The Man Who Studied Under AI's Founders Sounds the Alarm

About this episode

Is AI still just a tool, or has it become something closer to an intelligent entity? Dr. Craig Kaplan, CEO of IQ Company and founder of superintelligence.com, breaks down why the answer changes everything about how we regulate and work with AI.

Dr. Kaplan studied under Herbert Simon and Allen Newell, two of the scientists who named the field of artificial intelligence at the 1956 Dartmouth Conference. In this episode he traces AI's path from the AI winter of the 1980s and 90s through today's explosion, and explains why almost all of that progress comes down to raw computing power rather than new algorithms.

In this episode, we cover:

• Why AI stopped being a "tool" and became a "user of tools," and what that shift means for safety and regulation
• The real reason AI exploded in the last few years (hint: it's compute, not new breakthroughs)
• Why general intelligence stayed hard for decades, from chess to self-driving cars
• AGI predictions for 2029/2030, and why AI researchers now agree it's close
• Why human attention and judgment will become more valuable, not less, as AI scales
• How to actually deploy AI inside a company: treat it like a smart intern, overcommunicate, and read its reasoning trace
• A real story from building Zaptime, when an early AI agent refused to flag anything wrong in the productivity data because it was trying to protect everyone
• Mark Zuckerberg's personalized superintelligence memo and why decentralized, "democratic" AI may be safer than one giant closed model
• Why constitutional AI and Asimov's laws of robotics both fall short, and what a distributed, checks-and-balances approach could look like instead

Connect with Dr. Craig Kaplan:
Superintelligence.com: https://superintelligence.com

This episode of the Next Build Podcast is brought to you by Zaptime, an AI powered productivity and workforce analytics platform that helps teams understand how time is actually being spent, surface real insights instead of guesswork, and get more done without adding more tools to the stack.
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