Nathan Lambert on AI
8 quotes from Nathan Lambert on the wall, 2022 to 2026, newest first. Each one is verbatim and links to where it was said. Sources include interconnects.ai, Interconnects (Nathan Lambert). Topics: hype, culture, money. Open on the wall.
- 2026
Good ideas can be much more valuable than good execution in software
From Nathan Lambert's essay on Interconnects discussing how coding agents are shifting the balance between research ideas and engineering execution in AI.
I expect rapid progress but not towards general superintelligence
Lots of what they buy is frankly crap
From an Interconnects essay by Nathan Lambert on AI research acceleration, describing the low quality of RL training data sold by data companies.
I expect rapid progress but not towards general superintelligence
- 2025
For the time being, the default is Qwen
Nathan Lambert, in his Interconnects newsletter, on Qwen 3 overtaking Llama as the leading open-weight model suite, April 2025.
Now we really know what Ilya saw
Nathan Lambert, in Interconnects analysis of GPT-4.5's release, February 2025, referring to reports that Ilya Sutskever had foreseen limits to pretraining scaling.
- 2024
Scaling as we know it is ending
From Nathan Lambert's 2024 year-in-review on Interconnects, describing the impact of OpenAI's o1 model on the AI training paradigm.
Every time someone is talking about AGI they're talking about vibes rather than reality
From an essay on Interconnects (April 2024) by Nathan Lambert questioning the meaning of AGI.
- 2022
They hold the keys to the kingdom
Nathan Lambert on Interconnects, December 2022, describing Surge AI's dominance in providing human-feedback data for RLHF.
Closed-API vs Open-source continues: RLHF, ChatGPT, data moats
There'll be an open-source ChatGPT within 6 months, surely
Nathan Lambert predicting the pace of open-source AI catching up to ChatGPT, in a December 2022 blog post.
Closed-API vs Open-source continues: RLHF, ChatGPT, data moats