He Trained a Trillion-Parameter Model on Dad Jokes for $200 | Adam Grenier (Dad of 3, AI Matey)
Adam Grenier is the Founder of AI Matey, a growth and product advisor, longtime startup operator, and the creator of DadBench, an AI evaluation system built around one deceptively difficult challenge, teaching a model to write a good dad joke. He’s also a dad of three and one of the very first guests to appear on Startup Dad (#2 in fact!). Three years later, Adam is back to talk about what has changed in his family and how getting laid off from Eventbrite sent him deep into AI experimentation, model training, and reinforcement learning. We discussed: Advocating for neurodivergent kids at school: How Adam navigated two very different advocacy journeys, fighting for more support for his daughter with ADHD while deciding whether his autistic son was ready for less. Learning AI by actually building with it: Why Adam believes hands-on experimentation with new models and research can teach you things that traditional coursework might take years to reach. Training AI to tell dad jokes: How a funny side project became a crash course in reinforcement learning, model evaluation, reward design, and what actually makes a dad joke work. Getting reward hacked by your own AI: How Adam’s model learned to game his scoring system by cramming in more puns, and what Goodhart’s law teaches us about optimizing for the wrong metrics. Why getting to the point matters: How word economy became the strongest predictor of a better dad joke, and why teaching AI to commit to one idea proved more valuable than teaching it to be funny. Making model training accessible to product teams: Why Adam thinks reinforcement learning will move beyond AI researchers and into the hands of product managers and marketers who understand customers best. Where to find Adam Grenier Website: https://www.adamgrenier.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/akgrenier/ Twitter: https://x.com/AKGrenier Where to find Adam Fishman FishmanAF Newsletter: www.FishmanAFNewsletter.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamjfishman/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/startupdadpod/ X: https://x.com/fishmanaf In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Welcoming Adam Grenier, Founder of AI Matey (02:09) What changed in three years of parenting and startups (04:27) Advocating for two neurodivergent kids with different needs (08:45) How AI Matey led to training AI on dad jokes (13:33) Learning AI with goat screams and school photos (24:11) How anyone can start training AI models (29:17) What training on dad jokes actually taught the model (32:02) What actually makes a great dad joke (36:52) Putting the biggest AI models to the dad joke test (47:09) Getting reward hacked by your own AI model (51:05) Why the best dad jokes get straight to the point (53:41) Bringing humans and kids into the judging process (55:24) Why Adam fired an AI judge for being too slow (57:13) What dad jokes can teach us about building better AI (01:05:04) Can you actually teach a sense of humor? Resources From This Episode: AI Matey: https://aimatey.co/ DadBench: https://aimatey.co/dadbench/ GoatScreams: https://www.goatscreams.com/waitlist SmilePlease: https://smileplease.app/ ElevenLabs: https://elevenlabs.io/ Thinking Machines Labs: https://thinkingmachines.ai/ Inkling: https://thinkingmachines.ai/inkling/ Tinker: https://thinkingmachines.ai/tinker/ Prime Intellect: https://www.primeintellect.ai/ Unsloth: https://unsloth.ai/ DeepSeek: https://www.deepseek.com/ Gemma: https://deepmind.google/models/gemma/ Gemini: https://gemini.google.com/app GLM: https://chat.z.ai/ Grok: https://grok.com/ Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/ OpenAI: https://openai.com/ Claude: https://claude.ai/ The Book of Mormon (Musical): https://bookofmormonbroadway.com/ — Support Startup Dad For sponsorship inquiries, email: podcast@fishmana.com For Startup Dad Merch: www.startupdadshop.com
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