The Pre-Training Wall and the Treadmill After It

The Pre-Training Wall and the Treadmill After It

May 9, 2026 · 56 min · Episode 121

About this episode

The episode discusses the concept of the pre-training wall in AI and its implications for future developments in machine learning.

I've been confusing Don with frontier-lab links late at night for a bit. Ilya Sutskever told a NeurIPS audience that pre-training as we know it would unquestionably end. There's only one internet, and the data isn't growing. The frontier labs call this the pre-training wall. A leaked Google memo from 2023 argued they had no moat. R1 is on GitHub. Llama is on Hugging Face. OpenAI's secondary-market valuation has climbed past $850 billion. Don was confused. So he came over and we made an episode about it. Episode Page Support The Show Subscribe To The Podcast Join The Newsletter

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