A pessimist, an optimist and an AI walk into a lecture hall. That’s the gist of AI Rising: Risk vs. Reward, a two-part lecture delivered by Jacob Steinhardt and Geoffrey Hinton in Toronto this week.

Steinhardt is not exactly a household name. His modest title is assistant professor of statistics and electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley in California. But he is also, as of last week, the founder and CEO of Transluce, a non-profit research lab dedicated to understanding AI systems.