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Inside The Infinity Machine ft Sebastian Mallaby

Podcast: Invisible Machines podcast by UX Magazine (LS 30 · TOP 5% what is this?)Episode: Inside The Infinity Machine ft Sebastian MallabyPub date: 2026-04-02Get Podcast Transcript →powered by Listen411 - fast audio-to-text and summarizationThere's a book about artificial intelligence that doesn't start with Sam Altman. It doesn't start with Elon Musk. It starts in 1994, at Cambridge, where a teenager named Demis Hassabis is reading Gödel, Escher, Bach and concluding, before most of his professors would have agreed, that first-order logic can't be the full answer to building intelligence.Sebastian Mallaby spent years inside that story. His new book, The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence, is the most serious attempt yet to explain not just what AI is, but why the people building it can't stop. His answer draws on a line Jeff Hinton borrowed from Robert Oppenheimer: invention is sweet. A scientist, given the chance to build something, simply cannot resist. The consequences come later.In this conversation, Mallaby joins Josh Tyson and Robb Wilson to explore the full sweep of the Demis Hassabis story — from game designer to neuroscientist to Nobel laureate to the man running Google's flagship AI lab. They talk about why DeepMind was built the way it was, with neuroscientists and physicists and probabilistic mathematicians before AI was even a field, and how that cross-disciplinary foundation ended up mattering more than anyone expected. They talk about what the defeat of the world Go champion felt like from the inside, the humans who gave up and the ones who discovered new depths. And they talk about what it means that the internet, a thing nobody built to train AI, turns out to be exactly the fuel the industrial revolution of intelligence needed. Demis's own metaphor: it's like dinosaurs that died and turned into oil. Nobody designed it for this. It just happened to be there.The conversation also gets into what Mallaby calls the infinity machine: the reason the kind of inductive learning AI uses requires almost infinite examples to be reliable, and why the name captures something the scaling law charts obscure. Why the internet taught us more about the range of human experience than Hassabis expected. Why gaming runs so deep through the entire history of machine intelligence. And what it actually means to ask whether a machine is intelligent, when the people who built DeepMind weren't sure they had a definition.---------- Support our show by supporting our sponsors!This episode is supported by OneReach.aiForged over a decade of R&D and proven in 10,000+ deployments, OneReach.ai’s GSX is the first complete AI agent runtime environment (circa 2019) — a hardened AI agent architecture for enterprise control and scale. Backed by UC Berkeley, recognized by Gartner, and trusted across highly regulated industries, including healthcare, finance, government and telecommunications.A complete system for accelerating AI adoption — design, train, test, deploy, monitor, and orchestrate neurosymbolic applications (agents). - Use any AI models- Build and deploy intelligent agents fast- Create guardrails for organizational alignment- Enterprise-grade security and governanceBook a free demo: https://onereach.ai/book-a-demo/?utm_source=soundcloud&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=podcast_s7e6&utm_content=1 ---------- The revised and significantly updated second edition of our bestselling book about succeeding with AI agents, Age of Invisible Machines, is available everywhere: Amazon — https://bit.ly/4hwX0a5#ai #invisiblemachines #podcast #techpodcast #aipodcast #deepmind #DemisHassabis#InfinityMachine#agi #machinelearning #alphago #futureofaiThe podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Invisible Machines, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.

Ideas for a Post-YIMBY Housing Future

Podcast: The New Bazaar (LS 48 · TOP 1% what is this?)Episode: Ideas for a Post-YIMBY Housing FuturePub date: 2026-03-25Get Podcast Transcript →powered by Listen411 - fast audio-to-text and summarizationArpit Gupta, a finance professor at NYU who has made important contributions on a startingly high number of topics, speaks with Cardiff about his latest contributions to the study of housing affordability, remote work, artificial intelligence, and finance. Arpit is on board with the basic YIMBY project of undoing the oppressive zoning codes that limit housing construction in so many parts of the country, but he doesn’t think the housing story ends there. Other obstacles will remain even in the case of further YIMBY progress, and in the meantime he has offered a variety of reform ideas that both complement YIMBY ideas and also prepare for a future after a YIMBY victory. Among them are re-thinking property taxes, accelerating depreciation schedules, and making it easier for factory housing to get to market. Arpit and Cardiff end with a chat about the ways that AI can help us understand housing regulations, what AI means for the future of finance, and what he is both optimistic and pessimistic about. Related links: Remote Work's Impact on ProductivityWork from Home and the Office Real Estate ApocalypseOffice to Residential ConversionsUnlock a Housing Boom through Depreciation BonusesThree Rules for AI in FinanceIndustrial Policy for Housing Construction Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Economic Innovation Group, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.

The anguish of girls | Maiden Mother Matriarch 183

Podcast: Maiden Mother Matriarch with Louise Perry (LS 49 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)Episode: The anguish of girls | Maiden Mother Matriarch 183Pub date: 2026-02-01Get Podcast Transcript →powered by Listen411 - fast audio-to-text and summarizationGive the gift of everyday luxury and make every moment comfortable. Head to cozyearth.com and use my code COZYMMM for 20% off sitewide. And if you get a Post-Purchase Survey, be sure to mention you heard about Cozy Earth at the Maiden Mother Matriarch podcast.Teenage anxiety isn’t a new thing. Our mothers and grandmothers also worried about beauty, and friendships, and boys.What is new, however, is the role of technology in teenage anxiety. We see an inflection point in the early 2010s: a sudden drop in mental wellbeing among teenagers, particularly girls. The beginning of that drop coincided with the arrival of image-based social media like Instagram.My guest today argues that this was not a coincidence. Freya India is the author of the Substack GIRLS, where she writes about the challenges girls and young women face in the modern world. She’s also a staff writer for Jonathan Haidt’s newsletter, After Babel.Her new book is about the ways in which communication technology has given us a world in which teenage girls end up commodifying themselves – selling their lives on social media, advertising themselves on dating apps, and packaging themselves into personal brands. All at the cost of their own sanity. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Louise Perry, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.

Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble

Podcast: The Book Club (LS 49 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)Episode: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius and Obsession in the World of Competitive ScrabblePub date: 2026-03-25Get Podcast Transcript →powered by Listen411 - fast audio-to-text and summarizationMy guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Stefan Fatsis, whose classic Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble is 25 years old this year. Stefan tells me how a journalistic project turned into a quarter-century obsession, how dramatically tournament Scrabble differs from the living-room game, why we’re still having the same arguments over word lists … and how it has become a family story for him.Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this podcast without adverts. Go to spectator.co.uk/adfree to find out more.For more Spectator podcasts, go to spectator.co.uk/podcastsContact us: podcast@spectator.co.uk Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Spectator, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.

Arthur Brooks on Reinvention, Religion, and the Science of Happiness

Podcast: Conversations with Tyler (LS 65 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)Episode: Arthur Brooks on Reinvention, Religion, and the Science of HappinessPub date: 2026-04-01Get Podcast Transcript →powered by Listen411 - fast audio-to-text and summarizationClick here to find Tyler's new generative book, The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution! Arthur Brooks reckons he's on the fourth leg of a spiral-shaped career: French horn player, economist, president of the American Enterprise Institute, and now Harvard professor and evangelist for the science of happiness. His new book, The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness, argues that happiness isn't a feeling but a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning — the macronutrients of happiness, he calls them — and that most of us are gorging on the wrong ones. Tyler, naturally, wants to know: what's the marginal value of a book on happiness, and what does spiral number five look like? Along the way, Tyler and Arthur cover how scarcity makes savoring possible and why knowing you'll die young sharpens the mind, what twin studies tell us about the genetics of well-being and why that's not actually depressing, the four habits of the genuinely happy, the placebo theory of happiness books, curiosity as an evolved positive emotion, the optimal degree of self-deception, why Arthur chose Catholicism rather than Orthodoxy, what the research says about accepting death, how he became an economist via correspondence school, AI's effect on think tanks, the future of classical music, whether Trumpism or Reaganism is the equilibrium state of American conservatism, whether his views on immigration have changed, what he and Oprah actually agree on, which president from his lifetime he most admires, Barcelona versus Madrid, what 60-year-olds are especially good at, why he's reading Josef Pieper, how he'll face death, and much more. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel. Recorded March 19th, 2026. This episode was made possible through the support of the John Templeton Foundation. Other ways to connect Follow us on X and Instagram Follow Tyler on X Follow Arthur on X Sign up for our newsletter Join our Discord Email us: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts here. Timestamps: 00:00:00 - Intro 00:02:10 - The Macronutrients of Happiness 00:07:54 - What Happiness Books are Worth 00:12:28 - The Habits of the Happiest People 00:14:27 - Why the Young Reject Happiness Advice 00:17:35 - Curiosity's Role in Happiness 00:20:22 - Self-Deception 00:22:04 - Facing Death 00:25:44 - Choosing a Religion 00:28:41 - Immigration 00:30:27 - The American Right Wing 00:33:55 - AI's Role in Happiness 00:37:12 - What Drives Generosity 00:38:37 - Oprah's Political Views 00:40:16 - Which Political Leaders Arthur Admires 00:41:59 - The Best French Horn Players 00:43:40 - Arthur's Spiral of Careers 00:48:20 - The Future of Think Tanks 00:49:50 - The Future of Classical Music 00:51:27 - Living in Spain 00:55:34 - Age and Peak Performance 00:56:12 - What Arthur Will Do Next 00:59:14 - Outro Image Credit: Jenny ShermanThe podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Mercatus Center at George Mason University, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.