Nikolai Yakovenko: 4 years into the age of AI
From Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning by Razib Khan
May 15, 2026 · 1h 20m
About this episode
Razib Khan and Nikolai Yakovenko discuss the advancements in AI over the past four years and the current landscape of AI companies.
It’s been a minute since we’ve had Nikolai Yakovenko on the podcast. Yakovenko is a former professional poker player ,and was a research scientist at Google, Twitter and Nvidia. With a decade in computer science , Yakovenko has been at the forefront of the large-language-model revolution that has driven to prominence companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind, and an ecosystem that has birthed hundreds of smaller startups. He is also the founder of DeepNewz , an AI-driven news startup. Razib and Yakovenko have been discussing the Age of AI for about 4 years now, and it’s time for a temperature check. Nearly four years ago, Razib put in a “prompt” that generated the below image: The same prompt now returns the image at the top of this post. It illustrates the strides that AI has made in the last four years. On this podcast, Razib and Yakovenko talk about the current top of the line “frontier labs,” OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google’s DeepMind, why xAI has faltered, and the reality that only DeepSeek in China seems up to challenging the American firms. Yakovenko notes that AI’s transformative impact is mostly in the massive capital influx into the sector, as well as becoming a…
People in this episode
Host: Razib Khan
Guest: Nikolai Yakovenko
Topics covered
- AI advancements
- large-language models
- technology impact
- software engineering
- capital influx in AI
- AI startups
Keywords
- AI
- large-language models
- Nikolai Yakovenko
- Razib Khan
- DeepMind
- OpenAI
- software engineering
- capital influx
- AI startups
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Google, Twitter, Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, DeepNewz, xAI, DeepSeek
Places: China
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