The Race To Super Intelligence Has Already Started

Most of the AI conversation is fixated on AGI: when machines will match human intelligence, and which lab gets there first. Dr. Craig Kaplan thinks that is the wrong thing to watch. The real story is what comes seconds later artificial super intelligence, systems a thousand times, or even a trillion times, smarter than the smartest human alive. And he believes it is arriving faster than almost anyone is prepared for. Craig has been working on this since the 1980s. He earned his doctorate at Carnegie Mellon alongside Nobel laureate Herbert A. Simon, one of the scientists who named the field of AI, and he has spent decades building collective intelligence systems — including ones that traded billions of dollars on Wall Street and beat the best hedge funds. That track record is the foundation of his core argument in this episode: the widely held belief that safer AI must mean slower AI is simply wrong. You do not need to slow down, he says. You need a smarter design. That design is a democratic "society" of cooperating AI agents — millions of them, each carrying the values of a separate human checking one another in the open, rather than a single monolithic black box no one can see inside. Craig walks Maryrose through why this is both more powerful and far safer, what Pope Leo's first encyclical gets right and wrong about treating AI as a mere tool, and why the values we hand these systems now, in their "childhood," will shape everything that follows. He also makes the case for sovereign AI and the Global South, where cultures like Nigeria's Yoruba risk being erased by models trained overwhelmingly on Western data. And the pace is staggering: some AI capabilities, he notes, are now doubling in as little as 1.3 months. A sharp, grounded, and surprisingly optimistic conversation about getting the most important technology in human history right before it arrives. Find Craig's white papers and free designs at superintelligence.com * * * Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.