Everyone Is Betting on Bigger LLMs. She's Betting They're Fundamentally Wrong. (Eve Bodnia, Founder & CEO of Logical Intelligence)

0:00There's just a lot of healthcare areas where robotics can be crucial, like robotics for surgeries. Imagine if you let a lamp drive it, somebody says, oh, you know, the 20 % of the time during brain surgery, it can go to like the wrong area. I'm so sorry. You can't have that. You need really fast inference. You need to speak on a millisecond, microsecond scale. Do it. HDI should be just like natural intelligence, something which plans, something which is able to predict, produce new knowledge. So we created ecosystem to serve us as humans. I see that AGI to me is that ecosystem, but for the AI models to serve us as humans.

0:36Kona is really cheap. It's very efficient. It doesn't need any special hardware. If your data changes, if your environment changes, you need to be able to recognize it like this. So I want people always be in charge of what AI can be doing. My biggest nightmare is if AI is doing something it wasn't meant to be doing. So you need to work with different architecture which can self-align, which can adopt its behavior, which can be precise when it needs to be precise.

1:06Every major AI company is building a better language model. But Yves Bodnia thinks they're all solving the wrong problem. Yves is the founder and CEO of Logical Intelligence, a new AI lab built on an entirely different architecture. The company's energy-based reasoning model thinks in abstract mathematical space, solves problems with formal guarantees of correctness, and runs fast enough to control a surgical robot or design a chip in real time. In our conversation, Eva and I discuss why she left academia to start a company, what LLMs fundamentally can't do, the true nature of creativity, and the wisdom of legendary mathematician Grigori Perelman.

1:51I'm Mario, and this is The Generalist.

2:21Eve Bodnia:ends. You can also chat with your notes, which is one of my favorite features. If someone says something on the call that you didn't quite catch or want to learn more about, Granola can help you out. It's an amazing way to be better informed during a conversation without having to interrupt everyone else's flow. You can also have Granola review all your recent conversations to pull out to-dos, write a weekly recap, or surface interesting ideas you might have forgotten. Another thing I To get started with Granola, head to granola.ai slash Mario. And for new users, you can get three months free with the code Mario.

2:57Eve Bodnia:So go to granola.ai slash Mario and use code Mario for three months free. Eve, I'd love to start with an anecdote of yours that I saw on your Twitter account, which super intrigued me given the work that you do. Namely that as a teenager, you apparently met Grigori Perelman, one of the greatest living mathematicians, and had a fascinating encounter with him. How did that happen? Yeah, apparently I was very lucky because it was not easy to meet him. So I had like some summer internship in St. Petersburg. I was working on just some websites just to make some extra money. and he was very noticeable in the community he uh always like so by the office we had like little park and he was like walking the same route the same time every single day and he looked very different according to the standards of suavic culture so people obviously paid attention to him and he was like a little celebrity in the community and people didn't know he was a mathematician.

4:09I don't know why I'm like naturally curious person and I'm attracted to different kinds of bizarre people. I love all kinds of people, but bizarre people are my favorite. And hence I went to academia for my career, but that's a hard story. And he just said that he was working on a problem in topology. And yeah, so I obviously I wanted to know more, but he was not really talkative and when he went on news he was all over the place and i can't say more because there's nothing else to say more about it so i was just lucky to to ask like a few questions and i also asked him like why you did not get a fields medal and he said there's so many people were behind me and i i took sort of the work and put the pieces together and um like it's it's an eager thing to receive it so that was my understanding while like those people did not receive it see what i mean yes yeah uh for for folks who are maybe less familiar he's as you mentioned sort of famous for declining the fields medal yeah so it's actually funny he he was trying to reduce attention to himself, but it created the opposite effect.

5:31Yes. It made everyone curious as to how he could turn down this, you know, the sort of Nobel version for mathematics. I'm curious, when you say bizarre people are your favorite people, that resonates with me. I think there's a part of me that feels the same. Well, what does that feel like for you? What do you find most interesting about these strange birds? I just love this unconventional reasoning and thinking in general and the point of view of those people to the world. And that's what the major component of being creative, right? You just need to be able to think outside of your box. But if you're thinking outside of your box, you're obviously most likely going to look different, which is not true sometimes.

6:18But sometimes some people, it correlates. and I claim myself being normal, although most people laugh when I say it, but I feel home when I'm surrounded by bizarre people. Looking at your background, I don't mean this offensively at all. I mean it complimentarily. You definitely don't seem normal. I don't know that many people who are studying particle physics when they're 13. So, you know, I'm super excited to get into all of this, but the Perelman story for me is so interesting because as we'll get into, you're really building a form of mathematical genius yourself that hopefully extrapolates in lots of interesting ways too.

6:56But maybe to take a step back, how did you grow up? Why were you so fascinated by mathematics and science from such a young age? The answer is, I don't know, because I've always been like this. And since I was a kid, I was reading books. I was trying to understand some fancy mathematics because to me, math and science in general it's that representation of thinking outside of the box i see like our human experience we sort of bounded by our evolutional evolutional memory and it's very hard because of that to create something outside of this evolutional things so this is why when we invent something we're trying to tie it to things we already seen and I was looking for ways to create something which has nothing to do with this intuition of what we need in daily life.

7:56So for example, when people invent black holes, it's not something you see in daily life, right? It's very counterintuitive, so quantum physics in general. And mathematics is that tool which can take your imagination beyond your traditional know daily limits and it has certain rules and you just need to follow the rules and you know the stepping stone that brings you is sort of correct like you could trust it but it also gives you something you might not understand and it takes like us time to understand what it gave us so the notion of quantum mechanics took a very long time to build intuition around the notion of black holes in general quantum information is very counterintuitive area so interesting yeah i I was attracted to this kind of idea.

8:47Can I be exposed to the tools which will take my personal imagination outside of my limit? And the answer was in theoretical physics and mathematics. And yeah, I was just so obsessed with it from day one. It's amazing. I feel like the way that you describe that passion is how maybe I might have described writing for me. There's some amount of unification in so many of these things where, you know, whatever the right methodology is to allow your imagination to go into these interesting places. But that's such a beautiful description. You bring a very interesting point. I think I met somebody who has said similar things to me and he was working in literature, like he was a writer.

9:34And he said that words have so many different shades and so many different languages. They have their own sort of colors and shades. And it's like such a not easy decoding problem to decode what's in your brain in the form of language in the most accurate way. Like language is something which we solve naturally. Like in mathematics, it's called manifold hypothesis or manifold problem. So it's interesting. I like that you bring it up. Can you actually tease out the manifold hypothesis a bit more so I understand that analogy better? Like when you say there's some comparison there with language, what's the sort of connection?

10:13Yeah. So the idea is your brain thinks in some sort of abstract way. Our thoughts is sometimes not in language. It's like in something else, right? It's a mix of images. It's a mix of words. It has something else. And for different people, it's a different thing. And when you try to communicate, you need to find representation of what's in your brain in language space in the most accurate way and sometimes it it's like your life dependent on it like in the court so words can take you very far um but also like in literature in poetry it's like language is become an important part of channeling that creative whatever is in your brain.

10:59See what I'm saying? Yeah, 100%. No, I think it's sort of a lossy distillation in some way. Like language is the best we have in many instances of trying to explain to people what we have in our heads. And it can be, you know, obviously so beautiful and descriptive, but there's still something that you lose in that translation. Yeah. So what you're describing is the heart of this manifold hypothesis is when you try to take something very complex and you map it It's something very simple. And that simple needs to describe as accurate as possible what you originally meant to be. There is a huge information loss in translation.

11:40And yeah, it's a very popular question in AI, in biology, just anything related to brain and languages and communication. Yeah, it feels like we're riffing in this really interesting way, but it actually feels like it also deeply connects to what you're building. On that subject, actually, I wondered if you'd ever come across this piece written by the novelist Cormac McCarthy on the Kekulé problem, where he talks about, I think, the mathematician Kekulé or scientist or something like that, where he came up with the structure of, I think, benzene in this space beyond language. You know, he arose sort of with it from a dream with this snake like form of, you know, I'm doing a bad job explaining the science here.

12:32I clearly I I encoded it as a story, not as a science, you know, as a work of science. But it was really sort of even this legendary writer talking about how clearly there is this part of our mind that works way beyond language in this unconscious, symbolic way. Yeah, and it's amazing how like ability to extrapolate of our brain from one space to another. This is also like a major component for being creative, for creativity in general. I was also curious about the questions like, is there anything like consciousness? How can we define consciousness? Because then it brings you up to what you're talking about.

13:13There is a level of subconsciousness which takes over the processing, which is not directly related to your daily life. But this is something which can bring you something new. So some form of latent space of your subconsciousness, which always scans the information and just digest it and gives you something back. And there's so many scientists and just creative people in general get their insights from dreams or sometimes work on one area or another area. And like when I was doing this EBM, I'm always thinking about the EBM. Forgive me, like every topic people ask me, it all goes back to the EBM.

13:53No, I understand. Yeah, I was working in like entirely different field, which was nowhere close related to the EBM. But yes, the brain has amazing ability to extrapolate things from one place to another. And for for listeners, EBM is energy based model. It's the type of sort of AI that you're working on with logical intelligence. Yeah, yeah. Not based on language. Not based on language, yes, which is so interesting. Were your parents mathematicians or scientists? Like, did that sort of inform the way that you grew up such that these were the conversations you were having at home? No, actually, most people in my family, either in medical school or they're artists, we did not have such conversations at home and actually I was driving people nuts by having those conversations.

14:46And did you grow up in St. Petersburg? You mentioned that that's where you met Perelman. Yeah so part of it I was all over the place. I was born in Kazakhstan. I left with my parents to Russia and like when I was eight or something and we just we traveled a lot We lived in new towns every three years on average because of my family job situations. And also I have very large families, so there was always a relative in another town we could visit and maybe stay longer. And when I was 18, I moved to the U.S. In sort of researching you, it seemed like you had also spent some time around 13 or 14 working at CERN studying particle physics.

15:34How does that know? not that young not that young okay I was like how on earth does that happen I'm not like a genius child prodigy whatever you know like 13 you go to school I just was lucky to participate in a different olympiads and lucky to win one and was invited to choose any school in Russia so I chose something related to theoretical physics and math in general and I was finishing up the high school so i was like high school age and they gave me a project and they're like well we we're working like there's a place called cern and we're trying to study new particles and uh make like new particles and back then higgs mechanism and everything about higgs was a big deal i got my first project which was related to pp collisions and sort of trying to understand the origins of this quark gluant plasma so before the universe was formed that was quark gluant plasma and that was a lot of interesting plasma effects and just interesting numerical problem so they just gave it to me and i sold it we published the paper and then i was like well maybe i should just go and work at cern and we obviously had a lot of connections there and it's a great community i love spending time in switzerland it's one of my favorite countries and yeah and then i moved to the u.s so yeah you know nothing nothing crazy just as a high schooler oh now people like it's actually go even like there's you go even younger so what you see is be and there's a lot of students we had who were like at the end of the middle school for research summer program and they could already do like coding and understand things i did not understand that age I think right now kids are very, very smart.

17:33And back then high school was like not also a big deal. There's a lot of high schoolers in Russia. Very smart. And so you went to Berkeley when you were 18 and then ended up staying in California through your PhD. What were you studying? And perhaps as you sort of have the benefit of hindsight now, what were the pieces of that journey that maybe informed how you've thought about what you're building with logical intelligence? Well, the team was always the same, just trying to understand the fundamentals, laws of nature. I was specifically captured by the notion of symmetry. It's something which doesn't change while everything else change.

18:14And there are beautiful mathematics how to describe and how to define and how to derive what is not changing. So I'm like, everything in nature has this phenomena. So maybe that's going to be my theme and I'm just going to study this sort of invariance. That's what it's called. Things which are not changing as everything else is changing. Maybe I'm going to study this in brain and particle physics and condensed matter because mathematics was the same, but ability to extrapolate this knowledge from one domain to another makes you to bring something new to these fields. So I was focused on mathematical foundations to understand the symmetry groups.

18:56And symmetry groups describe particle physics. And if you understand particle physics, you can work with condensed matter because there are some similar phenomena, just different equations, but the idea is the same. And if you deal with condensed matter, you obviously start dealing with quantum physics, quantum information. And naturally, somebody from neuroscience department comes over and say, hey, you know, We're using some mathematics, which is like traditional, doesn't give us anything new. So maybe your methodology is going to help us describe something new. And brain is also, can be described the same equations as condensed matter, because there are some things that doesn't change in your brain while everything else changes.

19:40So I'm like, okay, maybe interested to see what kind of invariants we can find with certain brain activities. And I was studying that. so the team was always the same just the areas were different and naturally when you start talking about brain people like maybe you you could apply this to ai and this is where like i felt the gap i'm like oh no it's i cannot use the same tools on llm and i started digging into llms and i'm like well i i'm not claiming i have understanding how brain works but i spent some ears trying to understand. And for me, it was clear it was not like searching for patterns in any language.

20:22It was as a writer, you feel it yourself. You're not just like what you create, you're not just searching for patterns. It's like something else. And you have a freedom how to decode it. And that realization to close this gap kind of put me on this path. So interesting. And there are so many pieces of that that I'm excited to think through together. To take a step back to maybe where you sort of started a piece of this journey, symmetry and sort of the idea of invariance in nature. Maybe it's not possible to explain it to a word cell like me, but what would be an example of that where you see this sort of concept of invariant symmetry in nature?

21:03Everywhere. Literally everywhere. So the example of symmetry, I have like a water cup. And like if you are rotated 360 degree, it doesn't change. It brings you back to the point. So I kind of like enforce that symmetry into the object. Then just think of magnets. Like if you take smaller pieces of metal and you put them on a table, sort of like a metallic dust. and then you put the magnet and they start arranging itself in the pattern so we say symmetry is broken it didn't have order i mean it had disorder and then it acquired some order and that's called order rather so pretty much any ordering in nature can be described by symmetries of some form and your brain is another example um so like your brain naturally in like the background mode of our brain is very disorganized and dream as well but sometimes you have like very clean clear thought or thought process so it's the same idea right you had something disorganized and then suddenly it became organized you need to keep that order of chaos around it for things to be creative so you can come up with new things at the same time so you need to have this notion of entropy and uh the same phenomena occurring in condensed matter this is the subject about materials and material studies and how it's used in very hot temperature very cold temperature and they all have different properties, like high temperature semiconductor behave different from the low temperature ones.

22:46The same mathematics can be applied to a brain and it turned out to be the same ideas can be applied to AI. Wow, that is so interesting. And those are very, very helpful analogies. When I was looking into some of the papers you published and some of your prior work, You know, I certainly can't pretend to understand all of it, but there were some interesting indications of your your thinking, even in places like the acknowledgments, like one of your acknowledgments. I think you thank both fields medalists and also your Hindu gods. And it made me wonder how you think about spirituality, how you think about, I imagine there's some depth to what mathematics and science maybe means to you in that domain.

23:35I really like some books from Rick Rubin. The way he thinks about creativity in general, like it's not, well, obviously it's different theories about it and I don't want to go deeper about it. But I love this idea that you just need to sort of like relax and channel and it just comes to you like this. obviously this ties us to discussion of subconscious mind and how often you think about the problem how often you're exposed to like different areas and sometimes your subconscious mind is very creative or even conscious mind so i historically grew up uh even though i was growing up in russia uh my mom was very spiritual and she was practicing hinduism so i was exposed to meditation since relatively early age and i was always thinking that a part of our creativity does not belong to us it just belongs to the entire world and we just hear us sort of a channel like yes all connected on the level of consciousness subconsciousness we all live in beings and you know sometimes it just comes to you and you're just grateful and you like it does not belong to you.

24:48You're just here to receive it and to give it to the world. I really love that framework for creativity in part because I remember reading a book, the book Impro by Keith Johnstone. I'm not sure if you've ever read it, but it's in theory about improvisational theater. But one of the things he talks about is how different cultures have such a different connection to creativity where they do connect it to the divine and how that really frees you as an artist much more. Because if you connect creativity solely to your ego, then you feel really self-conscious about what you show other people. Whereas if you see yourself as a channel, then you sort of can separate yourself from it in some way.

25:36Exactly. You still feel responsible but you you just create unconditionally and i think about ego a lot and honestly running a business is the biggest test for any human ego because you're facing competition you're facing different kinds of fears but you're also facing other side of things which like positive and feed your ego so you always like have to force yourself to stay grounded but also that brings a question of ownership, right? What we create doesn't really belong to us. It's definitely belong to us, but does belong to you? Not really. So this brings us back to the point of Grigori Perelman.

26:18He was working on something people worked for a very long time. And you can't just isolate one person and say, well, obviously he's brilliant. He is genius. He took all these pieces of a puzzle and put them in the picture. But in reality... Each of these pieces of the puzzle was a very hard work for multiple generations of mathematicians. And this comes in every science field. So honestly, I don't like this idea of Nobel Prize in general. It's just given to one person or one group, but it should be given to entire community because all of us matters and all of us connected and collectively we contribute to its highest will.

27:01Maybe in your PhD or somewhere else, you mentioned there was a phase where maybe you were doing more experimental physics and that that was more challenging and that you never sort of wanted to go back to a touching lab equipment again. What was it about that sort of modality or, you know, expression for you that didn't work? Well, I'm actually a very sarcastic person. So it was like, it was a little message to my experimental team who just saved my ass during this era of my PhD. And I love them. That was one of the best parts of my PhD. But they were like, you just need to like do something else because it's too much pain in the ass.

27:46i honestly also don't see that there is a need to separate experimental science and theoretical science i know there's some people who just think that theory is the most important and some people who think experiments are the most important but for real world you need both and you need to have decent understanding of both so for example there was like some supersymmetry theories people like oh now we understand how the particle physics work we're going to build large hydrogen collider and this is we you know discover but when they actually build it the discoveries were different from what they expected so experimental side of things telling you what's real and what's not for the physical world and theories telling you about different kinds of options giving your assumptions so if you just isolate yourself only on experiments you're gonna feel limited you still need theories to test but you're only like focusing on limitations of the physical world for your science, for your constraints.

28:47And if you force yourself only on the theoretical side, you just might end up working on something which might never be useful, which is fine. I had a bunch of useless topics during my PhD, like multidimensional donuts, and none of this would ever be useful. So no judgment. Maybe let's jump ahead to this sort of period in your career when you start to maybe recognize the applicability of the things you were thinking about with regard to AI. You sort of mentioned this a little bit earlier, but how did that start to come together? And what was the process of that really formalizing into, hey, maybe I actually should start a company around this?

29:28So the first thought was like, I published a paper with that solution and received my tenureship and just be a professor my whole life. The second thought was like, there's a lot of academic papers out there and um right now i think we're facing that issue even crisis when people using the eye to publish papers and some very deep papers and very deep subject if you're not really an expert you cannot tell the difference like you don't know what's real what's not real anymore um my phd on archive there was like 500 papers a day so it's a lot of noise it's signal versus crisis and we don't have tools to like actually identify what's real and what's relevant and how to find it and i was like if i publish my paper it's just going to be one of those 500 papers a day and like it might get lost and it might just live in this academic realm and in industry i have a chance to actually bring it to life and like actually work with real people who's going to use it, get real feedback and close that market gap.

30:33And market gap is huge because right now all AI is just language-based models and all around us is not necessarily language-based model. So I'm like, why don't I focus on closing this gap if I have this opportunity? And opportunity came, universe provided. At the end of my PhD, I met an investor and he just like, okay, you have your team, so you have your thing. Let's just keep it going. I'm like, yeah, sure. So taking a step maybe back before you meet this investor, which I would love to hear about. But it sounded like you spent a bunch of time sort of analyzing LLMs and what they could and couldn't do.

31:08What were the frustrations or the limitations that you saw that that sort of fit around your work so clearly? Obviously, I was studying the brains and I'm like, OK, let's look at LLMs, a bunch of neural networks. And there's some layers and we optimizing for having like correct ways for certain things. and like can it extrapolate knowledge like real intelligence the answer is no alums are really good at operating facts in existing space and sometimes people say oh it created something new but you don't really it's new for you but you don't really know how new it is it was there out in the internet you've never seen yes or it can be just like there's some facts in some papers which were combined which is yeah it's new it's great people can do it that's how like literally science works for some part combining facts this one side of things and i was worried about like lms cannot create really fundamentally new things i also was worried about scalability of it and how easy it is to to keep up the same performance level as environment change so back to me trees yeah so lms to me really mimicking intelligence and there's a whole ecosystem of different companies who are trying to advertise tools how to mimic intelligence even better but reality is you just need to work with different architecture to reasoning and this architecture needs to be inspired from your brain how how we evolved like we have latent space which basically keeps sort of idea of your tasks on the back of your mind work with finite size of neurons you don't need the gigafactory and you know gpus and everything so your brain operates on like 20 watts and you have you have ways to select the information like signal versus noise and decode it in the different forms like it can be language it can be dance it can be singing it can be drawing like language is just a small part of this world although it's very hard and i'm like okay i i cannot just take an llm and make it better to create something new it's just incremental improvement but it's still tied to the language i need to create something which doesn't care about language but it can speak language if it wants to so it has to think in an abstract way just like your brain it thinks in an abstract way and then they have freedom what language i'm gonna speak to what am i gonna do if I drive a car, I don't need language at all, right?

33:46And the architecture we built is exactly that. It thinks in an abstract space. It's a vector space. And you could do... So all the reasoning happens in that space. And then you can have a layer of LLMs if you want to... People speak to your model or you want to speak back to people. LLM is just an interface. It's just a user interface out there. But for a body, you don't need even that, right? sometimes you need to control the circuits. Like you put AI as a brain in some robot and robot is doing some acting. You don't need any language to communicate to the circuits. EBM reasoning model can speak directly to the circuits.

34:25You need to speak on a millisecond, microsecond scale, do it, which we do. But yeah, in this case, you don't need an LLM as a user interface. And yeah, so I was thinking about this building architecture, sure having this on the back of my mind half of my life and it just came and that's it. Wow, amazing. This episode is brought to you by Persona, the B2B identity platform helping businesses verify users, fight fraud and build trust. Fraudsters are already using AI to spoof faces, voices and documents. So your defenses need to adapt just as fast. Persona helps secure some of the internet's largest and most trusted platforms with identity verification.