Captaining IMO Gold, Deep Think, On-Policy RL, Feeling the AGI in Singapore — Yi Tay 2

The conversation centers on the progress and future directions of AI research, particularly within Google's DeepMind. Yi Tay, from the Gemini team in Singapore, reflects on his return to Google, the shift towards reasoning and reinforcement learning (RL), and the pursuit of AGI. The discussion highlights the IMO gold medal win using Gemini, achieved through end-to-end model training, and touches on the debate between symbolic systems and connectionist models. Further topics include the increasing utility of AI coding tools, the importance of data efficiency, and the potential for AI to generate novel knowledge. The conversation also explores the application of LLMs in recommendation systems and the challenges of talent acquisition in the AI field.