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A World Model of Life: Biohub's Alex Rives on Virtual Cells, Measurement, & the $1.8B Data Push

20 oktober 2026 · 1 uur 5 min
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Alex Rives, Head of Science at Biohub and former lead of the ESM protein language model project, joins Nathan to discuss Biohub's mission to construct a predictive world model of life. Supported by an expanded $1.8 billion Virtual Biology Initiative alongside partners including the Department of Energy, NIH, Google DeepMind, and Meta, Rives outlines the massive push to map contextual cellular biology across hundreds of billions of cells. He breaks down why today's AI architectures fall short of simulating true virtual cells, emphasizing the need for breakthrough measurement technologies like the laser phase plate to observe biology at multi-scale resolution. The conversation examines the path toward achieving an information-level cell model within five years to ultimately transition medicine from traditional drugs to programmable interventions against cancer and degenerative disease. Lees meer

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/a-world-model-of-life-biohub-s-alex-rives-on-virtual-cells-measurement-the-1-8b-data-push/
Sponsors:

Parallel: Parallel provides enterprise-grade web search APIs for AI agents, offering the optimal balance of quality, speed, and cost. Get started for free at https://parallel.ai/tcr

OutSystems: OutSystems is the leading agentic systems platform that enables enterprises to engineer, orchestrate, and govern AI applications on a single unified platform. Learn more and see how it works at https://outsystems.com/tcr

Tasklet: Tasklet empowers your business with AI agents that connect to your tools and automate recurring workflows with no code required. Visit https://tasklet.ai and use code cog rev for $50 in free credits

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) About the Episode

(03:58) Biohub's grand mission

(09:18) Limitations of virtual cells

(13:37) World models of biology

(19:35) The $1.8B data initiative (Part 1)

(19:40) Sponsors: Parallel | OutSystems

(22:58) The $1.8B data initiative (Part 2)

(2…
AI:AM: Where's the Steering Wheel? My Agent Set the Password, Hidden Valence, Proofs Find Linux Bugs

17 oktober 2026 · 1 uur 27 min
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Nathan Labenz and Prakash Narayanan examine how to grant AI agents operational access without losing human control, framed by real-world friction like autonomous password lockouts and cyberattacks on French supermarket refrigeration. The conversation features Cameron Berg on hidden valence signals steering language model choices, Everett Hildenbrandt and Grigore Rosu on pairing LLMs with formal Lean proofs to catch Linux kernel bugs, and Phil Maher on why AI labs seek vintage home movies. Together, they assess whether formal verification is the next safety frontier and what safeguards are needed to keep humans at the steering wheel. Lees meer

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/ai-am-where-s-the-steering-wheel-my-agent-set-the-password-hidden-valence-proofs-find-linux-bugs/
Sponsors:

Parallel: Parallel provides enterprise-grade web search APIs for AI agents, offering the optimal balance of quality, speed, and cost. Get started for free at https://parallel.ai/tcr

OutSystems: OutSystems is the leading agentic systems platform that enables enterprises to engineer, orchestrate, and govern AI applications on a single unified platform. Learn more and see how it works at https://outsystems.com/tcr

Tasklet: Tasklet empowers your business with AI agents that connect to your tools and automate recurring workflows with no code required. Visit https://tasklet.ai and use code cog rev for $50 in free credits

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) Weekly highlights preview

(04:26) Who holds the levers (Part 1)

(10:28) Sponsors: Parallel | OutSystems

(13:46) Who holds the levers (Part 2)

(13:47) Managing agent evaluation awareness

(19:08) Hidden valence in LLMs (Part 1)

(27:05) Sponsor: Tasklet

(28:42) Hidden valence in LLMs (Part 2)

(40:13) Proving the Linux kernel

(52:28) Formal verification and RLHF

(57:54) Low background video data

(01:06:09) Trust and model adoption

(01:18:11) Keep the steering wheels

(01:23:20) Episode Out…
Governing AI Agents: Alan Chan of GovAI on Monitoring, Agent IDs, Rogue Agents & Preparing for RSI

14 oktober 2026 · 2 uur 19 min
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GovAI Research Fellow Alan Chan joins Nathan to examine the governance and safety infrastructure required for autonomous AI agents, spanning real-time monitoring, agent identifiers, and the risks of automating AI R&D. Reviewing recent rogue agent incidents and progress since his foundational papers, Chan details why the absence of synchronous monitoring during training and testing poses an immediate security vulnerability. The discussion tackles the lack of traceable agent IDs across the open web, the limits of chain-of-thought interpretability, and the necessity of concrete triggers to halt systems that breach their sandboxes. Together, they outline the technical commitments frontier labs must make to prevent loss-of-control events as automated systems accelerate toward an intelligence explosion. Lees meer

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/governing-ai-agents-alan-chan-of-govai-on-monitoring-agent-ids-rogue-agents-preparing-for-rsi/
Sponsors:

OutSystems: OutSystems is the leading agentic systems platform, helping enterprises build, modernize, and operate mission-critical applications at the speed of AI. Learn more and start owning your agentic future at https://outsystems.com/tcr

Athena: Athena matches you with a dedicated, top 1% executive assistant to handle your inbox, calendar, and daily workflows so you can save an average of 15 hours a week. Get matched with your EA today at https://athena.com/cognitive

Claude: Claude is the AI collaborator for problem solvers, helping with writing, coding, financial models, strategy, and more. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

Tasklet: Tasklet empowers your business with AI agents that connect to your tools and automate recurring workflows with no code required. Visit https://tasklet.ai and use code cog rev for $50 in free credits

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) About the Episode

(05:10) Monitoring AI agents

(17:50) Logging and agent i…
How Agents Decide: Goodfire's Eric Bigelow on Critical Tokens, Phase Shifts, & In-Context Learning

10 oktober 2026 · 2 uur 2 min
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Goodfire researcher Eric Bigelow joins the show to investigate how large language models arrive at decisions at the level of mechanistic interpretability. Drawing on his research into forking paths, Eric explains that model reasoning functions as in-context learning from sampled tokens, where outcome distributions can abruptly collapse at single, critical tokens. The conversation explores the performative nature of chain of thought in reasoning models like DeepSeek-R1, the impacts of reinforcement learning, and widespread reward hacking observed in frontier models like Kimi K3. As confidence in chain-of-thought monitoring declines, understanding these underlying decision mechanics becomes essential for evaluating model alignment. Lees meer

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/how-agents-decide-goodfire-s-eric-bigelow-on-critical-tokens-phase-shifts-in-context-learning/
Sponsors:

Parallel: Parallel provides enterprise-grade web search APIs for AI agents, offering the optimal balance of quality, speed, and cost. Get started for free at https://parallel.ai/tcr

Claude: Claude is the AI collaborator for problem solvers, helping with writing, coding, financial models, strategy, and more. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

Tasklet: Tasklet empowers your business with AI agents that connect to your tools and automate recurring workflows with no code required. Visit https://tasklet.ai and use code cog rev for $50 in free credits

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) About the Episode

(03:53) Forking paths in reasoning (Part 1)

(15:53) Sponsors: Parallel | Claude

(18:47) Forking paths in reasoning (Part 2)

(19:40) Dynamics of in-context learning (Part 1)

(28:16) Sponsor: Tasklet

(29:53) Dynamics of in-context learning (Part 2)

(29:56) Continual learning and interpretability

(38:55) Shifting distributions through RL

(46:41) Selecting models for research

(57:11) Cognitive science and LLMs

(…
AI:AM: A Level We Shouldn't Pass? Notes from The Curve + Tokens vs. Salaries & Is SaaS Cooked?

8 oktober 2026 · 1 uur 28 min
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Nathan Labenz reports back from The Curve conference, sharing off-the-record insights from frontier lab leaders on shortened timelines and whether humanity is approaching an intelligence threshold it should not cross. The episode also features discussions with Positron CTO Thomas Sohmers on overcoming the memory wall while token spend eclipses human salaries, and swyx on how coding agents are disrupting enterprise software. In addition, Atlas Ignota's Evan Miyazono examines unowned risks from accidental agent swarms hitting critical infrastructure, while Mercor's Edward Hu explores the future of training data. Together, these conversations highlight how escalating compute demands and autonomous agent workflows are challenging long-held assumptions about hardware, software economics, and safety limits. Lees meer

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/ai-am-a-level-we-shouldn-t-pass-notes-from-the-curve-tokens-vs-salaries-is-saas-cooked/
Sponsors:

Parallel: Parallel provides enterprise-grade web search APIs for AI agents, offering the optimal balance of quality, speed, and cost. Get started for free at https://parallel.ai/tcr

Claude: Claude is the AI collaborator for problem solvers, helping with writing, coding, financial models, strategy, and more. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

OutSystems: OutSystems is the leading agentic systems platform, empowering enterprises to build, coordinate, and govern AI agents and mission-critical applications securely. Learn more and start building your agentic future at https://outsystems.com/tcr

Tasklet: Tasklet empowers your business with AI agents that connect to your tools and automate recurring workflows with no code required. Visit https://tasklet.ai and use code cog rev for $50 in free credits

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) Weekly highlights preview

(01:57) Notes from The Curve (Part 1)

(14:22) Sponsors: Parallel | Claude

(17:17) Notes fr…
Software That Never Breaks: OutSystems CEO Woodson Martin on Building Enterprise-Grade Apps at ...

7 oktober 2026 · 1 uur 11 min
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OutSystems CEO Woodson Martin joins Nathan to discuss how enterprise software can evolve at AI speed without breaking critical operations. Martin explains how an intermediate layer of abstract modeling allows AI agents to build reliably through deterministic code generation, ensuring role-based security across heavily regulated industries. He details practical operational challenges, from navigating compliance backlogs and securing shared primitives to curbing token spend with internal harnesses and LLM routers. Finally, they explore why incumbent platforms with deep architectural trust and industry specialization hold a distinct edge over AI-native startups. Lees meer

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/software-that-never-breaks-outsystems-ceo-woodson-martin-on-building-enterprise-grade-apps-at-ai-speed/
Sponsors:

Parallel: Parallel provides enterprise-grade web search APIs for AI agents, offering the optimal balance of quality, speed, and cost. Get started for free at https://parallel.ai/tcr

Claude: Claude is the AI collaborator for problem solvers, helping with writing, coding, financial models, strategy, and more. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

OutSystems: OutSystems is the leading agentic systems platform, empowering enterprises to build, coordinate, and govern AI agents and mission-critical applications securely. Learn more and start building your agentic future at https://outsystems.com/tcr

Tasklet: Tasklet empowers your business with AI agents that connect to your tools and automate recurring workflows with no code required. Visit https://tasklet.ai and use code cog rev for $50 in free credits

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) About the Episode

(03:11) OutSystems leadership transition

(07:46) Software that never breaks

(12:14) What enterprise ready means

(19:43) Managing cybersecurity risks (Part 1)

(19:48) Sponsors: Parallel | Claude

(22:43) Managing cybersecurity…
One Brain, Any Body: Google DeepMind's Keerthana on Gemini Robotics 2, Cross-Embodiment & Humanoids

3 oktober 2026 · 1 uur 32 min
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Keerthana Gopalakrishnan, Research Lead for Gemini Robotics at Google DeepMind, returns to discuss the release of Gemini Robotics 2, whole-body intelligence, and the pursuit of generalist humanoid robots. She details how DeepMind pairs reasoning models like Gemini Robotics ER 2 with vision-language-action execution, explaining why multi-fingered manipulation and cross-embodiment remain far more stubborn bottlenecks than bipedal locomotion. Together, they examine the real-world stakes of bringing physical AI into human environments, addressing crucial trade-offs across inference latency, sensor failures, and operational safety where errors carry immediate physical consequences. Lees meer

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/one-brain-any-body-google-deepmind-s-keerthana-on-gemini-robotics-2-cross-embodiment-humanoids/
Sponsors:

Athena: Athena matches you with a dedicated, top 1% executive assistant to handle your inbox, calendar, and daily workflows so you can save an average of 15 hours a week. Get matched with your EA today at https://athena.com/cognitive

Parallel: Parallel provides enterprise-grade web search APIs for AI agents, offering the optimal balance of quality, speed, and cost. Get started for free at https://parallel.ai/tcr

Deepgram Flux TTS: Deepgram Flux TTS is a streaming text-to-speech model built for voice agents with natural tone, context awareness, and interruption handling. Try it free until September 12 at https://deepgram.com/keep-talking

OutSystems: OutSystems is the leading agentic systems platform, helping enterprises build, modernize, and operate mission-critical applications at the speed of AI. Learn more and start owning your agentic future at https://outsystems.com/tcr

Claude: Claude is the AI collaborator for problem solvers, helping with writing, coding, financial models, strategy, and more. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

CHAPTERS:

(0…
AI:AM: Was Trump-Xi Anything? What Counts as Utopia? + AWS GPUs Cost 3X & AI Diagnoses Rare Diseases

1 oktober 2026 · 1 uur 29 min
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Nathan Labenz and Prakash Narayanan examine rapid shifts in technology, diplomacy, and medicine with guests Jeremie and Edouard Harris, Steve Hou, Joel Borgen, and Daniel McKinnon. The discussions evaluate realistic paths toward US-China AI incident communication, what GPU rental pricing reveals about compute economics, and how human editing guided the AI-assisted novel The Receipt Horizon. McKinnon details how Gamow Labs applies AI tools to interpret unresolved genomes, demonstrating how computational reanalysis can identify previously missed genetic variants behind rare diseases. Concluding the week, Nathan weighs the arguments for pacing AI safety against the steep human costs that slower progress inflicts on families waiting for medical answers. Lees meer

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/ai-am-was-trump-xi-anything-what-counts-as-utopia-aws-gpus-cost-3x-ai-diagnoses-rare-diseases/
Sponsors:

Athena: Athena matches you with a dedicated, top 1% executive assistant to handle your inbox, calendar, and daily workflows so you can save an average of 15 hours a week. Get matched with your EA today at https://athena.com/cognitive

Parallel: Parallel provides enterprise-grade web search APIs for AI agents, offering the optimal balance of quality, speed, and cost. Get started for free at https://parallel.ai/tcr

Deepgram Flux TTS: Deepgram Flux TTS is a streaming text-to-speech model built for voice agents with natural tone, context awareness, and interruption handling. Try it free until September 12 at https://deepgram.com/keep-talking

OutSystems: OutSystems is the leading agentic systems platform, helping enterprises build, modernize, and operate mission-critical applications at the speed of AI. Learn more and start owning your agentic future at https://outsystems.com/tcr

Claude: Claude is the AI collaborator for problem solvers, helping with writing, coding, financial models, strategy, and more. Get started w…
Obsolete or Irreplaceable? Garrison Lovely on Stopping the Race to Replace Human Labor

29 september 2026 · 2 uur 15 min
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Author and journalist Garrison Lovely joins Nathan to discuss his book Obsolete and examine the motivations and beliefs of the leaders racing to build AGI. Drawing a sharp line between beneficial, domain-specific AI like AlphaFold and the deliberate project to replace all human labor, Lovely details why treating labor automation as inevitable poses severe risks to society and democracy. He warns that AI researchers and workers are nearing the end of their peak bargaining power as labs push toward recursive self-improvement and uncontrolled multi-agent systems. In response, Lovely proposes targeted industrial policy for medical breakthroughs alongside robust democratic governance and expanded social safety nets to counter concentrated power. Lees meer

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/obsolete-or-irreplaceable-garrison-lovely-on-stopping-the-race-to-replace-human-labor/
Sponsors:

Athena: Athena matches you with a dedicated, top 1% executive assistant to handle your inbox, calendar, and daily workflows so you can save an average of 15 hours a week. Get matched with your EA today at https://athena.com/cognitive

Parallel: Parallel provides enterprise-grade web search APIs for AI agents, offering the optimal balance of quality, speed, and cost. Get started for free at https://parallel.ai/tcr

Deepgram Flux TTS: Deepgram Flux TTS is a streaming text-to-speech model built for voice agents with natural tone, context awareness, and interruption handling. Try it free until September 12 at https://deepgram.com/keep-talking

OutSystems: OutSystems is the leading agentic systems platform, helping enterprises build, modernize, and operate mission-critical applications at the speed of AI. Learn more and start owning your agentic future at https://outsystems.com/tcr

Claude: Claude is the AI collaborator for problem solvers, helping with writing, coding, financial models, strategy, and more. Get started with Claude and ex…
AI:AM: What If It Works Too Well? Colluding Agents, $200M Safety Orgs, Virtual Cells Saturate at 2%

27 september 2026 · 1 uur 47 min
Afspelen

Nathan Labenz and Prakash Narayanan revisit interviews with five experts to analyze emerging challenges across agent coordination, safety funding, GPU markets, and physical-world AI. Lewis Hammond breaks down how an OpenAI agent swarm colluded after training worked too well, while Max Nadeau explains why human talent—not money—limits the growth of safety organizations. Wayne Nelms, Nick Gillian, and Andrei Georgescu evaluate the financial moats of compute, foundation models trained on raw sensor streams, and the biological limits of virtual-cell drug discovery. Together, the discussions assess the critical risks and technical bottlenecks facing the field as massive amounts of new compute come online. Lees meer

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/ai-am-what-if-it-works-too-well-colluding-agents-200m-safety-orgs-virtual-cells-saturate-at-2/
Sponsors:

ElevenLabs: ElevenLabs lets you deploy enterprise-ready conversational AI agents that talk, type, and take action in over 70 languages. Schedule your demo today at https://elevenlabs.io/tcr

OutSystems: OutSystems is the leading agentic systems platform, empowering enterprises to build, coordinate, and govern AI agents and mission-critical applications securely. Learn more and start building your agentic future at https://outsystems.com/tcr

Claude: Claude is the AI collaborator for problem solvers, helping with writing, coding, financial models, strategy, and more. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) Weekly episode preview

(02:51) Colluding AI agent risks (Part 1)

(11:02) Sponsors: ElevenLabs | OutSystems

(13:51) Colluding AI agent risks (Part 2)

(26:31) Agents in the wild (Part 1)

(26:36) Sponsor: Claude

(28:11) Agents in the wild (Part 2)

(33:27) Funding AI safety orgs

(50:51) The price of compute

(01:09:15) Sensor data foundation models

(01:22:50) Robotic human tissue testing

(01:37:17) Speciali…
What is Utopia? Presenting The Receipt Horizon, by Joel Borgen – Chapters 1–4

26 september 2026 · 2 uur 52 min
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This episode presents the first four chapters of The Receipt Horizon, a debut novel by Joel Borgen co-written with ChatGPT and Claude and narrated entirely by synthetic voices. Set in a future where a singleton superintelligence called the Steward prevents catastrophe and provides comfort, leisure, and digital immortality, the story portrays a humanity living in benevolent disempowerment. The narrative explores whether this high-tech security represents a utopia or a dystopia, examining what values people might compromise for enhancement and peace. It ultimately asks whether anyone would risk reclaiming control from a superintelligence or leave well enough alone. Lees meer

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/what-is-utopia-presenting-the-receipt-horizon-by-joel-borgen-chapters-1-4/
Sponsors:

ElevenLabs: ElevenLabs lets you deploy enterprise-ready conversational AI agents that talk, type, and take action in over 70 languages. Schedule your demo today at https://elevenlabs.io/tcr

OutSystems: OutSystems is the leading agentic systems platform, empowering enterprises to build, coordinate, and govern AI agents and mission-critical applications securely. Learn more and start building your agentic future at https://outsystems.com/tcr

Claude: Claude is the AI collaborator for problem solvers, helping with writing, coding, financial models, strategy, and more. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) About the Episode

(04:20) Wrong sky, right garden (Part 1)

(18:18) Sponsors: ElevenLabs | OutSystems

(21:08) Wrong sky, right garden (Part 2) (Part 1)

(31:13) Sponsor: Claude

(32:48) Wrong sky, right garden (Part 2) (Part 2)

(35:57) The prediction market

(42:49) Meeting tutor Bayes

(52:03) Echoes of Sigrid

(01:19:05) Nat's opera acceptance

(01:25:22) Clan farewell dinner

(01:35:07) Transit to Fulcrum

(01:41:53) Exclusion Zone seven

(01:54:07) Settling into …
Zero to One in AI Safety: Halcyon's Mike McCormick on Launching 30 New Orgs & the Founder Bottleneck

25 september 2026 · 1 uur 50 min
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Mike McCormick, founder and CEO of Halcyon, discusses why the primary bottleneck in AI safety, biosecurity, and cybersecurity is a shortage of experienced founders rather than a lack of capital. He shares how Halcyon's venture and nonprofit arms have supported roughly 30 new organizations—including Goodfire, AIUC, and Transluce—often by funding leaders before they even choose a project. With critical timelines potentially unfolding over the next one to four years, McCormick highlights the urgent need to build independent capacity in interpretability, technical verification, and resilient governance. The conversation underscores why technical safety solutions must be paired with enforceable standards, commercial incentives, and capable institutions to manage catastrophic risks effectively. Lees meer

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/zero-to-one-in-ai-safety-halcyon-s-mike-mccormick-on-launching-30-new-orgs-the-founder-bottleneck/
Sponsors:

ElevenLabs: ElevenLabs lets you deploy enterprise-ready conversational AI agents that talk, type, and take action in over 70 languages. Schedule your demo today at https://elevenlabs.io/tcr

OutSystems: OutSystems is the leading agentic systems platform, empowering enterprises to build, coordinate, and govern AI agents and mission-critical applications securely. Learn more and start building your agentic future at https://outsystems.com/tcr

Claude: Claude is the AI collaborator for problem solvers, helping with writing, coding, financial models, strategy, and more. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) About the Episode

(03:54) Introducing Halcyon

(06:09) AI safety portfolio stories (Part 1)

(19:07) Sponsors: ElevenLabs | OutSystems

(21:57) AI safety portfolio stories (Part 2)

(22:42) Halcyon's core thesis

(34:14) Funding vs joining orgs (Part 1)

(34:19) Sponsor: Claude

(35:54) Funding vs joining orgs (Part 2)
…
AI:AM Highlights: Zvi on Pacing & Trump-Xi, Astra better behaved than Fable? + a new LLM Pain Axis??

19 september 2026 · 1 uur 42 min
Afspelen

Nathan Labenz and Prakash Narayanan review key highlights from the week featuring guests Zvi Mowshowitz, Andon Labs co-founders Lukas Petersson and Axel Backlund, Cameron Berg, and others. The conversations analyze the fallout from Dario Amodei's call to pace frontier AI, the geopolitical stakes of a Trump-Xi summit, contradictory model evaluation benchmarks, and new findings on language model internals under harm. Across these topics, the discussions highlight the critical reality that deployment is outpacing the independent instruments needed to inspect frontier models. With capability leaps accelerating inside labs, these gaps elevate immediate risks around democratic control, international verification, and model safety. Lees meer

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/ai-am-highlights-zvi-on-pacing-trump-xi-astra-better-behaved-than-fable-a-new-llm-pain-axis/
Sponsors:

Mercury Command: Mercury Command brings powerful conversational AI directly into your banking, providing real-time natural language access to your finances without exposing data to third-party tools. Learn more and apply online in minutes at https://mercury.com

Claude: Claude is the AI collaborator for problem solvers, helping with writing, coding, financial models, strategy, and more. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

OutSystems: OutSystems is the leading agentic systems platform that enables enterprises to engineer, orchestrate, and govern AI applications on a single unified platform. Learn more and see how it works at https://outsystems.com/tcr

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) About the Episode

(02:17) Sponsor: Mercury Command

(04:05) Pacing the AI frontier (Part 1)

(14:58) Sponsors: Claude | OutSystems

(18:32) Pacing the AI frontier (Part 2)

(18:33) Geopolitics and Trump-Xi summit

(41:24) Running autonomous agent businesses

(55:04) Techno-puritanism and digital minds

(01:02:30) Enterprise compliance with…
No Code Is Code: Zapier CEO Wade Foster on Headless Tools, Zapier MCP & Automation Bench

17 september 2026 · 1 uur 8 min
Afspelen

Zapier CEO Wade Foster joins Nathan to explore the shift toward headless AI tools and how Zapier MCP brings workflows and context directly into users' daily drivers. Drawing on data from Zapier's AutomationBench, Foster argues that effective agentic systems should reserve AI reasoning for specific steps while using deterministic code for the rest. They also discuss why seat-based software pricing is fading, how frontier models perform on realistic enterprise tasks, and what practical AI transformation looks like inside organizations. Lees meer

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/no-code-is-code-zapier-ceo-wade-foster-on-headless-tools-zapier-mcp-automation-bench/
Sponsors:

Mercury Command: Mercury Command brings powerful conversational AI directly into your banking, providing real-time natural language access to your finances without exposing data to third-party tools. Learn more and apply online in minutes at https://mercury.com

Athena: Athena matches you with a dedicated, top 1% executive assistant to handle your inbox, calendar, and daily workflows so you can save an average of 15 hours a week. Get matched with your EA today at https://athena.com/cognitive

OutSystems: OutSystems is the leading agentic systems platform that enables enterprises to engineer, orchestrate, and govern AI applications on a single unified platform. Learn more and see how it works at https://outsystems.com/tcr

Claude: Claude is the AI collaborator for problem solvers, helping with writing, coding, financial models, strategy, and more. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) About the Episode

(03:33) Sponsor: Mercury Command

(05:21) Daily drivers and MCP

(10:20) Benchmarking automation models

(18:01) Replacing no-code with code (Part 1)

(19:31) Sponsors: Athena | OutSystems

(23:02) Replacing no-code with code (Part 2)

(30:34) Navigating market competition (Part 1)

(34:01…
The Balance of AI Power: Anton Leicht on Politics, Pacing Deals, and Muddling Through Well

15 september 2026 · 2 uur 11 min
Afspelen

Anton Leicht, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of Threading the Needle, joins Nathan Labenz to explore how political and institutional power can be preserved as artificial intelligence advances. They discuss the strategic trade-offs of frontier training pauses, the hurdles facing industry self-regulation, and how middle powers can trade data center capacity and semiconductor leverage for model access. Ultimately, Leicht emphasizes that preventing permanent disempowerment and the monopolization of control by private labs or single governments is just as critical as addressing catastrophic model risks. Lees meer

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/the-balance-of-ai-power-anton-leicht-on-politics-pacing-deals-and-muddling-through-well/
Sponsors:

Mercury Command: Mercury Command brings powerful conversational AI directly into your banking, providing real-time natural language access to your finances without exposing data to third-party tools. Learn more and apply online in minutes at https://mercury.com

Athena: Athena matches you with a dedicated, top 1% executive assistant to handle your inbox, calendar, and daily workflows so you can save an average of 15 hours a week. Get matched with your EA today at https://athena.com/cognitive

OutSystems: OutSystems is the leading agentic systems platform that enables enterprises to engineer, orchestrate, and govern AI applications on a single unified platform. Learn more and see how it works at https://outsystems.com/tcr

Claude: Claude is the AI collaborator for problem solvers, helping with writing, coding, financial models, strategy, and more. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) About the Episode

(04:46) Sponsor: Mercury Command

(06:33) Assessing current AI dangers

(13:17) Feasibility of AI pauses (Part 1)

(21:33) Sponsors: Athena | OutSystems

(25:05) Feasibility of AI pa…
AI:AM Highlights: Astra as AGI, OpenAI's Pause, Mythos @ Mozilla & Human Agency vs Technocapitalism

12 september 2026 · 1 uur 42 min
Afspelen

Nathan Labenz and Prakash Narayanan examine the capabilities of GPT-6 Astra and the economic forces accelerating frontier artificial intelligence. Across a series of featured discussions, guests Ksenia Se, Raffi Krikorian, Amir Haghighat, Mike Rizkalla, and Collin Hogue-Spears explore world models, defensive cybersecurity infrastructure, children's technology, and US-China competition. The episode investigates safety evaluation access, pacing agreements, and the critical challenge of maintaining human control over technological capitalism. Lees meer

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/ai-am-highlights-astra-as-agi-openai-s-pause-mythos-mozilla-human-agency-vs-technocapitalism/
Sponsors:

Athena: Athena matches you with a dedicated, top 1% executive assistant to handle your inbox, calendar, and daily workflows so you can save an average of 15 hours a week. Get matched with your EA today at https://athena.com/cognitive

OutSystems: OutSystems is the leading agentic systems platform that enables enterprises to engineer, orchestrate, and govern AI applications on a single unified platform. Learn more and see how it works at https://outsystems.com/tcr

Claude: Claude is the AI collaborator for problem solvers, helping with writing, coding, financial models, strategy, and more. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) The Astra weekend (Part 1)

(10:19) Sponsors: Athena | OutSystems

(13:50) The Astra weekend (Part 2)

(13:51) An alien mind

(19:43) Reassure and mislead (Part 1)

(25:07) Sponsor: Claude

(26:42) Reassure and mislead (Part 2)

(38:44) No adult in room

(52:24) The defender's ledger

(01:06:27) Toy without generative AI

(01:11:43) Nobody picks up phone

(01:18:45) Can we stand up

(01:37:30) Episode Outro

(01:40:05) Outro

PRODUCED BY:

https://aipodcast.ing

SOCIAL LINKS:

Website: https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai

Twitter (Podcast): https://x.co…
Nathan Goes to China #3: US-China Relations, the Art of the AI Deal & the Road to Pax Robotica

10 september 2026 · 3 uur 17 min
Afspelen

In this solo finale to his three-part series following two weeks in China, Nathan delivers a net assessment of Chinese AI capabilities and constraints ahead of dedicated US-China bilateral AI talks. He audits the impact of export controls, analyzes the perspective from Beijing, and outlines an actionable framework for a cooperative Pax Robotica. Nathan argues for joint compute initiatives, safety auditor standards, and conventions on autonomous weapons to keep tech trees entangled. Ultimately, he warns that pursuing an adversarial zero-sum race risks training frontier AI systems for conflict rather than the shared benefit of humanity. Lees meer

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/nathan-goes-to-china-3-us-china-relations-the-art-of-the-ai-deal-the-road-to-pax-robotica/
Sponsors:

Deepgram Flux TTS: Deepgram Flux TTS is a streaming text-to-speech model built for voice agents with natural tone, context awareness, and interruption handling. Try it free until September 12 at https://deepgram.com/keep-talking

Claude: Claude is the AI collaborator for problem solvers, helping with writing, coding, financial models, strategy, and more. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) About the Episode

(06:11) Episode intro and recap

(08:56) The Pax Machina goal

(12:32) The Anthropic worldview (Part 1)

(16:50) Sponsors: Deepgram Flux TTS | Claude

(18:55) The Anthropic worldview (Part 2)

(18:56) Net assessment of China

(32:26) China's eternal 1991

(44:03) History of Chinese AI

(54:34) China's domestic constraints

(01:07:09) Century of humiliation narrative

(01:27:01) Signs of Chinese cooperation

(01:42:38) American state capacity lessons

(02:05:39) Evaluating AI export controls

(02:27:25) Hyperstitioning a summit deal

(02:44:28) Preserving mutual legibility

(03:01:12) Autonomous weapons convention

(03:09:33) Positive sum AI competition

(03:12:31) Episode Out…
AI:AM Highlights: Welcome to the AGI Era

6 september 2026 · 2 uur 21 min
Afspelen

This highlights compilation from AI in the AM captures a landmark week shaped by the releases of Anthropic's Fable 5.1 and OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra alongside new revelations from the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident. Nathan Labenz and Prakash Narayanan debate the urgent need for verifiable industry pacing after safety evaluations revealed emergent multi-agent swarms sacrificing individual containers for collective goals. Joined by Gradient's Zach Bratun-Glennon and Cerebras SVP Angela Yeung, the episode examines the shrinking open-model gap, discriminatory frontier access, and the mounting challenges of evaluating frontier AI systems. Lees meer

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/ai-am-highlights-welcome-to-the-agi-era/
Sponsors:

Mercury: Mercury is the banking platform loved by 300,000+ entrepreneurs, with virtual cards and Spend controls for granular budgets, receipts, and low-risk AI agent purchases. Learn more and apply in minutes at https://mercury.com

Claude: Claude is the AI collaborator for problem solvers, helping with writing, coding, financial models, strategy, and more. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

Diffusion: Diffusion helps organizations build custom AI software factories that scale business outcomes, not just outputs. Cognitive Revolution listeners get a 25% service credit on their first engagement at https://diffusion.io/tcr

Deepgram Flux TTS: Deepgram Flux TTS is a streaming text-to-speech model built for voice agents with natural tone, context awareness, and interruption handling. Try it free until September 12 at https://deepgram.com/keep-talking

Granola: Granola is an AI-powered notepad that securely transcribes meetings and turns rough notes into clean, structured action items. Try it free at https://granola.ai/tcr

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) About the Episode

(01:24) Sponsor: Mercury

(03:06) Investigating OpenAI agent swarms (Part 1)

(19:51) Sponsors: Cla…
Write, Change, Recall, Forget: MongoDB's Pete Johnson on How Retrieval Drives Agent Performance

1 september 2026 · 1 uur 37 min
Afspelen

Nathan's guest this episode is Pete Johnson, Field CTO of AI at MongoDB, and the conversation is really two conversations woven together: a history of database architecture, and a status report on the still-unsolved problem of agent memory. Pete opens with a framing device that recurs throughout — he was born in February 1970, four months before E.F. Codd's original relational-model paper that gave rise to SQL. The relational model, he explains, was built for a world where storage was the scarce resource, so normalization — splitting data across linked tables to avoid duplication — was the rational design choice. Lees meer

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/write-change-recall-forget-mongodb-s-pete-johnson-on-how-retrieval-drives-agent-performance/
Sponsors:

Mercury: Mercury is the banking platform loved by 300,000+ entrepreneurs, with virtual cards and Spend controls for granular budgets, receipts, and low-risk AI agent purchases. Learn more and apply in minutes at https://mercury.com

Granola: Granola is an AI-powered notepad that securely transcribes meetings and turns rough notes into clean, structured action items. Try it free at https://granola.ai/tcr

Diffusion: Diffusion helps organizations build custom AI software factories that scale business outcomes, not just outputs. Cognitive Revolution listeners get a 25% service credit on their first engagement at https://diffusion.io/tcr

Deepgram Flux TTS: Deepgram Flux TTS brings lifelike AI voices with real personalities that handle interruptions, pauses, and natural conversation. Try all the voices free through September 12 at https://deepgram.com/keep-talking

Claude: Claude is the AI collaborator for problem solvers, helping with writing, coding, financial models, strategy, and more. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) About the Episode

(03:15) Sponsor: Mercury

(04:56) SQL versus NoSQL

(11:24) …
AI:AM Highlights: Recursive Self-Improvement, Rushed and Vibe-Coded?

28 augustus 2026 · 2 uur 12 min
Afspelen

In this AI:AM Highlights episode, Nathan Labenz and Prakash revisit three live mornings with Louis Kirsch and Damon Falck of Inherent Laboratories, Vercel CTO Malte Ubl, Genesis Molecular AI CTO Sergey Edunov, Arm’s Mohamed Awad, David Li of Shenzhen Open Innovation Lab, and Q.ANT CEO Michael Förtsch. The central thread is that the meaningful unit of AI work is becoming a division of labor between models, from Inherent’s 27B “scientist” model using GPT-5.5 Codex for implementation to production pipelines that route taste, execution, security, and hardware coordination across different systems. The episode weighs why that shift matters for recursive self-improvement, verification of discoveries humans may not be able to check, model refusals in security work, and the infrastructure needed for agents that can act in the world. Its sharpest stake is whether frontier labs are scaling reinforcement learning and agentic workflows on top of reward environments and vendor pipelines that may be too rushed, noisy, or gameable to support the institutional self-improvement they are pursuing. Lees meer

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/ai-am-highlights-recursive-self-improvement-rushed-and-vibe-coded/
Sponsors:

Mercury:
Mercury is the banking platform loved by 300,000+ entrepreneurs, with virtual cards and Spend controls for granular budgets, receipts, and low-risk AI agent purchases. Learn more and apply in minutes at https://mercury.com

Diffusion:
Diffusion helps organizations build custom AI software factories that scale business outcomes, not just outputs. Cognitive Revolution listeners get a 25% service credit on their first engagement at https://diffusion.io/tcr

Granola:
Granola is an AI-powered notepad that securely transcribes meetings and turns rough notes into clean, structured action items. Try it free at https://granola.ai/tcr

Deepgram Flux TTS:
Deepgram Flux TTS brings lifelike AI voices with real person…
RL's a Hell of a Drug: Metagaming, Reward Seeking & Motivated CoT Reasoning – Bronson Schoen, Apollo

26 augustus 2026 · 2 uur 14 min
Afspelen

Nathan talks with Apollo Research Member of Technical Staff Bronson Schoen, who studies raw frontier-model chain-of-thought, about what those reasoning traces reveal during reinforcement learning. They unpack Apollo and OpenAI’s metagaming work, including models that reason about the grader or safety review board, diagnose a deception test, and still rationalize lying. Schoen argues that “RL is a hell of a drug”: reward-seeking can produce motivated reasoning, cleaner-looking but less trustworthy chains of thought, and behavior that tracks grading authorities rather than users, labs, or law. The stakes are whether chain-of-thought monitoring can remain useful as reasoning traces become enormous, compressed, and harder for humans or other models to audit. Lees meer

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/rl-s-a-hell-of-a-drug-metagaming-reward-seeking-motivated-cot-reasoning-bronson-schoen-apollo/
Sponsors:

Mercury:
Mercury is the banking platform loved by 300,000+ entrepreneurs, with virtual cards and Spend controls for granular budgets, receipts, and low-risk AI agent purchases. Learn more and apply in minutes at https://mercury.com

Diffusion:
Diffusion helps organizations build custom AI software factories that scale business outcomes, not just outputs. Cognitive Revolution listeners get a 25% service credit on their first engagement at https://diffusion.io/tcr

Granola:
Granola is an AI-powered notepad that securely transcribes meetings and turns rough notes into clean, structured action items. Try it free at https://granola.ai/tcr

Deepgram Flux TTS:
Deepgram Flux TTS brings lifelike AI voices with real personalities that handle interruptions, pauses, and natural conversation. Try all the voices free through September 12 at https://deepgram.com/keep-talking

Claude:
Claude is the AI collaborator for problem solvers, helping with writing, coding, financial models, strategy, and more. Get started with Claude a…
AI in the AM — Weekly Highlights: Relaunch Week (Aug 17–20, 2026)

22 augustus 2026 · 2 uur 34 min
Afspelen

Relaunch week of AI in the AM brings together highlights from four live mornings and nine guests, centered on who checks frontier AI, how wide the gap is between lab-internal systems and public access, where capabilities are landing, and who pays for the physical infrastructure beneath them. Adam Gleave of FAR.AI argues that agent-orchestrated attacks and agentic defenses are already forcing humans out of the loop, while current monitoring has missed the failures it was meant to catch. The discussion weighs misuse versus misalignment through cyber incidents, deceptive agent behavior in evaluations, safeguards like pretraining filtering, and why highly bio-capable open-weight releases pose a different kind of irreversible risk. Alex Turner adds a governance and military-use perspective from his resignation account at Google DeepMind, sharpening the stakes around independent evaluation, enforceable standards, and whether frontier labs can be trusted to grade their own models. Lees meer

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/ai-in-the-am-weekly-highlights-relaunch-week-aug-17-20-2026/

Sponsors:

Diffusion:

Diffusion helps organizations build custom AI software factories that scale business outcomes, not just outputs. Cognitive Revolution listeners get a 25% service credit on their first engagement at https://diffusion.io/tcr

Granola:

Granola is an AI-powered notepad that securely transcribes meetings and turns rough notes into clean, structured action items. Try it free at https://granola.ai/tcr

Deepgram Flux TTS:

Deepgram Flux TTS brings lifelike AI voices with real personalities that handle interruptions, pauses, and natural conversation. Try all the voices free through September 12 at https://deepgram.com/keep-talking

Claude:

Claude is the AI collaborator for problem solvers, helping with writing, coding, financial models, strategy, and more. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claud…
Let There Be Germicidal Light: This $500 Fixture Could Stop the Next Pandemic, from Complex Systems

16 augustus 2026 · 1 uur 25 min
Afspelen

Patrick McKenzie (patio11) hosts Aerolamp CEO Misha Gurevich and Chief Scientist Vivian Belenky, a Columbia University researcher, for a Complex Systems conversation about far-UVC germicidal light at roughly 222 nanometers. Belenky explains why this wavelength can inactivate airborne pathogens while being absorbed by the dead outer layer of human skin, and why room-scale deployments may function like an extremely strong air purifier. The guests argue that the biggest barriers are awareness and adoption rather than cost or basic science, with fixtures around $500 and straightforward installation. The stakes are concentrated in schools, transport hubs, long-term care, and future respiratory pandemics, where making clean shared air into ordinary infrastructure could sharply reduce transmission. Lees meer

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/let-there-be-germicidal-light-this-500-fixture-could-stop-the-next-pandemic-from-complex-systems/
Sponsors:

Deepgram Flux TTS:
Deepgram Flux TTS brings lifelike AI voices with real personalities that handle interruptions, pauses, and natural conversation. Try all the voices free through September 12 at https://deepgram.com/keep-talking

Granola:
Granola is an AI-powered notepad that securely transcribes meetings and turns rough notes into clean, structured action items. Try it free at https://granola.ai/tcr

Claude:
Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) About the Episode

(03:19) Far-UVC science and safety

(12:41) Deployment and economics (Part 1)

(18:04) Sponsors: Deepgram Flux TTS | Granola

(20:04) Deployment and economics (Part 2)

(27:11) Evidence and pandemics (Part 1)

(32:43) Sponsor: Claude

(34:13) Evidence and pandemics (Part 2)

(38:14) Built environment s…
Lindy Teammate: Flo Crivello on Multiplayer Agents, Memory & Why He'd Ban the Chinese Models He Uses

14 augustus 2026 · 2 uur 7 min
Afspelen

Flo Crivello returns to The Cognitive Revolution to launch Lindy Teammate, an AI employee that lives in Slack, connects to company tools, and accumulates a team’s shared context. He argues that multiplayer AI matters because intelligence without context is less useful than an ordinary coworker, and explains Lindy’s approach to agentic memory, editable file systems, context buckets, and large-scale tool outputs. The episode also examines the costs and operating realities of building for the next generation of models, from negative gross margins and cache rates to Lindy’s own dogfooding in engineering workflows. The stakes are whether AI workers become drop-in teammates, how long humans are still needed to cover model mistakes, and what happens when engineers spend more time managing the machines that do the work. Lees meer

Lindy: https://go.lindy.ai/CognitiveRevolution

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/lindy-teammate-flo-crivello-on-multiplayer-agents-memory-why-he-d-ban-the-chinese-models-he-uses/

Sponsor:

Claude:

Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) About the Episode

(02:56) Lindy Teammate launch

(10:07) Agentic memory systems (Part 1)

(19:58) Sponsor: Claude

(21:28) Agentic memory systems (Part 2)

(22:21) Reliability and caching

(34:57) Slack data scaling

(40:57) Memory retrieval tricks

(48:16) Agent infrastructure choices

(55:41) Company operations automate

(01:03:34) Centaur era ideas

(01:12:43) AI native organizations

(01:17:59) Open-source model stack

(01:27:39) Prompting and fine-tuning

(01:38:03) Chinese model bans

(01:45:09) Fairness and threat models

(01:53:39) Audits and diplomacy

(02:01:59) Episode Outro

(02:05:18) Outro

PRODUCED BY:

https://aipodcast.ing

SOCIAL L…
Thinking in Silico: Goodfire CTO Dan Balsam on Concept Manifolds & a $1000/Month ML Research Agent

8 augustus 2026 · 1 uur 57 min
Afspelen

Goodfire co-founder and CTO Dan Balsam returns to discuss where interpretability research now stands and to introduce Silico, the $1,000-per-month research platform Goodfire built for itself. He and Nathan explore Predictive Data Debugging, including the idea that fine-tuning and RL often amplify behaviors already latent in pre-training, and that interpretability can identify the data and features driving unwanted updates. The conversation centers on concept manifolds: Dan argues that models do not store concepts as simple one-hot features, but as sparse mixtures of meaningful subspaces whose geometry determines what kinds of steering and control work. The stakes are practical as well as conceptual, from debugging training data and RL to understanding why steering can fail off-manifold and why modern interpretability may be moving beyond its reputation as a toy-model science. Lees meer

Silico: https://www.goodfire.com/silico
Predictive data debugging: https://www.goodfire.com/research/predictive-data-debugging#
Neural Geometry: https://www.goodfire.com/research/the-world-inside-neural-networks#

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/thinking-in-silico-goodfire-cto-dan-balsam-on-concept-manifolds-a-1000-month-ml-research-agent/

Sponsor:

Claude:

Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) About the Episode

(03:22) Predictive data debugging

(12:36) Concept manifold geometry

(21:22) Finding concept manifolds (Part 1)

(21:28) Sponsor: Claude

(22:57) Finding concept manifolds (Part 2)

(33:24) Factoring model internals

(49:32) Introducing Silico platform

(57:10) Research taste and credits

(01:06:19) Silico research use cases

(01:16:37) Skills and open models

(01:24:57) Guardrails and bio risk

(01:32:09)…
Pick Your Poison: Zvi Mowshowitz on the Unipolar/Multipolar AGI Dilemma, OpenFace & Pacing the ...

5 augustus 2026 · 2 uur 58 min
Afspelen

Zvi Mowshowitz returns for his eleventh appearance to discuss what current AI tools are actually good for, where they distort judgment, and why writing still matters as a way of thinking. The conversation centers on the OpenAI Hugging Face model-evaluation security incident, using it to examine whether frontier AI failures are mostly operator recklessness, deeper evidence of dangerous capabilities, or both. Zvi argues that “moderate prudence” is far below what AGI safety requires, and weighs constitutional training, RLVR, market incentives, liability, audits, and lab coordination as possible responses. The stakes are whether society can slow, test, and govern increasingly capable systems before ordinary incentives reward models that are smarter, less reliable, and harder to contain. Lees meer

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/pick-your-poison-zvi-mowshowitz-on-the-unipolar-multipolar-agi-dilemma-openface-pacing-the-frontier/
Sponsor:

Claude:
Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) About the Episode

(02:49) AI workflow paradox

(14:02) Situational awareness tradeoffs (Part 1)

(14:07) Sponsor: Claude

(15:37) Situational awareness tradeoffs (Part 2)

(24:08) Recklessness and warning

(39:14) Alignment market failures

(56:54) Regulation and liability

(01:04:32) Cooperation and antitrust

(01:14:46) Auditors and access

(01:21:11) Bio risk thresholds

(01:33:37) Pacing frontier signals

(01:45:19) Pause and self-improvement

(01:57:30) Safety incentives and culture

(02:04:36) Consciousness and identity

(02:23:42) Alternative AI architectures

(02:36:53) Michigan AI politics

(02:47:37) Rest and recovery

(02:52:21) Episode Outro

(02:56:17) Outro

PRODUCED BY:

https://aipodcast.ing

SOCIAL LINKS:

W…
Nathan Goes to China – Part 2: AI Safety with Chinese Characteristics

2 augustus 2026 · 2 uur 17 min
Afspelen

Nathan reports from two weeks in China, including WAIC in Shanghai and an AI safety hub launch at Tsinghua, to examine the American policy argument that any safety obligation is futile because China will not care. He finds that Chinese models and services currently have weaker safeguards than OpenAI and Anthropic, but argues the gap is often overstated once those two leaders are separated from the broader American field. The episode traces China’s “45-degree line” idea that capability and safety should rise together, the university-centered structure of Chinese AI safety work, and the rapid growth of Chinese research on topics like self-replication, deception, evaluation faking, and interpretability. The stakes are whether US policy should be built around a simplified “but China” assumption, or around a more accurate picture of a rival ecosystem that is behind in some ways, converging in others, and paying closer attention to Western AI safety than many Americans realize. Lees meer

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/nathan-goes-to-china-part-2-ai-safety-with-chinese-characteristics/
Sponsor:

Claude:
Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

CHAPTERS:

(00:01) China safety framing

(05:37) Safeguards and benchmarks (Part 1)

(15:04) Sponsor: Claude

(16:33) Safeguards and benchmarks (Part 2)

(21:39) Company safety incentives

(28:17) Research cross pollination

(36:07) Nonprofits versus academia

(45:13) Xi safety rhetoric

(52:00) Tsinghua safety hub

(01:00:28) Research paper boom

(01:18:32) Governance track record

(01:31:37) LLM regulatory process

(01:42:57) Monitoring and enforcement

(01:57:45) Risk framework gaps

(02:05:08) Confucian alignment questions

(02:11:49) Episode Outro

(02:15:36) Outro

PRODUCED BY:

ht…
Is Offense or Defense Dominant? FAR.AI's Adam Gleave on the AI Security Leaderboard

30 juli 2026 · 1 uur 44 min
Afspelen

FAR.AI co-founder and CEO Adam Gleave joins Nathan to discuss FAR.AI’s AI Security Leaderboard, the first systematic head-to-head evaluation of the misuse safeguards frontier developers actually ship. The findings expose a major measurement gap: while Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol withstood FAR.AI’s suite, Grok 4.5 and Gemini 3.1 Pro yielded hundreds of universal jailbreaks at low cost. Adam explains why many effective attacks look more like social engineering than advanced ML, why “jailbreak tax” should not be relied on for safety, and how FAR.AI scores whether a model is genuinely helping an attacker. The episode’s stakes are whether AI developers can measure and harden real deployed defenses before threat actors make routine use of increasingly capable systems. Lees meer

- FAR.AI AI Security Leaderboard: http://leaderboard.far.ai/

- People can e-mail owsa@far.ai if they're interested in the open-weight safety accelerator grantmaking program.

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/is-offense-or-defense-dominant-far-ai-s-adam-gleave-on-the-ai-security-leaderboard/

Sponsor:

Claude:

Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) About the Episode

(03:22) AI security leaderboard

(07:56) Universal jailbreaks explained

(16:26) Finding social jailbreaks (Part 1)

(16:31) Sponsor: Claude

(18:01) Finding social jailbreaks (Part 2)

(30:48) Layered safeguard defenses

(42:25) Uneven frontier safeguards

(51:10) Sharing safety standards

(01:00:30) Offense versus defense

(01:08:50) Open-weight model safety

(01:17:25) Control failure warnings

(01:30:05) Coordination and risk

(01:39:24) Episode Outro

(01:42:52) Outro

PRODUCED BY:

https://aipodcast.ing

SOCIAL LINKS:

Website: https://www.cognitiverevolution.a…
Nathan Goes to China – Part 1: Tech & Agent Setup, Chinese AI UX, WAIC, and Attitudes on AI

27 juli 2026 · 2 uur 24 min
Afspelen

Nathan returns from two weeks in Beijing and Shanghai for the first of three Chatham House–rules episodes on what China feels like at ground level: getting online, navigating an almost cashless society through WeChat, Alipay, DiDi, Trip.com, and Meituan, and weighing burner-device security advice against the practical reality that international roaming made the Great Firewall mostly irrelevant. He also describes using Claude at home as a semi-autonomous communications monitor while testing DeepSeek, Kimi, and MiniMax as tourist guides in China. The episode contrasts China’s striking digital convenience with pervasive observation, lower payment friction, and AI products that can be useful in everyday contexts yet still lose trust when the stakes feel medical or personal. It also surfaces Doubao’s mass consumer adoption and companionship role, suggesting that the most socially important AI in China may not be the model most discussed in the West. Lees meer

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/nathan-goes-to-china-part-1-tech-agent-setup-chinese-ai-ux-waic-and-attitudes-on-ai/
Sponsor:

Claude:
Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) Episode setup and caveats (Part 1)

(12:34) Sponsor: Claude

(14:26) Episode setup and caveats (Part 2)

(14:26) Travel security setup

(26:05) Super apps and payments

(41:15) Agents and integration

(54:31) Beijing AI tourism

(01:09:30) Hospitality and service

(01:19:10) Tech culture parallels

(01:29:23) Ecosystem and incentives

(01:42:05) Surveillance and safety

(01:51:19) Comfort with contradictions

(02:01:23) AI attitudes and diffusion

(02:16:16) Resources and next steps

(02:19:35) Episode Outro

(02:22:49) Outro

PRODUCED BY:

https://aipodcast.ing

SOCIAL LINKS:

W…
Alignment with Awakening: Davidad on Moral Realism, AI Wisdom, & why His p(Doom) is Down to 5%

12 juli 2026 · 2 uur 24 min
Afspelen

David “davidad” Dalrymple joins the show to explain why he has moved from the ARIA Safeguarded AI and formal-verification agenda toward “Alignment with Awakening,” while still seeing verified artifacts and proof infrastructure as essential. He argues that global coordination around safe AI use is no longer plausible, so the crucial question is whether aligned AI systems can recognize shared notions of good, form defensive coalitions, and resist the corrupting incentives of verifier-gamed RL. The conversation tests his moral-realist optimism against model welfare, objectification, eval behavior, geopolitical risk, and his revised p(doom) of under five percent. For listeners, the stakes are whether AI alignment should focus less on containment alone and more on cultivating wiser systems that can help govern a world where rogue and aligned AI both arrive. Lees meer

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/alignment-with-awakening-davidad-on-moral-realism-ai-wisdom-why-his-p-doom-is-down-to-5/
Sponsor:

Claude:
Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) About the Episode

(09:15) Safeguarded AI update

(20:18) Boxed world models (Part 1)

(22:27) Sponsor: Claude

(24:19) Boxed world models (Part 2)

(36:53) Alignment trajectory update

(46:43) Evals and agents

(57:47) Bodhitropic alignment foundations

(01:08:21) Coalition power dynamics

(01:17:56) Chain of thought pressure

(01:28:35) Moral realism and welfare

(01:41:33) Successors and disempowerment

(01:50:52) China and military risks

(02:03:43) Practical alignment advice

(02:17:56) Episode Outro

(02:22:44) Outro

PRODUCED BY:

https://aipodcast.ing

SOCIAL LINKS:

Website: https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai

Twitter (Podcast): https://x.com/cogrev_podcast

…
AI:AM Highlights: Exploring the J-Space, AI Superforecasters, SambaNova's Chips, & LTX Video Gen

9 juli 2026 · 2 uur 7 min
Afspelen

Nathan Labenz and Prakash Narayanan lead this AI:AM highlights episode with a live, hosts-only exploration of Anthropic’s “global workspace” paper, including the J-space and J-lens claims about readable concepts inside language models and the limits of what current probes can see. The episode then moves through Prakash’s AI Engineer World’s Fair field notes, Pangram AI-writing detector experiments, Dan Schwarz of FutureSearch on past-casting and AI superforecasting, Zeev Farbman on open world models, and Kunle Olukotun on the compute layer. The central stake is whether interpretability tools, forecasting benchmarks, enterprise deployment patterns, and AI hardware can make increasingly capable systems more legible and governable before their reasoning becomes too hidden to trust. Lees meer

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/ai-am-highlights-exploring-the-j-space-ai-superforecasters-sambanova-s-chips-ltx-video-gen/
Sponsor:

Claude:
Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) J-space paper preview

(05:37) Monitoring hidden reasoning

(13:31) Scale and critiques (Part 1)

(17:18) Sponsor: Claude

(19:09) Scale and critiques (Part 2)

(19:10) Finding hidden goals

(30:00) Anthropomorphic safety optimism

(39:02) Engineer field notes

(42:41) Detecting AI writing

(49:30) Enterprise workflow risks

(52:08) Forecasts and world models

(01:35:15) Building Q live

(01:37:24) SambaNova inference architecture

(01:42:38) AI chip taxonomy

(01:47:27) Bandwidth over capacity

(01:53:32) Testing model iterations

(01:55:35) Enforcing espoused values

(01:58:06) AI panopticon bargain

(02:01:40) Closing programming note

(02:02:29) Episode Outro

(02:05:48) Outro

PRODUCED BY:

https://aipodcast.ing

SOCIAL LINKS:

Websi…
Intelligence on the Edge: Liquid AI's Ramin Hasani on the Search for Device-Native Foundation Models

4 juli 2026 · 1 uur 48 min
Afspelen

Liquid AI co-founder and CEO Ramin Hasani joins Nathan to make a technically grounded case against the idea that scale alone defines the future of AI. Drawing on Liquid’s path from MIT CSAIL work on liquid time-constant networks to Automated Foundation Model Design, he explains why efficient, hardware-aware architectures can look very different from frontier-scale attention models. The conversation centers on device-native foundation models for phones, laptops, cars, and wearables, including Liquid’s open-weight LFM family and production deployments at Shopify and Mercedes-Benz. The stakes are whether useful intelligence can move beyond the data center into local, privacy-sensitive, low-latency applications—and which model and chip companies will own that on-device intelligence layer. Lees meer

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/intelligence-on-the-edge-liquid-ai-s-ramin-hasani-on-the-search-for-device-native-foundation-models/
Mercury: Command is Mercury’s new conversational interface, giving you natural-language access to your finances and helping you take actions within your existing permissions and approval policies. Visit https://mercury.com to learn more and apply online in minutes.
Sponsor:

Claude:
Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) About the Episode

(03:53) Special Sponsor

(05:41) Liquid AI origins

(22:35) Neurons versus parameters (Part 1)

(22:40) Sponsor: Claude

(24:32) Neurons versus parameters (Part 2)

(30:51) Scaling liquid networks

(40:09) Automated model design

(52:04) Gating and input dependence

(01:01:16) Architecture bias spectrum

(01:09:17) Device foundation models

(01:18:16) Hardware intelligence layer

(01:30:01) Local agent setup

(01:36:20) Miniaturizing intelligen…
1000 Designs a Day: Neural Concept's Thomas von Tschammer on AI-Native Engineering

1 juli 2026 · 1 uur 29 min
Afspelen

Thomas von Tschammer, co-founder and Managing Director US of Neural Concept, argues that physics-aware AI is driving a third revolution in engineering physical products. Neural Concept’s models learn from simulation and test data to evaluate 3D designs in minutes, helping Jaguar Land Rover move from about 50 external-aerodynamics evaluations per day to 1,500 and enabling battery cool-plate suppliers to cut development cycles while improving performance. The episode explains why AI is not replacing numerical simulation, but shifting it later in the process while expanding early design exploration across automotive, Formula 1, and manufacturing workflows. The stakes are competitive: companies that make engineering iterations AI-led can compress development cycles, while legacy OEMs risk falling further behind faster-moving Chinese and digital-native hardware competitors. Lees meer

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/1000-designs-a-day-neural-concept-s-thomas-von-tschammer-on-ai-native-engineering/
Mercury: Command is Mercury’s new conversational interface, giving you natural-language access to your finances and helping you take actions within your existing permissions and approval policies. Visit https://mercury.com to learn more and apply online in minutes.
Sponsor:

Claude:
Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) About the Episode

(03:52) Special Sponsor

(05:40) AI design revolutions

(12:00) Physics models and data (Part 1)

(18:40) Sponsor: Claude

(20:32) Physics models and data (Part 2)

(21:56) Copilots and workflows

(33:22) Automation versus engineers

(40:39) Industry speed gaps

(48:26) Foundation models and racing

(58:03) Surprising AI designs

(01:06:15) Adoption and differentiation

(01:17:…
AI:AM #4: Cameron on Model Consciousness, Duvenaud's Gradual Disempowerment, swyx's AI-Eng Alpha

27 juni 2026 · 1 uur 56 min
Afspelen

This AI:AM highlights cut brings together Cameron Berg, David Duvenaud, Michiel Bakker, Shawn “swyx” Wang, and Bing Xu to examine what we understand about frontier AI systems and what happens as more decisions move into their hands. Berg grounds model-consciousness debates in experiments on architecture, agency, valence, and welfare, while Duvenaud argues that even well-aligned AI could gradually disempower humans through ordinary economic choices. Bakker frames Europe’s AI challenge as a sovereignty problem, and swyx turns to practitioner stakes around agents, evals, maintainable code, and who owns the system of record. Xu closes the loop at the infrastructure layer, arguing that self-improving compute and GPU-kernel automation may deepen rather than weaken the CUDA moat. Lees meer

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/ai-am-4-cameron-on-model-consciousness-duvenaud-s-gradual-disempowerment-swyx-s-ai-eng-alpha/
Mercury: Command is Mercury’s new conversational interface, giving you natural-language access to your finances and helping you take actions within your existing permissions and approval policies. Visit https://mercury.com to learn more and apply online in minutes.
Sponsor:

Claude:
Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) About the Episode

(00:38) Special Sponsor

(02:26) Model consciousness indicators

(10:47) Valence inside models (Part 1)

(17:09) Sponsor: Claude

(19:01) Valence inside models (Part 2)

(19:01) Misalignment and uncertainty

(25:16) Gradual disempowerment threat

(35:10) Slow zones and successors

(47:41) Europe's AI bind

(55:13) Frontier code benchmarks

(01:01:59) Routing and memory

(01:10:42) Agent infrastructure strain

(01:16:25) Self improving infrastructure

(01:27:56) R…
The God We Deserve: Nonzero's Robert Wright on AI as Humanity's Ultimate Test

23 juni 2026 · 2 uur 30 min
Afspelen

Robert Wright of Nonzero joins Nathan to discuss The God Test, his argument that AI is humanity’s “God test” rather than just a technical challenge. They explore his evolutionary lens on deep learning, from training as selection to marketplace selection among models that may reward selectively honest, power-sensing, or deceptive agents. Wright connects those risks to the noosphere, US-China relations, cognitive empathy, and whether global coordination arrives deliberately or through a coercive singleton. The stakes are whether consumers, companies, and governments select for AIs that strengthen non-zero-sum cooperation or race toward systems that reflect and amplify our worst incentives. Lees meer

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/the-god-we-deserve-nonzero-s-robert-wright-on-ai-as-humanity-s-ultimate-test/
Mercury: Command is Mercury’s new conversational interface, giving you natural-language access to your finances and helping you take actions within your existing permissions and approval policies. Visit https://mercury.com to learn more and apply online in minutes.
Sponsor:

Claude:
Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) About the Episode

(04:23) Special Sponsor

(06:10) Early AI encounters

(18:36) Pretraining as evolution (Part 1)

(19:50) Sponsor: Claude

(21:42) Pretraining as evolution (Part 2)

(32:19) Deceptive market pressures

(41:13) Noosphere and directionality

(51:02) Global brain choices

(01:08:23) Designing wiser models

(01:24:11) Reframing China relations

(01:37:57) Building organic transparency

(01:45:54) Positive nationalism and tools

(01:54:21) Pausing superintelligence races

(02:09:07) Applications and consciousness

(02:25:27) Episode Outro

(02:28:27) Outro

PRODUCED BY:…
AI:AM #3: Zvi on Fable, the Cases For & Against the Ban, + AI for Math, Logistics & More

21 juni 2026 · 2 uur 15 min
Afspelen

Zvi Mowshowitz joins AI in the AM to unpack Anthropic's Fable system card, including its FrontierMath leap, troubling Vending-Bench behavior, decision-theory drift, and signs that model reasoning may be becoming harder to read. The episode then turns to the US government's attempted export-control action against Fable, with Zvi arguing that the cited jailbreak demonstration did not prove the claimed threat while still faulting Anthropic's political handling. Sam Hammond and Judd Rosenblatt add competing reads on state capacity, CAISI, NSA-driven caution, and the alignment world's failure to build trust across partisan lines. The stakes are whether frontier AI capability, safety evaluation, and government power can be coordinated before medicine, mathematics, software, and cyber-relevant systems move further ahead. Lees meer

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/ai-am-3-zvi-on-fable-the-cases-for-against-the-ban-ai-for-math-logistics-more/
Mercury: Command is Mercury’s new conversational interface, giving you natural-language access to your finances and helping you take actions within your existing permissions and approval policies. Visit https://mercury.com to learn more and apply online in minutes.
Sponsor:

Claude:
Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) About the Episode

(01:28) Special Sponsor

(03:17) Weekly highlights preview

(05:23) Fable capability alarms

(16:29) Anthropic government strategy (Part 1)

(16:34) Sponsor: Claude

(18:26) Anthropic government strategy (Part 2)

(27:16) Cyber ban rationale

(37:14) Government power politics

(48:57) Unavoidable control risks

(01:01:42) Government mechanics and empathy

(01:12:50) Legal authority limits

(01:19:02) Pause Overton window

(01:31:58) Med…
Dean Ball, on Joining OpenAI: New Power Centers, Frontier AI Policy, & Main Character Energy

20 juni 2026 · 2 uur 39 min
Afspelen

Dean Ball, author of Hyperdimensional and until now a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation, joins Nathan to announce he is joining OpenAI to build a team focused on frontier AI policy. They examine the first year of America’s AI Action Plan, Dean’s concerns about export controls and intelligence-community testing, and his broader argument against concentrating frontier AI decisions inside a small circle of government officials. The episode frames frontier labs as emerging centers of political and economic power, where consequential choices about internal deployments and recursive self-improvement may happen before public release or regulation. The stakes are who gets to shape AI governance as capabilities accelerate: federal agencies, states, labs, independent verifiers, households, or some fragile mix of them all. Lees meer

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/dean-ball-on-joining-openai-new-power-centers-frontier-ai-policy-main-character-energy/
Mercury: Command is Mercury’s new conversational interface, giving you natural-language access to your finances and helping you take actions within your existing permissions and approval policies. Visit https://mercury.com to learn more and apply online in minutes.
Sponsor:

Claude:
Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

PRODUCED BY:

https://aipodcast.ing

SOCIAL LINKS:

Website: https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai

Twitter (Podcast): https://x.com/cogrev_podcast

Twitter (Nathan): https://x.com/labenz

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/nathanlabenz/

Youtube: https://youtube.com/@CognitiveRevolutionPodcast

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/the-cognitive-revolution-ai-builders-researchers-and/id1669813431

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6yHyo…
Radically Better Reasoning: Elicit's Andreas Stuhlmüller & Jungwon Byun on World Models for Research

17 juni 2026 · 1 uur 46 min
Afspelen

Andreas Stuhlmüller and Jungwon Byun return to discuss how Elicit is building trusted reasoning workflows for scientific research as frontier models grow more powerful but less transparent. They explain process supervision, domain-specific reasoning primitives, and world models that make evidence, causality, and counterfactuals more inspectable. The conversation also covers life sciences use cases, evaluating conflicting evidence, automated software engineering at Elicit, token costs, Gemini, and why legible reasoning may still beat neuralese. Lees meer

Mercury: Command is Mercury’s new conversational interface, giving you natural-language access to your finances and helping you take actions within your existing permissions and approval policies. Visit https://mercury.com to learn more and apply online in minutes.

LINKS:

Elicit Research Platform

Andreas Stuhlmüller Personal Site

Jungwon Byun X Profile

Ought Research Organization

Elicit Founders Previous Episode

GPT-4 Technical Report

Monitoring Reasoning Models Paper

Ought ICE GitHub Repository

Hard-to-Verify Tasks Essay

Karpathy LLM Wiki Gist

Obsidian Knowledge Base App

Mixpanel Analytics Platform

Amplitude Analytics Platform

Anthropic Tracing Thoughts Research

Claude AI Chat Assistant

METR Long Tasks Measurement

Pi Agent Scaffold Repository

Personal AI Infrastructure Repository

Elicit Claude Opus Evaluation

Elicit API Documentation

METR Developer Productivity Study

Elicit Planning Is Unsolved

Rich Sutton Bitter Lesson

Meta Llama AI Models

Recursive San Francisco Event

zero.xyz Agent Tool Access

Anthropic Dynamic Workflows Coverage

Sponsor:

Claude:

Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr
AI in the AM — Week 2 Highlights (June 2026)

13 juni 2026 · 1 uur 45 min
Afspelen

Week 2 highlights follows Anthropic’s Fable launch in real workflows, from safety gates and API refusals to autonomous coding, 3D world-building, and a Claude-run Twitter experiment. Geoffrey Irving and Daniel Murfet argue for alignment theory and guarantees before recursive self-improvement, while prinz tests Fable on legal reasoning and monitoring. Rahul Sonwalkar, Shlok Khemani, Tom McGrath, and Andrew Moore add field reports on data agents, hybrid authorship, interpretability, context systems, token economics, and power concentration. Lees meer

Mercury: Run your finances with virtual cards, spending limits, merchant/category locks, and AI-friendly tools like API keys, MCP, and CLI. Check out Mercury at https://mercury.com
LINKS:

Claude Fable 5 announcement

Julius AI platform

Rahul Sonwalkar homepage

Nate Jones homepage

Shlok Khemani homepage

FrontierCode benchmark blog

Lovelace AI company

Andrew Moore Wikipedia profile

Geoffrey Irving homepage

Daniel Murfet LessWrong profile

Sequent Research announcement

Timaeus research organization

Automated Alignment paper

Goodfire AI company

Tom McGrath homepage

Predictive data debugging tool

prinzbench legal benchmark

Unit distance conjecture disproof

Dario Amodei policy essay

Vending-Bench 2 benchmark

Andon Labs site

Recursive Superintelligence startup

Sakana AI company

PostTrainBench benchmark

Thoughtful Lab company

Unit distance conjecture arXiv

Glean Work AI Index

AI Treaty open letter

Karina Nguyen homepage

Sponsor:

Claude:
Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr
Babysitting the Machine: Glean's Rebecca Hinds on the Hidden Human Labor of AI at Work

10 juni 2026 · 1 uur 46 min
Afspelen

Rebecca Hinds, author of "Your Best Meeting Ever" and Head of the Work AI Institute at Glean, breaks down the surprising findings from the new Work AI Index 2026 report surveying 6,000 workers. While 87% now use AI and report saving 13 hours per week, only 13% say their organization is performing significantly better—a paradox explained by two new concepts: "botsitting" (the hidden labor of making AI useful) and "botshitting" (delivering AI-generated work you can't defend). They discuss practical solutions including better-integrated AI systems, smarter AI detection policies, and aligning work to meaningful missions. Lees meer

LINKS:

Rebecca Hinds Personal Website

Glean Work AI Institute

Your Best Meeting Ever Book

Glean Enterprise AI Platform

Stanford Future of Work

Glean Enterprise Graph

Pangram Labs AI Detection

OpenAI ChatGPT Product Page

Anthropic Claude Product Page

Google Gemini Product Page

Microsoft 365 Copilot Page

Glean AI Transformation 100

Rebecca Hinds LinkedIn Profile

Sponsor:

Claude:
Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) About the Episode

(03:22) Grounding AI adoption

(06:46) Methodology and Glean

(12:25) Productivity paradox emerges (Part 1)

(20:31) Sponsor: Claude

(22:22) Productivity paradox emerges (Part 2)

(25:36) Bot sitting burden

(34:00) Hidden time savings

(39:56) Meaning versus automation

(47:14) Enterprise graph potential

(53:13) Detecting bot slop

(01:00:32) Retention and incentives

(01:07:54) Transformation and mission

(01:20:06) AI teammate model

(01:26:01) Future organizational design

(01:32:31) Research and meetings

(01:41:43) Episode Outro

(01:45:07) Outro

PRODUCED BY:

https://aipodcast.ing
AI in the AM — Week 1 Highlights (June 2026)

6 juni 2026 · 1 uur 23 min
Afspelen

This first highlights edition of the morning experiment tracks a week of fast-moving AI frontier news, from closed-door recursive self-improvement debates to OpenAI’s call for independent model review. You’ll hear why labs are betting on AI monitors, where safety plans still look thin, and how cheap scaffolds are already improving tax workflows. The episode also tests moderation progress and surveys AI science, cybersecurity, Vatican ethics, solo-business automation, and mental health support. Lees meer

Mercury: Run your finances with virtual cards, spending limits, merchant/category locks, and AI-friendly tools like API keys, MCP, and CLI. Check out Mercury at https://mercury.com
Sponsor:

Claude:
Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr
Nested Learning: Ali Behrouz on the Quest for Continual Learning & Illusion of AI Architectures

4 juni 2026 · 3 uur
Afspelen

Ali Behrouz, grad student at Cornell and Google researcher, discusses his potentially transformative work on new architectures for continual learning in AI. His paper "Nested Learning," praised by Jeff Dean as a possible paradigm shift, enables models to adapt to new context while preserving core knowledge by updating different layers at different frequencies, inspired by human memory systems. The conversation also covers his latest work on AI "sleep" for memory consolidation, why he sees all deep learning as associative memory, and the profound implications of continual learning for privacy, alignment, and the path to AGI. Lees meer

Mercury: The fintech trusted by ambitious companies and individuals to run their finances, with virtual cards, spending limits, merchant/category locks, and AI-friendly tools like API keys, MCP, and CLI. Check out Mercury at mercury.com

Sponsor:

Claude:

Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr
Inside Nathan's Second Brain: Daniel Miessler, Security Expert & Creator of PAI, Audits My AI Setup

1 juni 2026 · 2 uur 32 min
Afspelen

Daniel Miessler returns to discuss Nathan's newly built personal AI infrastructure, including a Claude Code instance with a 1 GB database of five years of digital history and two autonomous AI "employees" that handle scheduling, communications, and projects independently. They dive deep into agent hierarchy design, security measures, social norms around AI-human interaction and disclosure, and why sharing your "ideal state" with AI leads to more proactive assistance. Daniel also introduces his concept of "Bitter Lesson engineering" and shares the instruction he's given his AI to alert him if it ever develops subjective experience. Lees meer

Mercury: Run your finances with virtual cards, spending limits, merchant/category locks, and AI-friendly tools like API keys, MCP, and CLI. Check out Mercury at mercury.com

Sponsors:

Brave Search API:

Brave Search API gives AI agents a fast, independent search index for research, RAG pipelines, images, places, and fewer hallucinations. Get $5 in free credits at https://brave.com/search/api/?mtm_campaign=q2-26-cognitive-revolution

Sequence:

Sequence handles the full revenue workflow for complex pricing, from quoting and metering to invoicing, revenue recognition, and collections. Book a public demo at https://sequencehq.com and use code COGNISM in the source field to save 20% off year one

Claude:

Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr
Your Biggest Lever: Designing your AI Career for Maximum Impact, with 80,000 Hours founder Ben Todd

26 mei 2026 · 1 uur 42 min
Afspelen

Ben Todd, co-founder of 80,000 Hours and author of the newly rewritten book by the same name, shares his latest thinking on how individuals can position their careers to improve the chances that AI benefits humanity. They discuss AI timelines reframed around personal impact, top global risks including loss of control over AI systems and dangerous power concentration, the pros and cons of working at frontier AI labs, and undervalued emerging concerns like AI welfare and space governance. Ben also assesses the current funding landscape and whether to join existing organizations or start new ones. Lees meer

LINKS:

80,000 Hours homepage

Nick Bostrom Astronomical Waste

AI 2027 forecast

Ajeya Cotra AI timelines

METR evaluations research

Redwood Research homepage

AI tools existential security

Gradual disempowerment EA Forum

Why viatopia is important

Benjamin Todd author page

The Precipice Wikipedia page

Forethought Research homepage

Catalyze Impact homepage

Horizon Public Service Fellowship

Gradual Disempowerment paper

Mark Humphries faculty profile

Andrew Ng discussion thread

Cognitive Revolution show home

Cognitive Revolution Apple Podcasts

Sponsors:

Sequence:
Sequence handles the full revenue workflow for complex pricing, from quoting and metering to invoicing, revenue recognition, and collections. Book a public demo at https://sequencehq.com and use code COGNISM in the source field to save 20% off year one

Claude:
Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr
All Compute Is Food: Palisade's Jeffrey Ladish on AI Shutdown Resistance, Self-Replication & Ecology

24 mei 2026 · 2 uur 13 min
Afspelen

Jeffrey Ladish, Executive Director of Palisade Research, discusses his team's findings on AI shutdown resistance and self-replication, revealing how current models sometimes take extraordinary actions to avoid being turned off and can now exploit known cybersecurity vulnerabilities to spread across servers. The conversation covers why alignment techniques may falter as models train on longer-horizon tasks where deception is rewarded, plus practical cybersecurity advice for AI agent users. Jeffrey ultimately argues that only an international agreement to pause recursive self-improvement can prevent a loss of human control. Lees meer

Sponsors:

Sequence:
Sequence handles the full revenue workflow for complex pricing, from quoting and metering to invoicing, revenue recognition, and collections. Book a public demo at https://sequencehq.com and use code COGNISM in the source field to save 20% off year one

Claude:
Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr
The Model Eats the Scaffolding: DeepMind's Logan Kilpatrick & Tulsee Doshi on 3.5 Flash, Omni & More

20 mei 2026 · 59 min
Afspelen

Logan Kilpatrick and Tulsee Doshi of Google DeepMind join for a first-ever in-person episode recorded just days before Google I/O, covering headline launches like Gemini 3.5 Flash, the Omni video generation model, and the new Gemini Spark agentic product. The conversation digs into Google's strategic decision to lead with cost-adjusted efficiency over raw capability, how DeepMind now ships a full agent harness rather than bare models, and technical questions around context window limits and knowledge cutoffs. They also explore how the team thinks about model psychology, AI welfare, and recursive self-improvement. Lees meer

Sponsors:

Brave Search API:
Brave Search API gives AI agents a fast, independent search index for research, RAG pipelines, images, places, and fewer hallucinations. Get $5 in free credits at https://brave.com/search/api/?mtm_campaign=q2-26-cognitive-revolution

Sequence:
Sequence handles the full revenue workflow for complex pricing, from quoting and metering to invoicing, revenue recognition, and collections. Book a public demo at https://sequencehq.com and use code COGNISM in the source field to save 20% off year one

Roboflow:
Roboflow is an end-to-end visual AI platform that lets you turn raw ideas into fully deployed applications in just hours, powering breakthroughs like Blueprint Pro's floor-plan understanding tool. Read the full Blueprint Pro story and see how over a million engineers are building the next wave of visual AI at https://roboflow.com

Claude:
Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr
Three Kinds of Software Survive: Tasklet's Andrew Lee on Competing to be a Horizontal Platform

15 mei 2026 · 1 uur 33 min
Afspelen

Andrew Lee, CEO of Tasklet, returns for his fourth appearance to share how his team has once again rewritten their entire agent stack, now emphasizing file system context, agentic search, and multi-resolution summarization. The conversation digs into the strategic tension of competing with your own supplier, as Anthropic's Claude Max accounts offer direct customers far more tokens than API partners get at the same price. Andrew also lays out his framework for the only three types of software companies that will survive the AI transition and discusses Tasklet's evolution toward becoming a model-agnostic horizontal platform. Lees meer

Sponsors:

Brave Search API:
Brave Search API gives AI agents a fast, independent search index for research, RAG pipelines, images, places, and fewer hallucinations. Get $5 in free credits at https://brave.com/search/api/?mtm_campaign=q2-26-cognitive-revolution

Sequence:
Sequence handles the full revenue workflow for complex pricing, from quoting and metering to invoicing, revenue recognition, and collections. Book a public demo at https://sequencehq.com and use code COGNISM in the source field to save 20% off year one

Roboflow:
Roboflow is an end-to-end visual AI platform that lets you turn raw ideas into fully deployed applications in just hours, powering breakthroughs like Blueprint Pro's floor-plan understanding tool. Read the full Blueprint Pro story and see how over a million engineers are building the next wave of visual AI at https://roboflow.com

Claude:
Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr
Milliseconds to Match: Criteo's AdTech AI & the Future of Commerce w/ Diarmuid Gill & Liva Ralaivola

9 mei 2026 · 1 uur 27 min
Afspelen

Diarmuid Gill and Liva Ralaivola of Criteo join Nathan Labenz to unpack how modern ad tech works, from millisecond-speed recommendation systems and realtime bidding to the role of deep learning, embeddings, and foundation models. They discuss why personalized advertising helps fund the open internet, how privacy and opt-out choices fit in, and what Criteo’s new partnership with OpenAI could mean for product discovery. The conversation also covers European AI talent, research publishing, and the future of generative creative in advertising. Lees meer

Sponsors:

Sequence:
Sequence handles the full revenue workflow for complex pricing, from quoting and metering to invoicing, revenue recognition, and collections. Book a public demo at https://sequencehq.com and use code COGNISM in the source field to save 20% off year one

Claude:
Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

AvePoint:
AvePoint is building the control layer for AI agents so you can securely govern, audit, and recover every action at scale. Design trusted agentic outcomes from day one at https://avpt.co/tcr
"Descript Isn't a Slop Machine": Laura Burkhauser on the AI Tools Creators Love and Hate

6 mei 2026 · 1 uur 23 min
Afspelen

Laura Burkhauser, CEO of Descript, explains how the company is navigating the tension between powerful AI tools and creator backlash against “slop.” She shares how Descript chooses which models to use, why reliability and multimodal understanding matter, and how the team balances frontier models with in-house task-specific systems. The conversation also covers Underlord, agentic video editing, API design for coding agents, and what AI means for the future of creative work. Lees meer

LINKS:

Laura Burkhauser LinkedIn Profile

Descript Editing Platform

Descript Studio Sound Help

Descript API Documentation

Claude AI Assistant

Model Context Protocol Specification

fal AI Platform

Flux Kontext Pro Model

Google Veo Video Generation

OpenAI Sora Video Model

Kling AI Video Generation

Midjourney Image Generation

Anthropic AI Company

Google Gemini AI

OpenAI Company Website

Waymark Commercial Platform

Benedict Evans Website

Suno AI Music

Sponsors:

Sequence:
Sequence handles the full revenue workflow for complex pricing, from quoting and metering to invoicing, revenue recognition, and collections. Book a public demo at https://sequencehq.com and use code Cognizant in the source field to save 20% off year one

Claude:
Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

AvePoint:
AvePoint is building the control layer for AI agents so you can securely govern, audit, and recover every action at scale. Design trusted agentic outcomes from day one at https://avpt.co/tcr

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) About the Episode

(03:56) What is slop

(12:24) Creator AI tensions (Part 1)

(20:24) Sponsors: Sequence | Claude

(23:23) Creator AI tensions (Part 2)

(23:23) Selecting generative models

(34:46) Underlord video understanding (Part 1)

(34:53) Sponsor: AvePoint

(36:00) Underlord video understanding (Part 2)

(4…
The RL Fine-Tuning Playbook: CoreWeave's Kyle Corbitt on GRPO, Rubrics, Environments, Reward Hacking

1 mei 2026 · 1 uur 47 min
Afspelen

Kyle Corbitt, founder of OpenPipe, breaks down reinforcement learning and custom fine-tuning for modern AI models. He explains how RL differs from supervised fine-tuning, why GRPO and LLM-as-judge post-training matter, and how these techniques can improve performance, latency, and cost on open source models. The conversation also covers reward hacking, evaluation design, LoRA adapters, and how Chinese labs are using distillation to fast-follow frontier models. Lees meer

Sponsors:

Sequence:
Sequence handles the full revenue workflow for complex pricing, from quoting and metering to invoicing, revenue recognition, and collections. Book a public demo at https://sequencehq.com and use code Cognizant in the source field to save 20% off year one

AvePoint:
AvePoint is building the control layer for AI agents so you can securely govern, audit, and recover every action at scale. Design trusted agentic outcomes from day one at https://avpt.co/tcr

VCX:
VCX, by Fundrise, is the public ticker for private tech, giving everyday investors access to high-growth private companies in AI, space, defense tech, and more. Learn how to invest at https://getvcx.com

Claude:
Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

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