Two of the people most responsible for scaling the transformer are now betting on a next act. @MillionInt ran the Reasoning 🍓 team at OpenAI. @_arohan_ was a pre-training lead on Gemini after years at Google Brain and Anthropic. They just started @coreautoai to find what comes next. Their core argument: (1) models are trained in the lab but deployed in the real world and can't keep learning once they leave; (2) AI research is done by humans today but models will be able to explore and uncover new advances more rapidly and systematically (controversial but timely w this week's petition). The conversation covers: — why Jerry expected AGI in 2025 and what changed his mind — the two kinds of learning from experience, and why RL only captures one — the computational depth problem baked into today's architectures — why the biggest labs can't afford to look for a transformer replacement — the kernel competition where humans + $100K of coding agents found a 60x speedup no frontier model comes close to — a definition of AGI you can actually test: a model that improves itself with no human in the loop 00:00 Introduction 01:46 Appreciating Transformers 02:44 Scaling Hits Limits 04:54 Why Architecture Matters 05:32 RL Reality Check 07:32 Test Time Learning 09:52 Economics Of Scaling 12:47 Why Start A Company 14:24 Rohan On Transformers 19:11 Computational Depth Problem 20:32 When Transformers Top Out 23:22 Beyond Reinforcement Learning 26:41 Optimization And Efficiency 34:24 Building An Automated Lab 39:45 Kernel Automation Roadmap