fast.ai founder Jeremy Howard critiques the 'vibe coding' illusion, arguing that AI-assisted tools create a slot machine-like experience that erodes true software engineering skills. He revisits the origins of ULMFiT, champions interactive programming for building intuition, and reframes AI risk from existential threats to the dangers of power centralization and human enfeeblement.
Princeton Professor Tom Griffiths discusses his book "The Laws of Thought," exploring the mathematical models that govern both biological and artificial intelligence. He details the fundamental differences between human and machine cognition, rooted in their vastly different constraints, and explains how concepts like inductive bias, probability, and curiosity can bridge the gap between cognitive science and modern AI.
![Intelligence as "Less is More" - Prof. David Krakauer [SFI]](https://img.youtube.com/vi/dY46YsGWMIc/maxresdefault.jpg)
Prof. David Krakauer redefines intelligence not as possessing more knowledge, but as the ability to do more with less. He argues that LLMs are mere 'libraries' and proposes a universal theory where all life is intelligent, operating across strategic, inferential, and representational dimensions, with the latter being key to making hard problems easy.
Danielle from the Amazon AGI SF Lab introduces a new paradigm for agent development called "Useful General Intelligence" (UGI). Instead of focusing on making AI smarter than humans, UGI aims to build AI that augments human intelligence and agency. This talk explores the cognitive science principles behind this vision and introduces Nova Act, an agentic model and SDK designed to reliably interact with computer UIs, turning the browser into a programmable tool.
Prof. David Krakauer argues that we are confusing knowledge with intelligence. He critiques the AI community's superficial definition of "emergence" in LLMs, contrasting it with the true meaning from complex systems: a fundamental change in internal organization that allows for a simpler, more powerful macroscopic description. He introduces "exbodiment"—outsourcing cognition to external tools—as a key part of collective intelligence, but warns that our evolutionary drive to conserve energy will lead us to outsource our thinking to AI, causing a "diminution and dilution" of human thought.