An ancient institution warns about the dangers
of a tiny elite controlling the future. Beat.
Meanwhile, a machine just cracked a 56 -year
-old math problem for the price of a fancy dinner.
Two completely different worlds colliding, you
know? Let's unpack it. Welcome to today's Deep
Dive. I'm really glad you are here with us. We
have a truly fascinating journey ahead today.
We absolutely do. First, we are going to explore
a surprising new encyclical. It comes directly
from Pope Leo XIV. We're looking at AI. power
and the future of democracy. Right. Then we take
a rapid -fire tour of today's major AI industry
moves. We're talking spy agencies buying up chips
and, you know, workers automating their own jobs.
And finally, a mind -bending math showdown. And
AI just proved it can generate entirely new knowledge.
The three -line for today is the tension of control.
Who exactly controls this frantic technological
race? And what is the technology actually becoming
capable of? It is a massive question. And, well,
the Vatican just weighed in heavily. Yep. Start
right there. Pope Leo IV just released a new
encyclical. It is titled Magnifica Humanitas,
and it is making serious waves. Oh, for sure.
I mean, it uses AI as a primary hook, but it
actually tackles much deeper issues. The rapid
erosion of democracy, the rise of massive inequality.
Yeah. Specifically, how tech elites are essentially
steering the world to benefit themselves. The
timing of this document is incredibly striking
to me. The context here is super important. The
encyclical dropped right after a major political
shift in Washington. President Trump had just
delayed a major AI executive order. Just looking
at the timeline, that order was meant to give
government oversight, oversight for new powerful
AI models. Exactly. And billionaires are currently
pumping hundreds of millions into super PACs.
They are lobbying specifically to kill AI safety
regulations. So the pope is reacting to a very
specific moment in time. He argues something
very specific here. Tech built by a tiny opaque
group cannot serve the common good. AI naturally
amplifies the power of those who already have
money and data. And they use that data advantage
very effectively. They use it to manipulate our
choices. They manipulate what we buy every day
and even how we vote. I have to admit something
here. I still wrestle with knowing what's actually
true online myself. These deep fakes, they really
blur reality. You are definitely not alone in
feeling that way. The Pope actually highlights
that exact issue. Endless data deepfakes are
destroying our collective truth. Yeah, we are
losing our shared ability to agree on basic reality.
Without a shared reality, democracy really struggles
to function. So the Pope makes a very explicit
demand here. He calls for an end to this frantic
push. He specifically means the push for ever
larger data sets. He is warning against the blind
race for more powerful models. The document makes
a very sharp philosophical point. Just because
a small group can build insanely powerful tech.
Right. And they definitely have the capital to
do it. It doesn't give them the right to govern
society. It's like building a high speed train,
but letting the engineers decide what cities
are allowed to exist. That is a perfect way to
visualize it. The engineers shouldn't be the
mayors. And what is fascinating here is the historical
parallel. It mirrors history almost perfectly.
You're talking about the Industrial Revolution,
right? Yes. Back in 1891, the church issued a
very similar warning. They called out the exact
same type of exploitation. Back then, it was
factory owners. Today, it is data centers. Do
historical warnings like the 1891 decree ever
actually slow down technological momentum, or
do they just document it? They rarely stop the
actual machinery of progress. You can't uninvent
the steam engine, and you can't uninvent algorithms.
But they do something equally important. They
shift the cultural baseline of what society accepts.
So moral warnings highlight the stakes, even
if they don't hit the brakes. Exactly. They force
us to look at the road ahead. They give lawmakers
a moral vocabulary to eventually pass regulations.
The Pope warned about this frantic push for dominance.
Let's look exactly at what that frantic push
looks like on the ground this week. The corporate
shifts right now are just staggering. Let's start
with a company called ClickUp. They just laid
off 22 % of their workforce. Wait, 22%. Is that
a direct result of the AI or is the CEO just
using it as a convenient excuse? It seems directly
tied to their internal tech adoption. They rolled
out 3 ,000 internal AI agents just before the
layoffs. The CEO claims the future belongs to
employees who automate their own jobs. Automate
your job or lose your job entirely. That is a
brutal new reality for average workers. It is
a ruthless efficiency engine at work. Meanwhile,
the stakes are rising on a national level. The
White House just approved a massive spending
bill. They approved $9 billion for U .S. spy
agencies, buying up advanced AI chips at an incredible
rate. Officials are reportedly terrified of falling
behind globally. They believe they need to deploy
frontier AI systems as quickly as possible. Frontier
AI systems, basically the most advanced models
pushing the absolute limits. Yeah. The government
sees hoarding these chips as a core security
imperative now. At the same time, the broader
development speed is dizzying. Look at Google's
AI Studio. They let users build native Android
apps. You can do it directly on their platform
for free. And the volume of output is just insane.
Over 250 ,000 apps were built in a single week.
A quarter of a million apps in seven days. That
changes the entire software landscape completely.
It is like stacking Lego blocks of data. It really
democratizes code. But it also floods the zone.
And the models themselves are evolving incredibly
fast, too. Leaks suggest the next Grok model
is very close. They are calling it the 1 .5T
V9 medium model. It might drop in just two to
three weeks. Right. And the most interesting
part of the leak involves the training data.
Cursor data is heavily added into the mix. Let's
pause on that. Why does cursor data matter so
much? Well, Cursor is currently one of the most
popular AI coding editors. Developers use it
every day to write software. If Grok is craning
on how developers interact with Cursor, its coding
capabilities will skyrocket. I mean, it is learning
how we code while we are coding. That is a wild
feedback loop. We are also seeing practical daily
advice emerge. Yes. The creator of Cloud Code
shared a major tip for daily users. People are
always looking for ways to get better results.
What was the number one piece of advice? It is
surprisingly simple. But it changes everything.
You just explicitly tell the AI to review its
own code for bugs before it shows you the output.
Just asking it to double check its work. Yeah,
that simple second pass catches a huge percentage
of errors. These tools are becoming our everyday
digital companions, but they still have some
very weird, unsettling quirks. Like Google's
new AI search feature right now, it has been
acting a little bit strange lately. If you try
searching for certain command words, words like
ignore or stop. It breaks the illusion of a standard
search engine, starts talking back to you directly.
It responds just like a conversational assistant
would. It reminds you there is an agent behind
the search bar. Google says they are currently
working on a fix for it. Meanwhile, hardware
is shifting its focus entirely right now. Apple
is working on rumored new AI glasses. But they
are taking a very different approach from their
competitors. They may skip flashy augmented reality
screens completely. Right. They are focusing
on a very lightweight design instead. Simple
gesture controls for the user. And prioritizing
a much smarter, context -aware Siri built right
in. A Siri built for actual everyday use. How
do we reconcile this? Spy agencies hoard AI chips
for global dominance, while average workers must
automate their desk jobs or get fired. It really
highlights how AI is a dual use extreme right
now. It is a powerful weapon of statecraft at
the very top and a ruthless efficiency engine
at the very bottom. It's a two front race. National
security at the top. Personal automation at the
bottom. Precisely. The squeeze is happening to
society from both sides simultaneously. If our
national security, our daily livelihoods depend
on these frontier models, just how smart are
they actually getting? Let's look at a massive
recent breakthrough, a breakthrough that proves
they aren't just memorizing data anymore. We
will dive into that right after this short break.
Mid -roll sponsor break. We are back. Let's talk
about the math showdown. This is where things
get truly futuristic. Google DeepMind is officially
firing back at OpenAI. This all started when
OpenAI made a very large public claim. They claim
their system managed to disprove an 80 -year
-old math conjecture. So Google DeepMind just
answered with something undeniably huge. Their
new system is called Alpha Proof Nexus. And Alpha
Proof Nexus just solved nine open -air disk problems.
For those who might not know, what exactly is
an Erdos problem? Paul Erdos was a legendary
eccentric mathematician. He left behind hundreds
of unsolved problems in number theory and combinatorics.
They are notoriously tricky puzzles that require
deep logical leaps. An alpha -proof nexus just
solved nine of them. Two of these specific problems
have stumped human mathematicians for 56 years
straight. It didn't stop there, either. It also
recently solved 44 open conjectures from the
online encyclopedia of integer sequences. The
mechanism behind this breakthrough is truly fascinating
to me. It relies on a very specific loop between
two different systems. The AI system itself writes
the actual mathematical proof. It generates the
logical steps. Then a completely separate system
called Lean steps in to check it. Lean is essentially
a programming language designed to verify mathematical
proofs. It checks the math for any potential
logical errors in real time. Right. And here's
the magic part. They repeat this exact loop continuously.
The AI generates, Lean checks, the AI refines.
They run it over and over again until the proof
is completely flawless. Two secs silence. Whoa.
Imagine an AI grading its own math homework with
100 % certainty, cracking a 56 -year -old puzzle
for a few hundred bucks. The cost efficiency
is truly mind -blowing. Solving these historic
math problems used to take human lifetimes. It
took massive grants and years of intense focus.
Now, each problem costs only a few hundred dollars
in compute power. It completely flips the economics
of scientific discovery. But it is important
to note it does have a current hard limitation.
Yes, it hits a wall on certain types of abstract
problems. AlphaProof absolutely crushed all of
these existing logical puzzles. But it currently
struggles with inventing entirely new mathematical
constructions from scratch. It optimizes existing
frameworks beautifully, but it isn't dreaming
up new branches of math. It's like a grandmaster
who can play millions of chess games to find
the perfect move, but can't invent a new board
game. That is exactly the right way to view its
current limits. It masters the established rules
of the universe perfectly well, but it cannot
invent brand new math concepts on its own just
yet. Even with that limitation, the significance
of this milestone is profound. For a very long
time, skeptics have made a specific argument
about AI. They said AI could only regurgitate
its training data. They called large language
models very fancy autocomplete machines. They
argued the models were just guessing the next
likely word based on statistics. But disproving
and solving decades old math problems changes
everything. It is the literal definition of generating
brand new knowledge. It proves the system is
capable of genuine reasoning. Google showed us
a very clear working blueprint here. It is a
blueprint for the future of all scientific discovery.
Does this finally end the autocomplete debate
entirely, whether AI is just an autocomplete
or something actually capable of reasoning? It
absolutely should end that debate for good. Solving
a previously unsolved mathematical problem proves
a critical point. The system is reaching far
beyond its initial training data. It is tapping
into genuine, verifiable logic. Right. It's generating
genuine new knowledge, not just remixing its
training data. Exactly. The ceiling of the capability
is rising incredibly fast right now. Let's bring
this whole journey full circle today. We started
with deeply human moral concerns from the Vatican.
The Pope warned about morality, political power
and massive inequality. He was deeply worried
about who exactly wields this new technology.
He warned about the tiny elite controlling the
trajectory of society. And we contrasted that
human warning with cold, undeniable machine capability.
Systems like Alpha Proof Nexus are rewriting
human knowledge boundaries as we speak. The technology
is undeniably crossing a major... It is moving
from a tool of convenience to an engine of discovery.
Which makes the question of control more critical
than ever. Who steers this ship matters deeply
to all of us. It really does. The technological
race is simply moving much faster than our global
regulations. I want to leave you with a lingering
question today. If we can build an AI that flawlessly
grades its own logic in complex math, how long
until we ask it to logically grade the messy,
unequal societal systems the Pope is so worried
about? And would we even listen to its answer?
Thank you for joining our deep dive today, Otiro
Music.