Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas · Sean Carroll

Anil Ananthaswamy on the Mathematics of Neural Nets and AI

November 24, 2025·1 hr 14 min·5 clips

Anil Ananthaswamy tried to build a neural network that could predict planetary orbits like Kepler—and discovered it was impossible.

Sean Carroll interviews science writer Anil Ananthaswamy about the mathematical foundations of AI, covering topics from the perceptron and backpropagation to transformer architectures. They explore the history of neural networks, key breakthroughs, and the limitations of current large language models, emphasizing the elegance of underlying math.

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