In this episode, Nathan sits down with Jon Noronha, co-founder of Gamma. Gamma is a new medium for presenting ideas, allowing you to focus on your ideas and receive beautiful, engaging content without the formatting work. In this episode, Jon and Nathan discuss the journey of building Gamma, how to coax AI to do things well, and the opportunity for AI A/B testing. If you're looking for an ERP platform, check out our sponsor, NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive We're hiring across the board a...
Aug 17, 2023•1 hr 2 min
In this episode, Nathan sits down with Shawn Jansepar, Director of Engineering at Khan Academy, to discuss their GPT-4 powered Socratic tutor, Khanmigo. In this conversation, Shawn and Nathan chat about Khan Academy’s collaboration with OpenAI and how they helped fine-tune GPT-4, how Khan Academy leveraged GPT-4 to build Khanmigo, and the impact of providing access to an AI tutor to any student. If you're looking for an ERP platform, check out our sponsor, NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive...
Aug 15, 2023•1 hr 25 min•Season 1Ep. 53
Join Nathan Labenz and Erik Torenberg as they analyze the last month in AI advancements. Nathan takes us through the meaningful updates to his Scouting Report (released last month, linked below), discusses highlights from recent episodes of The Cognitive Revolution, and gives us a sneak peek at upcoming interviews with Google researchers. If you're looking for an ERP platform, check out our sponsor, NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik'...
Aug 10, 2023•41 min•Season 1Ep. 52
In this episode, Nathan sits down with Replit’s VP of AI, Michele Catasta. Replit is building what CEO Amjad Masad calls "the perfect substrate for AGI." In this discussion, Michele and Nathan discuss Replit's state of AI development report, advantages when it comes to AI development, and the company's custom models. If you're looking for an ERP platform, check out our sponsor, NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal team on oth...
Aug 08, 2023•2 hr 42 min•Season 1Ep. 51
In this episode, Nathan sits down with Tyler Angert, Product Designer at Replit, to discuss the future of software development. Replit is building what CEO Amjad Masad calls "the perfect substrate for AGI." In this discussion, Tyler and Nathan discuss how Replit is leveraging AI to enhance its current product, bot-bot interactions, the design and ethical considerations around AI agents, and more. If you're looking for an ERP platform, check out our sponsor, NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitiv...
Aug 04, 2023•2 hr 50 min•Season 1Ep. 50
This isn't news, it's analysis! Nathan Labenz sits down for an with Zvi Mowshowitz, the writer behind Don't Worry About the Vase to talk about the major players in AI over the last few months. In this extended conversation, Nathan and Zvi debate if AI has attained the intelligence of a well-read college graduate (per OpenAI's Jan Leike), a live player analysis (who to count/ who not to count), and the role of independent red teaming organizations. If you're looking for an ERP platform, check out...
Aug 02, 2023•3 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 49
Arthur Conmy sits down with Nathan Labenz for an accessible deep dive into the state of interpretability research online today. They discuss how pioneering researchers have painstakingly worked to isolate the sub-circuits within transformers that are responsible for different aspects of AI capabilities. Arthur also introduces us to a new ACDC approach that he and his co-authors have taken to automating some of the most time-consuming parts of this work. If you’re looking for an ERP platform, che...
Jul 27, 2023•2 hr 14 min•Season 1Ep. 48
Nathan Labenz sits down with Dr. Ronen Dar, CTO and co-founder of Run:ai, an Israel-based company that helps enterprises train and deploy AI models by optimizing GPU usage. The discussion covers how chip makers can meet the soaring demands, geopolitical fears, to the best practices companies can secure compute capacity. If you’re looking for an ERP platform, check out our sponsor, NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal team on ...
Jul 25, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 47
Head over to YouTube to watch Part 2 of The AI Scouting Report (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovm4MbQ4G9E), supported by slides and visual aides. In Part 2, Nathan Labenz builds on Part 1: AI Fundamental and delves into recent trends and practical applications for AI. Nathan's aim is to impart the equivalent of a high school AP course understanding to listeners in 90-minute installments. We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal team on other projects he's incubating....
Jul 19, 2023•4 min•Season 1Ep. 46
Nathan Labenz interviews Div Garg, founder of MULTI·ON, the world's first personal AI agent and life copilot. Div talks about the product strategy and roadmap for the MULTI·ON browser, their natural language approach to skills, and the steps they are taking to ensure user safety. Div explains how the platform uses a critic model to detect the success or failure of tasks, and how it can be used to book flights, order food, and more. Div also talks about the future of memory systems, such as the u...
Jul 13, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 45
Nathan Labenz sits down with Zvi Mowshowitz, the writer behind Don't Worry About the Vase. Zvi is an information hyperprocessor who synthesizes vast amounts of new and ever-evolving information into extremely clear summaries that help educated people keep up with the latest news. In this episode, we cover his AI safety worldview, an overview of the AI discourse, and who really matters in the AI debates. We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal team on other projects he...
Jul 11, 2023•3 hr 45 min•Season 1Ep. 44
Head to a special YouTube presentation with visual aides (https://youtu.be/0hvtiVQ_LqQ), where Nathan Labenz synthesizes the core fundamentals of AI as simply, clearly, and literally as possible. Nathan's aim is to impart the equivalent of a high school AP course understanding to listeners in 90 minutes. This special episode is in part brought to you by Athena. You can use Nathan’s referral link (http://athenago.me/nathan-labenz) for a free first month of Athena services for qualified customers....
Jul 06, 2023•7 min•Season 1Ep. 43
In this episode, Nathan Labenz sits down with Hayk Martiros, VP of Autonomy at Skydio. Martiros leads the autonomy team, which holds the state of the art in complex autonomous flight. Skydio is the largest drone developer in the US, and recently raised $230M to expand its US manufacturing 10-fold, bringing its valuation to $2.2 billion. In this discussion, Hayk and Nathan discuss why Skydio will not weaponize its drones, Skydio’s systems and AI approach, and the considerations of choosing an aut...
Jul 04, 2023•2 hr 42 min•Season 1Ep. 42
[Bonus Episode] Latent.space hosts, Alessio and Swyx, sit down with Linus Lee of Notion AI to discuss Linus’ experience starting the AI/UX community, prompt engineering at Notion, and designing AI interfaces and agents. The latent.space podcast aims to be the first place where AI engineers hear about the latest AI news and technology trends. We’ve had several guests in common – including Shreya Rajpal of Guardrails, Jonathan & Abhi from the recently acquired for $1.3B MosaicML, and also Riley Go...
Jul 01, 2023•1 hr 16 min•Season 1Ep. 41
Nathan Labenz sits down with Lili Yu, a researcher of Meta AI to discuss the paper she authored: MEGABYTE: Predicting Million-byte Sequences with Multiscale Transformers. In this conversation, they discuss the architecture and breakthroughs of their research, and the opportunity to eliminate the need for tokenization. We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal team on other projects he's incubating. He's hiring a Chief of Staff, EA, Head of Special Projects, Investment A...
Jun 29, 2023•2 hr 35 min
Ziming Liu is a Physics PhD student at MIT and IAIFI, advised by Prof. Max Tegmark. Ziming’s research is at the intersection of AI and physics. Today’s discussion goes in-depth on Liu’s paper “Seeing is Believing” where he presents Brain-Inspired Modular Training (BIMT), a method for making neural networks more modular and interpretable. The ability to see modules visually can complement current mechanistic interpretability strategies. We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's p...
Jun 27, 2023•2 hr 55 min•Season 1Ep. 39
Part 2 of Nathan's conversation with Tanishq Mathew Abraham focuses on Tanishq's work with virtual biopsy technology enabled by deep learning. This unique technology has the potential to address a number of important biomedical challenges; in particular, qOBM could help during live tumor and cancer removal surgeries. Tanishq, a 19-year-old UC Davis grad and one of the youngest people in the world to receive a Ph.D, with a degree in biomedical engineering, is the founder of the Medical AI Researc...
Jun 22, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Season 1Ep. 38
In this episode, Nathan sits down with Tanishq Mathew Abraham, 19-year-old UC Davis grad and one of the youngest people in the world to receive a Ph.D, with a degree in biomedical engineering. Tanishq is the founder of the Medical AI Research Center (MedARC), and with his teammates, recently published a paper: Reconstructions of the Mind's Eye, which encompasses their breakthrough research on reconstructing visual perceptions from fMRI scans into images. In this episode, Nathan and Tanishq talk ...
Jun 20, 2023•1 hr 20 min•Season 1Ep. 36
In this episode, Nathan sits down with Jonathan Frankle, Chief Scientist, and Abhi Venigalla, Research Scientist of MosaicML. They chat about Mosaic’s custom LLMs, the customers seeking Mosaic out and what their journeys and use cases look like, and exciting developments in Mosaic’s research: including their new inference platform, as well as Mosaic’s MPT-7B-65k+ storywriter model. RECOMMENDED PODCAST: The HR industry is at a crossroads. What will it take to construct the next generation of incr...
Jun 16, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 36
In this episode, Nathan Labenz and Erik Torenberg host a discussion between Emad Mostaque, founder of Stability AI, and Sam Lessin, GP of Slow Ventures and former VP Product at Facebook. These influential technology thinkers tackle topics pertinent to evaluating whether AI is a good investment for venture capital. They talk about the attention and information economy, SaaS markets, how AI-created entertainment will impact society and our relationships, and AI disruption of highly-regulated indus...
Jun 13, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Season 1Ep. 35
In this episode, Nathan sits down with Joshua Browder of DoNotPay, the world’s first robot lawyer. They chat about the current state of AI use in law, what policymakers should consider in regulating AI, and the ethics of robo-lawyers for consumer use. We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal team on other projects he's incubating. He's hiring a Chief of Staff, EA, Head of Special Projects, Investment Associate, and more. For a list of JDs, check out: eriktorenberg.com....
Jun 09, 2023•2 hr 33 min•Season 1Ep. 34
Nathan Labenz sits down with Ronen Eldan and Yuanzhi Li of Microsoft Research to discuss the small natural language dataset they created called TinyStories. Tiny Stories is designed to reflect the full richness of natural language while still being small to support research with modest compute budgets. Using this dataset, they began to explore aspects of language model performance, behavior, and mechanism by training a series of models that range in size from just 1 million to a maximum of 33 mi...
Jun 06, 2023•2 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 34
This 20-min episode comes from our friend Nathaniel Whittemore's excellent daily podcast The AI Breakdown Podcast. This episode aired on June 1, 2023, and covers the latest developments from OpenAI, including new features, a cybersecurity grant program, and their new process rewards model for trading. We hope you enjoy it as much as we do. We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal team on other projects he's incubating. He's hiring a Chief of Staff, EA, Head of Special ...
Jun 03, 2023•22 min
Nathan and Erik analyze the moats of the most powerful companies in AI. The paradigm-shifting technology has led to a flourishing open-source community with market share. Yet, the big players have key competitive advantages that can be examined from many different angles. LINKS: Nathan’s Twitter thread on AI moats that sparked this discussion: https://twitter.com/labenz/status/1654853321876815872 Read about the 9 moats at length in our newsletter: https://cognitiverevolution.substack.com/p/the-l...
Jun 01, 2023•1 hr 29 min•Season 1Ep. 31
Today’s episode is a deep dive into the collision of AI and the future of entertainment, against the backdrop of the still-raging Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike. Nathan Labenz sits down with Trey Kollmer, Sophia Lear, and Garrett Schabb – all seasoned television writers and Guild members – to discuss the labor dispute. While the strike encompasses many dynamics, the timely intersection with a rapidly changing AI landscape has the writers entwined in the wild possibilities and existential ...
May 30, 2023•2 hr 43 min•Season 1Ep. 30
Nathan Labenz sits down with Andrew Feldman, CEO and Co-Founder of Cerebras Systems, a company building a new class of computer system for accelerating AI and changing the future of work. Cerebras Systems is the creator of the world’s largest chip, at 2.6 trillion transistors. In this episode, they discuss the founding story of Cerebras, the experience of creating the world’s largest chip, and the process that goes into chip design and manufacturing for an AI-focused chip. This episode is the fi...
May 25, 2023•1 hr 21 min•Season 1Ep. 29
Nathan Labenz sits down with engineer Shreya Rajpal, the creator of Guardrails AI, a new Python library that allows developers to add a layer of output, validation and correction to their code. Practically guardrails can ensure a reliable interface between language models and more traditional deterministic software systems. At the same time, mind-bending and potentially risky use case frameworks like Guardrails allow developers to ask and answer entirely new kinds of questions. Talking to Shreya...
May 23, 2023•2 hr 35 min•Season 1Ep. 28
Nathan sits down with Vivek Natarajan, research scientist at Google Health. Vivek leads the Google Brain moonshot behind Med-PaLM, Google’s flagship medical large language model, featured in The Economist, The Scientific American, CNBC, and Forbes. In this episode, they discuss the foundational models that Vivek and team built before Med-PaLM, the techniques used to develop Med-PaLM which will be of interest to anyone developing AI systems for high-stakes use cases, and the capabilities for Med-...
May 21, 2023•1 hr 27 min•Season 1Ep. 28
[Bonus Episode] Future of Life Institute Podcast host Gus Docker interviews Conjecture CEO Connor Leahy to discuss GPT-4, magic, cognitive emulation, demand for human-like AI, and aligning superintelligence. You can read more about Connor's work at https://conjecture.dev Future of Life Institute is the organization that recently published an open letter calling for a six-month pause on training new AI systems. FLI was founded by Jann Tallinn who we interviewed in Episode 16 of The Cognitive Revo...
May 19, 2023•2 hr 41 min•Season 1Ep. 26
Nathan and Erik sit down with Neal Khosla, founder of Curai Health, a venture-backed virtual care startup using AI to provide low-cost primary healthcare. Prior to his current role at Curai, Neal was a machine learning researcher at Google and Stanford. In this episode, they discuss the current state of AI in medicine, what the future patient experience may look like, and how developments in AI healthcare may interact with different regulatory and social forces across the globe. We're hiring acr...
May 16, 2023•2 hr 30 min•Season 1Ep. 25
