No Priors Ep. 138 | The Best of 2025 (So Far) with Sarah Guo and Elad Gil

(instrumental music plays) 2025 has been another remarkable year in AI. This week on No Priors, we're sharing our favorite moments from the podcast from the year so far. We've talked to visionary leaders at Harvey, OpenAI, Glean, Abridge, and more. We also talked to legends of science like Dr. Fei-Fei Li and Noubar Afeyan. But first, let's start with the moment that captures the magic of leaning into new capabilities at the right time. Harvey CEO, Winston Weinberg, discovered an extraordinary opportunity hidden in plain sight.

Gabe and I actually had met a, a couple of years before, and I definitely didn't know anything about the startup world and didn't have a plan of, of doing a startup. And what had happened was, he showed me GPT-3, which at the time was, you know, public, and, and I was, first of all, just incredibly surprised that no one was talking about GPT-3 and no one was using it in any way, shape, or form. Um, and he showed me that, and I showed him kind of my legal workflows, and we started the, the kind of aha moment was we went on, uh, r/legaladvice, which is basically, you know, a subreddit where people ask a bunch of legal questions and almost every single answer is, "So who do I sue?" Um, almost every single time. And we took about 100 landlord-tenant questions, and we came up with kind of some chain of thought prompts, and this is before, you know, anyone was talking about chain of thought or anything like that, and we applied it to those landlord-tenant questions and we gave it to three landlord-tenant attorneys. And we just said nothing about AI. We just said, "Here's a question that a potential client asked, and here is an answer. Uh, would you send this answer without any edits to that client? Would you be fine with that? You know, is that ethical? Is it a, a good enough, um, answer to s- to send?" And 86 out of 100 was yes. Um, and actually we cold emailed the general counsel of OpenAI and we sent him these results, and his response basically was, "Oh, I had no idea the models were this good at legal." (laughs)

Nice.

Um, and we, we met with the, the C-suite of OpenAI a couple weeks after.

Now, from legal reasoning to spatial intelligence. The legendary Dr. Fei-Fei Li opened our eyes to an entirely different dimension of AI capability.

I think from a neural and cognitive science point of view that spatial intelligence is a really hard problem that evolution has to solve for animals, and what's really interesting is, I think animals have solved it to an extent, but not fully solved it. It's one of the hardest problem because, um, what is the problem animal has to so- solve? Animals have to evolve the capability of collecting lights in something which we call eyes mostly, and then with that collection of eyes, it has to reconstruct a 3D world in their mind somehow so that they can navigate and they can do things, and of course, they can interact. For humans, we're the most capable animal in terms of m- manipulation. We can do a lot of things. And all this spatial intelligence, to me that's, um, that's just rooted in, in our intelligence. What is interesting is, it's not a fully solved problem, even animals. We, uh... For example, uh, for humans, right? Um, if I ask you to close your eyes right now and draw out or, or, or build a 3D model of the environment around you-