Friday Lecture Series
(open to the Rockefeller and Tri-Institutional communities)
Friday, October 9, 2026
David Krakauer, Ph.D.
President, William H. Miller Professor of Complex Systems, Santa Fe Institute
The Material Nature of Human Intelligence
Recommended Readings:
David C. Krakauer, Melanie Mitchell, John W. Krakauer. “Large language models and emergence: a complex systems perspective.” Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 14 May 2026; 384 (2320): 20250014.
Safron, Adam, et al. “World models, artificial general intelligence and the hard problems of life–mind continuity: toward a unified understanding of natural and artificial intelligence.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 384.2320 (2026): 20240533.
Krakauer, David, Gülce Kardeş, and Joshua Grochow. “Universality in Collective Intelligence on the Rubik’s Cube.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.18609 (2025).
Krakauer, David C. “Unifying complexity science and machine learning.” Frontiers in Complex Systems 1 (2023): 1235202.
Mitchell, Melanie, and David C. Krakauer. “The debate over understanding in AI’s large language models.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 120.13 (2023): e2215907120.
