AI Is Crossing the Frontier of Human Knowledge | Kevin Weil
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You have no excuse if you've got an interesting idea. You can now create anything that you can think of. The models can now solve problems that humans have never solved before. Going beyond the frontier of human knowledge. That's how AI, I think, and AGI will really change our lives. Why not try and accelerate science, bring about the science of 2050 but in 2030
instead? Most people think of AI as a productivity tool. Kevin Weil thinks the biggest impact may be somewhere else entirely. Formerly CPO and Vice President of Science at OpenAI, Wheel is focused on a future where AI doesn't just help people write documents or generate code, but contributes directly to scientific discovery itself. The idea is ambitious: Use AI to accelerate breakthroughs in mathematics, medicine, materials science, and other fields that shape the future of human progress. In this conversation, Kevin discusses frontier science, robotic labs, AI reasoning, startup opportunities
All right. This is an incredible time to be alive, I think. Now you helped build and scale some of the most important technology companies of the last decade, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and now you're doing that at OpenAI. I did ask ChatGPT what it thinks about you. And so as you would expect, it was very complimentary, but you're also like a very accomplished guy. So Kevin is thoughtful, low ego, and unusually grounded for someone who's been at the center of so many high stakes products. So how did you, like, as you looked at all those four opportunities, plus many others that were ama
Yeah, number one advice, marry up. It was my my wife originally. Actually, I was a I was in grad school doing a physics degree, and I met my now wife who was a Mayfield fellow at Stanford and actually worked at Andreessen for a little while. And she was the one that kinda opened my eyes to everything, startups in the Valley and all that. I I grew up in Seattle. My dad was a an engineer at Microsoft for a long time, so I grew up programming, but still was just like, you know, math and physics, math and physics as I went through grad school. And it was my wife, Elizabeth. She introduced me to Tw
And then the original mandate as CPO with Sam was to what? And what are you sort of most happy with what you accomplished during that time?
Yeah. Originally, I was a CPO, so leading our consumer products, b two b products, developer products, etcetera. And, I mean, man, I think it's we grew like a weed. I've never seen anything grow that quickly in my entire life and I think brought, you know, kinda brought AI to to a whole bunch of the world. So very proud of that work. A few months ago, it was getting clear that our models could not just be great inside ChatGPT or inside Codex, which I think is an incredible product, but we're at the level that they could start to answer frontier scientific problems. Like, the models can now sol
When did you have your Claude weekend moment or your Codex weekend moment where you're like, wait a second, the world has fundamentally shifted and everything that I've done before is going to be very different going forward?
Yeah, so I have a very different take on this. I I think it's awesome and exciting. Like, when you when you take something that has historically been the craft of a relatively small number of people, there aren't that many people in the world that know how to program. I don't know. Like, 30,000,000 people maybe, and you expand it by a couple orders of magnitude, you get an explosion of creativity because lots of people have ideas, and sometimes they weren't they didn'
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