
S1E40 - Intelligence in an Open World - with Mengye Ren (NYU)
Published: May 20, 2026
Duration: 59:16
We talk with Mengye Ren, Assistant Professor at NYU's Center for Data Science, about what intelligence actually means once you step outside a benchmark, and why scaling a single centralized model isn't the whole story.
We get into why intelligence has to be defined in open environments, not closed ones, and what that means for how we measure progress. We push on the creativity question: today's models sample bottom-up from a softmax or a Gaussian, with no internal loop of consideration, and as Mengye puts it, we haven't understood creativity yet and we're already prepared...