Jack Clark

speaker

541 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2026 last heard 27 Mar

Jack Clark’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.

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Hard Fork · The Ezra Klein Show: How Fast Will A.I. Agents Rip Through the Economy? · 27 Mar 2026 podcast

The resulting sort of outcome of that is you have AI systems that have learned what it means to solve a problem that takes quite a while and requires them running into dead ends and needing to reset themselves.

And that gives them this general intuition for problem solving and working independently for you.

The way that I think of these systems now is that they're like little troublesome genies that I can give instructions to, and they'll go and do things for me.

But I need to specify the instruction still just right, or else they might do something a little wrong.

So it's very different to I type into a thing, it figures out a good answer, that's the end.

Now it's a case of me

summoning these little things to go and do stuff for me.

And I have to give them the right instructions because they'll go away for quite some time and do a whole range of actions.

It's a good question, and I think the answer is still hard to explain, even as technologists that are close to this technology.

Because we've taken this thing that could just predict things, and we've given it the ability to take actions in the world.

But sometimes it does something deeply unintuitive.

It's like you've had a thing that has spent its entire life living in a library and has never been outside, and now you've unleashed it into the world, and all it has are its book smarts, but it doesn't really have street smarts.

So when I conceptualize this stuff, it's really thinking of it as an extremely knowledgeable kind of machine that has some amount of autonomy, but is likely to get wildly confused in ways that are unintuitive to me.

Maybe genies is the wrong term, but it's certainly more than just a static tool that predicts things.

It has some additional intrinsic animation to it, which makes it different.

So the things which are predictable are...

just, oh, we taught it how to search for web.

Now it can search for web.

We taught it how to look up data in archives.

Now it can do that.

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