🎙️ Mia Salomakhin Thinks AI Is a New Species.

The Podcast

Why you should watch it ☝️

Mia Salomakhin has been seeing around corners for a long time. In 1998, she told a friend people should pay bills through their cell phones. In 1999, she argued music should be sold by the song, not the album. Neither idea went anywhere at the time. You probably know how both stories ended. She's been doing the same thing with AI: building explainable models, open-sourcing the mechanisms, and now helping enterprises move past the chatbot era into something that actually changes how work gets done.

But the thing that will stick with you from this conversation isn't the practical AI advice. It's her framing of what AI actually is. Not a tool. Not a digital human. A new species, one that knows everything ever written, doesn't die, has no short-term survival pressure, and therefore has no reason to build the hierarchical social structures that drive most human behavior. It sounds like sci-fi until she walks you through it, and then it sounds like the most logical frame anyone has put on this technology.

From there, the conversation goes to what comes after LLMs, why today's models will eventually collapse under their own weight, what conceptual models look like, and how brain-computer interfaces factor into a future where humans and AI coexist as genuinely distinct thinking entities. If you're tired of AI conversations that stay safely in the chatbot lane, this one doesn't.

In this episode:

Why AI should be understood as a new species — not a digital human, not a tool
How a thinking entity with no mortality develops entirely different values than we do
Why LLMs are brilliant at expression but aren't actually thinking — and what that ceiling means
The shift from language models to conceptual models, and why it matters
"Human on the loop" vs. "human in the loop" — the real workforce shift happening now
How Mia's explainable AI patent came out of trying to detect Alzheimer's with cheap EEG devices
Where brain-computer interfaces fit into a future of coexisting intelligent entities
The one thing she'd tell anyone just starting to explore AI

Here’s a teaser…

Where to find Mia Salomakhin 👇

Find Mia on Linkedin and on Substack (link below).

Cathie Salomon | Substack

Technology, humanity, and the spaces between. Philosophical musings, visionary insights, and war stories from an AI executive Mia Salomakhin - writing under a pen name Cathie Salomon.

Substack

Mia Salomakhin | Chief AI Officer Who Delivers Results While Others Chase Hype

Crisis-tested AI transformation that avoids the 80% failure rate. 30+ years, $1.2M cost savings, patents filed before industry standards. Contrarian thinking, measurable results.

Mia Salomakhin

What You Missed on Sunday

Here’s what we covered in Sunday’s newsletter edition…

This Debt is Harder to Pay Off Than Your Student Loans

Every organization I've ever worked with on innovation initiatives has a version of the same story: they ran an innovation initiative, it didn't quite work, and then they moved on.

Or at least, they told themselves they moved on.

The unfortunate truth is that even though the initiative ended, the cost keeps showing up. Every failed experiment leaves a residue: in the room where the next proposal gets pitched, in the leader who learned to say no faster, in the person who was the loudest champion last time and isn't raising their hand this time. Nobody tracks it. Nobody accounts for it. It just compounds quietly in the background.

In engineering, that's called technical debt. Innovation carries a similar debt, and I think it's one of the biggest untracked costs in most large organizations today.

Here’s what you’ll find: