Ken Liu: Art in the Age of AI — #79

Ken Liu (born 1976) is an American author of science fiction and fantasy. Liu has won multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards for his novel translations and original short fiction. Liu's short story "The Paper Menagerie" is the first work of fiction, of any length, to win all of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards. Besides his original work, Liu's translation of Liu Cixin's Chinese language novel The Three-Body Problem (the first in the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy) won the 2015 Hugo Award for Best Novel, making it the first translated novel to have won the award. He studied English Literature and Computer Science at Harvard College, and graduated from Harvard Law School. https://kenliu.name/ Steve and Ken discuss:  00:00 Meet Ken Liu: Acclaimed Sci-Fi and Fantasy Writer04:25 The Immigrant Experience and Cultural Perspectives09:22 Harvard, MSFT, HLS, Litigation15:01 The Art of Storytelling and Technology34:03 Controversy in AI Reasoning34:31 Technology Outstripping Science35:22 AI and the Arts38:30 The Future of AI in Art42:44 AI's Role in Creative Processes50:04 Art, Automation, and Society57:31 Favorite Science Fiction and Fantasy01:03:06 The Genius of Philip K. DickMusic used with permission from Blade Runner Blues Livestream improvisation by State Azure.  – 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. Announcing this for some friends at Mechanize - a startup that builds environments for training and evaluating frontier LLMs. Its customers include the top AI labs, and it has contributed to the breakthrough in coding capabilities of frontier models. Mechanize is hiring! https://mechanize.work/b/hsu Compensation is extremely competitive. For technical roles, $300-500k. They are also seeking smart generalists. For example: Research Engineer, Alignment: Build evals that test for misaligned model behaviors  $500K salary Puzzle Maker: Design interesting and original puzzles that LLMs can’t yet solve  $300K salary Mechanize understands that my readership is highly selected. There is a VERY GOOD CHANCE you will be interviewed if you apply via the link above.