Intelligence is collective, not artificial — Prof. Michael I. Jordan (UC Berkeley / Inria)
Michael I. Jordan, described by Science magazine as the most influential computer scientist alive, has never thought of himself as an AI researcher. In this conversation he explains why that distinction matters. SPONSOR: --- Cyber Fund built the Monastery to help founders ship products that were impossible a year ago. Applications for Batch 1 are now open. Apply now: https://cyber.fund --- Jordan trained as a statistician and cognitive scientist, and his career has been spent building machine learning systems that work in the real world: supply chains, commerce, healthcare, and large economic systems. When the field rebranded itself as AI and then AGI, he did not follow. Instead he argues that the framing is wrong. AI is better understood as a collective economic system than as a race to build a disembodied superintelligence. We talk about why AGI is mostly a PR term, what machine learning achieved before the LLM hype cycle, and why the assistant-on-your-shoulder vision may be less compelling than it sounds. Jordan explains why explanations need to be actionable, not merely mechanistic; why AlphaFold's missing error bars matter; how prediction-powered inference changes the picture; and why drug discovery is an incentive-design problem rather than a pure pattern-matching problem. ERRATA: Science magazine ranked him the most influential computer scientist, not Nature --- TIMESTAMPS: 00:00:00 Cold open: A demoralizing message to young builders 00:02:04 CyberFund sponsor read 00:02:50 From symbolic AI to machine learning systems 00:05:42 Why AGI is mostly a PR term 00:08:48 A collectivist, economic perspective on AI 00:11:33 Why LLMs need system design, not hype 00:14:50 Predictability beats faux understanding 00:17:55 AlphaFold, bias, and prediction-powered inference 00:21:48 Stop anthropomorphizing intelligence 00:27:44 Drug discovery as an incentive problem 00:32:29 The three-layer data market 00:38:07 Social knowledge, markets, and culture 00:45:39 Creator economics beyond Spotify 00:48:30 How science-fiction AI narratives mislead young builders 00:51:45 AI should improve humans, not replace them 00:56:42 Safety is a property of the whole system 00:58:12 Silicon Valley gurus and the cream off the top 01:00:47 Game theory, mechanism design, and contracts 01:04:39 Conformal prediction, e-values, and anytime inference 01:08:11 A new liberal arts triangle for the AI era 01:11:30 The Bayesian duck and markets as uncertainty reduction ReScript (transcript, PDF, refs etc) - https://app.rescript.info/public/share/fb68f94af29d3745c6cf6125e01328b5 --- REFERENCES: person: [00:02:50] Michael I. Jordan (homepage) https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~jordan/ paper: [00:06:01] A Collectivist, Economic Perspective on AI https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.06268 [00:18:09] AlphaFold https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03819-2 [00:20:36] Prediction-Powered Inference https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.09633 [00:33:47] On Three-Layer Data Markets https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.09697 [01:04:39] Conformal Prediction with Conditional Guarantees https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.07511 [01:04:51] A Tutorial on Conformal Prediction https://www.jmlr.org/papers/v9/shafer08a.html [01:06:00] E-Values Expand the Scope of Conformal Prediction https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.13050 [01:08:23] Computational Thinking https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~CompThink/papers/Wing06.pdf other: [00:28:20] How Should the FDA Test? https://rdi.berkeley.edu/events/sbc-assets/pdfs/Summit%20session%20speaker%20slides%20submission%20form-s1-5%20%28File%20responses%29/Slides%20in%20PDF%20%28Please%20name%20the%20submitted%20file%20as%20_firstname_-_lastname_-slides.pdf%29.%20%28File%20responses%29/27-Michael%20Jordan-Session%20V.pdf#page=15 [00:28:40] Michael I. Jordan Session V Slides <truncated, see ReScript link or YT VD>