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Unsupervised Learning with Jacob Effron

Unsupervised Learning with Jacob Effron

Ep 89: AI Research Legend’s Honest Assessment of Where We Are

Jun 3, 2026 · 1h 14m

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About this episode

This episode with Lukasz Kaiser, co-author of the seminal "Attention Is All You Need" transformer paper and former researcher at both Google Brain and OpenAI, is a wide-ranging conversation about the fundamental limits of current AI architectures and whether transformers will continue to dominate or eventually give way to something new. Lukasz brings a rare dual perspective: deep belief in how far the current paradigm has taken us (he's an enthusiastic daily Codex user who's seen 10x productivity gains in his own research), while maintaining genuine intellectual humility about whether transformers can truly generalize the way humans do. The episode weaves together questions about data…