The Behavioral Data Science Podcast

Episode 015: Welcome to the Era of Experience

The Behavioral Data Science Podcast

Show Notes

Jake and I chat about a forthcoming book chapter titled, "Welcome to the Era of Experience" by David Silver and Richard Sutton (link below). This—naturally—led other topics to surface, such as companies staffed entirely by AI agents (which turned out as well as that sounds); superintelligence (we might be legally required to reference this during the 2025 AI hype cycle); and how practical systems built on these ideas would even be architected (we both came in with different ideas here which was fun). Happy listening.

Links to things mentioned: Smith, D., & Sutton, R. S. (April 26, 2025). Welcome to the Era of Experience. Preprint of a chapter to appear in Designing an Intelligence. MIT Press. Sutton, R. S., & Barto, A. G. (2015). Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction. The MIT Press. Wilkins, J. (April 27, 2025). Professors Staffed a Fake Company Entirely With AI Agents, and You'll Never Guess What Happened. Who would have thought? [Friendly write-up of the agentic company work] Xu, F. F., Song, Y., Li, B., Tang, Y., Jain, K., Bao, M., ..., & Neubig, G. (2024). TheAgentCompany: Benchmarking LLM agents on consequential real world tasks. arXiv:2412.14161. [Actual study.]

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