Jack Morris on Finding the Next Big AI Breakthrough

Odd Lots

Bloomberg

News, Investing, Business, News Commentary, Business News

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 26 September 2025

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We know that the top-tier AI labs are spending unbelievable amounts of money on talent. But what are these researchers actually working on? And how do we know that they're making progress? And furthermore, how can we even measure that progress? On this episode, we speak with Jack Morris, an AI researcher and Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University, who is also a part-time researcher at Meta. We talk about what he does, and why breakthroughs seem to be lumpy and unpredictable. We also talk about the battle between open- and closed-source approaches, US vs. Chinese labs, and how an individual talent thinks about where they want to spend their time, balancing the desire for research and prestige with a big fat paycheck.

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0:00.0	In our new podcast, Everybody's Business, we talk about the business news that concerns everybody.
0:05.8	From Bloomberg Business Week, I'm Stacey Vanek-Smith.
0:08.4	And I'm Max Chaffkin.
0:09.9	Each week, we unpack what is happening on Main Street and Wall Street, all the streets.
0:15.4	WrestleMania has taken over the U.S. economy.
0:18.2	A poetry that executives write on LinkedIn.
0:21.0	A little actual magic in our underrated story of the week.
0:24.3	The single grades marketing campaign, the music business has ever seen.
0:27.0	I decided to ask people how they felt about the penny going away.
0:31.0	Listen to everybody's business wherever you get your podcasts.
0:37.2	Bloomberg Audio Studios.
0:39.6	Podcasts Radio News.
0:52.1	Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthal.
0:56.9	And I'm Tracy Allaway.
0:58.3	Tracy, have you played around with GPT5 much?
1:01.1	Not really. I've been perplexity pills.
1:04.4	Oh, that's your main?
1:05.6	Yeah. That's my main one at the moment. But is it good? I hear mixed things.
1:09.4	So I use it because I use trans-GPT every day. It does not strike me as like obviously better for my uses than like the
1:17.8	O3 models, which I've been very impressed by it because, you know, I want to establish him,
1:21.2	no hater or anything like that. But like it does not strike me as like, oh, this is like an
1:25.2	amazing step function or whatever.
	...

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