Voyage AI founder Tengyu Ma: frontier models at Ultra settings are still fundamentally dumb
lateinteraction · x · 2026-09-20
Tengyu Ma (lateinteraction), founder of Voyage AI and Stanford professor, describes the daily agony of extracting merely OK work from frontier models even at "Ultra" settings — requiring levels of detailed context and elaborate feedback he has never given a human, despite feedback being his literal job. His verdict: as of at least September 2026, public frontier models, like those of 2020, "know a whole lot but are fundamentally quite dumb and unadaptive" — a sharp counterpoint to AI-replacing-work narratives.
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