{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"TechSurge: Deep Tech Podcast","title":"The Path to Superintelligence: Alberta Plan Co-Author On Reinforcement Learning & AI-Powered Prosthetics","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":3460,"description":"In this episode, Dr. Patrick Pilarski, co-author of the Alberta Plan alongside Richard Sutton and Michael Bowling, makes the case for a radically different kind of AI: one that never stops learning, builds its own understanding from raw experience, and gets more out of limited compute rather than more data centers. A Canada CIFAR AI Chair (Amii) and professor at the University of Alberta, Pilarski also leads a lab that builds robotic prosthetic limbs that learn to anticipate what their users intend to do before they do it.\n\nIn this conversation, Pilarski joins TechSurge to unpack why his co-author Rich Sutton has publicly called LLMs a dead end, how the Alberta Plan’s “temporal uniformity” differs from how today’s AI labs bolt reinforcement learning onto pre-trained models, and why he believes AI safety problems in today’s LLM agents are really reinforcement learning problems the field has studied for decades.\n\nThe conversation covers:\n\n✅ Why Richard Sutton argues large language models are a dead end\n✅ The four core commitments of the Alberta Plan for AI research\n✅ Why “temporal uniformity” rejects the idea of separate training and deployment phases\n✅ Patrick’s upcoming move to ExperienceFlow.AI as Head of Edge Superintelligence\n✅ Why he doesn’t believe the AI data center build-out locks the industry into one path\n✅ How reinforcement learning’s lessons on exploration and reward specification apply to AI agent safety\n\n✅ Inside his lab’s work on AI-powered prosthetic limbs that predict user intent\n✅ Supernumerary limbs and the future of human augmentation\nGuest Links:\n\nPatrick Pilarski: Canada CIFAR AI Chair and Fellow at Amii, Professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Alberta, co-author of the Alberta Plan, and co-lead of the BLINC Lab. Incoming Head of Edge Superintelligence at ExperienceFlow.AI.\nUniversity of Alberta faculty page: https://sites.ualberta.ca/~pilarski/#teaching\n\nBLINC Lab: https://blinclab.ca\n\nFurther Reading and Resources\n\nThe...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/jQPF4l9NFf0J8GE3ySmQUhKsdFs-I1vwVANYFaBaoL0/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9kOGI1/OGFhMjdjOWMzMDhj/MGY4MGFiMDMyMmIx/Y2M4ZS5qcGc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}