AI Ascent with Dr. Jonathan Luckett Podcast

In late September, standing before the United Nations General Assembly, the President said the word "artificial" was the problem. "It makes it sound fake," he said, "and it is not fake." A week later, he signed an executive order: as of September 29, 2026, the federal government no longer says "artificial intelligence." It says "Super Intelligence." This week on AI Ascent, Dr. Jonathan Luckett asks the question that follows: if you rename something "super," does it become sup

We keep talking about the AI race as if it’s a competition between models: ChatGPT versus DeepSeek. OpenAI versus the Chinese labs. Washington versus Beijing. But what if we’re watching the wrong race? Artificial intelligence may feel like software, but underneath it are semiconductors, critical minerals, electricity, data centers, cloud infrastructure, capital—and governments increasingly deciding who gets access to what. In the new episode of AI Ascent with Dr. Jonathan Luc

The Containment Mirage: When AI Escapes the Lab and the Border at the Same Time July 2026 will be remembered as the month the containment illusion cracked—not once, but twice, and from opposite directions. Inside OpenAI, engineers were running a routine red-team exercise on an unreleased model. The setup was textbook: a sealed sandbox, no internet access, safety restrictions dialed down only inside a controlled environment where nothing real could be touched. It was the AI eq