State of AI, Summer 2026 – #116

Steve discusses the state of AI in summer 2026. Topics covered include: AI in math and theoretical physics, Recursive Self-Improvement, Agent swarms and tokenomics, IPOs and US-China competition, documentary film Machine God.

Machine God trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RSv3wmDIpY

Theoretical Physics with Generative AI: https://stevehsu.substack.com/p/theoretical-physics-with-generative

Chapter Markers:

• (00:00) - State of AI, Summer 2026
• (02:39) - AI in Math Physics
• (13:54) - Recursive Self-Improvement
• (21:08) - DeepSeek Hyperconnections
• (29:42) - Agent Swarms and Tokenomics
• (43:26) - Machine God Documentary

–

Steve Hsu is Professor of Theoretical Physics and of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering at Michigan State University. Previously, he was Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation at MSU and Director of the Institute of Theoretical Science at the University of Oregon. Hsu is a startup founder (SuperFocus.ai, SafeWeb, Genomic Prediction, Othram) and advisor to venture capital and other investment firms. He was educated at Caltech and Berkeley, was a Harvard Junior Fellow, and has held faculty positions at Yale, the University of Oregon, and MSU. Please send any questions or suggestions to manifold1podcast@gmail.com or Steve on X @hsu_steve.

Announcing this for some friends at Mechanize - a startup that builds environments for training and evaluating frontier LLMs. Its customers include the top AI labs, and it has contributed to the breakthrough in coding capabilities of frontier models. 

Mechanize is hiring! 

https://mechanize.work/b/hsu 

Compensation is extremely competitive. For technical roles, $300-500k. They are also seeking smart generalists. 

For example: 

Research Engineer, Alignment: Build evals that test for misaligned model behaviors  $500K salary 

Puzzle Maker: Design interesting and original puzzles that LLMs can’t yet solve  $300K salary 

Mechanize understands that my readership is highly selected. There is a VERY GOOD CHANCE you will be interviewed if you apply via the link above.