Topic
14 facts from 1 episode, in date order. These are what speakers said on the shows, each linked to the moment it was said. They aren't independently verified.
1990
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.”
Undated
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”
Undated
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.”
Undated
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”
Undated
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.”
Undated
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.”
Undated
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.”
Undated
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.”
Undated
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?”
Undated
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.”
Undated
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.”
Undated
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.”
Undated
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.”
Undated
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.”
Episodes