Tracing the breakthroughs behind today’s AI, and the human future it’s shaping next

Welcome to season five of MINDWORKS. Over the next 12 months, together, we’re going to explore how artificial intelligence is redefining the many roles we humans play—whether we’re at school, at work, or at play.

In this first episode, I’m joined by my colleagues Dr. Svitlana Volkova and Dr. Robert McCormack to make sense of where we are and where we’re going with AI. We discuss the breakthroughs that brought us here—transformers, reinforcement learning with human feedback—and the frontiers opening now: compound AI, agentic workflows, and reasoning models.

You’ll hear how these advances are changing the way we search, learn, and even design digital twins of ourselves, along with the big questions they raise about bias, safety, privacy, and creativity. And we’ll look ahead to what’s coming soon—AI woven into our phones and enterprises—and what’s just over the horizon with embodied intelligence in the physical world.

For developers, our advice is clear: focus on real problems, rethink how we evaluate AI, and design systems that team with humans. For everyday users: treat AI as a collaborator, not an oracle.

And those headlines about an “AI bubble”? What we’re seeing is not the end of the story, but the end of the prologue.