Welcome back to Generally Intelligent! We’re excited to relaunch our podcast—still featuring thoughtful conversations on building AI, but now with an expanded lens on its economic, societal, political, and human impacts.

Matt Boulos leads policy and safety at Imbue, where he shapes the responsible development of AI coding tools that make software creation broadly accessible. His work centers on understanding what technological power means for individual liberty and advocates for the legal and institutional frameworks we need to protect our freedom. Matt is a lawyer, computer scientist, and founder.A full transcript is available on our Substack: https://imbueai.substack.com/matt-boulos/

Highlights:

• AI’s four core challenges
• Governing lawless digital spaces
• Why abundance is not enough without liberty
• Freedom as deep enablement and deep protection
• The role of technologists in shaping society

Generally Intelligent is a podcast by Imbue, an independent research company developing a better way to build personal software. Our mission is to empower humans in the age of AI by creating powerful computing tools controlled by individuals.

Website: https://imbue.com/

Substack: https://imbueai.substack.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/imbue_ai/

X: @imbue_ai

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/imbue-ai.bsky.social

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@imbue_ai/

Rylan Schaeffer is a PhD student at Stanford studying the engineering, science, and mathematics of intelligence. He authored the paper “Are Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models a Mirage?”, as well as other interesting refutations in the field that we’ll talk about today. He previously interned at Meta on the Llama team, and at Google DeepMind.

Generally Intelligent is a podcast by Imbue where we interview researchers about their behind-the-scenes ideas, opinions, and intuitions that are hard to share in papers and talks.

About Imbue

Imbue is an independent research company developing AI agents that mirror the fundamentals of human-like intelligence and that can learn to safely solve problems in the real world. We started Imbue because we believe that software with human-level intelligence will have a transformative impact on the world. We’re dedicated to ensuring that that impact is a positive one.

We have enough funding to freely pursue our research goals over the next decade, and our backers include Y Combinator, researchers from OpenAI, Astera Institute, and a number of private individuals who care about effective altruism and scientific research.

Our research is focused on agents for digital environments (ex: browser, desktop, documents), using RL, large language models, and self supervised learning. We’re excited about opportunities to use simulated data, network architecture search, and good theoretical understanding of deep learning to make progress on these problems. We take a focused, engineering-driven approach to research.

Website: https://imbue.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/imbue_ai/

Twitter/X: @imbue_ai

Ari Morcos is the CEO of DatologyAI, which makes training deep learning models more performant and efficient by intervening on training data. He was at FAIR and DeepMind before that, where he worked on a variety of topics, including how training data leads to useful representations, lottery ticket hypothesis, and self-supervised learning. His work has been honored with Outstanding Paper awards at both NeurIPS and ICLR.

Generally Intelligent is a podcast by Imbue where we interview researchers about their behind-the-scenes ideas, opinions, and intuitions that are hard to share in papers and talks.

About Imbue

Imbue is an independent research company developing AI agents that mirror the fundamentals of human-like intelligence and that can learn to safely solve problems in the real world. We started Imbue because we believe that software with human-level intelligence will have a transformative impact on the world. We’re dedicated to ensuring that that impact is a positive one.

We have enough funding to freely pursue our research goals over the next decade, and our backers include Y Combinator, researchers from OpenAI, Astera Institute, and a number of private individuals who care about effective altruism and scientific research.

Our research is focused on agents for digital environments (ex: browser, desktop, documents), using RL, large language models, and self supervised learning. We’re excited about opportunities to use simulated data, network architecture search, and good theoretical understanding of deep learning to make progress on these problems. We take a focused, engineering-driven approach to research.

Website: ⁠https://imbue.com/⁠

LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/company/imbue-ai/⁠

Twitter: @imbue_ai