EP 47: The AI Pioneer Who Decided Privacy Matters More Than Hype

About this episode

If you ever had a document you wished you could just ask questions to - without it leaving your computer, wouldn't be pretty good from data privacy perspective? In this episode, Sam sits down with Dr. Jonathan Schaeffer - Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta, co-founder of the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, and founder and CEO of Synsira, creator of KIND — for one of the most historically grounded AI conversations we've had on this show.

He holds two Guinness World Records: his program Chinook became the first computer to beat a human world champion in any game (Checkers, 1994), and in 2007 his team mathematically solved the game of Checkers - proving perfect play always ends in a draw across 500 billion billion positions. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the AAAI. In February 2026 he launched KIND, a desktop AI application built by his company Synsira Software Solutions, with one founding thesis: your data should work for you and only you.

IN THIS EPISODE:

▪ The 40-year arc of AI through the eyes of someone who lived every wave - expert systems, search scaling with computing, deep learning removing human knowledge bottlenecks, and being stunned on November 30, 2022 when ChatGPT launched

▪ Why nondeterminism is built into LLMs and why the 'hallucination' band-aids being applied don't fix the fundamental flaw - the answer today may be different from the answer tomorrow

▪ Why Jonathan renamed AI as 'augmented intelligence' - and what that reframe means for how leaders should govern and oversee these tools

▪ KIND unpacked: a private, local, hallucination-free desktop AI that answers questions about your own files - with no internet access, no data leaving your device, and a clear answer of 'I don't know' when the answer isn't in your data

▪ Real-world use cases from Jonathan himself: personal medical records, family history, book research, and intellectual property - things he uses ChatGPT and Claude for daily, but would never put near KIND's use cases

▪ The data resale story: searching for a niche collectible online, then receiving a cold email from an unknown company selling exactly that product within 24 hours

▪ Digital sovereignty: why Canada, Europe, and much of the non-US world is dangerously dependent on a small number of large US companies - and why user agreements, when you read them, reveal more than most people expect.

FIND DR. SCHAEFFER & KIND:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jonathan-schaeffer-phd-frsc-aaai-fellow-3318015

KIND download: kind.synsira.com

Amii: amii.ca

</