Went to NeurIPS but couldn't hit all the talks I wanted, so I turned workshop sessions and invited talks into 11 podcast episodes (each under 20 min). Some findings that changed how I think about AI:

Reality checks:

- Best vision models: 28.8% accuracy on tasks requiring physics/time/causality

- FDA approvals for generative AI in clinical use: Zero

- 1000x gap in data efficiency between AI and human brains

- 10 years of daily financial data = 2,500 observations (way too small for transformers)

Actual breakthroughs:

- Brain-computer interfaces detecting subconscious error signals (90% to 99% accuracy)

- Apple Watch pulse geometry predicting heart disease better than cholesterol

- Multimodal fusion eliminating the need for 10,000 human labels per robot task

- Dynamic portfolios spontaneously switching hedging instruments during COVID

Episode list:

1. Society's Fragile Equilibrium - Why "good enough" AI at scale is more disruptive than superintelligence (AGEI vs AGI)

2. The Evaluation Crisis - Why we're testing AI wrong (the infant morality study, Clever Hans effect)

3. The Reasoning Revolution - How o1/o3 actually think, mode collapse, the artificial hivemind problem

4. Engineering Creative AI - DALL-E training 23x faster with one token, world models, IP questions

5. AI Transforms Scientific Discovery - Dolphin communication, ground squirrels to heart treatments, virtual cells

6. Foundation Models for Brain and Body - Biological age gap from wearables, BCI error detection, SSL for neural data

7. Computer Vision's Journey - AI vision is solved, AI reasoning is not (28.8% reality check)

8. Robots That Learn Without Humans - Zero-shot robotics training via multimodal fusion

9. The Autonomous Agent Revolution - Reward hacking everywhere, why rigid multi-agent systems fail

10. Generative AI in Finance - Four pitfalls that break standard AI, task-driven training solutions

11. AI as Time Machine for Science - Years to days, but zero FDA approvals (the central tension)

Sources: NeurIPS 2025 workshops and invited talks (Yejin Choi, Melanie Mitchell, Zeynep Tufekci, etc.)

https://www.basisset.com/#NeurIPS2025