No Priors Ep. 68 | With Zapier Co-Founder and Head of AI Mike Knoop

(music plays) Hi, listeners, and welcome to No Priors. Today, we're talking with Mike Nute, the co-founder and head of AI at Zapier. Mike co-founded the company in 2011 and was an early adopter of the power of AI in the enterprise. Recently, he's joined forces with François Chollet to launch a competition to accelerate progress towards AGI called the ARC Prizes. Mike, welcome to No Priors, and, um, maybe you can start off just by telling us a little bit more about what you're up to on the prize side. That sounds really exciting.

Yeah, thanks for, uh, having me. I'm super excited. Uh, I've been a No Prior listener since, uh, literally episode one. So, uh, finally, excited to- to get on and, uh, e- introduce yourself. So I'm Mike. I'm one of the co-founders of Zapier. Um, I've run and advised all of our AI projects over the last, uh, two years or so. And my day job has been, um, you know, building AI at the application layer for Zapier. But my, kind of nights and weekends, um, have been more interested in this, like, AGI research and progress. In- in fact, this kind of curiosity goes all the way back to kind of my college days, pre-Zapier. Um, you know, I think actually this is one of the reasons why Zapier got- was so early into some of the AI stuff, was kind of this curiosity (laughs) in, like, AGI. Uh, the- the chain of thought paper that came out in Jan 2022 was what kind of, like, shook me loose. I- I was, uh, running half the company actually at that point, and, um, I gave up my exec team role to go, like, kind of back to being an IC, and answer for myself, like, "How close are we to AGI?" And, um, as it turns out, uh, we are not that close. Um, you know, I- my belief is that AGI's progress has really stalled out over the last four or five years. Um, and I think there's a- kind of a handful of reasons for that. I think the- the biggest one is that the kind of consensus definition of what AGI is, uh, the definition of it is wrong. I think we're measuring the wrong things, and this leads people to think that we're closer to AGI than we actually are. Uh, this causes, like, AI researchers and kind of generally the world to be overinvested in exploiting this large language model, like, paradigm and regime, ex- as opposed to exploring, like, new ideas, which are desperately needed. Um, and, like, frontier AI researchers also basically, like, completely stopped publishing. You know, the GPT-4 paper had zero technical details. Uh, the Gemini paper had zero technical details on a lot of the context stuff. Um, and I- I just wanted to help fix this, so I- I wanted to see if there was something I could do to help accelerate. And so yeah, I'm excited to share, uh, we just launched ARC Prize. It's a million dollar plus non-profit, uh, public challenge to beat François Chollet's, um, ARC AGI Eval, and open source the solution to it, and open source the progress towards it. Um, ARC AGI, to best of my knowledge, is the only true AGI eval that actually exists in the world, and measures a actually good definition, correct definition of what AGI is, which we can talk about. Um, this- there's an AI lab called Lab 42 out of Switzerland that's been running a small annual contest over the last four years, uh, to try and beat this eval, and state of the art today is 34%. Um, state of the art four years ago when it was first introduced was 20%, so we've made very, very little marginal progress towards it. And, uh, this was pre-L and pre-scale, right? So it's like it has successfully resisted the advent of scale and LMs. Um, the ARC AGI actually looks like an IQ test if you go look at some of the puzzles. Maybe we can, like, uh, overlay some of the puzzles, uh, and- and show some stuff.