Rethinking What Makes AI Intelligent

Published: September 21, 2026

Ai concept. Glowing Ai symbol on the abstract main cpu on circuit board with light trails as data streaming symbol

Artificial intelligence has become one of the defining technologies of our time. But what if the way we’re thinking about AI – starting with the very idea of “intelligence” – is too narrow?

Welcome to Resoundingly Human: The INFORMS Podcast about how operations research, analytics, data science, and AI are helping us better understand – and improve – the world around us.

Today’s guest has spent decades helping shape our understanding of machine learning and its connections to statistics, computation, cognition and decision-making.

Michael Jordan is a researcher at Inria Paris and Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley and will be joining us in San Francisco as the opening plenary speaker at the 2026 INFORMS Annual Meeting, where he’ll present “A Collectivist, Economic Perspective on AI.”

I hope that we’re surprised that AI just becomes a regular technology like radio or electrical circuits or chemical engineering. That it occasionally sparks controversies and lots of young people are excited about really contributing to it. I just hope it becomes more normal.

Interviewed this episode:

Michael Jordan

University of California, Berkeley

Michael I. Jordan is a researcher at Inria Paris and Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests bridge the computational, statistical, cognitive, biological and social sciences. Prof. Jordan is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Foreign Member of the Royal Society, and a Foreign Member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He was a winner of a BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in 2025 and was the inaugural winner of the World Laureates Association (WLA) Prize in 2022. He was a Plenary Lecturer at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2018. He has received the Ulf Grenander Prize from the American Mathematical Society, the IEEE John von Neumann Medal, the IJCAI Research Excellence Award, the David E. Rumelhart Prize, and the ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award.