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1 episodes · 25 quoted claims
Alex Pentland says hedge funds that set up AI and walk away lose a lot of money because of backtesting on past data and lack of context.
“the answer is that if they do that, they lose a ton of money. Why is that? Well, because of the backtesting, back view, because of lack of context”
Pentland says Deliberation.io, an AI mediator, made meetings more than twice as efficient and effective according to participants, compared with humans alone.
“makes people's meetings more than twice as efficient and effective, according to the people, than having just humans.”
Pentland described the leader of a 350,000-employee multinational who plans to cut in-house staff to 150,000.
“here's one example of a leader of a a large multinational 350,000 employees. What he says is that he's going to move down to 150,000 employees that are in-house”
According to Pentland, a doctor with no technical background and a few helpers built an operating system for a hospital in six weeks using AI tools, and the hospital adopted it.
“in six weeks, they built an operating system for the hospital that the hospital ended up adopting and having much greater results and much better efficiency.”
Pentland proposes that companies give 10% of their shares to a sovereign wealth fund when they are formed, in return for guarantees about future taxation.
“if when you set up a company, you were required to give ten of the shares, and remember, at the beginning, with a company, the shares are worth zero into a sovereign wealth fund.”
Pentland estimates that a share-contribution scheme started in 1990 would have produced a US sovereign wealth fund worth about $10 trillion today.
“Now, if we had that in place, say in 1990, we'd have a sovereign wealth fund worth something like 10 trillion today in the United States.”
Pentland says American society tied healthcare and retirement to employment in the 1950s, when lifetime employment was common.
“we've tied things like healthcare and retirement to employment. And we did that back in the 1950s, when lifetime employment was not a joke.”
Pentland says the UK government is interested in his sovereign wealth fund proposal because of its inequality problem.
“I was just I'm here in the UK, and that idea is really interesting to the government here.”
Pentland says Costa Rica gave every school child a computer and insisted they learn English, in a push to move beyond coffee growing.
“they gave every school kid a computer. This is back in the like 70s, right? And they insisted that they speak the technical language of the world, which was English.”
Pentland says Costa Rica's investment in a skilled population led Intel to build a fabrication plant there and attracted software firms.
“as a consequence, they got Intel to build a fab plant there, they got software there. They're doing quite well, thank you”
Pentland says he helped shape the MIT Media Lab and describes it as an apprenticeship program rather than a traditional educational program.
“I I helped, uh uh, shape the Media Lab at MIT, that's what it is. It's not an educational program in the traditional way, it's an apprenticeship program.”
Pentland says Loyalagents.org, run with Consumer Reports and Stanford's law school, pushes for AI shopping agents that represent the user and are auditable.
“if you're gonna have an agent buying things for you, it had better represent you and not some other company, right?”
Pentland cites a study of open-source language models finding that the cost of a given level of performance fell by 50% every three and a half months, or tenfold per year.
“Where the current state-of-the-art LLMs fell by 50 every three and a half months, and by a factor of ten every year.”
Pentland says the cost of a given amount of AI capability has dropped roughly a thousandfold over three years.
“So that means in the last three years, the cost of a given amount of intelligence has dropped by order of a thousand.”
Pentland says a friend running the nation's largest supercomputer center reported productivity tripled once language models could run on high-end laptops.
“he says that the moment they were able to get these LLMs to run on super high-end laptops, their productivity tripled.”
Pentland says he runs a group within the Internet Engineering Task Force, which sets internet specifications, working on making bots and data provenance easier to identify.
“we run a group, uh, uh, that's in the IETF, which are the ones that set the specs for the internet.”
Pentland says a specification his IETF group is finishing would cost North Korea about $1 billion a year in stolen proceeds.
“we're just finishing a spec that's gonna cost, uh, North Korea about $1 billion a year. Cause they steal things”
Pentland says Taiwan uses a tool called Polis for government conversations that visualizes the range of opinion and helps identify extreme voices.
“if you look at, um, a thing called Polis that, uh, nor that, uh, Taiwan uses for government conversations”
Pentland describes community notes as a simple system in which broad audiences attach notes to posts, which he says reduces false beliefs somewhat.
“the big social media companies have begun doing something called community notes, so community notes is, uh, a very simple sort of AI system.”
Pentland says he dined with the head of Singtel and a Temasek representative, who found the frontier-model hype amusing.
“I was sitting with the head of Singtel, which is the the biggest sort of, uh, telco in the Indo-Pacific, and Temasek, which is, uh, the, uh, sovereign wealth fund of Singapore.”
Pentland says China is pursuing access to global business-process data through its Belt and Road initiative.
“So that's what, uh, China is primarily focused on through Belt and Road, and they've been doing a very good job at it.”
Pentland describes India's Citizen Stack as open, free public software generalizing the India Stack, providing identity, contracts, payments and medical information.
“They have a thing called the Citizen Stack, which is a generalization of their India stack. It's open, free, uh, public software that provides identity, uh, contracts, payments, medical information”
Pentland says twelve countries have signed up to India's stack, 26 are considering it, and 1.4 billion customers have been signed up.
“And so they have, at the moment, uh, twelve countries cl signed up, 26 altogether, uh, that are thinking about it and be doing parts. They've signed up 1.4 billion customers to this.”
Pentland says he served on the data board of AT&T, a hundred-year-old company that used upskilling programs and early retirement to adapt to new competitors.
“I was on, um, the data board for ATT, you know, they have this problem that, you know, they're a hundred-year-old company.”
Pentland says investment funds in China and the Middle East use time horizons of around 40 years.
“if you look at investment funds in China, 40 year time horizons, if you look at investment funds in the Middle East, 40 year time horizons.”