Meetings

Final meeting: a personal retrospective on AI and flourishing, then two rounds redesigning the course for next year

Finish your final project and show it to your classmates.

Pair discussion on what makes us human, what AI changes, and what AGI would change if it arrives

Pitch your final project, get peer feedback, refine your scope, and start building.

Exploring where AI is heading beyond 'just make it bigger': mixture of experts, local models, specialization, and AGI

Pair discussion of who controls how AI behaves: companies, governments, or something else

Build a website with Replit using conversational AI — brainstorm, build, share.

Pair discussion of emotional bonds with AI, agent autonomy, and design responsibility

Hands-on exploration of the AI training lifecycle: pretraining, instruction tuning, and RLHF

Pair discussion of how AI is changing work, who benefits, and what should be done

Use AI to analyze a real dataset, create visualizations, and discover insights

Pair discussion of the energy, human, intellectual, and political costs of AI

How does AI represent meaning? Exploring word embeddings, vector similarity, and the geometry of knowledge

How complexity emerges from simple building blocks — connecting neurons, networks, and intelligence

Hands-on exploration of artificial neurons and neural networks through interactive visualizations

Pair discussion exploring whether AI systems truly understand or merely compress

Use AI to build study materials for your other courses while learning evidence-based study techniques

Hands-on exploration of language model mechanics through interactive demos and collaborative inquiry

Pair discussion of themes from the AlphaGo documentary

Professor Zach Biondi leads a discussion of McLuhan's 'The Medium is the Message' — what 1960s media theory reveals about our relationship with AI

Creating images, video, and music with AI tools — and comparing what different people get from the same concept

Experiencing conversational assessment firsthand and exploring what happens when AI agents talk to each other

Continuing to map the shape of AI intelligence with new challenges

Mapping the shape of AI intelligence through hands-on exploration

First day introductions through AI-themed discussions