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Welcome to the Where Shall We Meet podcast. Our guest this week is James Manyika, who is Senior Vice President of Research, Labs, Technology and Society at Google and Alphabet. He joined Google in 2022 in a newly created role reporting to Sundar Pichai, and has spent the years since arguing that AI's largest contribution may turn out to be to science itself.

His latest essay in the new volume of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences is devoted to AI and scientific discovery which features Demis Hassabis, Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, Eric Topol and others. He also co-chaired the United Nations Secretary-General's High-Level Advisory Body on AI, served as vice chair of the US National AI Advisory Committee, and co-wrote No Ordinary Disruption.

James was born and raised in Zimbabwe and read electrical engineering at the University of Zimbabwe before going to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, where he took a doctorate in AI and robotics and became a fellow of Balliol College. He was a visiting scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, then spent twenty-five years at McKinsey, thirteen of them as chairman of the McKinsey Global Institute.

We talk about:

• AlphaFold and a fifty-year grand challenge
• Did it understand how proteins fold, or just learn the grammar?
• Is hallucination a bug or a feature?
• Move 37 and the bitter lesson
• Turing on why an infallible machine is a boring one
• Is this the first time we have had a cognitive competitor?
• The impossible problem of alignment
• AI as an invention for making inventions
• Missed use, and who actually benefits from a breakthrough

Let's discover!

Web: www.whereshallwemeet.xyz
Twitter: @whrshallwemeet
Instagram: @whrshallwemeet

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Welcome to the where shall we meet podcast. Our guest this week is Xavier Collins who is the CEO and Co-founder of Wonder Studios, an AI-native creative studio redefining how film, advertising, and music video content is made. Based in London, Xavier founded Wonder alongside CCO Justin Hackney with a clear thesis: that the most valuable creative work in the AI era lives at the intersection of human taste and intelligent production — what the studio calls “crafting jewelry from AI gold.”

Wonder has raised $15M from investors including LocalGlobe and Blackbird, with angels from ElevenLabs, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind — and is building toward becoming the A24 of the AI generation.

Before Wonder, Xavier held senior roles scaling some of the world’s fastest-growing consumer platforms, including Uber and Deliveroo.

We talk about:

• Who is the maker when we use AI?
• Does what we value change when things don’t require effort?
• Is the box office truly reflective of what care about?
• Will AI tools empower the unskilled?
• How will we adjust to fakery?
• Is Inga Rose a watershed moment?
• Will artisanal always resonate more AI?
• Can AI create novelty?

Let’s wonder!

Web: www.whereshallwemeet.xyz
Twitter: @whrshallwemeet
Instagram: @whrshallwemeet

Questions, suggestions, or feedback? Send us a message!

Welcome to the Where Shall We Meet podcast. This is the first time we have a returning guest. We talk about Maria Popova’s new book Traversal, which to be honest defies summary.

Web: www.whereshallwemeet.xyz
Twitter: @whrshallwemeet
Instagram: @whrshallwemeet