Russ Salakhutdinov - Kimi K3 CEO’s PhD Advisor Predicts the Future of AI Agents

About this episode

Kimi K3 took the world by storm last week for open-sourcing frontier level intelligence, so I sat down with Zhilin Yang's (Kimi CEO) PhD advisor Russ Salakhutdinov to talk.

Russ has been everywhere in modern AI. He did his PhD with Geoff Hinton back when neural nets were a punchline, sold his startup to Apple and worked on Project Titan, teaches at Carnegie Mellon, and spent the last couple years at Meta Superintelligence Lab building computer use agents. Now he's the founder of Sooth Labs, building AI that forecasts the future.

We talked about why there's no secret architecture inside the frontier labs and why the real moat is data, engineering, and infrastructure. He explains why Cursor and half the startups you know are quietly running on Chinese open source models, why all the LLMs are going to be commodities, and why the people actually building AGI don't buy the two-year timeline. We get into his time at Meta, why computer use agents still hit 60% when you need 99.9%, whether AI can beat prediction markets, and why the RL environment business isn't sticky. And he makes the case that AI should replace McKinsey, Bain, and BCG.

Chapters:
0:00 - Intro

1:26 - Bumping into Hinton on the street

3:25 - When neural nets were the third choice

5:21 - Generating digits before it was cool

6:59 - AlexNet breaks computer vision

10:18 - Teaching models to describe what they see

12:10 - Early text-to-image (and the toilet seat that beat Google)

16:52 - Hallucination is a feature

19:36 - Selling Perceptual Machines to Apple

22:45 - Self-driving: 0 to 80 in a year, stuck for 5

30:30 - Inside FSD and Waymo's architecture

34:18 - Building Visual Web Arena at CMU

39:07 - Why he joined Meta Superintelligence

40:09 - The agent that plans your faculty job hunt

42:00 - Paying people for their browser history

42:45 - The coupon-hunting agent

43:35 - Why agents still fail

46:14 - 60% when you need 99.9%

47:04 - Agents on your phone

50:12 - No secret architecture at the frontier labs

51:20 - Why coding and math got solved first

54:01 - Models that smell and touch

56:14 - The future of software engineering

59:41 - Founding Sooth Labs

1:00:07 - The 13% graduation prediction

1:05:55 - Why ChatGPT can't forecast

1:08:12 - Agents first, decision systems next

1:09:23 - The Wikipedia contamination story

1:13:43 - Can AI beat prediction markets?

1:16:26 - AI replaces McKinsey

1:18:20 - Why the crowd is hard to beat

1:19:30 - China's open source models rise

1:24:26 - Why the US needs its own open models

1:25:53 - RL environment businesses won't last

1:28:35 - The end of SaaS, LLMs as commodities

1:32:55 - What's next: self-improvement, forecasting, robots

1:35:34 - The only useful robot is the Roomba

1:37:53 - What he'd study in college today

1:41:20 - Adapt or get left behind

1:44:07 - Wrapping up