Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

Did OpenAI just solve Navier–Stokes—and what would that actually mean for AGI?

Emad Mostaque joins Brian Keating LIVE to examine the claimed breakthrough, what would count as a verified solution, and whether AI solving a major mathematical problem changes the debate about intelligence—or control.

Watch my explainer about AI and the Navier-Stokes problem, including insights from Terry Tao https://youtu.be/je9X59psm6U?si=wGbcLhXmf47jeCHL?sub_confirmation=1

A convincing answer isn’t necessarily a proof. A mathematical breakthrough isn’t automatically AGI. But if this claim holds up, how much should we update our expectations?

Emad helped bring Stable Diffusion to the world and signed the letter calling for a pause on frontier AI development. In his previous conversation with Brian and AI safety researcher Roman Yampolskiy, he questioned how such a pause could work—and highlighted swarm intelligence as a particularly dangerous and unpredictable risk.

Now we return to the question underneath the excitement: if AI’s capabilities are accelerating, is our ability to understand and control them keeping up?

ON THE TABLE:

• What exactly is being claimed about Navier–Stokes?
• What separates a proposed solution from an accepted mathematical proof?
• If the result holds up, does it demonstrate AGI—or something narrower?
• Can AI produce discoveries that humans struggle to verify?
• What would this change about open-source AI and the argument for a pause?
• Are we watching the wrong risk: a single superintelligence, or swarms of AI agents?
• What evidence would change Emad’s mind?

Bring your questions. We’ll examine the claim, the evidence, and what follows if it’s right.

This livestream discusses a claimed result; it does not assume the Millennium Prize Problem has been resolved.

FEATURED GUEST:

Emad Mostaque on Twitter/X: https://x.com/EMostaque
I.I.I. Inc.: https://ii.inc/
Stable Diffusion / Stability AI: https://stability.ai/

Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt

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MY BOOKS:

Losing the Nobel Prize: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA
Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu
Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U
Galileo’s Dialogue audiobook: https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un

CONNECT WITH BRIAN:

Twitter/X: https://x.com/BrianKeating
Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com
Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog
Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast

#OpenAI #NavierStokes #AGI #EmadMostaque #ArtificialIntelligence #BrianKeating #IntoTheImpossible
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The man who open-sourced the most-used AI image model in history sat down with the man who has spent a decade proving superintelligence cannot be controlled. Brian set up a debate. What emerged was something more unsettling than any debate.

Roman Yampolskiy is the computer scientist who coined the term AI safety and author of AI: Unexplainable, Unpredictable, Uncontrollable. Emad Mostaque is the co-founder of Stable Diffusion and the only AI CEO who signed the pause letter. He now says he doesn’t know how a pause could work. Yampolskiy thinks that is the only option left.

The question underneath everything is simple: if you have a 50% chance of wiping out civilization and you build it anyway, what are you actually doing? We cover what AI safety researchers actually think the danger is, why nobody has published a paper, filed a patent, or shipped a prototype for controlling a superintelligence, what the Qwen weights being out means for the pause argument, and why Mostaque thinks swarm intelligence is the most dangerous and most unpredictable risk vector we have.

What you’ll hear:
-Why both guests think P(doom) tells you less than you’d hope
-What it means that no company, no lab, and no team has a patent on controlling superintelligence
-Why the models the public receives are slightly lobotomized
-The difference between an AI swarm and the ASI everyone is debating
-Why giving every psychopath access to a cutting-edge intelligence weapon is incoherent safety strategy
-What it would actually take to update Yampolskiy’s assessment

“We either do it, or we die. There is nothing for you to gain by doing it.” — Roman Yampolskiy

CHAPTERS
00:00 A debate that wasn't a debate
00:36 Turing test, AGI, superintelligence: where are we?
02:02 The open source argument nobody wins
03:32 Pause frontier AI forever. Which button?
05:04 P(doom): parameterizing our ignorance
09:02 Nukes are inefficient. AI isn't.
11:46 The lobotomized model problem
18:04 Decade-old problems solved weekly now
26:18 We either do it or we die
31:10 Stop the training or stop the funders
33:34 Lipstick on a Shoggoth
35:50 No paper. No patent. No framework.
39:42 Train only on what you need
44:14 What lowers Mostaque's p(doom)?
52:00 Same future. Two perspectives.

Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt

Have a .edu email and live in the USA? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu

Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1

Support Into the Impossible on Patreon, get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating

Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join

Featured Guests:
Roman Yampolskiy on Twitter/X: https://x.com/romanyam?lang=en
AI: Unexplainable, Unpredictable, Uncontrollable (book): https://www.amazon.com/dp/103257626X
MIRI: https://intelligence.org

Emad Mostaque on Twitter/X: https://x.com/EMostaque
I.I.I. Inc.: https://ii.inc/
Stable Diffusion: https://stability.ai/

My books:
Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA
Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu
Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U
Galileo’s Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un

Twitter/X: https://x.com/BrianKeating
Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com
Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog
Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast

#AIrisk #aisafety #stablediffusion #RomanYampolskiy #EmadMostaque #briankeating #intotheimpossible
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I joined Peter McCormack to dig into one of the deepest unanswered questions in physics: what is time, and why does it only seem to move in one direction? My answer might surprise you. Time may not be a fundamental feature of reality at all, and understanding space, matter, and energy still doesn't mean we understand the universe itself.

We cover:

- What may have existed before the Big Bang
- Why something can't truly come from nothing
- How my work with the Simons Observatory could detect gravitational waves from the universe's earliest moments
- What dark matter actually means
- Why even a film as detail-obsessed as Interstellar still gets the physics wrong.

The conversation then turns from cosmic time to human time: mortality, family, meaning, and attention. We get into UFO disclosure, the collapse of institutional trust, and whether AI can ever reproduce the embodied human insight that let Einstein transform physics. My take: AI remains a tool built to serve humanity, and it's time we stop apologizing for humanity's greatness.

———

📬 Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt

🌠 Have a .edu email and live in the USA 🇺🇸? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu

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🎯 Support Into the Impossible on Patreon — get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating

⭐ Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join

📚 My books:

Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA
Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu
Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U
Galileo's Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un

🌐 More:

🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/BrianKeating
📚 Substack https://briankeating.substack.com/ss
✍️ Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog
🎙️ Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast

#intotheimpossible #briankeating #science #physics #astronomy #cosmology #podcast #universe

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The same mathematics that explains why a fridge magnet sticks to your refrigerator also explains why neural networks work when they have no right to. His group did the calculation. Nobody else had. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation.

Goldenfeld is a Professor of Physics at UC San Diego, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and a Member of the National Academy of Sciences who spent 36 years at the University of Illinois applying condensed matter physics to problems everyone else had given up on: why the genetic code is optimal, why early life evolved impossibly fast, and why AI works despite being overparameterized beyond anything classical statistics can explain.

The thread connecting all three is one idea: that what emerges from many things together is qualitatively different from the sum of its parts. That idea explains magnetism, AI, the origin of the genetic code, and why life may be inevitable wherever the laws of physics apply. He also argues that what is happening to science right now is not a disagreement about facts but a fracture in how people decide what is true, and that is a more dangerous problem.

What you’ll hear:

-Why the same phase transition that explains magnetism also explains why AI works at all

-Why Francis Crick concluded life must have come from outer space and what Goldenfeld found instead

-What horizontal gene transfer has to do with how libraries work

-Why Goldenfeld thinks Enceladus is a better bet for life than Europa

-The purpose of life, stated as a thermodynamics problem

-Why “different is more” is more useful than “more is different”

“The impact you make is the ratio of what you do divided by what everybody else does. Minimize the denominator.” — Nigel Goldenfeld

CHAPTERS

00:00 AI shouldn't work. It does.

00:56 What is a phase transition?

03:10 What the renormalization group does

08:54 Ising gave up. Wrong dimension.

13:32 Nigel almost met Ising. 40 minutes away.

26:38 AI is the best example of more is different

33:52 Bardeen won two Nobels. The transistor looked like chewing gum.

37:24 The three mysteries Crick couldn't solve

46:20 The genetic code can't evolve. And yet it did.

49:00 How early life evolved like a library

57:06 The purpose of life as a physics problem

01:00:04 Life is physics, not chemistry

01:05:56 Anti-science age. Not because of opinions.

01:13:00 20 seconds with your 20-year-old self

01:17:14 Different is more

Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt

Have a .edu email and live in the USA? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu

Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1

Support Into the Impossible on Patreon, get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating

Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join

Featured Guest:

Nigel Goldenfeld website: https://guava.physics.ucsd.edu/~nigel/

Lectures on Phase Transitions and the Renormalization Group: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0201554097?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallbackNigel Goldenfeld on Twitter/X: https://x.com/NigelGoldenfeld

My books:

Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA

Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu

Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U

Galileo’s Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un

Twitter/X: https://x.com/BrianKeating

Substack: https://briankeating.substack.com

Blog: https://briankeating.com/blog

Audio-only: https://briankeating.com/podcast

#intotheimpossible #briankeating #NigelGoldenfeld #physics #AI #originoflife #condensedmatterphysics #podcast
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The system that produces the world’s most important discoveries runs on metrics that nobody agrees on, odds that would stop most people, and mentorship that sometimes looks like cruelty in blue ink. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation.

Lipomi is Professor and Chair of Chemical and Sustainability Engineering at the University of Rochester and the author of Science Nonfiction: Behind the Scenes in University Research. His lab works on organic electronics, materials science, recyclable polymers, and the science of human touch. He trained under George Whitesides at Harvard, one of the most cited chemists who has never won the Nobel Prize.

The conversation covers the H-index, what elite mentorship actually looks like when your advisor writes “This is illiterate” in blue ink on your outline, and what the future of academic research versus industry careers looks like in an era of AI, demographic headwinds, and graduate school debt that can’t be discharged in bankruptcy. We also get into homochirality, OLED displays, and why Lipomi thinks the nanotechnology revolution already happened, we just didn’t call it that.

What you’ll hear:

-Whether the academic system is designed to produce scientists or to filter them out

-What is Baumol’s cost disease and why it explains rising tuition costs

-Why the nanotechnology revolution already happened and nobody called it that

-How nanotechnology is used in cancer drug delivery today versus what science fiction promised

-What it actually takes to build a PhD career at the intersection of chemistry, mechanics, and neuroscience

-Whether engineering students should be reading Plato — and what countries that skip it are getting right

“Find a skill at the intersection of three or more interests that no one else is working on.” — Darren Lipomi

CHAPTERS

00:00 He says don't go to college. He runs the department.

01:10 The H-index: imperfect, irreplaceable

02:04 1 in 20 PhDs gets the job

05:42 The meteorite and the origin of life

08:34 Did life's asymmetry come from space?

12:00 Who is an organic materials chemist at 3am?

13:52 The collaboration that started at a coffee shop

15:22 The nanobot revolution already happened

18:24 Nanotechnology inside your body right now

19:08 The $70 billion invention Kodak gave away

22:12 Kodak, Xerox, Bausch + Lomb: what Rochester built

26:06 Working under Whitesides at Harvard

28:54 What he wrote on the outline in blue ink

30:38 Who you work with matters more than what you work on

31:56 Department chair: hostage negotiator, not boss

34:36 Why the department changed its name after 110 years

36:00 The headwinds have never been stronger

38:44 Should engineers read Plato?

39:38 The debt you can't discharge in bankruptcy

40:06 Do you buy Baumol's cost disease?

43:14 Why he had to write the book

48:16 The Fisher-Price camcorder experiment

51:06 Teaching in one sentence. Research in one.

53:42 Losing Darren to Rochester: the Fernando Tatis analogy

Get the transcript, fascinating bonus content, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message: https://briankeating.com/yt

Have a .edu email and live in the USA? You automatically win a meteorite: https://BrianKeating.com/edu

Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1

Support Into the Impossible on Patreon, get my weekly M.A.G.I.C. Message, unfiltered bonus content, and live monthly Office Hours with me: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating

Join this channel for perks, monthly Office Hours, and your name in the Member Roster at the end of every episode: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join
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