Omar Shams: AI Founder and Google AI Agent Lead — #89

Manifold

Shams was trained in theoretical physics before becoming an AI engineer at DeepMind and founding the company Mutable, which was acquired by Google. He is now lead engineer for Google's software agent group.

Steve and Omar discuss:

• (00:00) - Introduction
• (01:18) - Journey from Physics to AI
• (10:51) - Elon Tried to Buy DeepMind
• (16:52) - Building Mutable and Auto Wiki as Context for LLMs
• (33:39) - The Value of AI Talent and Meta's AI Hiring Spree
• (42:58) - AI and The Workforce
• (58:02) - The Intersection of Physics and AI

Music used with permission from Blade Runner Blues Livestream improvisation by State Azure.

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Steve Hsu is Professor of Theoretical Physics and of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering at Michigan State University. Previously, he was Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation at MSU and Director of the Institute of Theoretical Science at the University of Oregon. Hsu is a startup founder (SuperFocus.ai, SafeWeb, Genomic Prediction, Othram) and advisor to venture capital and other investment firms. He was educated at Caltech and Berkeley, was a Harvard Junior Fellow, and has held faculty positions at Yale, the University of Oregon, and MSU. Please send any questions or suggestions to [email protected] or Steve on X @hsu_steve.