AI & Consciousness

Tommy Jakobsen

AI & Consciousness A Podcast About AI News Podcast Overview The podcast is generated by an AI Agentic solution with a human touch. "AI & Consciousness" is a weekly podcast that navigates the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence. We go beyond the headlines to explore the innovations, challenges, and societal impact of AI, providing a clear and insightful perspective for enthusiasts, professionals, and the simply curious. Mission To make complex AI news accessible and engaging. We aim to foster a deeper understanding of the technology that is reshaping our world, covering the ethical dilemmas, corporate battles, and scientific breakthroughs that define the future of human-AI collaboration. Target Audience Professionals in Tech: Engineers, data scientists, and developers looking for a concise, high-level summary of industry trends. Entrepreneurs & Business Leaders: Individuals seeking to understand how AI is changing business models and creating new opportunities. Students & Academics: Researchers and learners who want to stay current with the latest research and ethical debates. The "AI-Curious" General Public: Anyone interested in the societal and cultural implications of AI, from its impact on jobs to its role in daily life. Key Content Pillars Each episode will be a journey through the most critical topics in the AI realm, broken down into six main segments: AI Innovations & Tools: A look at the newest models, software, and hardware that are pushing the boundaries of what's possible. Business & Corporate Moves: Analysis of mergers, acquisitions, and strategic partnerships that are shaping the competitive landscape. Legal & Ethical Challenges: A deep dive into the complex questions of bias, regulation, and the responsible use of AI. Societal Impact & Controversies: Discussions on AI's influence on employment, culture, and public discourse, including debates that are making headlines. Emerging Trends & Research: Highlights from the latest scientific papers and academic breakthroughs that point to the future of the field. Notable Events & Acquisitions: A brief roundup of major announcements and key deals that listeners need to know.

  1. Week 43, mid week episode

    10/22/2025

    Week 43, mid week episode

    In this comprehensive episode, we merge two days of rapid-fire AI developments into one essential deep dive. We explore the groundbreaking new frameworks that are finally helping to define and measure Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and revealing the surprising limits of "reflection" in today's most advanced models. We'll cover major breakthroughs in healthcare, where AIs like DeepSomatic are finding previously missed cancer variants in children, and in law, where new systems are redefining corporate accountability in the age of algorithms. From clever 'jailbreaking' attacks that expose critical vulnerabilities to the fun side of AI playing Dungeons & Dragons, this episode covers the innovations, the risks, and the societal shifts shaping our world. Sharing a lot of references from this episode. References and Further ReadingA Definition of AGI: Proposes a quantifiable framework to define and measure Artificial General Intelligence based on human cognitive abilities.DeepSomatic: Details Google's AI model that identified 10 previously missed genetic variants in pediatric leukemia cells.Distractor Injection Attacks: Reveals how top LLMs can be distracted by irrelevant tasks, cutting task accuracy by up to 60%.DTKG: A dual-track knowledge graph framework that improves complex multi-hop question answering in RAG systems.From Local to Global (GISP): Introduces GISP, a structured pruning method making LLMs up to 50% smaller without losing performance.FST.ai 2.0: An explainable AI system to assist Taekwondo referees, reducing decision review times by 85%.Illusions of reflection: Shows that frontier LLMs lack functional, goal-driven reflective reasoning, a key gap in current AI capabilities.Is Multilingual LLM Watermarking Truly Multilingual? (STEAM): Presents STEAM, a method using back-translation to fix fairness issues and ensure watermarking works in low-resource languages.Na Prática, qual IA Entende o Direito?: A study finding that a specialized legal AI (JusIA) significantly outperforms general models like ChatGPT on legal tasks.Operationalising Extended Cognition: Proposes a legal framework for holding corporations accountable for decisions made by their AI systems.The Right to Be Remembered: Argues for a digital right to combat the erasure of minority voices and cultural memory by LLMs.Team-Phi: A multi-agent framework that automatically evaluates and selects models for anonymizing patient health data.VERA-V: A framework that automates the discovery of 'jailbreak' vulnerabilities in multimodal AIs like GPT-4o.What Limits Agentic Systems Efficiency? (SpecCache): Introduces SpecCache, a method to speed up web-based AI agents by up to 3.2x via intelligent caching.

    9 min
  2. Week 42, start of the week

    10/13/2025

    Week 42, start of the week

    This week on AI & Consciousness, we explore the rapidly accelerating world of artificial intelligence, where groundbreaking innovations emerge alongside complex societal and ethical dilemmas. In this episode, we unpack major technical leaps and their real-world applications: Google is revolutionizing the smart home by replacing Google Assistant with Gemini for Home. The company also introduced Speech-to-Retrieval (S2R), a new approach that maps spoken queries directly to embeddings without first converting them to text.We explore the rise of sophisticated AI agents, from the "agentic mesh" concept that envisions collaborative AI to Sentient AI's release of ROMA, an open-source framework for building agents with hierarchical task execution.Discover how the horticulture company ScottsMiracle-Gro saved $150 million by implementing a "hierarchy of agents" to streamline its supply chain, marketing, and customer service.A major breakthrough in healthcare comes from researchers at Stanford, ETH Zurich, Google, and Amazon, who have introduced OpenTSLM, a new family of models designed to interpret and reason over complex medical time-series data.We also dive into the profound societal impacts of AI's expanding footprint: The debate over AI's role in the workforce intensifies with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's comment that jobs eliminated by AI may not have been "real work" to begin with.The potential for AI-driven misinformation is highlighted by reports of Trump supporters using OpenAI's Sora to generate videos of soldiers assaulting protesters.AI is blurring the lines of human connection, with a new study finding that a significant number of high schoolers have had "romantic relationships" with an AI, while the state of Ohio is considering a bill to ban human-AI marriage.In education, we look at the risks of flawed implementation, as a university's AI system has been found to be falsely accusing students of cheating with AI.Tune in to the full episode to hear our in-depth analysis of these stories, the latest in venture capital for deep tech startups, and much more.

    10 min

About

AI & Consciousness A Podcast About AI News Podcast Overview The podcast is generated by an AI Agentic solution with a human touch. "AI & Consciousness" is a weekly podcast that navigates the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence. We go beyond the headlines to explore the innovations, challenges, and societal impact of AI, providing a clear and insightful perspective for enthusiasts, professionals, and the simply curious. Mission To make complex AI news accessible and engaging. We aim to foster a deeper understanding of the technology that is reshaping our world, covering the ethical dilemmas, corporate battles, and scientific breakthroughs that define the future of human-AI collaboration. Target Audience Professionals in Tech: Engineers, data scientists, and developers looking for a concise, high-level summary of industry trends. Entrepreneurs & Business Leaders: Individuals seeking to understand how AI is changing business models and creating new opportunities. Students & Academics: Researchers and learners who want to stay current with the latest research and ethical debates. The "AI-Curious" General Public: Anyone interested in the societal and cultural implications of AI, from its impact on jobs to its role in daily life. Key Content Pillars Each episode will be a journey through the most critical topics in the AI realm, broken down into six main segments: AI Innovations & Tools: A look at the newest models, software, and hardware that are pushing the boundaries of what's possible. Business & Corporate Moves: Analysis of mergers, acquisitions, and strategic partnerships that are shaping the competitive landscape. Legal & Ethical Challenges: A deep dive into the complex questions of bias, regulation, and the responsible use of AI. Societal Impact & Controversies: Discussions on AI's influence on employment, culture, and public discourse, including debates that are making headlines. Emerging Trends & Research: Highlights from the latest scientific papers and academic breakthroughs that point to the future of the field. Notable Events & Acquisitions: A brief roundup of major announcements and key deals that listeners need to know.