Follow-up: I found the episode very unconvincing.

A few points:

• this was recorded early 2023 during the peak hype of generative AI
• the guest immediately started making outlandish statements like "cancer will be solved in 10 years", a statement entirely outside of his field of expertise: bad start but I kept listening all the way through
• statements like "we have no idea how it answered a "give me a reason" to an AP bio question" demonstrate how out of touch both he and the head of open AI are with the work, if that story was even true. There are clear and easy explanations for it: the model has extensive training in formal education question and answer formats being the first.
• the guest is the head of AI at Microsoft and has been in the field for 20 years: which is less of a flex than you might think. It means he has a literal vested interest in this being the next big thing. He spends 1/4 the episode selling Microsoft as the big integration for AI into everyone's lives.
• the solution to hallucination suggested hasn't born fruit as far as I'm aware: hallucinations cannot be consistently detected by other instances.
• he immediately makes claims about superhuman AI appearing in the next 5-10 years when there is 0 indication that's close
• he immediately anthropomorphizes the ai talking about it "reasoning". It's literally weighted functions. It doesn't reason: it pushes input through a predetermined path and outputs a response. There's no consideration, no extra steps: it just transforms input into output by training. Stochastic parrot.

He seems like a salesman who has fallen for his own pitch.