Our guest today is Thomas Scialom, Senior Staff Research Scientist at Meta.

In our conversation, we first discuss Thomas' PhD where he explains how he managed to publish around 20 academic papers. We then dive into several LLMs that Thomas built at Meta including Galactica, Llama 2 and Llama 3. We finally dig into AI Agents, their limitations and how close we are to AGI and ASI.

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👉 From beginner to advanced LLM developer course by Towards AI (use the code AISTORIES10 to get a 10% discount): https://academy.towardsai.net/courses/beginner-to-advanced-llm-dev?ref=63e5e3

👉 8-hour GenAI Primer course by Towards AI (use the code AISTORIES10 to get a 10% discount): https://academy.towardsai.net/courses/8-hour-genai-primer?ref=63e5e3

ToolFormer paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.04761

To learn more about Llama 2: https://www.llama.com/llama2/

To learn more about Llama 3: https://www.llama.com/

Follow Thomas on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tscialom/

Follow Neil on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leiserneil/  

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(00:00) Intro  
(02:28) How Thomas got into AI & ML
(07:20) Publishing Academic Papers
(14:48) Joining Meta
(16:09) About Toolformer, ChatGPT & Galactica
(19:20) Meta’s Response to ChatGPT
(23:53) Scaling and Building LLMs
(31:38) Why Open Source Matters
(33:33) Thomas’ role in building Llama 3
(37:22) AI Agents 
(42:13) AGI 
(46:34) Current challenges faced with AI Agents
(51:03) Career Advice