new workflows
(1:17:00) Zapier for reasoning
(1:23:00) What are the most fundamental "magic questions" for all domains?
(1:31:43) Significant impact of GPT4
(1:36:00) How people are using Elicit
(1:44:00) AI Uncertainty and reason for hope
(1:48:00) 3 lightning-round questions

TWITTER:
@CogRev_Podcast
@jungofthewon
@stuhlmueller
@labenz (Nathan)
@eriktorenberg (Erik)

Thank you Omneky for sponsoring The Cognitive Revolution. Omneky is an omnichannel creative generation platform that lets you launch hundreds of thousands of ad iterations that actually work, customized across all platforms, with a click of a button. Omneky combines generative AI and real-time advertising data. Mention "Cog Rev" for 10% off.


More show notes and reading material released in our Substack: https://cognitiverevolution.substack.com/