🔮 Science turns to AI; Omicron & public goods; xenobots & whale sounds ++ #351

Hi, I’m Azeem Azhar. I convene Exponential View to help us understand how our societies and political economy will change under the force of rapidly accelerating technologies. I laid out my thesis about the transition to the Exponential Age in my book Exponential.

🎙This week on the podcast
A decade into the artificial intelligence boom, scientists in research and industry are making incredible breakthroughs. Increases in computing power, theoretical advances and a rolling wave of capital have revolutionised domains from biology and design to transport and language analysis. In the latest podcast episode, I am joined by Murray Shanahan, a senior research scientist at DeepMind. Murray works at the cutting edge of industry and academia and has a deep understanding of the field’s history – as well as where it might go next. In the course of the conversation, we explore:

• 🧬 Why transformer models were a surprise breakthrough [13.10]

• 🦊 How animal cognition can help us understand AI [28.47]

• 🧠 …