Scaling Theory

My guest today is Allison Stanger . Allison is a Middlebury Distinguished Endowed Professor; an Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University; the Co-Director (with Danielle Allen) of the GETTING-Plurality⁠ Research Network, Harvard University; founding member of the Digital Humanism Initiative (Vienna); and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Alli...

My guest is Arvind Narayanan , a Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University, and the director of the Center for Information Technology Policy, also at Princeton. Arvind is renowned for his work on the societal impacts of digital technologies, including his textbook on fairness and machine learning, his online course on cryptocurrencies, his research on data de-anonymization, dark patter...

My guest today is ⁠ Sara Hooker⁠ , VP of Research at Cohere, where she leads Cohere for AI, a non-profit research lab that seeks to solve complex machine learning problems with researchers from over 100 countries. Sara is the author of numerous research papers, some of which focus specifically on scaling theory in AI. She has been listed as one of AI’s top 13 innovators by Fortune. In our conversa...

My guest today is Michael Mauboussin (@ mjmauboussin ), one of the world’s leading experts in finance. Michael serves as Head of Consilient Research at Counterpoint Global, Morgan Stanley. He has authored three books and regularly appears in the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New York Times, and other publications. Since 1993, Michael has been an adjunct professor of finance at Columbia Bus...

My guest is Glen Weyl , an influential economist and social technologist known for his interdisciplinary work at the intersection of economics, computer science, sociology, and political science. He is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, a co-author of the books “Radical Markets” and the recently published “ Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and  Democracy” which he co-au...

My guest is Yann LeCun, a pioneering French-American computer scientist, known for his groundbreaking work in machine learning, computer vision, and neural networks. Yann is the Silver Professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University and serves as the Vice President and Chief AI Scientist at Meta. Yann is one of the world’s most influential computer scientists. He...

J. Doyne Farmer is the Director of the Complexity Economics programme at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School, a Professor at the Mathematical Institute of Oxford University, and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. In this episode, we explore Doyne’s latest book, “Making Sense of Chaos.” We focus on the relationship between chaos and scaling theory, and...

Thomas Wolf  is the co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Hugging Face, the company at the center of the open-source AI ecosystem. He has a Ph. D. in statistical & quantum physics. In this episode, we explore why open-source (“OS”) AI may be preferable to closed-source, whether OS has a real chance to take over the space, the challenges OS developers must overcome to scale their foundational...

Geoffrey West is a physicist, former president and distinguished professor of the Santa Fe Institute. His book, “ Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Businesses ” (2017), is a masterpiece. In this episode, we talk about the power laws behind living organisms, cities, businesses, and technologies. By the end of this episode, you will know more about the po...

In this first episode, Dr. Thibault Schrepel (@ ⁠ProfSchrepel⁠ ) introduces “Scaling Theory”, a podcast dedicated to the power laws behind the growth of companies, technologies, legal and living systems. *** References : ➝ Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859) ➝ Melanie Mitchell, Complexity: A Guided Tour (2011) ➝ Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and...