Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning podcast

Player FM - Internet Radio Done Right

เพิ่มแล้วเมื่อ threeปีที่ผ่านมา

เนื้อหาจัดทำโดย Razib Khan เนื้อหาพอดแคสต์ทั้งหมด รวมถึงตอน กราฟิก และคำอธิบายพอดแคสต์ได้รับการอัปโหลดและจัดหาให้โดยตรงจาก Razib Khan หรือพันธมิตรแพลตฟอร์มพอดแคสต์ของพวกเขา หากคุณเชื่อว่ามีบุคคลอื่นใช้งานที่มีลิขสิทธิ์ของคุณโดยไม่ได้รับอนุญาต คุณสามารถปฏิบัติตามขั้นตอนที่แสดงไว้ที่นี่ https://th.player.fm/legal

All About Change

1
Chris Nowinski - Protecting Athletes from Head Injuries & Preventing CTE 27:28

9 วันที่แล้ว27:28

ลิสต์เล่นในภายหลัง

ลิสต์

ถูกใจ

ที่ถูกใจแล้ว

27:28

Chris Nowinski is a former football player at Harvard University and professional wrestler with WWE, World Wrestling Entertainment. After enduring a career-ending head injury, Chris has dedicated his professional life to serving patients and families affected by brain trauma, particularly Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, a progressive neurodegenerative disease that develops after repeated head injuries. Jay and Chris discuss the state of head injuries in American athletics, the difference between advocating for head safety at youth and professional levels, Chris’ newest research, and much more. Episode Chapters (00:00) Intro (00:50) changes in the culture around concussions in the past two decades (02:39) padded helmet technology (03:55) concussion reporting in the NFL (10:35) Chris’ career path and concussion history (14:52) connecting with activists who haven’t themselves suffered a traumatic brain injury (17:42) SHAAKE - a new sign to identify concussions (20:53) Unions can help players advocate for safety policies (23:10) final thoughts and goodbye For video episodes, watch on www.youtube.com/@therudermanfamilyfoundation Stay in touch: X: @JayRuderman | @RudermanFdn LinkedIn: Jay Ruderman | Ruderman Family Foundation Instagram: All About Change Podcast | Ruderman Family Foundation To learn more about the podcast, visit https://allaboutchangepodcast.com/…

Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

แบ่งปัน

หน้าโฮมของซีรีส์•Feed

Razib Khan engages a diverse array of thinkers on all topics under the sun. Genetics, history, and politics. See: http://razib.substack.com/

200 ตอน

#Science #Biology #Social Sciences #Culture #History #Politics #Razib Khans

Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

updated 2 วันที่แล้ว

แบ่งปัน

หน้าโฮมของซีรีส์•Feed

Razib Khan engages a diverse array of thinkers on all topics under the sun. Genetics, history, and politics. See: http://razib.substack.com/

200 ตอน

#Science #Biology #Social Sciences #Culture #History #Politics #Razib Khans

ทุกตอน

Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

1
Charles Murray: 50 years on the public scene 59:57

2 วันที่แล้ว59:57

59:57

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning , friend of the podcast, Charles Murray returns to chat with Razib again. Murray has been a public intellectual and scholar since the 1970’s. He is the author of Losing Ground , The Bell Curve , Human Accomplishment , Real Education , Coming Apart and What it means to be a libertarian and Human Diversity , among others. Born in 1943 in Newton, Iowa, Murray has a BA from Harvard, an MA and PhD from MIT, and did a 1960’s stint in the Peace Corps in Thailand. He has held positions at the American Institutions for Research, the Manhattan Institute and the American Enterprise Institute. More than four years after their last conversation , and seven years after his official retirement, Murray reflects with Razib on where he sees America going in the next decade, and what has surprised him about the last 25 years. Razib asks what it is like to be a long-standing “Never Trump conservative” and a libertarian in Trump’s populist America. They also discuss the end of the “awokening” that began in the mid-2010s, and whether Murray’s long exile from notice and acknowledgement from mainstream opinion-leaders and tastemakers is at an end. Murray also addresses the ideological fractures he sees on the right, and how America will deal with the last generation of mass immigration that has altered the US’ demographic balance. They also discuss how taboo it still is to talk about group differences in cognitive performance, and whether America will be able to face the reality of demographics and the social consequences thereof in the 21st century.…

Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

1
Titus Techera: Post-Modern Conservative in a post-national Europe 1:26:24

8 วันที่แล้ว1:26:24

1:26:24

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning , Razib talks to Titus Techera , a Romanian living in Budapest, but commenting extensively on American and European culture. He is the Executive Director of the American Cinema Foundation, International Coordinator of the National Conservatism Conference and is a primary contributor to the Substack PostModernConservative . Techera also hosts a podcast for the American Cinema Foundation. Razib first talks to Techera about the 2024 Romanian presidential election that was overturned by the courts over accusations of Russian interference. Techera explains the social and cultural context of the candidate initially declared victorious against a backdrop of Romanian society’s typical stock characters. Techera also discusses the tension between having a nation-state with a distinctive character and becoming part of the broader EU project that is attempting to forge unity across 27 countries. He then addresses what a “Postmodern Conservative” is in the context of the arts. Perhaps most importantly, PostModern Conservatives take the 20th century and the modernist period seriously; they are not simply reactionaries who want to return to the 19th century. Conservatives who value the arts and culture cannot simply roll the tape back; they have to engage with what has come before. Razib and Techera also consider how inferences from the sciences, like the rejection of the “blank slate,” might influence the arts. They also discuss their disagreements about the latest Dune films, Techera prefers David Lynch’s attempt to adapt the book in 1984 to Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 version.…

Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

1
Nathan Lents: Sex, truths and gender wars 2:09:01

9 วันที่แล้ว2:09:01

2:09:01

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Nathan Lents about his new book, The Sexual Evolution: A Provocative Look at Sexual Behavior Through the Lens of Evolution . A professor at John Jay College in New York City, Lents earned a Ph.D. in Pharmacological and Physiological Sciences in 2004 at Saint Louis University School of Medicine, and did his postdoctoral fellowship in cancer genomics at NYU Medical Center. Lents’ research ranges from the evolution of molecular mechanisms to behavioral ecology. He is also the author of Not So Different: Finding Human Nature in Animals and Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes . Lents reached out to Razib after hearing his podcast with Conn Carroll , about his book Sex and the Citizen: How the Assault on Marriage Is Destroying Democracy . Lents felt that Carroll overemphasized the role of monogamy during humanity’s long forager phase, and more precisely, failed to distinguish social monogamy and genetic monogamy. As noted in The Sexual Evolution , many socially monogamous species, like most birds, engage in enough extra-pair copulation so that genetic fidelity is considerably lower than 100%. Razib and Lents then go back to first principles, talking about the origins of sex, and its persistence in the face of the two-fold cost of reproduction in dimorphous organisms. They discuss why specialized males and females exist in complex organisms as distinct as flowering plants and humans. Lents also discusses the reviews empirical literature on homosexual behavior, variation in sex differences across many classes of organisms and the application of evolutionary thinking to our understanding of the human past. Then they discuss the relevance of evolutionary biology for understanding the human present, and our current debates about marriage, sex and gender. Finally, they consider the differences between sex and gender, and the idea that both can be conceptualized in a nonbinary fashion.…

Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

1
Antonio Regalado: CRISPR babies 6 years later 1:16:44

13 วันที่แล้ว1:16:44

1:16:44

Today Razib talks to Antonio Regalado , reporter at MIT Technology Review . Regalado covers how technology is changing medicine and biomedical research. Before joining MIT Technology Review in 2011, he lived in São Paulo, Brazil, where he wrote about science, technology, and politics in Latin America for Science and other publications. From 2000 to 2009, he was a science reporter and foreign correspondent at the Wall Street Journal . Among the many stories Regalado has broken was the prenatal sequencing of Razib’s son in 2014, but on this episode they talk about another scoop: his 2018 reporting on the “CRISPR babies” (listen to a podcast on the topic with Regalado on The Insight ). Starting in 2024, the scientist who led the 2018 gene-editing of two babies in China, He Jiankui, seemed to embrace a new role as self-appointed social media evangelist and oracle, mostly about his own future. Regalado talks about what he thinks the Chinese scientist is up to, where the field of CRISPR-gene editing is at present and where it is going. Razib and Regalado also discuss the rise and fall, and future prospects, of CRISPR biotech startups attempting to develop therapies that deploy gene-editing. Regalado also muses on the emergence of companies that provide genomic technologies and services like embryo screening in the “gray market” away from public view.…

Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

1
Daniel McCarthy: American conservatism after Trump (and before) 1:03:05

13 วันที่แล้ว1:03:05

1:03:05

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Daniel McCarthy, editor-in-chief of Modern Age . Former editor-in-chief of The American Conservative , his writing has also appeared in the New York Times , USA Today , The Spectator , The National Interest and Reason . McCarthy also helped run communications for the 2008 Ron Paul campaign and was a senior editor at ISI Books. He earned a Ph.D. in classics from Washington University in St. Louis. First, Razib and McCarthy discuss the outcome of the 2024 presidential election, and the realignment of coalitions on both right and left, and what these realignments might presage for both parties’ future. McCarthy also outlines the long march of anti-war conservatives who organized themselves around The American Conservative in the first George W. Bush term, their eventual move into the mainstream and poll position in the discourse under Donald Trump. Razib asks about the origins of modern conservatism’s divisions, going back to William F. Buckley’s founding of National Review in the 1950’s. McCarthy also talks about Russell Kirk’s role in the development of post-World War II conservatism, which included the founding of Modern Age , a more intellectual and philosophical publication than National Review . Razib asks McCarthy how the Right will evolve in a changing America, with a diminishing white majority and a more post-Christian mainstream. This episode is live on Substack 14 days before it premieres on Youtube. For early access, feel free to explore it there. https://www.razibkhan.com/p/daniel-mccarthy-american-conservatism…

Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

1
Tade Souaiaia: the edge of statistical genetics, race and sports 1:10:34

19 วันที่แล้ว1:10:34

1:10:34

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Tade Souaiaia , a statistical geneticist at SUNY Downstate about his new preprint, Striking Departures from Polygenic Architecture in the Tails of Complex Traits . Souaiaia trained as a computational biologist at USC, but also has a background as a division I track and field athlete. Razib and Souaiaia discuss what “genetic architecture” means, and consider what we're finding when we look at extreme trait values in characteristics along a normal distribution. Though traits like height or risk for type II diabetes can be thought of as represented by an idealized Gaussian distribution, real molecular and cellular processes still underlie their phenotypic expression. Souaiaia talks about how genomics has resulted in an influx of data and allowed statistical geneticists with a theoretical bent to actually test some of the models that underpin our understanding of traits and examine how models like mutation-selection balance might differ from what we’ve long expected. After wading through the depths of genetic abstraction and how it intersects with the new age of big data, Razib and Souaiaia talk about race and sports, and whether there might be differences between groups in athletic ability. Souaiaia argues that the underlying historical track record is too variable to draw firm conclusions, while Razib argues that there are theoretical reasons that one should expect differences between groups at the tails and even around the memes.…

Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

1
Shadi Hamid: pessimism on Palestine but hope in America 1:20:47

27 วันที่แล้ว1:20:47

1:20:47

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks with Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid. A native Pennsylvanian of Egyptian ethnic background, and Islamic faith, Hamid completed his Ph.D. in politics at Oxford University. He is an assistant professor at Fuller Seminary , co-host of the Wisdom of Crowds podcast and website, and now the author of his own Substack and a recent book, The Problem of Democracy: America, the Middle East, and the Rise and Fall of an Idea . Hamid is also the author of Temptations of Power: Islamists & Illiberal Democracy in a New Middle East and Rethinking Political Islam . Hamid and Razib discuss the tail end of the war in Gaza, from the explosion of 10/7 and the wave of atrocities against Israelis surrounding the Palestinian enclave, to the brutal counter-attack that has resulted in tens of thousands of Gazan civilian deaths. While Hamid points to the deep structural issues that divide the two parties, and make final resolution of the conflict difficult, Razib highlights the many pitfalls of third parties becoming involved in such a highly polarized and fraught topic. They also discuss the growing identification of the global Left, including American progressives, with the Palestinian cause, the difficulties of grappling with and containing anti-Semitism within the movement. Though Israel’s counter-offensive is finally reaching a denouement, Hamid strikes a fundamentally pessimistic note about long-term possibilities. Then they pivot to domestic politics, and recent cultural trends that culminated in a Trump victory in the 2024 USelection, and the alienation of many nonwhites in the Democratic coalition from the hegemony of woke cultural elites. Hamid reiterates his long-standing critiques of racial identitarianism on the Left, and the irony that the progressive awareness of racial minorities only tends to extend to them when these minorities cosign woke nostrums. In contrast to the seemingly interminable nature of the conflict in the Middle East, Razib and Hamid both see hope for a path forward with reduced racial polarization and a reorientation of politics around substantive material interests rather than symbolic racial or ethnic categories.…

Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

1
Conn Carroll: Sex and the Citizen 1:14:13

5 weeksที่แล้ว1:14:13

1:14:13

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Conn Carroll , the author of Sex and the Citizen: How the Assault on Marriage Is Destroying Democracy . Caroll is currently an editor for the Washington Examiner , but previously he was the communications director for Senator Mike Lee of Utah, an assistant director at the Heritage Foundation, White House correspondent for Townhall.com and a reporter at National Journal . Carroll wrote Sex and the Citizen in response to what he felt was misleading and biased reporting in the mainstream media on the origins and implications of marriage and monogamy. Razib asks Carroll how he refutes the ideas presented in Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá’s Sex at Dawn , which argues that prehistoric humans were non-monogamous. Carroll outlines the current mainstream thinking in evolutionary anthropology and primatology, and all the biological reasons that indicate that Homo sapiens is far more monogamous than our common chimpanzee and gorilla cousins, most clearly in our reduced sexual dimorphism. But while our hunter-gatherer past was defined by monogamy, Sex and the Citizen argues that the rise of agriculture resulted in the explosion of polygamy, as high status males in societies defined by incredible inequality began to monopolize access to women, culminating in the explosion of Y chromosomal “star phylogenies,” where supermale lineages exploded all over Eurasian 4,000 years ago. Carroll then explains that the Romans and Greeks took steps toward enforcing monogamy as a legal institution, and Christianity introduced the idea of sexual fidelity upon men. After Christianity popularized egalitarian monogamous marriage, Sex and the Citizen follows in Joe Henrich’s wake in The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous . Carroll discusses the Catholic Church’s strict policies on incest and adoption, which destroyed the power of elite related clans in the West, and hastened the emergence of the Western European marriage norm of independent and separate nuclear families, rather than extended families as the primary unit of kinship in society. In the second half of Sex and the Citizen Carroll addresses the social history and policy changes in relation to marriage in the US. While Western European societies took a significant step away from familialism, Carroll explains that American marriage was even more individualistic and radical, as nuclear families spread out to the frontier, away from their extended kin networks. He also contextualizes the rise of the 1950’s nuclear family, which some scholars have argued was an aberration in American history. Carroll argues that actually it was an extension of earlier American norms, but the rise of the wage-based capitalist economy allowed for couples to set up separate households earlier in their lives. Carroll concludes the discussion outlining the 1970’s policy changes in welfare provision that discouraged marriage, noting the decline of the institution across American society over the last 60 years, and how government policy might reverse it.…

Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

1
Dan Hess: the fertility collapse 1:44:34

6 weeksที่แล้ว1:44:34

1:44:34

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib has a wide-ranging conversation with Dan Hess, the man behind the More Births account on social media. An engineer with a large family in the DC area, Hess’ essays on topics like Israelis’ high birth rate have gained the attention of X, with an account that has come from a few hundred followers to more than 30,000 in 2 years. Razib and Hess first review the birth-rate collapse seen worldwide in the past two decades. They discuss the relatively abrupt cultural pivot that has occurred since the turn of the century, with the end of the “overpopulation” narrative typified by Paul Erhlich’s Population Bomb , the rise of the “birth dearth” and the natalist movement. They talk about the most extreme cases of low total fertility rates (TFR) in Europe and East Asia, but also the decline in societies like the US, Latin America and the Middle East. Hess addresses both possible causes and possible solutions. They also discuss historical and demographic factors that impact fertility; for example, which religions have been the most pro-natalist? Hess also puts a particular focus on South Korea, the world’s most extreme case of a sharp decrease, with a TFR of about 0.70 children per woman (vs. 2.1 replacement), as well as exceptions to the rule like Haredi Jews and the Amish. Finally, Razib and Hess tackle why we should care about slower population growth in this century, from dependency ratios to the impact on cultural vitality.…

Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

1
Brian Chau: welcoming the AI-age and DeepSeek 52:05

6 weeksที่แล้ว52:05

52:05

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Brian Chau , who writes at the From the New World Substack. A graduate of the University of Waterloo and former software engineer with a background in pure mathematics, today Chau is executive director of the Alliance for the Future , a think tank that believes artificial intelligence will transform our world for the better. Chau addresses the great “doomer vs. anti-doomer” debate, and argues for an anti-catastrosophist position. He also makes the case that increasing scaling has started to hit diminishing returns, and the expectation that artificial intelligence will continue to gain power purely through throwing more resources at the same problems. Then, they discuss the revolutionary impact of the recent advances DeepSeek has made in China (an issue he addresses on his Substack ). Chau breaks down the technological nuts and bolts, as well as geopolitical and economic consequences.…

Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

1
John Hawks: 2024 in Neanderthals, Denisovans and Hobbits 1:10:42

6 weeksที่แล้ว1:10:42

1:10:42

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, third-time guest John Hawks returns after two years to discuss what we’ve learned in paleoanthropology since he and Razib last talked. Hawks obtained his PhD under Milford H. Wolpoff , and is currently a professor in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin. Hawks has also co-authored Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story and Cave of Bones: A True Story of Discovery, Adventure, and Human Origins with Lee Berger. Razib first presses Hawks on what we know about archaic human admixture into modern populations, and particularly what we’ve learned about Denisovans. They discuss how many Denisovan populations there were, how many Denisovan fossil remains we have, and why it has taken so long for researchers to assign a species name to this lineage of humans. Hawks also address the puzzle of the phenomenon of why there are at least two pygmy hominin populations in Southeast Asia. Perhaps humans too are subject to island dwarfism like many other mammals? Also, Razib wonders why Southeast Asia was home to such a startling variety of humans at once prior to the arrival of modern populations. They discuss all of this in light of the framework of Out-of-Africa, the recent spread of anatomically modern humans outside of Africa. Razib questions how robust this model is today given our understanding of modern humans’ extensive and repeated interactions with both Neanderthals and Denisovans. Finally, Hawks covers some controversies over fossils being sent into space that roiled the archaeological world last year.…

Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

1
David Mittelman: pushing the genomic frontier in 2024 56:41

7 weeksที่แล้ว56:41

56:41

Three years ago David Mittelman came on Unsupervised Learning to talk about emerging possibilities on the frontiers of genomics, and his new startup at the time, Othram . Since then, Othram’s work has been featured widely in the media, including in a Law & Order episode, and the firm has solved thousands of unsolved cases, with nearly 500 public. For over a decade, Mittelman has been at the forefront of private-sector genomics research. He trained at Baylor College of Medicine and was previously faculty at Virginia Tech. Razib and Mittelman discuss the changes that the rapid pace of genomic technology has driven in the field of genetics, from the days a $3 billion dollar draft human genome in the year 2000 to readily available $200 consumer genomes in 2024. One consequence of this change has been genetics’ transformation into information science, and the dual necessities of increased data storage and more powerful, incisive data analysis. Genomics made information acquisition and analysis so easy across the research community that it allowed for the pooling of results and discoveries in big databases. This has pulled genetics out of the basic science lab and allowed it to expand into an enterprise with a consumer dimension. Mittelman also discusses the improvements and advances in DNA extraction and analysis techniques that allow companies like his to now glean insights from decades-old samples, with bench sciences operating synergistically with computational biology. Razib and Mittelman talk about how he has helped solve hundreds of cold cases with new technology, in particular, at the intersection between new forensic techniques and both whole-genome sequencing and public genetic databases. They also discuss the future of genetics, and how it might touch our lives through healthcare and other domains, passing from inference to fields like genetic engineering…

Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

1
In Search of Indo-Europeans in 2024: of Catacombs and Corded Ware 35:36

7 weeksที่แล้ว35:36

35:36

On this episode of Unsuperivsed Learning reviews what we know about Indo-Europeans as 2024 comes to a close. This is prompted by a new preprint Ancient genomics support deep divergence between Eastern and Western Mediterranean Indo-European languages , which finally establishes that populations in Northern and Southwestern Europe derived from a different steppe-origin population than the Greeks and Ilyrians of the Balkans, as well as Armenians. Razib talks about how ancient DNA is resolving long-standing disputes in historical linguistics, and coming down on the side of very particular sets of hypotheses. He discusses Peter Bellwood’s First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies , and its models about the origins of Indo-European languages, and how they have been falsified by paleogenomics. Razib also steps through the relationship of particular Indo-European groups to ancestral archaeological cultures like the Corded Ware, Bell Beaker and Catacomb Cultures. He also talks about the connections between charioteers and the early Mycenaeans, and looks at Robert Drews’ ideas in Coming of the Greeks . Finally, he addresses outliers in the ancient DNA data that indicate connections between locales as disparate as Scandinavia and Cyprus 4,000 years ago.…

Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

1
Megan McArdle: American food culture, artisanal to industrial 1:34:14

8 weeksที่แล้ว1:34:14

1:34:14

This week on Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Megan McArdle , author of The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success and Washington Post columnist and op-ed board member. McArdle was raised in New York City and attended Riverdale Country School. She obtained an undergraduate degree in English from University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from the University of Chicago. A pioneering blogger based out of New York City and covering the site of the WTC in the wake of 9/11, McArdle went on to work at The Economist , The Atlantic and Newsweek . In this episode, the discussion largely focuses on McArdle’s research about the cultural history of food and cooking in the US. But first they discuss the economic implications of Donald Trump’s election, and the domestic consequences shifting toward a tariff-heavy trade regime. McArdle lays out the case that a massive tariff would have the same impact as a tax, not to mention the broad disruptive economic effects on large companies’ supply chains. Then they move on to the changes in American cuisine over the last few centuries, and the shifts driven by technology and innovation. McArdle points out that in the 19th century, gelatin dessert was a luxury and an exotic treat because it was labor intensive to prepare. But by the middle of the 20th century industrial-scale food processing made gelatin, in particular Jell-o, a cheap commodity, and it became associated with the lower classes. Similarly, before factory farming, chicken and eggs were more expensive than red meat, and thus viewed as high-end ingredient (whereas today, chicken is far cheaper than beef). Finally Razib and McArdle talk about how the plentitude of food available in the 21st century contributes to the obesity epidemic that has only ceased its relentless expansion with the advent of Ozempic.…

Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

1
Nikolai Yakovenko: the Singularity is not here 1:07:00

8 weeksที่แล้ว1:07:00

1:07:00

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning , Razib catches up with Nikolai Yakovenko about the state of AI at the end of 2024. Yakovenko is a former professional poker player ,and research scientist at Google, Twitter and Nvidia. With a decade in computer science , Yakovenko has been at the forefront of the large-language-model revolution that has given rise to multi-billion dollar companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity and hundreds of smaller startups. Currently, he is the CEO of DeepNewz , an AI-driven news startup that leverages OpenAI’s latest model. Full disclosure: Razib actively uses and recommends the service and is an advisor to the company. Razib and Yakovenko first review what makes the last few years special, the rise of large-language-models on top of neural network architecture of transformers. Yakovenkoi discusses how far they’ve come since OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public in the fall of 2022, and how people have been using the underlying technology to develop applications atop it. Despite predictions of mass unemployment, Razib points out that two years later America is at full employment, and only niche fields like translation have been impacted. In contrast, Yakovenko points out that most software developers use artificial intelligence in some form to aid in their daily engineering work, noting the possibility that the AI revolution is integrating itself seamlessly as a utility for preexistent jobs. They also discuss the fact that though AI is a booming field, only one brand-name company has so far emerged in the industry, OpenAI. Though they agree that the current hype cycle is now abating, it is clear that the major investments in the field like data centers will continue from major players as AI-driven applications like self-driving cars become more and more mainstream.…