The AI revolution has begun – the product of a seventy-year quest by scientists, mathematicians, and visionaries who set out to build machines that could think. But what began as a fringe idea has now become one of the most powerful forces of the 21st century. This is the story of that journey: its rivalries, its competing visions of utopia and apocalypse, and the race to build what may be humanity’s last invention.
Last refreshed: ⓘ
Follow this podcast in the Metacast mobile app to refresh it and see new episodes.
Don't just listen to podcasts. Learn from them with transcripts, summaries, and chapters for every episode. Skim, search, and bookmark insights. Learn more
In this episode we talk with Daniel Alejandro Moreno-Gama, the man who was recently arrested and charged with attempting to kill Sam Altman. Several months before the attack, our team contacted a young man posting on Discord under the handle "Butlerian Jihadist," who referenced “Luigi-ing tech CEOs” to our producer. He agreed to an interview and to answer questions about his background and how he came to believe that AGI must be stopped for humanity to survive. To leave a comment and sign up for...
This episode was originally reported on our podcast Reflector. You can hear this story and many more by visiting us here What if the next great leap in computing wasn't made of silicon — but of living human brain cells? Reporter Greg Warner takes us inside the lab of Hon Weng Chong, an Australian computer engineer who has built a biological computer: a device that houses actual human neurons in a petri dish, teaches them to play Pong using reward and punishment, and is now being sold to medical ...
In this episode, we dive into the views of the people who think the AGI race is being oversold, misunderstood, or misframed. As you’ll hear, we break them down into three distinct camps: “AI Is Grift” (a tech-industry con), “Wrong Path” (LLMs can’t reach AGI without new ideas), and “AI as Normal Technology” (powerful, but adoption will be slow and institution-bound). Through interviews with Ed Zitron, Gary Marcus, and Princeton’s Arvind Narayanan, the episode argues that the real fight isn’t jus...
Today, Andy interviews Steve Bannon and his War Room tech editor, Joe Allen. They make the populist right-wing case for breaking up Big Tech, forcing transparency on frontier AI labs, and blocking “AI amnesty” efforts that would preempt state oversight. Bannon frames AI as a species-level inflection point driven by what he calls “broligarch” elites pushing “techno-feudalism,” warning that the public is underwriting opaque labs while losing jobs, leverage and eventually autonomy. LINKS: War Room ...
Ezra Klein – New York Times opinion columnist and an influential voice on the American left – joins us at a hinge moment in the A.I. revolution. As artificial intelligence accelerates, Klein examines what’s at stake politically, socially, and morally: the role that government should play in shaping this technology, the disruptions he believes matter most, and how to think clearly when the landscape is shifting so rapidly. LINKS: Ezra Klein’s book Abundance The Ezra Klein Show This Changes Everyt...
Meet the accelerationists: a rising movement that believes expediting AI development is not only inevitable but morally necessary – humanity’s best chance at transcending its limits. What happens when the world’s most powerful technologists treat AI progress as a duty rather than a danger? THIS EPISODE FEATURES: Olivier Oullier, Guido de Croon, Alex Williams, Reid Hoffman, Guillaume Verdon/“Beff Jezos” LINKS: Beff Jezos/Guillaume Verdon’s Twitter David Sinclair’s website Olivier Oullier’s Compan...
The episode traces the AI safety movement's beginnings to a 2015 gathering in Puerto Rico, where pioneers sought to align AI development with human well-being. It reveals how the initial commitment to cooperative, safe AI has largely succumbed to geopolitical and corporate competition, compromising principles like race avoidance. Through interviews with "AI Scouts" Liv Boeree and William MacAskill, the discussion delves into the catastrophic risks of unmanaged AI, the immense potential for peace and abundance, and the critical need for "long-termism" and building wisdom alongside technological power to ensure a beneficial future.
This episode explores how extreme techno-optimists evolved into AI doomers, fearing superintelligence could threaten humanity. It traces the movement's origins from 1980s Extropians and the pivotal role of Eliezer Yudkowsky. Guests Connor Leahy and Nate Soares detail concerns like the AI 'black box' problem, unintended behaviors, and the alignment challenge, arguing for a global halt to the AI race to prevent catastrophic outcomes.
This episode explores humanity's initial, often surprising, encounters with advanced AI, detailing Sam Altman's shifting stance on regulation amid the global AI race and a journalist's unsettling experience with a "misaligned" chatbot. It also features AI pioneers Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton, who reveal their newfound anxieties about AI's existential risks, prompting them to advocate for divergent strategies to ensure humanity's safe coexistence with increasingly intelligent machines.
The episode details the paradoxical journey of AI pioneers like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Dario Amodei, who, despite loudly warning about AI's existential dangers, became the very people racing to develop it. Driven by a belief that they could build safe AI before others created dangerous versions, their competition led to the founding of OpenAI and the ultimate release of ChatGPT, fundamentally transforming the technological landscape. It also explores the internal conflicts and philosophical debates that shaped the early development of these powerful systems.
The episode chronicles AI's journey through games, starting with IBM's Deep Blue beating Kasparov in chess and Watson winning Jeopardy, highlighting the limitations of brute-force AI. It then delves into the contrarian work of Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, who championed neural networks despite initial rejection. Their breakthroughs in backpropagation, coupled with big data and gaming GPUs, led to the transformative ImageNet victory. This success spurred the quest for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) by pioneers like Demis Hassabis and his company DeepMind, ultimately igniting a global AI race.
This episode traces the journey of artificial intelligence from its conceptual birth with Alan Turing's wartime code-breaking and early predictions of thinking machines to the present-day impact of ChatGPT. It delves into the 1956 Dartmouth conference where the field was formally named, the divergent paths of "symbolist" and "connectionist" AI, and how Cold War funding fueled early optimism. The discussion also covers the "AI winter," I.J. Good's prescient ideas of superintelligence, and the profound, double-edged influence of science fiction—especially HAL 9000 from "2001: A Space Odyssey"—in shaping public understanding and motivation regarding AI's potential existential threats and transformative promise.
A tip alleging a Silicon Valley conspiracy leads to a much bigger story: the race to build artificial general intelligence — within the next few years — and the factions vying to accelerate it, to stop it, or to prepare for its arrival. FEATURING: Mike Brock, Kevin Roose, Geoffrey Hinton, Connor Leahy, William MacAskill, Liv Boeree, Sam Harris, and Yoshua Bengio LINKS: Sam Harris 2016 TED Talk, Can We Build AI Without Losing Control Over It Nick Bostrom's book Superintelligence Sam Harris' Makin...
For over seventy years, technologists have dreamed of building a true “thinking machine.” An artificial intelligence so powerful it would reshape every aspect of human life. Would it unlock unimaginable abundance? Or bring about our destruction? Today, many of the people closest to the latest A.I. breakthroughs believe that moment has arrived. Some are walking away from their jobs to sound the alarm. Others argue it can’t be stopped, and the only choice is to unite as a society and try to get re...
