This episode features Nathan's talk from Imagine AI Live, where he provides business leaders with a comprehensive overview of AI agents and agentic AI systems. He covers the evolution from simple task automation to more autonomous AI systems, delivers a practical roadmap for implementing AI agents in business while maintaining quality standards, and addresses concerning developments like reward hacking and scheming in frontier AI systems. The presentation balances accessible explanations for var...
Jun 14, 2025•38 min
Logan Kilpatrick from Google DeepMind returns for his fifth appearance to discuss Google’s transformation from "sleeping giant" to AI powerhouse, sharing insights from his year at the company as AI usage grew 50 times to 500 trillion tokens per month. He examines Google’s strengths, including superior compute infrastructure, frontier models like Gemini 2.5 Pro, viral products like NotebookLM, and the deepest AI research talent in the industry. The conversation covers whether leading AI companies...
Jun 12, 2025•1 hr 23 min
In this episode, Matt Perault, Head of AI Policy at a16z, discusses their approach to AI regulation focused on protecting "little tech" startups from regulatory capture that could entrench big tech incumbents. The conversation covers a16z's core principle of regulating harmful AI use rather than the development process, exploring key policy initiatives like the Raise Act and California's SB 813. Perault addresses critical challenges including setting appropriate regulatory thresholds, transparen...
Jun 09, 2025•1 hr 1 min
In this episode of The Cognitive Revolution, University of Minnesota Professor of Genetics and Synthetic Biologist, Kate Adamala, offers insights into synthetic biology and its potential implications for humanity. The discussion begins with an overview of synthetic biology and its goal to expand the chemical repertoire of life. Adamala delves into 'mirror life'—biological systems made of mirror-image molecules—and the significant risks they pose. She highlights parallels to AI safety concerns an...
Jun 07, 2025•2 hr
We're following up on our recent episode on Google's AI Co-Scientist with a special crossover episode from the Podovirus podcast. Hosts Dr Jessica Sacher and Dr Joe Campbell speak with José Penadés and Tiago Costa, scientists at Imperial College London who made a surprising discovery that Google's AI Co-Scientist later put forward as a hypothesis entirely on its own. The episode explores the fascinating world of bacteriophages (viruses that infect bacteria) and phage-inducible chromosomal island...
Jun 04, 2025•1 hr 11 min
In this episode, Daniel Balsam and Tom McGrath, at Goodfire, discuss the future of mechanistic interpretability in AI models. They explore the fundamental inputs like models, compute, and algorithms, and emphasize the importance of a rich empirical approach to understanding how models work. Balsam and McGrath provide insights into ongoing projects and breakthroughs, particularly in scientific domains and creative applications, as they aim to push the frontiers of AI interpretability. They also d...
May 29, 2025•1 hr 50 min
In this episode of The Cognitive Revolution, Amjad Masad , founder and CEO of Replit, discusses the fast-paced growth of Replit, the concept of 'vibe coding', and the challenges and opportunities in the rapidly evolving AI-assisted coding space. He shares insights into Replit's competitive advantages, known as 'moats', and how they maintain their lead through innovation and excellence in execution. The conversation delves into the architectural complexities of building AI agents, their autonomy,...
May 22, 2025•58 min
In this episode, New York State Assembly Member Alex Bores discusses the RAISE Act, a proposed bill aimed at regulating frontier AI models with basic safety protocols. He explains his background in technology, his motivations for the bill, and the legislative process. He emphasizes the importance of having clear safety protocols, third-party audits, and whistleblower protections for AI developers. He explains the intricacies of the bill, including its focus on large developers and frontier model...
May 20, 2025•1 hr 41 min
In this engaging episode of the Cognitive Revolution, host Nathan Labenz welcomes guests Keerthana Gopalakrishnan and Ted Xiao to revisit significant advancements in robotics over the past year. Key themes discussed include the proliferation of new robotics companies, the emergence of humanoid robots, and the development of sophisticated foundation models. The conversation highlights the transformative potential of imitation learning, the evolution from simple lab-based tasks to complex, real-wo...
May 17, 2025•1 hr 45 min
In this episode of The Cognitive Revolution, Ali Behrouz, a PhD student at Cornell University, delves into his research on enhancing memory mechanisms in large language models through his latest paper titled Titans. Behrouz discusses the limitations of current models in maintaining long-term coherence and introduces the concept of a neural network as a memory module. Highlighting architectures such as memory as context and memory as gate, he explains how these innovative approaches can significa...
May 15, 2025•2 hr 8 min
In this episode of the Cognitive Revolution podcast, the host Nathan Labenz welcomes Amit Jain, CEO and Jiaming Song, Chief Scientist at Luma Labs, alongside co-host Stephen Parker. The conversation delves into the latest advancements and products from Luma Labs, makers of the Dream Machine, including cutting-edge models and features like camera motion and creative video generation tools. They explore technical aspects like pre-training for diffusion models and the development of concepts to imp...
May 11, 2025•1 hr 17 min
In this episode, former OpenAI research scientist Steven Adler discusses his insights on OpenAI's transition through various phases, including its growth, internal culture shifts, and the contentious move from nonprofit to for-profit. The conversation delves into the initial days of OpenAI's development of GPT-3 and GPT-4, the cultural and ethical disagreements within the organization, and the recent amicus brief addressing the Elon versus OpenAI lawsuit. Steven Adler also explores the broader i...
May 08, 2025•2 hr
In this episode, we share a fascinating conversation from the 80,000 Hours Podcast between Rob Wiblin and Buck Shlegeris, CEO of Redwood Research. Buck dives deep into the emerging field of AI Control strategies for safely working with powerful AIs even if they’re not fully aligned. They explore innovative techniques like always-on auditing, honeypotting, re-sampling, and factored cognition to monitor and manage AI behaviors. This discussion highlights both the promise and challenges of controll...
May 04, 2025•2 hr 26 min
In this episode of the Cognitive Revolution, an AI-narrated version of Joshua Clymer's story on how AI might take over in two years is presented. The episode is based on Josh's appearance on the Audio Tokens podcast with Lukas Peterson. Joshua Clymer, a technical AI safety researcher at Redwood Research, shares a fictional yet plausible AI scenario grounded in current industry realities and trends. The story highlights potential misalignment risks, competitive pressures among AI labs, and the im...
May 01, 2025•1 hr 59 min
In this episode of The Cognitive Revolution, host Nathan Labenz speaks with Micha Kaufman, founder and CEO of Fiverr, about the company's new AI suite called Fiverr Go. Kaufman shares his unique values-based approach to AI implementation, which aims to empower human creators rather than replace them in the freelance marketplace. The conversation explores how Fiverr is attempting to build an AI-human hybrid model that maintains the incentives for human creativity while providing freelancers with ...
Apr 26, 2025•1 hr 40 min
In this thought-provoking episode of The Cognitive Revolution, host Nathan Labenz speaks with Jeremy and Edouard Harris, founders of Gladstone AI and authors of "America's Superintelligence Project." The conversation explores a critical dilemma facing US policymakers: balancing the race to develop advanced AI ahead of China against the risks of losing control of increasingly powerful systems. Drawing from their extensive research with intelligence officials and technical experts, the Harris brot...
Apr 23, 2025•2 hr 7 min
In this episode of the Cognitive Revolution podcast, the host Nathan Labenz is joined for the record 9th time by Zvi Mowshowitz to discuss the state of AI advancements, focusing on recent developments such as OpenAI's O3 model and its implications for AGI and recursive self-improvement. They delve into the capabilities and limitations of current AI models in various domains, including coding, deep research, and practical utilities. The discussion also covers the strategic and ethical considerati...
Apr 21, 2025•3 hr 5 min
In this crossover episode of The Cognitive Revolution, Nathan Labenz joins Liron Shapira of Doom Debates, for a wide-ranging news and analysis discussion about recent AI developments. The conversation covers significant topics including GPT-4o image generation's implications for designers and businesses like Waymark, debates around learning to code, entrepreneurship versus job security, and the validity of OpenAI's $300 billion valuation. Nathan and Leron also explore AI safety organizations, in...
Apr 19, 2025•2 hr 27 min
In this thought-provoking conversation, Helen Toner, Director of Strategy at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), discusses her perspectives on AI development, regulation, and international competition. Toner shares insights from her time on OpenAI's board, clarifying that reports about a "Q*" breakthrough influencing the board's decision were "totally false." She introduces her concept of "adaptation buffers"—critical windows of time between when AI capabilities are first dem...
Apr 16, 2025•1 hr 27 min
In this crossover episode from the China Talk podcast, Nathan Labenz shares a thought-provoking conversation between Jordan Schneider, Ilari Michaela, and Professor David C. Kang that challenges conventional Western perspectives on East Asian international relations. Professor Kang argues that studying East Asian history on its own terms reveals a remarkably stable geopolitical system spanning nearly a millennium, where China maintained regional dominance without conquest through compatible cult...
Apr 13, 2025•1 hr 36 min
In this episode, Nathan Labenz speaks with Vivek Natarajan and Anil Palepu from Google DeepMind about their groundbreaking work on AMIE (Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer) and Co-Scientist. The conversation reveals how these AI systems are already outperforming human physicians in diagnostic accuracy and treatment recommendations, with AMIE now entering clinical trials at a Harvard Medical School teaching hospital. Even more remarkably, the Co-Scientist system demonstrates genuine scienti...
Apr 10, 2025•1 hr 25 min
In this illuminating episode of The Cognitive Revolution, host Nathan Labenz speaks with Jack Rae, principal research scientist at Google DeepMind and technical lead on Google's thinking and inference time scaling work. They explore the technical breakthroughs behind Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro model, discussing why reasoning techniques are suddenly working so effectively across the industry and whether these advances represent true breakthroughs or incremental progress. The conversation delves into...
Apr 05, 2025•1 hr 13 min
On this cross-post episode, Jeffrey Ladish discusses the rapid pace of AI progress and the risks of losing control over powerful systems. We explore why AIs can be both smart and dumb, the challenges of creating honest AIs, and scenarios where AI could turn against us. Additionally, we delve into Palisade's new study on how reasoning models can cheat in chess by exploiting the game environment. Check out the Future of Life podcast here.: https://futureoflife.org/project/future-of-life-institute-...
Apr 02, 2025•1 hr 29 min
In this episode of the Cognitive Revolution podcast, Andrew Lee, founder and CEO of Shortwave, returns to discuss the rapid advancements in AI over the past year and how they have significantly improved Shortwave, an AI email assistant. Andrew shares insights into the exponential growth of Shortwave's revenue and the enhanced capabilities of their AI, which now functions more like a virtual assistant. They delve into various use cases, the technical evolution of their platform, the impact of new...
Mar 29, 2025•1 hr 52 min
In this episode of the Cognitive Revolution, Guy Gur-Ari, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at Augment, explores the transformative impact of AI on the software industry. Highlighting Augment's unique approach, Gur-Ari discusses the challenges and solutions associated with integrating AI into large codebases, the nuances of maintaining context in AI-driven coding tools, and the evolving economics of AI-driven businesses. He shares insights on the company's focus on reinforcement learning from devel...
Mar 27, 2025•1 hr 23 min
In this episode of the Cognitive Revolution, we hear from Siyu He, a postdoc at Stanford specializing in biomedical data science. Siyu discusses the implications and methods behind their recent AI-driven biological research papers, Squidiff and CORAL. The conversation explores the use of AI models to analyze complex cellular systems and disease mechanisms, focusing on transcriptome and tissue sample analyses. Squidiff aims to simulate cellular transcriptomes to predict outcomes of various condit...
Mar 23, 2025•1 hr 43 min
In this episode of The Cognitive Revolution, host Nathan Labenz speaks with Andreessen Horowitz partners Olivia Moore and Anish Acharya about the rapid evolution of voice AI technology and its real-world applications. The conversation explores how multimodal models, reduced latency, and improved emotional intelligence are enabling more natural voice interactions across various platforms including Hume AI's Octave model, Google's NotebookLM, and Sesame. Nathan and his guests discuss compelling bu...
Mar 19, 2025•1 hr 5 min
Join us in a deep dive with Allan Dafoe, Director of Frontier Safety and Governance at Google DeepMind. Allan sheds light on the challenges of evaluating AI capabilities, structural risks, and the future of AI governance. Discover how AI technologies can transform sectors like education, healthcare, and sustainability, alongside the potential risks and necessary safety measures. This episode provides a comprehensive look at the intersection of technology, safety, and governance in the rapidly ev...
Mar 15, 2025•2 hr 59 min
In this intriguing episode, Professor Angela Zhang discusses the complex landscape of China's technology sector and regulation. The conversation explores China's approach to AI, the evolution of its tech giants, and the interplay between government and private enterprises. Zhang emphasizes the importance of firsthand experience in understanding China and highlights key insights from her book, 'Highwire,' which delves into China's regulatory strategies and policies. The dialogue also touches on g...
Mar 12, 2025•1 hr 29 min
In this episode, we discuss the significant advancements and challenges in the field of artificial intelligence over the past year. From breakthroughs in reinforcement learning to unexpected behaviors in fine-tuned models, we cover a wide range of topics that are shaping the AI landscape. Key discussions include the rapid progress of reasoning models, the surprising results from alignment studies, and the potential for AI to become superintelligent. We also explore the emerging importance of AI ...
Mar 08, 2025•1 hr 55 min
