Polygenics and Machine SuperIntelligence; Billionaires, Philo-semitism, and Chosen Embryos – #102

This is a two-part episode. The first ~30m covers the most important 2025 breakthroughs in polygenic embryo screening, while the second 30m focuses specifically on AI capabilities at the frontier of human knowledge. Both segments make predictions for 2026 and beyond.

Links:

Chinese billionaires, Philo-semitism, and the Chosen embryos:

https://x.com/hsu_steve/status/2000206116823675078

My talk from Reproductive Frontiers 2025 in Berkeley:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n64rrRPtCa8

Previous episodes on frontier AI capabilities in math and theoretical physics

https://www.manifold1.com/episodes/theoretical-physics-with-generative-ai-101

https://www.manifold1.com/episodes/ais-win-math-olympiad-gold-prof-lin-yang-ucla-97

Chapter Markers:

• (00:00) - Introduction
• (02:22) - Advancements in Polygenic Prediction of Human Traits
• (03:20) - Polygenic Risk Scores in Healthcare
• (08:15) - Embryo Selection and IVF
• (20:37) - Public Perceptions: billionaires and FOMO
• (31:40) - AI advances in 2025: High end capabilities and use of AI at the frontier of human knowledge
• (55:33) - Conclusion and predictions for 2026

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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.

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https://mechanize.work/b/hsu

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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

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