I “joke” that I’m the dumbest guy in the company. I’m surrounded by math Olympiad winners, engineers who’ve been building and shipping AI for over a decade, a Fields Medalist, a Turing Award winner, and a boss who worked at CERN as a teenager, has a PhD in algebraic topology (I still don’t know what that means), and was early at Google’s Quantum AI lab. Most explanations of AI either get buried in jargon or get simplified to the point where they’re misleading. So I’m going to try something different. I’m going to explain it the way I understand it, in plain English, using whatever analogies actually stick, even if they’re a little rough. And when I get things wrong or cut a corner or two too many, Dr. Boris Hanin from Princeton, who advises us, will jump in and mark it up in the margins just like he does my internal memos. The goal is simple. Help the rest of us non-quantum PhDs understand the systems that are starting to shape how the world actually works…(Patrick Hillmann)