Will Marshall

speaker

244 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 31 Jul

Will Marshall’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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

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Freakonomics Radio · 683. In the New Space Race, Who Makes the Rules? · 31 Jul 2026 podcast

We train AI on all the beautiful deltas of the Earth and the forests of the Earth and the river systems and so on.

It will care more about the Earth, the humans, the rest of life on the Earth.

I'm Steve Levitt.

Before NASA, I had done a PhD in physics.

It was incredible to work with some geniuses and humbling scientists.

which helped set my career more into space, which I thought I could handle because these physicists are just out there, next level people.

I think there's a new era of machine intelligence that I call planetary intelligence.

So let me do a little backdrop first.

Everyone's familiar with large language models now, incredibly powerful.

They've read all the books in the world and the text on the internet, can write an essay, can hallucinate obviously sometimes, but they can do code.

I was testing some of those LLMs early on.

I was inspired to find just how capable they were at advanced physics.

I was like,

I think I'm smarter on this specific area of physics that I did my PhD in.

Let's see.

And I was like, damn, that's not messing around.

They have a lot of lay knowledge and they can pull all that together from all the disparate fields like no human can.

But for all this capability, LLMs, the chat GPTs and Geminis and what have you, are essentially blind.

And what I mean by that is that they have no understanding of what's going on in the real world day to day.

So I'll give you an example.

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