Flapping Airplanes on the future of AI: ‘We want to try really radically different things’
There’s been a bunch of exciting research-focused AI labs popping up in recent months, and Flapping Airplanes is one of the most interesting. Propelled by its young and curious founders, Flapping Airplanes is focused on finding less data-hungry ways to train AI. It’s a potential game-changer for the economics and capabilities of AI models — and with $180 million in seed funding, they’ll have plenty of runway to figure it out. Last week, I spoke with the lab’s three co-founders — brothers Ben and Asher Spector, and Aidan Smith — about why this is an exciting moment to start a new AI lab and why they keep coming back to ideas about the human brain. I want to start by asking, why now? Labs like OpenAI and DeepMind have spent so much on scaling their models. I’m…