# Frontier Feud: Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta FAIR, Thinking Machines — Barr Yaron, Amplify AI Engineer · 2025-04-19 Teams from Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta FAIR, and Thinking Machines compete in a Frontier Feud game hosted by Barr Yaron at the AI Engineer Summit 2025. Surveyed AI engineers name Ilya Sutskever as the most influential AI researcher, with Andrej Karpathy, Jeff Hinton, and Yann LeCun also on the board. Cost is the top consideration when choosing a model, followed by latency, eval scores, and open vs. closed source. The buzzword everyone is tired of hearing is AGI, with RAG and prompt engineering trailing. In the fast money round, Cursor tops favorite AI tools, 'Attention Is All You Need' wins most influential paper, and hardware failure is the biggest 2 a.m. nightmare. The winning team, Rocco's Basilisk, takes home a massive llama and other prizes. ## Questions this episode answers ### What is the most influential AI paper according to AI engineers? In a live survey of 100 AI engineers at the AI Engineer Summit 2025, the paper "Attention Is All You Need" was by far the number one answer. Host Barr Yaron noted it "demolished" other options, underscoring its foundational role in modern AI. [18:33](https://aie.addtry.com/8ba84fe9-fcbb-463b-a0c9-df28d7b60f63?t=1113000) ### What do AI engineers prioritize most when choosing a model? According to a survey of 100 AI engineers at the AI Engineer Summit 2025, cost (price) is the number one consideration. Host Barr Yaron expressed surprise, asking the audience if they would have guessed that, noting it wouldn't have been obvious to her. Other top answers included latency and accuracy/performance. [10:48](https://aie.addtry.com/8ba84fe9-fcbb-463b-a0c9-df28d7b60f63?t=648000) ### Which AI buzzword are engineers most tired of hearing? In a live game at the AI Engineer Summit 2025, "AGI" was the number one answer when 100 AI engineers were asked to name a buzzword everyone in AI is tired of. Host Barr Yaron confirmed it after a guess, noting other overused terms included "agents," "RAG," and "prompt engineering." [15:28](https://aie.addtry.com/8ba84fe9-fcbb-463b-a0c9-df28d7b60f63?t=928000) ## Key moments - **[0:00] Intro** - **[1:33] Team Intros** - [1:47] Anthropic's Mahir predicts at least one of the five big AI model trainers will stop by year end. - [3:17] Google DeepMind's Paige predicts within 1.5 years the majority of deployed models will be on-device, using smaller specialized orchestrations. - **[5:19] Round 1** - [9:08] Q: Name the most influential AI researcher. Top survey answers include Andrew Ng, Fei-Fei Li, and Yoshua Bengio, alongside Yann LeCun. - **[9:38] Round 2** - [10:48] Q: Name the top consideration when choosing a model. Cost is the number one answer, surprising host Barr Yaron. - **[13:46] Round 3** - [15:28] Q: Name a buzzword everyone in AI is tired of hearing. 'AGI' is the number one answer; also tired of RAG and prompt engineering. - **[16:35] Final Round** - [17:50] Q: Name the most influential AI paper in history. 'Attention is all you need' is the overwhelming top answer. - [20:48] Q: Name the job most at risk of AI disruption. Data entry is the top answer, while software engineers ranks third. - **[21:08] Wrap-Up** - [21:36] Amplify Partners and AI Engineer are running a massive survey on the state of AI engineering, to be presented at the AI Engineer World Fair in June. ## Speakers - **Barr Yaron** (host) - **John** (guest) - **Mahir** (guest) - **Paige Bailey** (guest) - **Petra** (guest) - **Shrishta** (guest) - **Steven** (guest) - **Tina** (guest) ## Topics AI Engineering Philosophy ## Mentioned Amplify (company), Anthropic (company), Augment Code (company), DeepSeek (company), FAIR (company), Google DeepMind (company), Reflection AI (company), Thinking Machines (company), CUDA (product), ChatGPT (product), Copilot (product), Cursor (product), Gemini (product) ## Transcript ### Intro **Barr Yaron** [0:17] Welcome to Frontier Feud. So, I'm your host, Barr Yaron. I'm a partner at Amplify. We're the first investors in technical founders, and I invest in data and AI companies. I'm very excited to be here, Frontier Feuding, in my favorite city, New York City. And today on stage we have some amazing folks competing for prizes and eternal glory and all that good stuff. So, we're going to introduce our teams. Do not let these smiling faces deceive you; we are here to compete. Before we do intros for the teams, just an audience feeler: who here in the audience, including those on stage, have watched Family Feud before? Quick show of hands. Okay, most people. For those of you who haven't, the premise is pretty simple. The nuance is you'll learn with the game. So, we surveyed 100 AI engineers on a series of questions. Folks on stage are going to guess the answers to those questions, and the most popular answers from the survey are going to get the most points. So, feel free to follow along and guess yourself in the audience as we go along. If you don't like the answers, you can look to your left and look to yourright and blame your neighbors. No, I'm just kidding. In all seriousness, thank you so much to everyone who filled out that survey before. And so, we're going to do some quick intros. We have on my left, Mahir, you can kick it off. Tell us who you are, what you do, and your tech hot take. ### Team Intros **Barr Yaron** [1:45] We're going to do quick intros. **Mahir** [1:47] Cool. Hey everyone, my name is Mahir. I work at Anthropic. My tech hot take is I think, let's say, of the five-ish people training big models today, at least one of them will no longer be training AI models by the end of the year. **Barr Yaron** [2:05] Mic drop, but really, mic pass. So, John. **John** [2:09] Hi guys, I'm John. I work at Anthropic, and my tech hot take is I think AIs make really good therapists. **Tina** [2:20] Hi, I'm Tina. I work at Reflection AI. It's a startup building coding agents. And my tech hot take is that everybody working in our industry should spend like 20 minutes a day with just a piece of paper and a pencil and think like non-AI interrupted thoughts. Thank you. **Shrishta** [2:40] Hi, I'm Shrishta. I'm the product lead for the Gemini developer APIs working with Paige. I have two. My first tech hot take is a follow-up from Tina's. I think it'll be important for people to do what Tina said, because eventually when you have AI models representing you, they'll need some good content to be trained on. I think I'll save my next one for later. **Barr Yaron** [3:04] I love it. **Paige Bailey** [3:05] Excellent. **Barr Yaron** [3:06] Paige, you want to start your side? **Paige Bailey** [3:07] Heck yeah. Greetings, everyone. We on the stage did not get to vote in the survey, so just be aware that we did not pre-game it. **Barr Yaron** [3:17] No fraud. **Paige Bailey** [3:17] No fraud. My name is Paige. I work at Google DeepMind, leading engineering for our AI DevRel team. And I guess my tech hot take is that speed forward ahead a year and a half, I think that the majority of deployed models will be on-device and we'll be seeing a trend more towards smaller models that are kind of orchestrated together, maybe hyper-specialized for a specific task, as opposed to relying just on larger models and sending data elsewhere to do interesting things. **John** [3:57] My name's Colin. You might remember me from my talk earlier today. I'm a researcher at Augment Code, building AI coding tools. Before that, I was at FAIR, Facebook AI Research here in New York, working on AI for board games. I just had to get out both hot takes because I had two ones. So, one is that in the future, dating apps will be our AIs dating each other. Two is I don't think transformers are the final architecture, because eventually we'll build these models using biological materials. **Barr Yaron** [4:27] Oh, snap. **Petra** [4:29] Hi, my name is Petra. I'm the product manager of factuality for the AI answer at the top of the Google search page. My hot take is that chatting with one bot one-on-one is boring, and in the future, most conversations will have at least two other bots in the room with you. **Barr Yaron** [4:48] I love it. **Steven** [4:50] Hello, I'm Steven. I'm joining Thinking Machines soon. And my hot take is that if you think we're hitting a token wall, that sounds like a skill issue to me. **Barr Yaron** [5:02] I love it. Amazing. So, with that, let's get started. I'm going to have Paige and Mahir join me. Not that you're so far from me. **Paige Bailey** [5:09] Excellent. **Barr Yaron** [5:11] Great. **Paige Bailey** [5:11] So, the objective is like hit this as fast as possible,right? **Barr Yaron** [5:15] Yes. **Paige Bailey** [5:16] Okay. **Barr Yaron** [5:16] So, whoever buzzes first has the first chance to answer this question. So, I'm going to ask a question and we'll take it from here. So, we asked 100 AI engineers, name the most influential AI researcher. ### Round 1 **Paige Bailey** [5:32] God dang it. I looked at the screen. **Barr Yaron** [5:35] Okay, what's your guess? **Mahir** [5:37] Ilya Sutskeva. **Barr Yaron** [5:41] Okay, we have Ilya. **Tina** [5:43] Noam Shazir. **Barr Yaron** [5:44] Noam Shazir. Very influential, but not on the board, not in our topic answers. So, your team decides if to play or pass. **Mahir** [5:54] Allright, we're going to play. **Barr Yaron** [5:55] You're going to play. You're going to play. Okay, awesome. So, John, it's your turn to guess someone. **Mahir** [6:00] I'll guess another person. **Barr Yaron** [6:01] But you could stay there. We're working out the kinks. **Paige Bailey** [6:08] Cheating. Fraud. **Mahir** [6:12] Andrej Karpotkin. **Barr Yaron** [6:17] Answer. Good answer. Allright, Tina, how about you? **Tina** [6:22] Jeff Hinton. **Barr Yaron** [6:23] Oh, an excellent one, but it's not a success. **Paige Bailey** [6:28] Oh, that's so Jeff. How? **Barr Yaron** [6:34] Oh, sorry. Did you say Jeff Hinton? **Paige Bailey** [6:37] Yeah. **Barr Yaron** [6:38] Oh. That's on me. I thought you said something else. Great. **Shrishta** [6:48] The lead author on the transformer paper. The attention all you need paper. **Barr Yaron** [6:53] We need a specific name. **Shrishta** [6:55] Sorry. Sorry, I'm having a literal, like I know the name, but I'm having a literal like. **Barr Yaron** [7:08] We're going to have. Yeah, I think. But wait, you already had a strike that doesn't count, so we're going to keep it. We're netting at one. Go, Mahir. **Steven** [7:21] I'm going to say Yann LeCun. **Barr Yaron** [7:23] Yann LeCun. We do have Yann LeCun. **Mahir** [7:27] Okay. Why do we keep going? **Barr Yaron** [7:29] Because you're winning. **Mahir** [7:30] Oh, until we lose? **Barr Yaron** [7:32] Yeah, until we lose. **Mahir** [7:32] Oh, I didn't. **Barr Yaron** [7:36] If you want to lose, here's your opportunity. **Mahir** [7:38] Steve Sviswani. **Barr Yaron** [7:40] No. So, not on the board. **Mahir** [7:43] Okay. **Paige Bailey** [7:47] What was the question again? **Barr Yaron** [7:50] Good question. So, name the most influential AI researcher. **Paige Bailey** [7:54] I'm going to say Sam Altman. **Barr Yaron** [7:56] Sam Altman. It's a good one. It's not on the board. **Paige Bailey** [7:58] Oh, that's ironic. **Barr Yaron** [7:59] And so, we are at three strikes. So, your team needs to deliberate. And if you pick an answer, you actually steal the points. We have four options on the board. And for those who are joining, the question is, we asked 100 AI engineers, name the most influential AI researcher. Allright, I'm giving you a five, four. You're good? Allright. **John** [8:42] I'll do Jeff Dean. **Barr Yaron** [8:46] Jeff Dean is not on the board, which is what I had registered earlier. Okay, so that goes to Rocco's Basilisk. And we're going to go. **Mahir** [9:02] Wait, what were the rest of them? **Barr Yaron** [9:04] Yeah, I'll show you the rest of them. So, these were the ones that were guessed. We also have Andrew Ng. We have Yuan Shenibuo. We have Fei-Fei Li. And we have Yoshua Benjio. There is a long tail of very influential researchers too, but they're only eight spots, so all great guesses. Okay, next. Allright, I think John and Colin. **Mahir** [9:34] Wait, so what is it? **Barr Yaron** [9:36] Yeah. You want to know the question? **Mahir** [9:37] Yeah. **Barr Yaron** [9:38] Patience. So, name the top considerations when choosing a model. ### Round 2 **Mahir** [9:44] Oh, I think there's a throat thing. I think he's half-versed. **Barr Yaron** [9:50] More passion. Come aggressively, this team. But we'll, yes, name the top considerations when choosing a model. **John** [10:05] Intelligence. **Barr Yaron** [10:18] I'm going to be very literal. **Tina** [10:20] Very smart answer. **Barr Yaron** [10:22] Very smart answer. You have given an opportunity to guess. **John** [10:29] Safety. **Barr Yaron** [10:31] Safety is actually not on here. And so, why don't we get Tina and Petra to guess. **Paige Bailey** [10:43] Am I next? **Barr Yaron** [10:44] Yeah. **Paige Bailey** [10:44] Oh, price. **Barr Yaron** [10:48] So, cost is the number one answer, which actually surprised me. I don't know if, like, maybe raise of hands if you would have guessed price. Now you know, so hindsight's 20/20. That wouldn't have been obvious to me. But this means that you guys will continue with this answer and we'll continue from there. **Shrishta** [11:06] Latency. **Barr Yaron** [11:07] Latency. Yes. **Mahir** [11:18] Evals slash benchmark scores. **Barr Yaron** [11:24] Some of these things are ambiguous, but I'm going to put it under don't kill me accuracy performance. **Mahir** [11:42] That's like everything. **John** [11:50] The CEO. **Barr Yaron** [11:51] The CEO. Good answer. Good answer. Good answer. Moving on. **Paige Bailey** [11:58] Oh, I thought it was because we missed, oh no, we skipped that. **Barr Yaron** [12:00] No, your team got it. **Paige Bailey** [12:02] Like where the model's being served, like if it's on-prem or, you know. **Barr Yaron** [12:07] No, we're not going to count that one. But it's a good answer. Okay, this team has an opportunity to steal these points. I hear some folks in the audience think they're ready to steal. So, I love that about you. I love the confidence. **Mahir** [12:25] Oh my god. **Paige Bailey** [12:43] We can make a guess. Oh, that was me. No, it wasn't. **Barr Yaron** [12:47] Open source versus closed source. Whoa. Okay, so with that, you guys get 63 points because you stole the points by getting them. **Mahir** [12:57] Oh. **Barr Yaron** [12:58] So, it's a pretty close game going into the third and final question. Yeah. Allright. Sorry. I know everyone wants the answers. **Paige Bailey** [13:12] Who has like very strong upper body strength? **Barr Yaron** [13:15] So, here are the answers. **Paige Bailey** [13:20] Oh, capabilities. **Barr Yaron** [13:22] Yeah, these are the answers. Great. Thanks for keeping me honest, everyone in the audience and everyone here. So, allright, next. So, who do we have coming up? Petra and Tina. Incredible. **Paige Bailey** [13:35] You can do it. **Barr Yaron** [13:37] So, both in the front. Okay, this requires power, is what we've learned. So, are you ready? **Paige Bailey** [13:45] Ready. ### Round 3 **Barr Yaron** [13:46] Okay. We asked 100 AI engineers, name a buzzword. It's okay. I'm not offended. But name a buzzword everyone in AI is tired of hearing. **Paige Bailey** [13:57] Agents. **Barr Yaron** [13:59] Agents. What do you all think? Yes? Okay, but you still have an opportunity to guess because you could get the number one answer. **Paige Bailey** [14:11] Oh, okay. **Barr Yaron** [14:21] But you have to guess now. I'm giving you three, two, one. Sorry. Okay, so it's going to go to this team. And, Chrysloi, it goes to you. We asked 100 AI engineers, name a buzzword everyone in AI is tired of hearing. I'm going to start my five, four. **Shrishta** [14:56] Multimodality. **Barr Yaron** [14:58] Multimodality? We do not have multimodality. But I don't know where this strike came from, so it's the first strike. **Mahir** [15:09] I'm going to go with Copilot. **Barr Yaron** [15:13] Copilot. What do we think? Yes or no to Copilot? **Paige Bailey** [15:17] That's a very good guess. **Barr Yaron** [15:19] I think it's a good, okay. Good answer. Good answer. But no. **John** [15:28] AGI. **Barr Yaron** [15:29] AGI. Okay, what does the audience think? AGI? **Mahir** [15:35] Yes. **Barr Yaron** [15:35] Allright, it seems like we think it's a good answer. And no, just kidding. Yes. The number one answer, AGI. Allright, Tina. **Paige Bailey** [15:45] Oh, DeepSeek. No DeepSeek. **Barr Yaron** [15:56] So, this team has an opportunity to steal. But you'reright. Maybe for like the week. Yeah, you're back. You're so back. **Mahir** [16:09] I'm going to give connection my last one. Safety. **Barr Yaron** [16:13] Safety. So, unfortunately, safety is not one of the answers. So, these were the additional answers. People here are sick of rag and prompt engineering. But what this means is that we have a winner, which is Rocco's Basilisk. Amazing work by paid attention and the mixture of experts. And so, we're going to move to the fast money round. Do you guys have two representatives? ### Final Round **Barr Yaron** [16:47] Allright, you two are going. And that means, John, leave the stage. I'll call you when you're ready. Allright, we're moving into fast money. And so, some of you have seen Family Feud, but we're playing fast money. The goal is for the two of them together to get to 200 points. You have Mahir 20 seconds to answer five questions. If you can't think of anything, just say pass, and we can come back to it at the end or never. And if you hear a buzzer sound, let me check that it works. Beautiful. Your answer wasn't one of the survey questions, so you can keep asking or move on. Allright, are you ready? **Mahir** [17:27] Yeah. **Barr Yaron** [17:28] Okay. Name an AI tool that engineers love. **Mahir** [17:33] Cursor. **Barr Yaron** [17:36] Name the, sorry, I didn't start the clock. Name the job most at risk of AI disruption. **Mahir** [17:45] Software engineers. **Barr Yaron** [17:47] Name the most influential AI paper in history. **Mahir** [17:50] Attention is all you need. **Barr Yaron** [17:52] Name the biggest nightmare for AI engineer at 2 a.m. **Mahir** [17:58] Hardware failure. **Barr Yaron** [18:00] Okay. So, we got through four, but they were good ones. So, name an AI tool that engineers love. You said cursor. Cursor is the number one answer. We asked, name the job most at risk of AI disruption. You said software engineering. That is the number three answer. We asked, name the most influential AI paper in history. What do you think? Demolished. Attention is all you need is by far the number one answer. Name the biggest nightmare for AI eng at 2 a.m. **Mahir** [18:38] Hardware failure. **Barr Yaron** [18:38] Hardware failure. You know what? We'll give it. We'll give it as an infra problem. **Mahir** [18:45] Okay, okay. **Barr Yaron** [18:47] And so, you're going into the round, 140 points. You want to tap John in? John ran away. He got scared. No. There we go. Amazing. Incredible. So, John. **Mahir** [19:07] Let's go. Big things. **Barr Yaron** [19:08] You have 25 seconds, and they got to stand back there. You have 25 seconds to answer five questions. And if you can't think of anything, just say pass, and we'll come back to it if we have time at the end. If you hear a buzzer sound, it means that either your answer isn't on the board or Mahir has already answered it. You ready? **Mahir** [19:28] Yeah. **Barr Yaron** [19:29] Okay. And I'm going to start your timer. Name an AI tool engineers love. **Mahir** [19:36] Cursor. Oh, ChatGPT. **Barr Yaron** [19:44] Name the job most at risk of disruption. **Mahir** [19:47] Artists. **Barr Yaron** [19:51] Name the most influential AI paper in history. **Mahir** [19:55] Transformers is all, attention is all you need. **Barr Yaron** [19:58] Okay. So, we have model APIs, which is the third answer on the board. We have name the job, you said artist. So, I'm going to give you content creation slash writing. It's a little ambiguous. And attention is all you need was already selected by Mahir. But I'll let you pick the next question, which is name the biggest nightmare for AI engineer at 2 a.m. Someone wrote in cold email from a VC, so I will talk to them after. **Mahir** [20:34] Kuda airs. **Barr Yaron** [20:35] Kuda airs. Okay, well, you know what? Your teammates, because you think alike and you think of great answers. So, let me just show you the number one answers here, which are cursor, data entry for the job most at risk of AI disruption. Attention is all you need, the top paper. So, that was a good one, just already taken. The biggest nightmare, an outage of the model or otherwise, and an industry that would benefit the most from AI, healthcare. So, with that, we have, well, you lost the 200 points. But I think that you're still winners, and you're all still winners. And we have a few prizes outside that I think someone is bringing. So, we have a massive llama for this team. We have rainbow lambabini babies for everyone. ### Wrap-Up **Barr Yaron** [21:25] We have AI engineering books and gift cards to your favorite restaurants in New York. And we can bring them out and leave. Thank you so much for joining us for Frontier Feud. And we're going to see you next year. We're running a massive survey on the state of AI engineering. Going to be presenting it at the June AI Engineer World Fair. So, if you liked some of the teaser questions, this will get much more in-depth into the tools folks are using, the workflows that AI engineers have, and it's a way for the industry to be more transparent. So, thank you. You can find the QR code or the link here if you want to participate in that survey on the state of AI engineering. Amazing. --- This library is powered by PodHood (https://podhood.com), the podcast website platform.