Episode
Machine God: Hsu, Greer, Huang – #120
- Podcast
- Manifold
- Published
- Sep 10, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 4474
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://share.transistor.fm/s/c79d620d
Actions
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Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/manifold-4829537/machine-god-hsu-greer-huang-120.md
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Summary
Machine God is a feature-length AI documentary film, created by Steve Hsu, John Greer, and Lei Huang. This episode discusses the film's creation and content. Chapter Markers: (00:00) - Meet the Filmmakers (02:06) - Berkeley AI Boomtown Origins (19:23) - Techno Capital and the Pause Plea (38:55) - Why Slow Down AI (41:40) - Recursive Self Improvement (46:01) - Gradual Disempowerment (51:48) - Film Release and Closing – Steve Hsu is Professor of Theoretical Physics and of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering at Michigan State University. Previously, he was Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation at MSU and Director of the Institute of Theoretical Science at the University of Oregon. Hsu is a startup founder (SuperFocus.ai, SafeWeb, Genomic Prediction, Othram) and advisor to venture capital and other investment firms. He was educated at Caltech and Berkeley, was a Harvard Junior Fellow, and has held faculty positions at Yale, the University of Oregon, and MSU. Please send any questions or suggestions to [email protected] or Steve on X @hsu_steve. Announcing this for some friends at Mechanize - a startup that builds environments for training and evaluating frontier LLMs. Its customers include the top AI labs, and it has contributed to the breakthrough in coding capabilities of frontier models. Mechanize is hiring! https://mechanize.work/b/hsu Compensation is extremely competitive. For technical roles, $300-500k. They are also seeking smart generalists. For example: Research Engineer, Alignment: Build evals that test for misaligned model behaviors $500K salary Puzzle Maker: Design interesting and original puzzles that LLMs can’t yet solve $300K salary Mechanize understands that my readership is highly selected. There is a VERY GOOD CHANCE y…