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A
The concept of a drone swarm is crazy and is possible now.
B
A drone swarm?
A
Yeah. Have you heard that concept?
B
No, what is that?
A
It's like one of the sort of existential threat ideas in the AI space. Imagine a bunch of small drones, like literally, you know, this big or even smaller, but each one is like a little tiny explosive. And then imagine having like computer vision model on that drone. And then imagine saying, do your drone swarm. We want you to go these people of a certain profile or even an individual person. And then you send your drones out there and the drones just zip really quick and they hit the target.
B
All right, guys, we got Michael here, co founder of the AI4 conference where we're filming out right now, man. You ready for this week?
A
Ready to go? Yeah. I mean, tired as hell, but ready to go.
B
The growth of this thing has been crazy, man. So congrats, first of all.
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, thanks. Yeah, I think we're probably one of the fastest growing tech events in the world. We started in 2018 as a 300 person event at this little hotel in Williamsburg that doesn't exist anymore.
B
Wow.
A
And now this year we'll have around 8,000 people from 85 countries.
B
Did you expect that growth?
A
No, I mean, no. I mean, in 2018 when we started, AI was cool, but it was mostly people, you know, making their own custom machine learning models on their own data for like, pretty niche use cases. And then it was really 2022 when ChatGPT came out and the sort of foundation model era began that. Yeah, this event and just the industry in general has started growing like crazy.
B
Yeah. Over 600 speakers at this one, 250 exhibitors, 85 plus countries from the attendees.
A
It's crazy, dude. I mean, the first time they ever did was just literally 300 people, like almost all in New York. Now I see people from Australia and Dubai and every corner of the world flying here to be here. It's really nuts.
B
Nuts, man. The innovation's been crazy. I just had someone that's like bringing back deceived loved ones. He's an exhibitor over reflector. Reflector.
A
So cool, so cool, so cool.
B
I mean, that would have never been possible a few years ago.
A
No, I mean, yeah. The number of things that are going to be possible, that are possible is insane. From reflect to tomorrow, you're talking to. Yeah, the woolly mammoth guy. Using a lot in their stuff to even. Yeah. I live in Austin and just seeing the Waymos drive around is not really an LLM thing, but it's still new and A sick example of AI.
B
Those are in Austin now because when I was in San Fran, I went in one.
A
Yeah. So they're in San Fran, San Francisco, Austin and then I think in Arizona somewhere. Scottsdale maybe.
B
Self driving is going to be all AI in a few years, I think. Yeah.
A
I mean I was telling you before we started, I just had my first kid and you know, she's a month, Daphne's one month old now, but I think when she's, you know, 16, normally you should learn to drive. I think the odds that she learns to drive is very slim.
B
Oh, by then, 16 years from now.
A
Yeah. There's no way that a majority of people, the majority of cars are being driven by humans. Yeah, there's just no way.
B
Well, it's more dangerous to drive a car than be a passenger in a plane.
A
Way more dangerous. And it's more dangerous now to drive in a human driven car than an AI driven car. If you look at the stats, you know, Waymo released something and they said like for every 50 million Waymo miles, the safety just data is much better for their cars than for human cars.
B
Wow.
A
Yeah.
B
That's crazy.
A
Yeah.
B
I've been in an Uber that got an accident before, so.
A
Yeah, so have I. Oh yeah. So you can see, you'll see online like, you know, some of the stuff of like, oh, the Waymo did this crazy maneuver to avoid the person. Humans just aren't doing that. We're just, we're not superhuman AI drivers. We're just not. We're tired, we're texting, we're distracted, we're stressed.
B
Absolutely. What other sectors and industries other than driving you really excited about AI integration.
A
So, you know, unique. Now with this technology, every industry is having to like figure it out. So we at this conference, there's literally 55 different track themes covering applications across pretty much every industry. You know, back in the day in 2018, 19, it was really the bigger industries were adopting finance, healthcare, retail. But now it's every industry is adopting stuff that I'm excited about. The education stuff is really cool. The idea of just completely personalized learning experiences for each person that goes at their exact pace I think is amazing.
B
I'm a huge fan of that because I hated public school because of that reason.
A
Yeah, I, I didn't really like being a student either. I think the healthcare stuff is sick, particularly the drug discovery stuff. So there's a lot of really cool applications around using AI to not automate yet, but make the drug discovery process way more efficient, way higher throughput and you have companies like Isomorphic Labs owned by Alphabet, you know, kind of positioning themselves as like digital biology companies. But the goal is to literally turn, you know, the wet lab into a digital process using AI. And there's some really sick stuff that's happening there. So, you know, the promise of that would be turning, you know, 10 year to $3 billion process to find a new drug into hopefully a year or hopefully. Hopefully eventually. It's literally immediate, personalized, just to you.
B
Wow. Well, Viome is kind of doing that, right?
A
Yeah, viome. Yeah. With the gut stuff. Yeah, they're kind of doing that. Yeah. I don't know how deep they are in terms of really building. Yeah. Like AI models for the gut stuff. But they seem cool. See, the healthy stuff's cool. The education stuff's cool. Yeah. The driving stuff's cool. The defense stuff is cool. Honestly.
B
What's the defense stuff like?
A
Like the autonomous weapon stuff. Autonomous drone stuff? Yeah, it's just cool. Obviously there's a lot of implications there around using it responsibly, but the concept, like the concept of a drone swarm is crazy and is possible now.
B
A drone swarm?
A
Yeah. Have you heard that concept?
B
No, what is that?
A
A drone swarm. So it's like one of the sort of existential threat ideas in the AI space. Imagine a bunch of small drones, like literally this big or even smaller, but each one is a little tiny explosive. And then imagine having a computer vision model on that drone. And then imagine saying to your drone swarm, we want you to go kill these people of a certain profile or even an individual person. And then you send your drones out there and the drones just zip really quick and they hit the target. Wow. And you could imagine people like, there's this one group, the Future of Life Institute, thinks about this a lot. They're a nonprofit focused on AI alignment stuff. You could imagine that. What if you had a swarm of a million drones or of a billion drones? It is kind of like a existential threat.
B
That is nuts.
A
Application of AI.
B
I didn't know you could make a bomb that small that it could fly around and just explode.
A
I don't know what the bomb innovation, what the bomb status is, honestly, but I just know the drone swarm concept is one that, you know, people stress about. It's like a long term threat.
B
Well, there's some already really advanced drones in the military, right?
A
Yeah. Like this if the Palantir does. Yeah, yeah.
B
Like it can enter a house and then target someone.
A
Wow, that's crazy. Yeah, yeah, Makes sense. And then On a lighter note, the delivery drones are also cool.
B
Yeah, let's mention the good ones too.
A
Yeah, yeah. Like Amazon using drones for delivery. Or there's this one company, I think they're here, they use drones to deliver goods, especially medical goods, in places where there just aren't roads.
B
Oh, that's cool.
A
Which is great because it's like someone's sick, we need to get them supplies. We can't really drive there in a timely fashion. Let's just use a drone and then they'll use AI to deliver it. Yeah, there's so many. I mean, there's so many applications that are cool. Yeah, it's. It's truly is endless. I mean, you know, we built civilization using human intelligence and now we're just starting to rely more and more on artificial intelligence to progress. It's. But sky's or beyond the sky is the limit.
B
Honestly, I feel like I'm finding out new things all the time about AI. That just blows my mind.
A
Yeah, yeah, it's not going to stop. I mean, the rate of progress of these models and just how capable they are is not slowing down. I mean, the one, one thing I'm also super excited about is the large world models. Have you heard of that concept? So like, an LLM would be like a ChatGPT or, you know, Claude or Gemini or whatever. These are all large language models. They're trained mostly on a text database and now they're multimodal. So there's text and there's image. And, you know, some have video now, but now you have people working on what are. They're called large world models. And so on day three of the conference on Wednesday, we have Fei Fei Li speaking. Fei Fei became kind of famous for, in the AI industry, at least for creating the ImageNet conference, which kind of popularized deep learning. And then Jeff Hinton won her conference. Who's speaking tomorrow? But anyway, so she's always been super into computer vision. She started a company called World Labs recently. She raised like 230 million bucks or something. And they're focused on building large world models. So the concept is really just a foundation model for navigating the physical world.
B
Navigating the physical world, yeah.
A
So right now OpenAI has their GPT series of models, GPT5 being the most recent that they released. And then that's called a foundation model because a lot of other people can just tap into that API and build off of that foundation model without having to train.
B
Got it.
A
Their own model, which is super expensive and time consuming and Hard, honestly. So now you have that foundation model which becomes really just the foundation of all these other apps that are built off the API. But you can't, for example, take GPT5 and build an application to get a humanoid robot to navigate the world. You can't. You can use GPT5 as a foundation model to build an application to build a chatbot on your website. That you can do. But you can't take that foundation model and teach Boston Dynamics humanoid robot to go pick up your groceries and bring them to your house.
B
Got it. So I see what you're saying. Nothing physical.
A
Yeah. But the vision of this large world model concept, which is going to. It's going to work, is going to be, you know, is to create, you know, an analogous model to the foundation model of an LLM like ChatGPT for just navigating the physical world. So then people can just start building people and companies can start building applications to just get robots to navigate physical space, to do the million trillion things we would want them to do in physical space.
B
That'd be a big step. Because that's a huge thing, right? Issue right now. Right?
A
It would be a big step. I mean.
C
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B
Cost of similar brands.
C
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A
Yeah, it would be a huge step. I mean, you know, human civilization, we built it for like the human form.
B
Right.
A
And so now you have these companies like Tesla, you know, on their Tesla bot or Optimus, whatever they call it now. Boston Dynamics, that company figure we have a company here actually, with a humanoid robot that's going to be on stage tomorrow.
B
I just had him on the show.
A
Oh, nice. They're going to do a really fun demo tomorrow during the keynote.
B
They went viral at ces, right?
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's the name again?
B
I should know this. They came on a few days ago.
A
And then I should know too. They're literally.
B
Yeah, they're based in Vegas.
A
I'm like, just blanking. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, these humanoid robots, like, the hardware is there. Like, these robots are so capable, they can lift stuff, they can walk, they can do backflips.
B
What?
A
Yeah, yeah, look up the videos of like Boston Dynamics Atlas robot. It's a humanoid robot doing backflips.
B
Wow.
A
But yeah, so the hardware is there now. It's just about getting the software to catch up. And these, you know, large world models could be the answer to that. And then, you know, there's a world where like five years from now, we literally just like a lot of us have humanoid robots in our houses delivering groceries, doing, you know, the last mile for delivery.
B
Yeah, it'd be like an assistant or.
A
A maid, almost be an assistant house manager.
B
That's driving.
A
Drive the kids to school in your, in your human non AI car that you don't. So you don't have to replace it to get an AI driven. An AI powered car.
B
It's like a black mirror episode.
A
It is a black mirror episode. I mean, this whole thing is going to kind of be like that, this whole AI transition. And it's just, you know, it's happening, it is happening quickly in large part because every new generation of models of that come out is enabling the next generation. So it's like right now it's something like, you know, 80% of code, new code that gets written is using AI coding assistance.
B
Wow.
A
Like, you know, things like a replit or whatever. And, and, but, you know, these, the AI coding assistants are powered by whatever the latest AI models are. And so when the next generation comes out, that is GPT5, that is going to make the, you know, AI assisted coding better, which is then going to write better, more efficient code.
B
You're good.
A
There we go. And it is kind of a vicious cycle in terms of it's getting faster and faster. And not only is AI writing the code that is going to lead to the next generation, it's also helping design the chips. So if you listen to like Nvidia or arm, like they're using AI to help design these chips. So the next generation of chips is also becoming dependent on the current generation of AI. So it's just like it's a crazy spiral. We don't know exactly where. But that's why you have people like Emmett, who you're talking to tomorrow, who are thinking a lot about this alignment problem of how do we make sure humans and AI play nice with each other.
B
Yeah. It's so nuts because as a. You're a parent now. And as a soon to be parent, I'm thinking about what skills do I want to teach my kids that are going to be relevant when they're adults. And I remember when I was growing up, my dad wanted me to learn programming.
A
Yeah.
B
But now that's like almost not needed, right?
A
Yeah. I mean I wouldn't. Yeah. With my kid Daphne, would I be like, daphne, go learn to code? No, I wouldn't. I would not say that. Yeah, I think. Yeah.
B
What?
A
Yeah, the skills are changing. Do you, do you need to learn to drive? No. Do you learn to code? No.
B
Crazy.
A
Do you need to learn to critically think about all the things that we learn to know? Like the, you know our keynote this morning, the woman from the teachers union.
B
Yep.
A
She was talking about how stress of hers is critical thinking. And so she stressed like, oh, these kids are going to just use ChatGPT to do their assignments and then they're not going to learn to think critically. Which I think is definitely something that needs to be thought through and valid concern. But at the same time I'm kind of like if we have a technology that's reliable that can do all the things that we currently think are critical thinking, maybe we just let the technology do all those things and then find the new bucket of things to think about.
B
Interesting.
A
Yeah. It's like, it's like a good example is with Google Maps, before digital Maps or before even MapQuest, which was like the printed version you would do.
B
Yeah.
A
People knew directions, they memorized directions. Now I live in Austin. I literally, I can probably get like 10 places. The rest I just plug it in.
B
Same way in Vegas. For me, I need my Google Maps.
A
Yeah.
B
Screwed.
A
Yeah. I'd rather think about other stuff, but.
B
I grew up in Jersey. My dad could pull out a map and drive all the way to the shore from an hour and a half.
A
That's crazy.
B
It's nuts.
A
That but was as efficient as the. As the Google Maps. I don't know.
B
He probably made some wrong turns. I had no idea.
A
Maybe he was having more fun.
B
Yeah.
A
I do get sometimes I do get stressed sometimes because you make a wrong turn off Google Maps and you're like, oh, shit, I made a wrong turn. This is horrible. But it's like, who cares?
B
Yeah. That's like four minutes.
A
Yeah, exactly.
B
Yeah. No, it's an interesting thought because growing up in school, they taught us, like, not to use calculators. Right. Then we had calculators.
A
I know. It's like, why we have the calculators. Use the calculators.
B
And now they're teaching kids not to use AI, But I think that's kind of backwards.
A
It's definitely. It's definitely a little confusing. And by the end of the day, we're just all figuring it out. One good thing also, that education woman mentioned is like. So her union, it's like a union that represents 1.8 million people. It's like a huge teacher's union. They partnered with, I think she said, Microsoft opening Anthropic, and they, I guess those three companies funded, like, an AI education lab in New York where I think they're going to just be figuring out, like, how do we use AI?
B
Oh, wow.
A
For education? So people are, you know, asking the question, and I think we'll have some pretty cool answers.
B
Wow, 1.8 million teachers.
A
Yeah. It's crazy.
B
That's incredible.
A
Yeah, it's a huge.
B
And she's integrating AI. That's impressive.
A
It's really cool. Yeah, yeah.
B
There's some great speakers here, man. You did really well with this lineup. I mean, Emma Sheer, G2 Perel, Ben Lam, faithfully Godfather. I can't miss him.
A
Yeah, Jeff's. Jeff's the best. People love Jeff. Yeah, yeah. I mean, he, you know, he literally invented neural networks in the 80s, and then for the next, like, roughly 30 years, they weren't that cool.
B
Yeah.
A
And then when he, you know, when he eventually figured out deep learning, just, you know, multi, multi, multi layered neural networks and how valuable those were compared to shallower networks. That's what really kicked off this whole wave, to be honest. And he figured that out at fei Fei Li's ImageNet conference. It's a really cool connection.
B
That's the importance of events like this. Right. Bringing the smartest people together.
A
Totally. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, you know, this whole AI thing, whether it goes good or bad, is up to us humans. And literally just talking about it and communicating about how we're approaching this huge transition for society is critical.
B
Yeah, yeah, I know. The opportunity is massive because when I see mark Zuckerberg paying $250 million to hire one person for an AI role, it's like, what is what is going on here?
A
Yeah, I mean, it is wild, you know, whether that's going to become the market rate or not, I don't know.
B
I don't think for everyone.
A
But yeah, I think what he did with that, I mean, it was a really interesting, like, marketing move to basically just be like, meta is really serious about, you know, AI. No, they, you know, made the investment in scale of like 15 billion for 49% of it. And then he started paying those few researchers a shit ton of money. And yes, like the legitimacy of the salaries aside, it's just, it shows like, okay, Meta is going to be really serious about AI moving forward.
B
Yeah.
A
And this, this was a strong signal.
B
He's trying to get the Avengers over there.
A
Pretty much. Yeah. Yeah, he's trying to get the Avengers over there. Yeah. I wonder how Jan feels about it.
B
Who's Jan?
A
Jan Lecan. He. They're like kind of their head of AI, or has been for years. Another very famous person in the AI community. He actually, him and Hinton did a lot of work together. Jan, I'm pretty sure, was the lead inventor of convolutional neural networks, which was originally critical for image recognition.
B
Got it.
A
But yeah, Meta, I'll be really interested to see what they come out with and if they stick open source, because they've been all open source with Llama, but maybe now with all this investment, they'll go more closed source to mimic the other big models. Yeah, we'll see.
B
Where are you at on that whole debate with open source? First, closed source, you don't care.
A
I mean, the coolest models that I use day to day and that, you know, most people are talking about are the closed source ones, you know, chatgpt, Claw, Gemini, Perplexity, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But the open source ones are definitely powerful because they let people do whatever they want. I mean, they let people do whatever they want because right now you can't, you know, build on top of GPT5 whatever application you want. They have guidelines and restrictions which does limit creativity inherently. Yeah. Like I'm sure you've noticed, sometimes you'll prompt, you know, like ChatGPT or whatever LLM you use, and you'll get like a. I can't answer that. It's against my guidelines.
B
I got that about Epstein Island.
A
Yeah, but like, you're right. But you should be able to talk about that with your LLM if you want to. It's not like, who cares?
B
I literally asked for, can you name me some survivors from Epstein Island. It said I can't. Right.
A
Which it should answer that. There's nothing wrong with that. But at the end of the day, it still is software and it is still behaving based on its prompt. Its pre prompt. So that's kind of an annoying example. Whereas maybe you want to make a model that knows all the Epstein stuff because people are super interested in it and you could really only build that off of a open source model.
B
No, I was trying to get one of them on the show just to hear their perspective and it wouldn't provide me any details. Wow, it was crazy.
A
Yeah. That is crazy.
B
Yeah. Do you think this AGI thing is overhyped or do you think it will actually change the world when it comes out?
A
I think the funny thing about it is just that the definition keeps changing the goal, the goalpost keeps moving. So, you know, back in the day. So Alan Turing was, you know, the original, the ultimate OG for this space. Alan Turing essentially invented computer science, or formalized it at least, and he essentially invented the concept of AI. He wrote a paper, I believe this is 1950 paper, that was his super famous AI paper. In it he posed this concept of the Turing Test, which I'm sure you've heard of. Yeah, yeah. And the whole premise was as soon as we can have a human talk to a machine and the human can't decipher whether or not it's talking to a human or machine, AI is like arrived. And we have super smart AGI type technology. But now we've passed that turning test, obliterated. And people are still, now we're still pursuing AGI. So the goalpost keeps changing and I think the reality is just like artificial intelligence, it's always going to look a little bit different than human intelligence and we're always going to experience it just a little bit differently. Whereas we keep trying to compare it to ourselves with this AGI concept, which you can't fault us for because what else do we have to compare it to? But I think it's always going to look a little bit different. And I don't really think. I think we're just going to keep moving the goalpost, to be perfectly honest, and it's going to keep getting more powerful, more general purpose, more amazing. But I don't know if we're really going to get to this moment where we're like, now it's.
B
Now it's arrived, develop a consciousness.
A
Yeah, I mean, like, yeah, like that. The whole conscious debate. I mean, you could do that debate forever, but we don't even have consciousness pinned down in humans.
B
Right. We don't defined fully. It's not been proven in humans too.
A
Yeah, we don't know.
B
We don't know.
A
We're just some physical pattern doing cool stuff.
B
Yeah.
A
And AI is going to be similar. Some physical pattern doing cool stuff, a lot of which we can't do.
B
That's a good point. I haven't heard that argument. But if we can't even prove it in humans, how do you expect to prove AI is conscious?
A
Yeah, good luck. But it's going to keep getting crazier, that's for damn sure. And it's going to keep doing just crazier and crazier stuff. Like, one thing that Demis, the founder of DeepMind, often points to is like, can we get AI to generate original science, for example?
B
Original science?
A
Yeah, like people like Newton or Einstein or Teller or Dirac.
B
Oh, their own laws and stuff.
A
Yeah. They, you know, observed our reality and extrapolated math from it, essentially that we could then use to make predictions about how reality behaves. And can we get an AI to do that? Is a really interesting question. And right now it's like unclear. Like, there's some little early examples, but we definitely haven't figured out how to like automate physics, like automate scientific discovery yet with AI. But that would be. That would be sick. That'd be nuts. That would be nuts. That would be nuts.
B
That'd be nuts. Because right now it's all the prompting. Like the human still has to put in a lot of effort into the AI.
A
Humans have to put a lot of effort into the AI. And there's just. There's no prompt right now that we can give to really get like some original observation about reality out from AI. So there's just also just a model limitation that the model just doesn't understand or isn't able to observe our reality, like sufficiently enough to really draw its own conclusions. That makes sense.
B
Yeah, for sure. Michael, what's next for AI4man? Where could people find you and come to a future event?
A
Yeah, thanks for asking. We just can keep getting bigger this year. Yeah, around 8,000. Next year we'll probably have around 12,000 people. And so we've fully outgrown the MGM now. We've been here since 22. And so we're moving next year to the Venetian, still in Las Vegas.
B
Nice.
A
But just a much bigger space. So yeah, we'll be here at the Venetian August, I think, third to six at the Venetian. Yeah, bigger, bigger, better, more awesome. More time. We're going to have a thousand speakers next year.
B
Holy crap. That might be a record or conference. I don't know. You got to call up Guinness.
A
I mean, I think there's just so much shit to talk about with AI it's like with most conferences, there isn't that much to talk about, but AI is literally touching every part of society. And so we need to bring people from. From everywhere to make it a truly AI for everything show.
B
Yeah. Well, thanks for having me here. I met some great people, and I look forward to getting to know.
A
Yeah. Good to meet you.
B
Yeah. Check them out, guys. Check out the AI4 conference. See you next time.
C
I hope you guys are enjoying the show. Please don't forget to like and subscribe.
B
It helps the show a lot with the algorithm. Thank you.
Episode #1726 – January 1, 2026
Host: Sean Kelly
Guest: Michael Weiss, Co-Founder of the AI4 Conference
In this episode of Digital Social Hour, Sean Kelly welcomes Michael Weiss, AI entrepreneur and co-founder of the rapidly expanding AI4 Conference. They dive deep into the evolving landscape of artificial intelligence: its explosive industry growth, the life-changing and sometimes unsettling uses emerging today, and what the future holds over the next decade. The conversation touches on everything from self-driving cars, personalized education, defense, humanoid robots, AI alignment problems, open vs. closed-source models, and the elusive idea of artificial general intelligence (AGI).
Timestamps: 00:43–01:40
Quote:
“We started in 2018 as a 300 person event at this little hotel in Williamsburg that doesn’t exist anymore. And now, this year, we’ll have around 8,000 people from 85 countries.” — Michael Weiss [00:54]
Timestamps: 01:52–05:44
Quote:
“The idea of just completely personalized learning experiences for each person that goes at their exact pace I think is amazing.” — Michael Weiss [04:16]
Timestamps: 02:23–03:42, 13:35–16:33
Quote:
"There’s no way that...the majority of cars are being driven by humans. Yeah, there's just no way." — Michael Weiss [02:53]
Timestamps: 05:44–07:51
Quote:
"Imagine a bunch of small drones...each one is a little tiny explosive... and then imagine saying to your drone swarm, 'We want you to go kill these people of a certain profile...' It is kind of like an existential threat." — Michael Weiss [06:09]
Timestamps: 08:22–11:06
Quote:
"But the vision of this large world model concept...is to create...an analogous model to the foundation model of an LLM like ChatGPT for just navigating the physical world." — Michael Weiss [10:40]
Timestamps: 14:15–15:20
Quote:
“Not only is AI writing the code that is going to lead to the next generation, it’s also helping design the chips...So the next generation of chips is also becoming dependent on the current generation of AI.” — Michael Weiss [14:42]
Timestamps: 15:20–18:18
Quote:
"If we have a technology that's reliable that can do all the things that we currently think are critical thinking, maybe we just let the technology do all those things and then find the new bucket of things to think about." — Michael Weiss [16:31]
Timestamps: 18:21–20:43
Quotes:
“Events like this... bringing the smartest people together.” — Sean Kelly [19:00]
"Meta is going to be really serious about AI moving forward...This was a strong signal." — Michael Weiss [20:09]
Timestamps: 20:57–22:21
Memorable Moment:
“I literally asked, ‘Can you name me some survivors from Epstein Island?’ It said, ‘I can’t.’” — Sean Kelly [21:53]
"Which it should answer that. There’s nothing wrong with that." — Michael Weiss [21:56]
Timestamps: 22:28–24:47
Quote:
“I think we’re just going to keep moving the goalpost, to be perfectly honest, and it’s going to keep getting more powerful, more general purpose, more amazing.” — Michael Weiss [24:16]
Timestamps: 24:47–26:19
Quote:
"There's just no prompt right now that we can give to really get like some original observation about reality out from AI." — Michael Weiss [25:54]
Timestamps: 26:19–27:13
| Segment | Timestamp | |-------------------------------------|--------------------| | Opening: Concept of drone swarms | 00:00–00:43 | | AI4 growth & global scale | 00:43–01:40 | | AI innovation examples | 01:52–05:44 | | Self-driving & future skills | 02:37–03:42, 13:35–16:33 | | Defense: Drones, threats, and drones for good | 05:44–07:51 | | Large world models & robotics | 08:22–13:13 | | AI coding and chip design cycle | 14:15–15:20 | | AI’s impact on education | 15:20–18:18 | | Talent wars & open vs. closed debate| 18:21–22:21 | | AGI, consciousness, and creativity | 22:28–26:19 | | AI4’s future and closing remarks | 26:19–27:13 |
This episode offers a sweeping look at both the hopes and anxieties surrounding AI’s rapid progress. Michael Weiss paints a picture of vast opportunity—across medicine, education, and even daily life—as well as serious risks and unresolved questions. The conversation reflects both awe and urgency: as technological waves crest ever higher, it is human perspectives, ethics, and collaboration that will ultimately shape the future.