State of AI in 2026: LLMs, Coding, Scaling Laws, China, Agents, GPUs, AGI | Lex Fridman Podcast #490

Summary

Nathan Lambert and Sebastian Raschka are machine learning researchers, engineers, and educators. Nathan is the post-training lead at the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) and the author of The RLHF Book. Sebastian Raschka is the author of Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch) and Build a Reasoning Model (From Scratch). Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep490-sb See below for timestamps, transcript, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex, etc. *Transcript:* https://lexfridman.com/ai-sota-2026-transcript *Correction:* Here's an updated image listing a collection of recent open & closed…