The Edge of Infinity Infinity AI | Hosted by Lina Avancini Colucci

In this episode we talk with George Morgan who is the founder and CEO of Symbolica AI. Symbolica is a moonshot AI company. George believes the way that AI models are trained today is fundamentally broken and will not lead us to AGI. Symbolica is taking a completely different approach that will make models orders of magnitude faster, cheaper, and with additional reasoning capabilities. 

George is also a fascinating human being and this episode is packed with stories about Elon Musk, Andrej Kaparthy, the Sony QRIO robot, and much more. Of course, we also chat about our predictions on AGI and the future of AI. 

Hope you enjoy my conversation with George! 



Time Stamps

02:30 The 20-year robot saga that took George to Japan 

10:55 What’s wrong with AI models today? 

16:40 What does it mean to represent things symbolically instead of statistically? 

20:20 Symbolica does not have labels, only data

25:10 The manifold hypothesis 

29:44 What is online learning? 

34:58 Symbolica’s moonshot goals 

38:04 What will be Symbolica’s ChatGPT moment? 

39:51 George’s path to Tesla (including dropping out of college and writing an email to Elon Musk!)

44:35 Why it’s stressful to work for Elon Musk 

47:21 Why George disagrees with Andrej Kaparthy 

51:35 The difference between being a founder and an employee (this is the #1 lesson George learned from Elon) 

55:50 George’s definition of AGI 

57:35 Common issues with LLMs: they mimic human behavior, but don’t let that fool you 

01:01:28 Lina’s different take on LLMs’ abilities 

1:04:02 George’s counter-argument 

1:09:09 Our discussion about a quote from “The Beginning of Infinity” (see below)



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“Even if chatbots did at some point start becoming much better at imitating humans (or at fooling humans), that would still not be a path to AI. Becoming better at pretending to think is not the same as coming closer to being able to think. [...] A non-AI program cannot fake AI. ”

— David Deutsch, “The Beginning of Infinity”



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Links to Resources mentioned in this episode:


Sony QRIO Robot: https://spectrum.ieee.org/qrio-the-robot-that-could 


Tesla Self-Driving Team: https://www.tesla.com/AI 


Elon Musk: https://twitter.com/elonmusk 


Andrej Kaparthy: https://twitter.com/karpathy 


Paper about “The Reversal Curse in LLMs - LLMs trained on "A is B" fail to learn "B is A”: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.12288 


Paper where GPT4 explains neurons in GPT2: https://openai.com/research/language-models-can-explain-neurons-in-language-models 


Symbolica AI: https://www.symbolica.ai/ 





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George’s accounts 


Twitter: https://twitter.com/vr4300 


LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgemorgan2/ 


Symbolica AI: https://twitter.com/symbolica_ai    



Lina’s Accounts


Twitter: https://twitter.com/lina_colucci


LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lina-colucci/





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The Edge of Infinity: Imagining the Future of AI

Will AI change the world? Everyone agrees that AI will change a lot about society, but no one knows exactly how. My name is Lina Colucci. I founded Infinity AI and got my PhD from MIT and Harvard. I talk to other AI founders, engineers, and researchers who are building the future of artificial intelligence. Together, we predict the ways AI will shape our world both in the near-term and as we project out to infinity.

Join us and let’s imagine the future of AI together.

In this episode, we talk with Evan Morikawa who leads Applied Engineering at OpenAI. Evan's team is responsible for all the backend, frontend, and inference infrastructure for all of OpenAI's products from ChatGPT to the APIs to DALLE.


OpenAI is one of the most important companies in the world and they are on track to be one of the - if not the first - inventor of AGI. OpenAI recently divided the Applied Engineering group into multiple different teams but, at the time of launch of ChatGPT and DALLE, Evan managed all (!) the applied engineers at the company.


Hope you enjoy my conversation with Evan - one of the people who brought ChatGPT into the world.


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Full show notes can be found here: https://blog.infinity.ai/ep-2-openai-has-always-been-a-bit-different-evan-morikawa-f43ddfe02b4c


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Time Stamps
02:21 Remembering ChatGPT launch day
08:31 What Evan's team (Applied Engineering) does at OpenAI
12:44 The craziest time at OpenAI
14:24 Was he surprised by the reception of GPT4? made less of a splash than ChatGPT?
16:11 What's the balance between shipping things versus doing R&D?
18:38 What Evan has learned from Sam Altman
23:29 The difference between being an employee versus a founder
26:53 The future of SW engineering given AI and tools like CoPilot
31:42 Is GPT4 AGI? Evan's definition of AGI is interesting.
33:59 How will we know we've gotten there?
35:15 Lina's definition of AGI
39:25 Are we missing any fundamental pieces that are needed to get to AGI?
41:33 What is Olin College and why you should go there
47:54 Advice for early career folks who want to get a job at OpenAI
53:04 Evan's advice for balancing career and kids
1:00:00 Favorite paper from the past 6 months
1:00:03 Our discussion about a quote from "The Beginning of Infinity" (see below)

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"We have a duty to be optimistic. […] An optimistic civilization is open and not afraid to innovate, and is based on traditions of criticism."
- David Deutsch, "The Beginning of Infinity"

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Evan's Accounts
Twitter: https://twitter.com/E0M
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evanmorikawa/

Lina's Accounts
Twitter: https://twitter.com/lina_colucci
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lina-colucci/

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THE EDGE OF INFINITY: Imagining the Future of AI
Will AI change the world? Everyone agrees that AI will change a lot about society, but no one knows exactly how. My name is Lina Colucci. I founded Infinity AI and got my PhD from MIT and Harvard. I talk to other AI founders, engineers, and researchers who are building the future of artificial intelligence. Together, we predict the ways AI will shape our world both in the near-term and as we project out to infinity.


Join us and let's imagine the future of AI together.

Akshay Chaudhari is a Professor at Stanford University where he leads the Medical Intelligence for Medical Imaging group. Akshay is a leader in applying deep learning to medical imaging and works across modalities from MRI to X-rays to CT as well as other sensors. We have a far ranging conversation from leveraging GenAI to train medical classifiers to where the future of computer vision is going. Hope you enjoy!


Full Show Notes (transcript + links to all resources): https://blog.infinity.ai


Time stamps


02:30 Stable Diffusion to generate synthetic images of chest x-rays (and then training on those images!)


10:21 Using deep learning to speed up MRI scans


15:06 Why MRI is the most beautiful modality of all time (Note: Both Akshay and Lina may be a little biased…)


23:38 Ideas to make use of the massive datasets that sit in hospital data warehouses today (e.g. abdominal CTs from the ER)


25:20 Will radiologists exist in the future?


30:28 What Akshay is jealous about from the natural image CV community


36:67 Where the future of computer vision is going


49:19 Favorite papers from the past 6 months


57:29 Advice for newcomers into the AI space


61:48 Tips for staying up to date with the firehose of AI advancements


1:03:34 Reflect on quote from "The Beginning of Infinity"



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Akshay’s Accounts

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Dr_ASChaudhari

Lab Website: https://med.stanford.edu/mimi.html

Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=08Y4NhMAAAAJ&hl=en

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/akshaychaudhari/



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Lina’s Accounts

Twitter: https://twitter.com/lina_colucci

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lina-colucci/



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This Episode's Quote from "The Beginning of Infinity"

"It is inevitable that we face problems, but no particular problem is inevitable. We survive and thrive by solving each problem as it comes up. And since the human ability to transform nature is limited only by the laws of physics, none of the endless stream of problems will ever constitute an impassable barrier." 

- David Deutsch, "The Beginning of Infinity"