Generative AI 101

AlphaGo didn’t just beat a Go champion, it rewrote the rules of competition. In this episode, host Emily Laird discusses Lee Sedol’s post-match arc, the rise of AlphaZero (a machine so next level it mastered three games in a day), and how that same AI playbook is coming for your office job. From coders and lawyers to journalists and teachers, the AlphaGo moment is already happening. But there’s hope, your creativity, your “Move 78,” still matters. Just don’t expect a standing ovation if you’re clinging to your typewriter.

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AlphaGo may have crushed Lee Sedol, but the aftermath wasn’t just about losing, it was about what humans still bring to the table. In this episode, host Emily Laird traces Sedol’s pivot from humiliation to adaptation, the birth of AlphaZero (the algorithm that mastered Go, Chess, and Shogi in a day), and how that same playbook is rewriting your workplace, from coding and law to journalism and academia.

Watch the AlphaGo Documentary

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AlphaGo vs. Lee Sedol wasn’t just a board game, it was humanity staring down its algorithmic doppelgänger and wondering who gets the last laugh. In this episode, host Emily Laird continues her exploration of the 2016 Go showdown that shocked pros, spawned memes, and gave us two immortal moves: AlphaGo’s eerie, alien “Move 37” and Sedol’s legendary “God Move.” From overconfident predictions to existential gasps, we trace how a quiet Go board in Seoul turned into a global stage for the question: what happens when human intuition meets machine precision and loses?

Watch the AlphaGo Documentary

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Go isn’t just old, it’s ancient, intimidating, and smarter than it looks. For decades, it stood as the Everest of board games, the one thing AI couldn’t conquer without looking like a confused intern at a philosophy lecture. That is, until Google's DeepMind came along with AlphaGo, a Frankenstein of neural nets, reinforcement learning, and sheer digital obsession.

In this episode, host Emily Laird rewinds to the moment when AI stopped being a party trick and started playing mind games, literally. We unpack how Go became AI’s final boss, why brute force wasn’t enough, and how AlphaGo flipped the script by teaching itself to win. Spoiler: it crushed a European champion like he was playing with oven mitts.

From ancient Chinese tea houses to the labs of Google DeepMind, this is the story of the game that broke the board and changed how we think about machines and intelligence forever.

Watch the AlphaGo Documentary

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What do trivia night, jazz bands, and IKEA furniture have in common? They all make more sense once you understand Mixture of Experts. In this episode, host Emily Laird breaks down how LLMs are using conditional computation to get smarter and cheaper, without frying your GPU like a budget toaster. We’re talking expert networks, gating systems, and why the future of AI might look more like a five-star kitchen than a power-hungry robot army.

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Is ChatGPT here to help you ace the test or just do your homework for you? In this episode, host Emily Laird unpacks OpenAI’s new Study Mode, a feature that turns the AI from vending-machine answer bot into a never-tired tutor who actually makes you think. From math problems that fight back to privacy concerns and its big debut in schools via Canvas, we cover why teachers, parents, and even students are warming up to the idea. It might just be the first AI tool that raises grades and consciences.

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AGI can do anything you can, write, reason, crack jokes, without being told how. Superintelligence can do all that and make you look like a potato with Wi-Fi. In this episode, host Emily Laird breaks down the real meaning of these two buzzwords, why even the experts can’t agree, and how the biggest AI players, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, Meta, and xAI, are racing to build them. Whether it’s curing cancer, boosting productivity, or accidentally turning off the internet, we’re here to separate hype from reality before the machines do it for us.

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OpenAI’s GPT-5 isn’t just an upgrade, it’s a whole crew of AIs working together. One’s fast, one’s a deep thinker, and a couple work the cheap shifts, all coordinated by a smart “router” that picks the right brain for the job. It’s breaking records in math, coding, and reasoning, slashing hallucinations, and even scheduling your meetings. The Pro version handles monster problems in seconds, while all versions get built-in web search, vision, and real task execution. The model menu is gone, GPT-5 just figures it out for you.

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What do you get when you mix a chess prodigy, a neuroscience detour, and a borderline obsession with solving intelligence? Google DeepMind. In this episode, host Emily Laird goes into the mind (and muscles) behind modern AI, aka Demis Hassabis. From teaching AIs to dominate in Go and StarCraft to solving protein folding and launching the Gemini models, DeepMind isn’t just flexing, it’s reshaping the future. If your chatbot had a Nobel Prize and a gamer tag, it’d be this.

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Meet Kimi K2! Join host Emily Laird as she explores the trillion-parameter powerhouse from Shanghai-based Moonshot AI that's throwing elbows at GPT-4.1, Gemini, and Claude 4. With a Mixture-of-Experts brain, a freakishly long memory (128K tokens), and the power to write code, run commands, and basically do your job better than you, this isn’t your average chatbot. It’s a business-savvy, open-source disruptor priced like street food but cooking with Michelin fire. Oh, and it’s backed by Alibaba and Tencent. Translation: the AI arms race just got very real—and very Chinese.