Wisdom in fragments

You can have the best AI in the world and the best robots in the world, but if they aren't integrated well with the humans, then you will lose.

We have to recognise that if we ignore or downplay the human side, we could lose. That, I think, is really the key insight for why and how things should be done differently.

If you tried to achieve that purely through informal methods—where hallucination is a persistent risk—getting to the same level of consistent correctness would likely require a lot more research effort and resources.

The third and deepest reason this matters—why it's not just commercially meaningful but potentially world-changing—is the ability to bridge different levels of abstraction.

A model that's really strong at mathematical reasoning is likely to be strong at coding. And a model that's excellent at both math and code is often very good at analysing the nuts and bolts of legal reasoning as well.

What we envision is humans using informal reasoning and intuition as a powerful guide, with formal systems then verifying those ideas. In this way, the formal system grounds high-level intuition.

We see math as code and code as math. The real magic, and the key transition, comes from combining AI, programming languages, and mathematics—bringing all three pillars together.

This tool is truly the best thing that the science has come up with for getting two people to like each other. A little bit of optimisation can be effective—you should be eating healthy and exercising and doing the basics. But I tend to think in terms of relational optimisation: how can I put two people in the best position to share things about themselves that allow them to find conversational pathways that happen to go well?

You feel like a product when you're on these things. You feel like you're selling yourself. But what's amazing is that when you get people in person, actually interacting, much of the time they don't do that same optimisation, especially if you give them just a few nudges.

When you tell people these things, they get a little fatalistic about it. They tend to think, 'Well, I guess there's not much I can do about that.' I would call that a bias. It is wrong just as often as it's likely to be right. We really need to interrogate and deconstruct that assumption. It's rarely true, and it can lead people to internalise some of these effects in a way that can be pretty damaging and totally unnecessary.

What we see in the science is something very different. We often see that romantic partners basically see the best in each other. They're wearing rose-coloured glasses. And the primary thing that brings people together is what we would call attachment bonds or pair bonds: the idea that people are looking for somebody who they feel has their back, somebody who's going to celebrate their successes, and somebody who's going to be there for them.

If we can create excitement, wonder, and solutions to problems like loss of biodiversity, then I think that not only can we inspire the next generation, but we can give them hope.

From day one, we said that we wanted to create value, create impact, and create inspiration. We're not going to build a business that just creates impact—we're not a nonprofit. We have to create value. As long as we're doing all three, we're never going to lose.

I think that we must move to a model where we value nature differently and work by integrating with nature. We just have to start innovating at a faster scale, and doing it in a way where we can then communicate those innovation wins to the next generation in a way that gets them excited and gives them hope.

Data is showing that the amount of information we're sending them without hope, and the ratio of hope versus negativity, is shutting down the next generation, which is terrifying. They're like, 'Oh my gosh, what's the point? The fire is too big.'

The power is amazingly concentrated in Whitehall with very clever technocrats who go into it as their first job. Then they're assigned, aged 24 or 25, things like planning bus routes for Manchester. At the moment, the basic principle in the Treasury is that whatever you do, don't give money to local governments because they will squander it.

Economist specializing in poverty, conflict, and development in Africa