A conversation with John Schulman on the first year LLMs could have been useful, building research teams, and where RL goes from here.00:00 - Speedrunning ChatGPT09:22 - Archetypes of research managers11:56 - Was OpenAI inspired by Bell Labs?16:54 - The absence of value functions18:23 - Continual learning21:09 - Brittle generalization24:05 - Co-training generators and verifiers, GANs27:06 - John’s personal use of AI for research28:54 - Day in the life33:01 - Slowdowns in consequential ML ideas36:21 - "Peer review" within the labs39:19 - Distribution shift in researchers43:33 - Future of RL45:33 - Will the labs coordinate if the world needs them to?44:46 - Forecasting ills in AGI and engineering47:53 - Thinking Machines

Michael Truell (CEO of Cursor) sits down with Patrick Collison (CEO of Stripe) to discuss programming languages, the role of AI in programming, and building long-lasting software.

00:15 Why Patrick wrote his first startup in Smalltalk

03:35 LISP chatbots

06:09 Good ideas from esoteric programming languages

09:12 Brett Victor and Dynamicland

16:37 Programming human organizations

20:28 A codebase's "Big Bang" moment and MongoDB

25:49 Rewriting Stripe

32:00 How do you, Patrick Collison, use AI?

38:25 Changes to GDP/TFP

41:56 Programming human biology

46:10 Unexpected beneficiaries of AI

What does it really take to train an AI to write great code? In this roundtable conversation, some of the founders and researchers at Cursor explore the process of building superhuman AI coding agents — from infinite context models and the best rewards to real-time RL and scaling to millions of environments.This is an inside look at some of the work behind Cursor and what AI-assisted coding might look like in the future.