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•Ep 44•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 43•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 42•Transcript available on Metacast [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•Ep 41•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 39•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 38•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 36•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 36•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 35•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 34•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 34•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 31•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 30•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 29•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 28•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 28•Transcript available on Metacast [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•Ep 26•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Ep 25•Transcript available on Metacast Nathan sits down with Professor Zak Kohane, the Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School, and co-author of the new book, The AI Revolution in Medicine, for which Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO wrote the foreword to the book. Professor Kohane was among a select few people to receive early preview and research access to GPT-4 in the fall of 2022, and his approach to exploring and characterizing how AI is about to transform medicine. The book is out May 13, 2023 and can...
May 11, 2023•1 hr•Ep 24•Transcript available on Metacast Nathan Labenz sits down with prominent – and notably prescient – AI media figures Robert Scoble and Ben Tossell. They discuss what the work of being an AI scout looks like, how to bring the mainstream along with emerging AI developments, and their predictions and hopes for AI. Robert Scoble is a long-time Silicon Valley technology explorer and connector, a futurist who's met so many technology legends in their primes that he's now also something of a historian. https://scobleizer.blog/ Ben Tosse...
May 09, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Ep 23•Transcript available on Metacast Nathan Labenz sits down with Rachel Woods, founder of The AI Exchange, an AI education platform with over 130,000 subscribers on TikTok. They discuss Rachel’s experience consulting for public and private companies on AI strategy, how teams should think about their AI strategy, and how Rachel uses AI in her own business. Rachel was previously a data scientist at Meta, and a founder of a venture-backed e-commerce startup, where she began to use chatGPT in her startup operations. This episode is th...
May 04, 2023•1 hr 11 min•Ep 22•Transcript available on Metacast Nathan Labenz and Erik Torenberg sit down with Sarah Guo and Elad Gil, notable investors and co-hosts of the AI-focused No Priors podcast. They discuss how Sarah and Elad are approaching AI investment opportunities right now, how that differs from how they've thought about investing in the past, where in the stack from hardware to applications they expect to see value accrue, what modes of human-AI interaction they are most interested in, and more. Sarah is the founder of $100M AI-focused ventur...
May 02, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Ep 21•Transcript available on Metacast Raza Habib is on the front lines of LLM implementation as CEO of Humanloop, a Y Combinator backed startup that helps companies of all kinds, small and large bridge the gap from API access to successful LLM deployment. Nathan sat down with Raza to hear what he has learned in the process of helping so many companies on their LLM implementation journeys – and he did not disappoint – as you'll hear, he shared a bunch of concrete examples of customer use cases, practical challenges that people face, ...
Apr 27, 2023•1 hr 23 min•Ep 20•Transcript available on Metacast Nathan Labenz sits down with Matt Welsh, the CEO and co-founder of Fixie.AI which just raised $17M in seed funding. The technology world's attention has turned en masse to AI agents over the last month, but Matt, a former Harvard professor and ex-Google, has been focused on AI agents for longer over at Fixie. The platform is currently in developer preview mode, where developers can build agents and end users can try them. Agents hold the promise of handling not only the core cognitive work, but ...
Apr 25, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Ep 19•Transcript available on Metacast Nathan dives in with Alex Albert, a 22-year-old computer science student at the University of Washington, who has become a prolific creator of Jailbreakchat.com and author over at The Prompt Report.com. This is Alex's first podcast appearance! Please enjoy this thought-provoking conversation with Alex Albert as part of 'Prompt Engineering Week' at The Cognitive Revolution. We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal team on other projects he's incubating. He's hiring a Ch...
Apr 20, 2023•2 hr 31 min•Ep 18•Transcript available on Metacast For anyone who discovered this show on Twitter, Riley (@goodside) likely needs no introduction – after all, he spent most of 2022 posting his explorations of OpenAI's text-davinci-002, and quickly became one of the must-follow accounts in AI. Riley Goodside is the world's first Staff Prompt Engineer at Scale AI, and is an expert in prompting large language models and integrating them into AI-powered applications. Few have spent as much time on the language model frontier, so I hope you enjoy thi...
Apr 18, 2023•2 hr 58 min•Ep 17•Transcript available on Metacast Nathan Labenz dives in with Jaan Tallinn, a technologist, entrepreneur (Kazaa, Skype), and investor (DeepMind and more) whose unique life journey has intersected with some of the most important social and technological events of our collective lifetime. Jaan has since invested in nearly 180 startups, including dozens of AI application layer companies and some half dozen startup labs that focus on fundamental AI research, all in an effort to support the teams that he believes most likely to lead ...
Apr 13, 2023•2 hr 45 min•Ep 16•Transcript available on Metacast Nathan Labenz and Erik Torenberg delve into the upcoming economic transformation and the future of work in light of the threshold crossed by GPT-4. 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. RECOMMENDED PODCAST: The HR industry is at a crossroads. What will it take to construct the next genera...
Apr 11, 2023•1 hr 13 min•Ep 15•Transcript available on Metacast 
