Lewis Goodall

Machine learning.

Machine learning is the thing that trips off the tongue of a lot of the people you talk about in your book.

And why is it so useful for companies?

And Google, I suppose, particularly at that time, has not a monopoly, but something probably approaching it for a lot of markets on unbelievable quantities of data.

And then presumably its problem is it doesn't quite know how to process it and amplify it and use it best.

So AI is literally, to some extent, or this renaissance you're saying is to some extent born out of that process.

Well, I want to come on to that, and particularly the Imperial bit, which I think is especially fascinating.

Before that, just on that, I also find this completely fascinating.

I did a special episode of News Agents last August.

We went to San Francisco, spoke to a load of AI companies, including Anthropic, who let us in, and we interviewed Jack Clark there, who's very senior at the company.

And, you know, I sort of got on...

Onto this question with him, which I think is really fascinating.

Because obviously the thing that they talk about, and listeners of yours may have heard of, is this concept of AGI, or Artificial General Intelligence, which is the sort of next stage.

And you can kind of get a bit lost in kind of what that means and exactly what it is.

But fundamentally what they're saying, it's a theoretical form of machine intelligence that can understand, learn, and apply knowledge as we do, right?

Independently.

And perhaps be able to create new systems to replace itself and so on.

And I sort of said...

The thing that really, really struck me and stayed with me about that interview is because he kept saying, and you know, this, it could be catastrophic, you know, once we've,

we could be unleashing something that's utterly catastrophic.