Dec 13, 2025

The Mathematical Foundations of Intelligence [Professor Yi Ma]

Professor Yi Ma presents a unified mathematical theory of intelligence based on two principles: Parsimony and Self-Consistency. He argues that current AI, particularly LLMs, excels at memorization by compressing already-compressed human knowledge (text), but fails at true abstraction and understanding. His framework, centered on maximizing the coding rate reduction of data, provides a first-principles derivation for architectures like Transformers (CRATE) and explains phenomena like the effectiveness of gradient descent through the concept of benign non-convex landscapes.

Nov 06, 2025

Intelligence as "Less is More" - Prof. David Krakauer [SFI]

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.

Oct 31, 2025

Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz on the State of AI

A discussion with Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz on the true nature of AI creativity, the limitations of intelligence in leadership, why the current AI boom is not a bubble, and the coming platform shifts and geopolitical race in robotics.

Sep 04, 2025

The Day AI Solves My Puzzles Is The Day I Worry (Prof. Cristopher Moore)

Professor Cristopher Moore of the Santa Fe Institute discusses the surprising effectiveness of AI, arguing it stems from the rich, non-random structure of the real world. He explores the limits of current models, the nature of intelligence as creative problem-solving and abstraction, the importance of grounding and shared reality, and the profound implications of computational irreducibility and the need for algorithmic transparency in high-stakes applications.

Jul 26, 2025

Intelligence = Doing More with Less (David Krakauer)

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.