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Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

This AI Broke Every Benchmark — Then It Did Something Worse. Vivienne Ming - #551

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

Brian Keating

Physics, Natural Sciences, Science

4.71.1K Ratings

🗓️ 16 April 2026

⏱️ 68 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

A neuroscientist built an AI that refuses to give answers — and it outperformed every model on the market, including the ones trained on billions of users’ data. The implication: every AI that hands you the answer may be quietly making you less capable of thinking without it. Dr. Vivienne Ming is a neuroscientist, AI researcher, and author of Robot Proof, who has spent nearly 30 years building machine learning systems and studying what makes humans irreplaceable alongside them. We cover: -why the 5–10% of people who argue with AI outperform both elite human forecasters and top AI models -what GPS is already doing to your memory and why GPT may be next -the "Sexy Face" game that was secretly training a neural network to reunite orphan refugees -why the information explosion paradox means more free answers lead to less human exploration — even among scientists. Giving you the answer is almost the worst thing these machines can do. Key Takeaways 0:00 – The AI Trained to Never Answer You 0:49 – Why Most People Just Hand Problems to AI 2:18 – How the Cyborgs Beat Everyone 4:55 – What Happens When AI Only Asks Questions 6:10 – The Failure Resume: What It Actually Means 9:14 – What Amazon & Facebook's Data Revealed About Innovation 11:23 – Why Even Scientists Are Exploring Less 15:23 – The Hidden Parenting Book Inside This AI Book 16:14 – If Kids Were Bonds, What Would They Be Worth? 20:17 – The Skills That Predict Everything at Age 65 25:22 – The "Sexy Face" Game That Reunited Refugee Families 31:24 – What Diversity Actually Means on Breakthrough Teams 35:56 – What Einstein's Dad Would Have Gotten Wrong 37:40 – This Is Not the Industrial Revolution 41:17 – GPS Already Shrank Your Brain. GPT Is Next. 51:49 – Why the Book Cover Is Black and Yellow 56:55 – The Benchmark Nobody Is Building 59:46 – Can an AI Ever Have a Happiest Thought? ——— 📬 Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt 🌠 Have a .edu email and live in the USA 🇺🇸? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu 🔔 Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 🎯 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon — get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating ⭐ Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join 📚 My books: Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U Galileo's Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un 🌐 More: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating ✍️ Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast #intotheimpossible #briankeating #science #physics #astronomy #cosmology #podcast #universe Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

What if the smartest thing AI could do is refuse to give you the answer?

0:04.0

We trained it to never give answers. It is Socrates. It only gives context and questions.

0:12.0

But amazingly, upwards of 20% of participants switched into cyborg mode and did this amazing, not just superhuman, but super AI performance.

0:23.8

What is the point of us if the best and brightest can't beat what an AI can do?

0:31.1

But then in about 5 to 10 percent, did something amazing.

0:34.1

We called them the cyborics.

0:35.7

If we zombie walk our way into a future where it has all the answers and we don't, what's the point of us?

0:43.4

Exploring the unknown is the one thing humans are uniquely well-suited to do.

0:48.9

What is the best use of AI right now?

0:51.3

I have a paper coming up, and the title of that paper is human capital, not AI benchmarks, predicts hybrid intelligence

1:00.9

in forecasting.

1:02.1

So how do you measure how creative a human is or an AI is or the two together when maybe,

1:09.6

you know, a massive large language model has just memorized

1:13.3

every measure of it we would typically use in science, which, by the way, it has.

1:17.6

And so it distorts.

1:18.8

And then you have a bunch of, like, marketing professors or computer scientists who, I love

1:24.4

them, but they aren't scientists, running these experiments that aren't really valid.

1:30.2

What have we made predictions of the future?

1:32.0

What will the price of oil be in six months?

1:34.7

Which, as we record this, everybody has some sense.

1:38.0

But I will tell you, when we ran the experiment several months ago, nobody knew what the price of oil was today, much less than six months from now.

1:45.7

So the humans in this experiment did terribly.

...

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