State of AI in 2026: LLMs, Coding, Scaling Laws, China, Agents, GPUs, AGI | Lex Fridman Podcast #490
Key technical shifts include the dominance of Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) for reasoning, the rise of text diffusion for efficiency, and the critical importance of data quality over raw scale.summaryText Diffusion Models: While autoregressive models (like GPT) dominate, text diffusion models are emerging as a potentially faster and cheaper alternative for generating long sequences of text, particularly for coding ditakeaway














