Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier [The Knowledge Project Ep. #223]

Shane Parrish: What was your first real aha moment with AI where you realized, holy shit, this is going to be huge?

Bret Taylor: I had two separate aha moments. One that I don’t think I really appreciated how huge it would be, but it kind of reset my expectation, was the launch of DALL-E (an AI image generator) in the summer of ’22. Is that right? I might be off by a year, but I think summer of ’22 and the avocado chair that they generated. My background is in computer science and pretty technically deep. I hadn’t been paying attention to large language models. I didn’t follow the progress after the Transformers paper, and I saw that, and my reaction was “I had no idea computers could do that.” And that particular launch, seeing a generated image of an avocado chair, I don’t think I extrapolated to where we are now, but it shook me, and I realized I need to pay more attention to this space and OpenAI specifically than I had been. I think that was the moment when I realized I clearly have been not paying attention to something significant.