AI & Identity, from East & West, with Yohei Nakajima GP at Untapped Capital and BabyAGI Creator

**Erik Torenberg** (0:00)
Hey, everyone. Erik here. I'm hiring across the board at Turpentine and for my personal team on other projects I'm incubating. I'm hiring a Chief of Staff, EA, Head of Network, Head of Special Projects, and Investment Associate for my personal team.
At Turpentine, I'm hiring for roles in newsletters, events, and more. I have a list of JDs and other projects at erictorenberg.com. If you think you're a good fit for any of the above roles, please reach out.

**Yohei Nakajima** (0:25)
I think Western identity tends to think of like, my thoughts are who I am.
And so my mind and my thoughts are my identity. I do feel like Eastern cultures tend to treat the mind and the brain as more of a tool to control, and your thoughts as an output of that tool.
And so like meditation and enlightenment is really about harnessing how to leverage that tool. As I get emails, as I get texts, as I follow people on Twitter, as I read websites, if I could just convert all that into a structured knowledge graph of the people and entities and events, it should be easier to identify potential people to reach out to, to connect with, to make introductions to make amongst people, right? I've seen a couple of early tools of like helping people understand each other that previously wouldn't or helping find commonalities between two groups of people that might not be intuitive. And I think if we can start to think about AI as a tool for that, new ideas will emerge that can hopefully create a future that's not as bleak as, right? Some people see the future.

**Nathan Labenz** (1:20)
Hello, and welcome to The Cognitive Revolution, where we interview visionary researchers, entrepreneurs, and builders working on the frontier of artificial intelligence. Each week we'll explore their revolutionary ideas, and together we'll build a picture of how AI technology will transform work, life, and society in the coming years. I'm Nathan Labenz, joined by my co-host Erik Torenberg. Hello and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution.
Today we've got a special bonus episode with returning guest Yohei Nakajima, general partner at Untapped Capital and creator of the pioneering BabyAGI project. Our first episode with Yohei came out in October, right after he had spoken at the TED AI event, but before the talk was available to watch online.
We cover Yohei's many experimental open-source AI projects, as well as his investment philosophy in that episode.
Today with the talk live on the TED website, we're back to watch it together and to explore the key themes more deeply along the way. In the first half, I could not resist digging into more of the details of how Yohei is building today now that OpenAI has launched the GPT Store and the Assistance API. In the second half, we unpack his reflections on identity and discuss how different cultural contexts seem to be shaping individuals and societies' responses to and relationships with AI technology. This sort of reaction video is a new format for me, but I think it came out extremely well, and I want to thank you, the listeners, for making it possible. Yohei is one of a few guests who have recently told me that they've heard far more about their Cognitive Revolution episode than they'd heard about any other podcast that they'd done. And so it was an honor to spend an hour with Yohei on the morning of his birthday for a conversation that touches on some of the smallest technical minutiae and also some of the biggest philosophical questions in AI today. Please do continue to share the show with your friends, and I hope you enjoy this special part two with Yohei Nakajima. Yohei Nakajima, welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution.

**Yohei Nakajima** (3:22)
Thanks for having me.

**Nathan Labenz** (3:24)
So as we kind of teased in the last episode, you have recently put out a TED Talk, and now it is available to the public.
And just as a kind of fun experimental idea and a way to get a little deeper into your philosophy as it pertains to AI as well, we're going to just roll the TED Talk and then pause it as we go and kind of discuss and allow you to expand on some of the ideas that you only had, I guess, nine minutes to deliver live, but we've got the full hour today. So excited to play it and we'll just kind of pause and discuss as we go.

**Yohei Nakajima** (3:58)
Let's just dive in and take it from there.
In my office, I have a stack of index cards that I call my You Are Who You've Met book. On one side of each card is a name of somebody from my past, and on the other is one lesson I learned from them. It includes friends, teachers, enemies, real people, and fictional characters.