Machine Learning Street Talk · 2026-05-21 · 1h 17m
Michael I. Jordan, described by Science magazine as the most influential computer scientist alive, has never thought of himself as an AI researcher. In this conversation he explains why that distinction matters. SPONSOR: - Cyber Fund built the Monastery to help founders ship products that were impossible a year ago. Applications for Batch 1 are now open. Apply now: - Jordan trained as a statistician and cognitive scientist, and his career has been spent building machine learning systems that work in the real world: supply chains, commerce, healthcare, and large economic systems. When the field rebranded itself as AI and then AGI, he did not follow. Instead he argues that the framing is wrong. AI is better understood as a collective economic system than as a race to build a disembodied superintelligence. We talk about why AGI is mostly a PR term, what machine learning achieved before the LLM hype cycle, and why the assistant-on-your-shoulder vision may be less compelling than it sounds.
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