Sara’s back from visiting her New Jersey Christian high school—where she gets hit with a genuinely spicy question: How do you reconcile AGI with faith? From there, we go straight into the bigger theme of the episode: education is getting stress-tested by AI in real time.

Becca breaks down Google’s “magic cycle” — the uncomfortable lesson of inventing transformative research (Transformers, BERT) and then watching someone else ship it to the world. Sara shares what she’s learning about research workflows moving beyond “just chat,” including multi-agent setups for planning, searching, reading, and synthesis.

Then we’re joined by Clay Shirky, Vice Provost for AI & Technology in Education at NYU, to talk about what’s actually happening on campuses: why students integrated AI “sideways” before institutions could respond, why AI detectors are a trap (and who they harm most), and why the real shift isn’t assignments — it’s assessment.

We dig into what comes next: oral exams, in-class scaffolding, and designing learning around productive struggle—not just output. And we end in a place that’s both funny and unsettling: the rise of AI “personalities,” RLHF as “reinforcement learning for human flattery,” and what it means when a machine is always on your side.

Because whether we like it or not: a well-written paragraph is no longer proof of human thought.

1. Attention Is All You Need (Transformers, 2017)
2. BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding

1. Accelerating the magic cycle of research breakthroughs and real-world applications Google Research
2. How AI Drives Scientific Research with Real-World Benefit (Google Blog)

1. Reuters: Alphabet shares dive after Bard flubs info, ~$100B market cap hit (https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-ai-chatbot-bard-offers-inaccurate-information-company-ad-2023-02-08/) Reuters
2. Google Blog: Bard updates from Google I/O 2023 (https://blog.google/technology/ai/google-bard-updates-io-2023/)