Steve Levitt

speaker

962 appearances 8 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard 31 Jul

Steve Levitt’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.

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Freakonomics Radio · 682. Should A.I. Move to Space? · 24 Jul 2026 podcast

What people might find confusing about this, though, is that we've built these neural nets, these AI programs, and it is bizarre that the objective is to predict the next word.

And I think what you're arguing is that you can't predict the next word well at all unless you have a pretty complete model of how the entire world works, because you don't know.

If you don't have the context, you'd just be terrible at that.

And

At least my own experience as I've interacted more and more with AI is to really reconsider who I am and to think that, yeah, that kind of what AI is doing feels a lot like what I do.

That if I'm really tired or maybe had too much to drink, I start making the exact same kind of mistakes that AI makes when it doesn't exactly understand what's going on.

It's been interesting.

I wouldn't have thought that I would come to see myself

as being like AI, but I really have.

Now, someone might get the idea from our conversation so far that you're a dreamer or a philosopher, but that's so far from the truth.

You've got a long track record of building things that really work.

And one of the projects that your Paradigms of Intelligence team is working on now is called Project Suncatcher.

And if you pull it off, it will be perhaps the most ambitious engineering undertaking of all time.

Would you say that's a fair assessment of the degree of difficulty, or am I exaggerating?

There's a lot of controversy around AI data centers and their power consumption.

But one thing that's not disputed is that that consumption is growing.

The International Energy Agency expects that about half the increased demand for electricity in the U.S.

So we wouldn't need that much electricity in the end, because even though we'll build bigger and bigger models and use AI more and more, we'll get so good at saving the energy that it won't really be a problem.

That it'll be a wash.

And you're obviously not the only one thinking about this.

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