982: In Case You Missed It in March 2026
Jon Krohn rounds up March’s interviews in this ICYMI episode. Hear from AI and data science experts across the fields of education and business in this wide-ranging series of clips that take listeners from the Renaissance to the near future. Guests include Lin Quiao (Episode 971), Chris Fregly (Episode 973), Zack Kass (Episode 975), Kyunghyun Cho (Episode 977), and Rohit Choudhary (Episode 979).
Additional materials: www.superdatascience.com/982
Interested in sponsoring a SuperDataScience Podcast episode? Email natalie@superdatascience.com for sponsorship information.
977: Attention, World Models and the Future of AI, with Prof. Kyunghyun Cho
What’s going to be the next big step function that blasts us forward in AI capabilities? To find out, Jon Krohn sits down with Professor Kyunghyun Cho, whose 200,000 citations and co-authorship of the first paper on attention place him among the most influential AI researchers in the world. In this episode, Kyunghyun explains why today’s models have already captured most correlations in passive data, making the real challenge about actively choosing which data to collect. He also weighs in on the open debate around world models, whether AI needs high-fidelity, step-by-step imagination or whether a high-level latent representation that lets it skip ahead is sufficient and shares the surprising discovery that 80% of his 200 computer science students had never installed a coding agent.
Additional materials: www.superdatascience.com/977
Interested in sponsoring a SuperDataScience Podcast episode? Email natalie@superdatascience.com for sponsorship information.
In this episode you will learn:
(06:43) The story behind the attention mechanism
(28:43) Sample efficiency and active data collection
(39:04) World models and latent planning
(49:52) Teaching undergrads with coding agents
(58:21) Reranking, multi-stage ranking, and the foundations of RAG
