Magic

Today on No Priors, Sarah Guo and Elad Gil are joined by Eric Steinberger, the co-founder and CEO of Magic.dev. His team is developing a software engineer co-pilot that will act more like a colleague than a tool. They discussed what makes Magic stand out from the crowd of AI co-pilots, the evaluation bar for a truly great AI assistant, and their predictions on what a post-AGI world could look like if the transition is managed with care. Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @EricSteinb Show Notes: 0:00 Introduction 0:45 Eric’s journey to founding Magic.dev 4:01 Long context windows for more accurate outcomes 10:53 Building a path toward AGI 15:18 Defining what is enough compute for AGI 17:34 Achieving Magic’s final UX 20:03 What makes a good AI assistant 22:09 Hiring at Magic 27:10 Impact of AGI 32:44 Eric’s north star for Magic 36:09 How Magic will interact in other tools

There’s a new archetype in Silicon Valley, the AI researcher turned founder. Instead of tinkering in a garage they write papers that earn them the right to collaborate with cutting-edge labs until they break out and start their own. This is the story of wunderkind Eric Steinberger, the founder and CEO of Magic.dev. Eric came to programming through his obsession with AI and caught the attention of DeepMind researchers as a high school student. In 2022 he realized that AGI was closer than he had previously thought and started Magic to automate the software engineering necessary to get there. Among his counterintuitive ideas are the need to train proprietary large models, that value will not accrue in the application layer and that the best agents will manage themselves. Eric also talks about Magic’s recent 100M token context window model and the HashHop eval they’re open sourcing. Hosted by: Sonya Huang, Sequoia Capital 00:00 - Introduction 01:39 - Vienna-born wunderkind 04:56 - Working with Noam Brown 08:00 - “I can do two things. I cannot do three.” 10:37 - AGI to-do list 13:27 - Advice for young researchers 20:35 - Reading every paper voraciously 23:06 - The army of Noams 26:46 - The leaps still needed in research 29:59 - What is Magic? 36:12 - Competing against the 800-pound gorillas 38:21 - Ideal team size for researchers 40:10 - AI that feels like a colleague 44:30 - Lightning round 47:50 - Bonus round: 200M token context announcement