Harvard Club of San Diego: October 23, 2025 - Ivy+ AI Parlour Talk

October 23, 2025 - Ivy+ Parlour Talk on AutoComplete to Superintelligence

 

 

Oxford and Cambridge Society of San Diego invite Ivy+ to a Parlour Talk on AutoComplete to Superintelligence on Thursday, October 23^rd at 6.30pm at the Mangelsen Gallery at 7916 Girard Ave. in La Jolla Village. Free registration HERE. 

Please try to arrive at 6.30 for a complimentary glass of wine or soft drink, ready for the Talk to begin at 7.00pm. Following the Talk there will be a no-host, casual dinner at a local hostelry for those who wish to continue the discussion.

Abstract: AI is already smarter than us. It solves olympiad-level mathematics problems, churns out production-ready computer code, and rivals expert physicians at diagnostics. Yet the technology underlying these feats is barely more sophisticated than your phone’s auto-complete. How did we get here? Drawing on prescient writings by computer scientists Claude Shannon and Richard Sutton, we explain how intelligence may arise from simply predicting the next word in a sentence. We relate this form of intelligence to human cognition through Daniel Kahneman’s System 1/System 2 framework, shedding light on what AI can and cannot do. Finally, we explore where AI is headed and imagine the economic and social consequences of a post-AI world.

Speaker Bio: Michael Zellinger is building next-generation reading software that dynamically adapts books to you. He studied mathematical modeling at Oxford (Somerville College) and holds a PhD in artificial intelligence from Caltech, an MSc in statistics from ETH Zurich, and an Sc.B. in mathematics from Brown. Previously, he integrated AI into investment processes at Oaktree Capital Management and helped Novartis adopt causal inference methods for clinical trial analysis.