Why AI Agents Don't Work (yet) - with Kanjun Qiu of Imbue
Last month, Imbue was crowned as AI’s newest unicorn foundation model lab, raising a $200m Series B at a $1+ billion valuation. As “stealth” foundation model companies go, Imbue (f.k.a. Generally Intelligent) has stood as an enigmatic group given they have no publicly released models to try out1. However, ever since their $20m Series A last year their goal has been to “develop generally capable AI agents with human-like intelligence in order to solve problems in the real world”. Kanjun Qiu joined us to share more of their story.
Full show notes: https://www.latent.space/p/imbue
00:00 - Intro…
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Chapters (16)
Introductions
7:13
The origin story of Imbue
11:26
Imbue's approach to training large foundation models optimized for reasoning
14:20
Imbue's goals to build an "operating system" for reliable, inspectable AI agen
17:51
Imbue's process of developing internal tools and interfaces to collaborate wit
19:47
Imbue's focus on improving reasoning capabilities in models, using code and ot
21:33
The value of using both public benchmarks and internal metrics to evaluate pro
21:43
Lessons learned from developing the Avalon research environment
23:31
The limitations of pure reinforcement learning for general intelligence
32:12
Imbue's vision for building better abstractions and interfaces for reliable ag
33:49
Interface design for collaborating with, rather than just communicating with,
39:51
The future potential of an agent-to-agent protocol
42:53
Leveraging approaches like critiquing between models and chain of thought
47:30
Kanjun's philosophy on enabling team members as creative agents at Imbue
59:54
Kanjun's experience co-founding the communal co-living space The Archive
1:00:22
Lightning Round
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