AGI and Institutional Disruption: Sam Hammond in Conversation with FLI’s Gus Docker

**Erik Torenberg** (0:00)
Turpentine is a network of podcasts, newsletters, and more covering tech, business, and culture, all from the perspective of industry insiders and experts.
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At Turpentine, we're building the first media outlet for tech people by tech people. We have a slate of hit shows across a range of topics and industries, from AI with Cognitive Revolution, to Econ 102 with Noah Smith. Our other shows drive the conversation in tech with the most interesting thinkers, founders, and investors, like Moment of Zen and my show Upstream. We're looking for industry leading hosts and shows along with sponsors. If you think that might be you or your company, email me at erik.turpentine.co. That's E-R-I-K at turpentine.co.

**Nathan Labenz** (0:45)
Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution.
As we reach the end of 2023, we're still just 11 months into making The Cognitive Revolution, but I wanted to take a moment to say a big thank you to everyone who has made this show possible. Starting with our sponsors, from our first presenting sponsor, Omneky, who agreed to support the show before hearing even a single episode, to the household names you've heard from throughout the year, including Oracle, Masterclass, Shopify, and NetSuite. We appreciate your support.
I also want to say thank you to the entire Turpentine team, and in particular, our producers, Natalie Toren and Vivian May, our editor, Graham Bessalou, and of course, our super connector, and the mastermind behind the idea for a network of expert hosted podcasts, Eric Thornburg.
We've made nearly 90 episodes of this show, and I always emphasize that AI content ages poorly. With that in mind, we've turned many episodes around in just a day or two. Now, this is not the norm in the podcasting business, and it does create a lot of odd hours for the team. But they've been here for it every step of the way, and I have been extremely privileged to be able to focus 100 percent of my time and energy on the content itself, knowing that they have my back on all the logistics.
Of course, I also want to thank our many incredible guests. They are an amazingly diverse group, hailing from at least a dozen different countries around the world, with all sorts of different academic and professional backgrounds, but all united by an appreciation for the transformative, dare I say revolutionary, potential of AI. Collectively, they have helped me develop a far deeper understanding of AI technology than I had coming into the year, and I hope the same is true for you. Finally, I want to thank all of you, the listeners, for making this project not just worthwhile, but a success well beyond my expectations. Coming into the year, I had never created original content before, and I had no platform or audience anywhere. And to be honest, I wasn't really sure if anyone would want to listen to the deeply in the weeds, hopefully anti-polarizing content that I wanted to create. On that front, I'm glad to say that I have been consistently pleasantly surprised. Thousands of you have become regular listeners, and some of our most challenging episodes, including my recent two and a half hour monologue about state space models, have been among our very best received. We end the year as the 20th ranked technology podcast according to Spotify, 31st according to Apple, and I take that as a sign that something is definitely working. Nevertheless, when a friend recently asked what metrics we use to track performance, I responded that for me, the best indicator is the number and the quality of people who reach out to share feedback with me directly. So with that in mind, if you have any topic or guest suggestions, or just general thoughts about how we can make the show more valuable, we would love to hear them. We have a ton planned for The Cognitive Revolution in 2024, including episodes about the rise of AI Automated Scientific Exploration, the intersection of AI and biology, the energy demands of AI, the future of robotics, and much, much more. So while we're working on all that as a bit of bonus content, we're going to repost a few of my favorite AI scouting episodes from other shows, episodes that I was jealous of when I first heard them, starting today with an episode from the Future of Life Institute podcast, in which host Gus Docker interviews economist Samuel Hammond. This conversation is super wide-ranging, covering the most likely default path to AGI, the economic and institutional transformations that AI will beget, the critical distinction between thinking about AI in isolation versus as part of a dynamic system, the proposal for a Manhattan or Apollo-like mega project for AI safety, and lots more along the way. I hope you find this and the next couple of episodes to be helpful, complements to my own AI scouting work. And I encourage you to subscribe to the Future of Life Institute podcast feed, where you can hear lots more about AI and other issues of global importance. With that, happy new year from The Cognitive Revolution, and here's Gus Docker and Samuel Hammond.