Can computers think like humans? Can they learn like us? $1 trillion is spent yearly on tasks a general artificial intelligence can do. D Scott Phoenix of AI startup Vicarious is building exactly that.

SCOTT'S HISTORY
00:00 Intro
00:59 How Garry and Scott met
02:02 How Scott came up with the idea to work on AGI

ON ARTIFICIAL GENERAL INTELLIGENCE
02:41 The time to build AGI is now
03:10 Why work on AGI?
04:26 What are the building blocks to building a general AI?
04:49 What is a human-like learning system?
06:15 Vicarious vs Deep Learning
08:08 Traditional AI methods resemble insectoid or reptilian brain approaches
09:43 New methods and models are more important than more money on training existing models
11:52 Limits of narrow AI
12:48 History and origins of the AI debate in philosophy and neuroscience
14:45 Brute force methods require 14,000 years of training to do what children only need 2 years to learn
15:28 Lessons from biology
16:24 How do systems layer to generate more complex behavior?
17:30 Is an ambitious project like AGI composable and iterable like SaaS software?

ON VICARIOUS
20:01 Long term ambition is great, but what do you do along the way?
20:38 Vicarious's first applied use case in robotics
22:16 Vicarious vs other robotics approaches
23:47 Building learning systems, not one-off point solutions

FOR FUTURE FOUNDERS
24:51 Advice for builders just starting out
25:17 How to tackle large problems and ambitious projects
26:57 Technology is the ultimate lever for humans to create a better world
29:14 How to be prepared for the long hard road

Full transcript at https://blog.garrytan.com/building-general-ai-with-d-scott-phoenix-founder-of-vicarious

Learn more about Vicarious: https://vicarious.com

I’m Garry Tan, venture capitalist and cofounder at Initialized Capital. We were earliest investors in billion dollar startups like Coinbase and Instacart, and we’re spending time with some of our best founders to learn the secrets of their success and see the future they’re building. I’m doing my own run-and-gun one man YouTube channel with no staff or crew — we're going for raw and unfiltered, not perfect.

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