How Classical Thinking Shaped Modern AI | Peter Danenberg | TEDxBoston

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The story of AI is often framed as a race for speed and scale. In this talk, Peter Danenberg offers a different lens: AI as a human project shaped by language, culture, and institutional restraint.

Drawing on his early work on Google’s Bard and Gemini, Peter takes us inside the quiet experimental phase before generative AI went public—and how everything changed once it did. Blending technical insight with his background in classics and philosophy, he argues that understanding meaning, context, and trust may matter as much as raw intelligence, and that the future of AI may be less about chatbots and more about systems that quietly share our world. Peter Danenberg is a technologist and thinker working at the intersection of artificial intelligence, language, and human meaning. He has been a key contributor to Google’s natural language initiatives, including early work on Bard and its evolution into Gemini, helping shape how large language models move from research into real-world systems.

With an unconventional background spanning classics, philosophy, and computer science, Peter brings a distinctly humanistic lens to modern AI. He studied ancient languages and philosophy, including intensive work on Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, before transitioning into natural language processing—where questions of syntax, semantics, and interpretation reemerge in computational form.

At Google, Peter is known not only for his technical contributions but also for convening wide-ranging conversations across disciplines, hosting salons that bring together engineers, leaders, and critics to wrestle with AI’s social and ethical implications. His work emphasizes that the most consequential challenges in AI are rarely purely technical—they are cultural, organizational, and profoundly human. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx