No Hallucinations: Dr. Jonathan Schaeffer's Case for Honest AI

Written By Fred Davis

Jonathan Schaeffer has spent four decades inside the machine — and he'll be the first to tell you it's all an illusion. A pioneer in AI and competitive game-playing systems, Jonathan has watched this field evolve from hand-coded expert systems to large language models that can fool the world into thinking they're intelligent. Now he's building Kind — a privacy-first desktop AI that keeps your data yours, eliminates hallucinations, and cuts through the noise of the AI gold rush with something radical: trust.

In this episode:

  • Why the distrust of AI is earned — and what the industry got wrong by losing sight of the eight billion people it's supposed to serve

  • How Kind works as a privacy-preserving desktop AI that answers questions exclusively from your own data — with zero hallucinations

  • Why Jonathan calls modern AI the "Harry Houdini effect" — and what chess, poker, and ChatGPT all have in common with magic tricks

  • The 2017 Google paper that set the stage for the ChatGPT revolution — and why Google didn't see what they had

  • Why AI is just sophisticated text completion — and how that simple model produces both stunning results and dangerous hallucinations

  • Deep Blue vs. Kasparov: what 200 million positions per second teaches us about playing to your strengths instead of your weaknesses

  • Why "Artificial Intelligence" is a dangerous misnomer — and how anthropomorphizing these systems is setting society up for a reckoning

  • The nuclear technology parallel: why AI regulation can't afford to be reactive, and what proactive guardrails need to look like right now

  • What Google's AlphaFold and the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry tell us about where AI is actually winning — and why it matters to everyone

  • What we're getting right about AI: breakthrough science, protein analysis, and technology that will save lives at scale

  • What we're getting wrong: the race to the finish line at the expense of the trust that will determine whether any of this actually gets adopted

Connect with Jonathan Schaeffer & Kind: LinkedIn: Jonathan Schaeffer | Kind

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Fred Davis
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