Kimi K3 took the world by storm last week for open-sourcing frontier level intelligence, so I sat down with Zhilin Yang's (Kimi CEO) PhD advisor Russ Salakhutdinov to talk.
Russ has been everywhere in modern AI. He did his PhD with Geoff Hinton back when neural nets were a punchline, sold his startup to Apple and worked on Project Titan, teaches at Carnegie Mellon, and spent the last couple years at Meta Superintelligence Lab building computer use agents. Now he's the founder of Sooth Labs, building AI that forecasts the future.
We talked about why there's no secret architecture inside the frontier labs and why the real moat is data, engineering, and infrastructure. He explains why Cursor and half the startups you know are quietly running on Chinese open source models, why all the LLMs are going to be commodities, and why the people actually building AGI don't buy the two-year timeline. We get into his time at Meta, why computer use agents still hit 60% when you need 99.9%, whether AI can beat prediction markets, and why the RL environment business isn't sticky. And he makes the case that AI should replace McKinsey, Bain, and BCG.
