The Last Invention

The Last Invention

The AI revolution has begun – the product of a seventy-year quest by scientists, mathematicians, and visionaries who set out to build machines that could think. But what began as a fringe idea has now become one of the most powerful forces of the 21st century. This is the story of that journey: its rivalries, its competing visions of utopia and apocalypse, and the race to build what may be humanity’s last invention.

Episodes

Introducing: The Last Invention

September 15, 2025 • 2 mins
For over seventy years, technologists have dreamed of building a true “thinking machine.” An artificial intelligence so powerful it would reshape every aspect of human life. Would it unlock unimaginable abundance? Or bring about our destruction? Today, many of the people closest to the latest A.I. breakthroughs believe that moment has arrived. Some are walking away from their jobs to sound the alarm. Others argue it can’t be stopp...
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EP 1: Ready Or Not

October 2, 2025 • 35 mins
A tip alleging a Silicon Valley conspiracy leads to a much bigger story: the race to build artificial general intelligence — within the next few years — and the factions vying to accelerate it, to stop it, or to prepare for its arrival. FEATURING: Mike Brock, Kevin Roose, Geoffrey Hinton, Connor Leahy, William MacAskill, Liv Boeree, Sam Harris, and Yoshua Bengio LINKS: Sam Harris 2016 TED Talk, Can We Build AI Without Losing Co...
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EP 2: The Signal

October 2, 2025 • 53 mins
In 1951, Alan Turing predicted machines might one day surpass human intelligence and 'take control.' He created a test to alert us when we were getting close. But seventy years of science fiction later, the real threat feels like just another movie plot. THIS EPISODE FEATURES: Connor Leahy, Max Tegmark, Robin Hanson, Karen Hao, Nick Bostrom, Sam Harris, and Justin Murphy LINKS: Karen Hao’s book “Empire of AI” Nick Bostrom's bo...
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EP 3: Playing the Wrong Game

October 9, 2025 • 50 mins
What if the path to a true thinking machine was found not just in a lab… but in a game? For decades, AI’s greatest triumphs came from games: checkers, chess, Jeopardy. But no matter how many trophies it took from humans, it still couldn’t think. In this episode, we follow the contrarian scientists who refused to give up on a radical idea, one that would ultimately change how machines learn. But their breakthrough came with a cost: ...
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EP 4: Speedrun

October 16, 2025 • 61 mins
Is the only way to stop a bad guy with an AGI… a good guy with an AGI? In a twist of technological irony, the very people who warned most loudly about the existential dangers of artificial superintelligence—Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Dario Amodei among them—became the ones racing to build it first. Each believed they alone could create it safely before their competitors unleashed something dangerous. This episode traces how their s...
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EP 5: Contact

October 23, 2025 • 50 mins
In the strange months after ChatGPT’s release, the world made contact with something new. A tech CEO begged to be regulated, a chatbot seemed to fall in love, and the godfathers of AI became frightened by the implications of what they’d spent their lives building. THIS EPISODE FEATURES: Keach Hagey, Kevin Roose, Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton LINKS: Keach Hagey’s book The Optimist Sam Altman testifies at Senate artificial inte...
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EP 6: The AI Doomers

November 6, 2025 • 56 mins
What happens when some of the most idealistic techno-optimists come to believe that superintelligence poses a threat to humanity's survival? Today, the best case for the worst case scenario. We sit down with Nate Soares and Connor Leahy and ask them to make their case for why we need to stop ASI, before it’s too late. THIS EPISODE FEATURES: Connor Leahy, Natasha Vita-More, Max More, Keach Hagey, Nate Soares LINKS: Nate Soares’...
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