We’re excited to welcome to the podcast Dr. Angel Acosta, an expert on healing-centered education and leadership. Angel runs the Acosta Institute which helps communities process trauma and build environments for people to thrive. He also facilitates leadership programs at the Garrison Institute that support the next generation of contemplative leaders. With his background in social sciences, curriculum design, and adult education, Angel has been thinking deeply about how artificial intelligence intersects with mindfulness, social justice and education. In our conversat ..read more

We're excited to welcome Doug Belshaw to the show today. Doug is a founding member of the We Are Open Co-op which helps organizations with sensemaking and digital transformation. Doug coined the term "serendipity surface" to describe cultivating an attitude of curiosity and increasing the chance encounters we have by putting ourselves out there. We adopted the term quite some time ago and were eager to talk with Doug about how he thinks about serendipity surfaces in the age of generative AI. As former Head of Web Literacy at Mozilla and now currently pursuing a master's degree in systems think ..read more

We’re excited to welcome Richard Kerris, Vice President of Developer Relations and GM of Media & Entertainment at NVIDIA, to the show today. Richard has had an extensive career working with creators and developers across film, music, gaming, and more. He offers valuable insights into how AI and machine learning are transforming creative tools and workflows. In particular, Richard shares his perspective on how these advanced technologies are democratizing access to high-end capabilities, putting more power into the hands of a broader range of storytellers. He discusses the implications of t ..read more

We're excited to welcome Tyler Marghetis, Assistant Professor of Cognitive & Information Sciences at the University of California, Merced, to the show today. Tyler studies what he calls the "lulls and leaps" or "ruts and ruptures" of human imagination and experience. He's fascinated by how we as humans can get stuck in certain patterns of thinking and acting, but then also occasionally experience radical transformations in our perspectives. In our conversation, Tyler shares with us some of his lab's fascinating research into understanding and even predicting these creative breakthroug ..read more

Why is scientific progress slowing down? That's a question that's been on the minds of many. But before we dive into that, let's ponder this—how do we even know that scientific progress is decelerating? And in an era where machines are capable of understanding complexities that sometimes surpass human cognition, how should we approach the future of knowledge? Joining us in this exploration is Professor James Evans from the University of Chicago. As the director of the Knowledge Lab at UChicago, Professor Evans is at the forefront of integrating machine learning into the scientific process. His ..read more

Few understand how to anticipate major technology shifts in the enterprise better than today's guest, Ed Sim. Ed is a pioneer in the world of venture capital, specifically focusing on enterprise software and infrastructure since 1996. He founded Boldstart in 2010 to invest at the earliest stages of enterprise software companies, growing the firm from $1M to around $375M today. So where does an experienced investor who has seen countless tech waves come and go place his bets in this new AI-first future? That’s the key topic we dive into today. While AI forms a core part of our di ..read more

One of our research obsessions is Edge AI through which we study opportunities to build and deploy AI on a computing device at the edge of a network. The premise is that AI in the cloud benefits from scale but is challenged by cost and privacy and Edge AI solves many of these challenges by eliminating cloud computing costs and keeping data within secure environments. Given this interest, we were excited to talk with Rodrigo Liang, the Co-Founder and CEO of SambaNova Systems which has built a platform to deliver enterprise grade chips, software, and models in a fully integrated system, purpose ..read more

One of our long-time subscribers recently said to us: “What I love about you is that you’re regularly talking about things three years ahead of everyone else.” That inspired us to look back through our catalog of conversations to see which ones we think are most relevant now. Today, we're revisiting one of our most thought-provoking episodes, originally recorded in April 2022, featuring Barbara Tversky, the author of "Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought." This episode is great way to start 2024 because we are all about to experience what are known as Large Multimodal Models or LMMs, mode ..read more

In this episode, we speak with cognitive neuroscientist Stephen Fleming about theories of consciousness and how they relate to artificial intelligence. We discuss key concepts like global workspace theory, higher order theories, computational functionalism, and how neuroscience research on consciousness in humans can inform our understanding of whether machines may ever achieve consciousness. In particular, we talk with Steve about a recent ⁠research paper⁠, Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence, which he co-authored with Patrick Butlin, Robert Long, Yoshua Bengio, and several oth ..read more

If you’ve used a large language model, you’ve likely had one or more moments of amazement as the tool immediately responded with impressive content from its massive data cosmos training set. But you’ve likely also had moments of confusion or disillusionment as the tool responded with irrelevant or incorrect responses, displaying a lack of reasoning. A recent research paper from Meta caught our eye because it proposes a new mechanism called System 2 Attention which “leverages the ability of LLMs to reason in natural language and follow instructions in order to decide what to attend to ..read more