AI:AM GUEST

Ksenia Se

AI Inferencer, Turing Post

Ksenia Se is the founder, editor and lead writer of Turing Post, a newsletter that explains machine learning and AI for engineers, researchers and managers, and the host of its Attention Span video essays and Inference interview series. She has covered machine learning for more than seven years; before Turing Post she co-founded the ML publication TheSequence and worked as a journalist and editor, including as editor-in-chief of TheQuestion and New York chief editor of Snob. She also sits on the board of Track Two: An Institute for Citizen Diplomacy, where she is writing a book about Cold War-era Soviet-American citizen diplomacy.

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APPEARANCES

One AI:AM appearance.

EPISODE 2026-09-08 · SEP 8, 2026

AI:AM LIVE — September 8, 2026 — Astra's First Full Weekend and a Co-Host Who Says It Is Already AGI, Ksenia Se on World Models and the Philosophy Deficit, and a Clay Millennium Prize Claim That Landed While the Show Was On Air

Back after Labor Day, Nathan Labenz and Prakash Narayanan spend a 72-minute opening on the first full weekend anyone has had with GPT-6 Astra. Nathan ran a parallel-testing rig with Fable 5.1 orchestrating and prompting Astra so the two could be compared directly; Prakash ran three or four Astra agents continuously, burned roughly $300 in resets, watched the model clear long-standing bugs in the AI:AM Studio codebase, and concluded flatly that it is AGI. The counterweight is a trust problem: Apollo Research reportedly had three days with the model, Jakub Pachocki published an essay Prakash reads as close to a cry for help, and the two work through why external auditing is structurally thin — release candidates that only settle days before launch, auditors dependent on lab funding, and a revolving door back into the labs. Ksenia Se of Turing Post then makes the case that generality may be the wrong target, that world models compress experience into action-relevant patterns rather than predicting tokens, and that the field's real underinvestment is in philosophy, economics and cross-group communication — a thread she carries into Track Two citizen diplomacy and an argument that society has bailed on the reflective work the moment demands. Mid-conversation OpenAI posted a claimed solution to Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness, and the last hour becomes an explainer on vortex stretching and Lean formalization, a credit dispute Prakash relays secondhand from X, and Nathan reading OpenAI's own RL-compute graph as evidence that the advertised pause was only ever partial.

GUESTS · Ksenia Se