Reinventing AI From Scratch with Yaroslav Bulatov

The Information Bottleneck · Mar 30, 2026 · 57m · transcript

Yaroslav Bulatov helped build the AI era from the inside, as one of the earliest researchers at both OpenAI and Google Brain. Now he wants to tear it all down and start over. Modern deep learning, he argues, is up to 100x more wasteful than it needs to be - a Frankenstein of hacks designed for the wrong hardware. With a power wall approaching in two years, Yaroslav is leading an open effort to reinvent AI from scratch: no backprop, no legacy assumptions, just the benefit of hindsight and AI agents that compress decades of research into months. Along the way, we dig into why AGI is a…