Debating RSI, the US-China Gap, and Jaggedness with JS Denain of Epoch AI

This episode is with Jean-Stanislas “JS” Denain of Epoch AI, who leads their Insights Team and is one of the people I find myself debating the state and trajectory of AI with more and more. We’ve had follow-on discussions of many of my favorite recent posts online and/or in private, so I wanted to dig into the nuance in a public episode.

A big takeaway of this podcast is how JS and I both have so much uncertainty with exactly where we are heading, and this was our best effort at stating our observations today.

Chapters / topics include:

* 00:00 Predictions for RSI

* 18:15 The role of robotics in an AI acceleration

* 24:20 How far behind are Chinese models?

* 27:39 Does distillation explain the gap?

* 40:58 What Chinese job postings reveal about their labs

* 48:13 Are open or closed models safer?

* 58:10 How Epoch AI ticks

* 1:00:55 What a frontier post-training recipe looks like

Enjoy!