In this episode, a16z partners Justine Moore and Anish Acharya join Nathan to discuss the AI Abundance Agenda, their latest thesis for consumer AI. They discuss the intersection of weird and working, and their investment pillars in AI for creativity and productivity, companionship, and wellness and growth. Looking for a search API? Try the Brave search API for free for up to 2000 queries per month at https://brave.com/api LINKS: Read a16z’s AI Abundance Agenda here: https://gamma.app/docs/a16z-C...
Feb 13, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, Dr Michael Levin, Distinguished Professor of Biology at Tufts University, joins Nathan to discuss embodied minds, his research into limb regeneration and collective intelligence, cognitive light cones, and much more. Michael and the Levin Lab work at the intersection of biology, artificial life, bioengineering, synthetic morphology, and cognitive science. LINKS: The Levin Lab and Dr. Michael Levin’s research: https://drmichaellevin.org/resources/ Dr Michael Levin’s blog: https:/...
Feb 09, 2024•1 hr 26 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, Nathan sits down with Max Bennett, author of the book: A Brief History of Intelligence. They discuss the five major breakthroughs in evolution that resulted in human brains and cognition. They delve deeper into the workings of each breakthrough, the evolution of intelligence, and how AI can benefit from understanding these principles. If you need an ecommerce platform, check out our sponsor Shopify: https://shopify.com/cognitive for a $1/month trial period. We're hiring across t...
Feb 07, 2024•2 hr 58 min•Transcript available on Metacast In today's episode Yohei Nakajima, GP at Untapped Capital and Creator of BabyAGI, returns to the show. Together with Nathan, they watch Yohei’s TEDAI Talk, unpacking themes on collective intelligence, identity, and how AI can help us better understand one another. If you need an ecommerce platform, check out our sponsor Shopify: https://shopify.com/cognitive for a $1/month trial period. We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal team on other projects he's incubating. He...
Feb 01, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, Nathan sits down with Sander Schulhoff, Cofounder and CEO of Learnprompting.org. They discuss the business model, the keys to prompting that every user of language models should know, negative prompting, prompt hacking, and more. If you need an ecommerce platform, check out our sponsor Shopify: https://shopify.com/cognitive for a $1/month trial period. LINKS: - Learnprompting.org: https://learnprompting.org/ - Learnprompting.org Prompt Hacking: https://learnprompting.org/docs/ca...
Jan 30, 2024•2 hr 44 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, Nathan sits down with Suhail Doshi, founder of Playground AI. They discuss the current state of AI image generation, how Suhail is building Playground while the technology for vision and image generation is still maturing, thought to image reconstruction, and more. If you need an ecommerce platform, check out our sponsor Shopify: https://shopify.com/cognitive for a $1/month trial period. We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal team on other projects h...
Jan 26, 2024•1 hr 17 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, Nathan sits down with tech lawyer Cecilia Zeniti, Founder & CEO of GC AI, the AI for in-house counsel. They discuss the origins of IP law in the US Constitution to promote creativity, the "fair use doctrine" and how OpenAI could argue ChatGPT is transformative, Google's patenting strategy around the transformer, and much more. If you need an ecommerce platform, check out our sponsor Shopify: https://shopify.com/cognitive for a $1/month trial period. LINKS: GC AI: https://getgc.a...
Jan 23, 2024•2 hr 31 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, Nathan sits down with Div Garg, founder of Multion, to discuss the current state and future outlook of AI agents. They discuss benchmarking real-world tasks, the promise and perils of consumer AI adoption, predictions that 2024 may be a breakout year for personal bots, and more. If you need an ecommerce platform, check out our sponsor Shopify: https://shopify.com/cognitive for a $1/month trial period. We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal team on ot...
Jan 20, 2024•2 hr 43 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, Nathan sits down with Juan Sequeda, Principal Scientist and Head of AI Lab at data.world. They discuss how knowledge graphs can be your organization's "brain" for AI, integrating structured and unstructured data, benchmarking enterprise AI systems, and more. If you need an ecommerce platform, check out our sponsor Shopify: https://shopify.com/cognitive for a $1/month trial period. We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal team on other projects he's inc...
Jan 18, 2024•2 hr 53 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, Nathan sits down with Gabe Gomes, Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and researcher behind Coscientist: the first non-organic, intelligent being to design, plan, and execute a chemistry experiment. They discuss how Coscientist allows scientists to use natural language to control remote experiments on Emerald Cloud Lab, how it will democratize scientific knowledge, and accelerate the pace of research. If you need an ecommerce platform, check out our sponsor Shopif...
Jan 12, 2024•2 hr 51 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, Nathan sits down with Dan O’Connell, Chief Strategy Officer at Dialpad. They discuss building their own language models using 5 billion minutes of business calls, custom speech recognition models for every customer, and the challenges of bringing AI into business. If you need an ecommerce platform, check out our sponsor Shopify: https://shopify.com/cognitive for a $1/month trial period. We're sharing a few of Nathan's favorite AI scouting episodes from other shows. Today, Shane ...
Jan 09, 2024•1 hr 23 min•Transcript available on Metacast We're sharing a few of Nathan's favorite AI scouting episodes from other shows. Today, Shane Legg, Cofounder at Deepmind and its current Chief AGI Scientist, shares his insights with Dwarkesh Patel on AGI's timeline, the new architectures needed for AGI, and why multimodality will be the next big landmark. If you need an ecommerce platform, check out our sponsor Shopify: https://shopify.com/cognitive for a $1/month trial period. You can subscribe to The Dwarkesh Podcast here: https://www.youtube...
Jan 04, 2024•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast We're sharing a few of Nathan's favorite AI scouting episodes from other shows. Today: Nita Farahani shares her insights with 80,000 Hours' Luisa Rodriguez on the current state of neurotechnology and its potential impacts on various fields, including work, healthcare, privacy, and even human cognition. The discussion includes Farahani's assessment of devices like SmartCap and Neuralink, the concept of cognitive liberty, the risks of the technology, and the need for proper regulation and ethical ...
Jan 03, 2024•2 hr 6 min•Transcript available on Metacast For the end of the year, we're going to repost a few of Nathan's favorite AI scouting episodes from other shows. Today: Samuel Hammond joins the Future of Life Institute podcast to discuss how AGI will transform economies, governments, institutions, and other power structures. If you need an ecommerce platform, check out our sponsor Shopify: https://shopify.com/cognitive for a $1/month trial period. Samuel Hammond is a Canadian-born, DC-based senior economist for the Foundation for American Inno...
Dec 30, 2023•2 hr 23 min•Transcript available on Metacast In today's conversation, Nathan joins Rob Wiblin, host of The 80,000 Hours Podcast to discuss why we need more AI scouts, OpenAI's safety record, and redteaming frontier models. If you need an ecommerce platform, check out our sponsor Shopify: https://shopify.com/cognitive for a $1/month trial period. 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 mor...
Dec 27, 2023•4 hr 53 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, Nathan does an emergency pod deep dive into Mamba, a new state space model architecture. If you need an ecommerce platform, check out our sponsor Shopify: https://shopify.com/cognitive for a $1/month trial period. 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. SPONSORS: Shopify is...
Dec 22, 2023•3 hr 30 min•Ep 89•Transcript available on Metacast In this video, Nathan chats to Dan Shipper, CEO and Co-founder of Every, for the series "How I Use Chat-GPT". They discuss Nathan's prompting techniques for creative and cognitive labour, and using GPT in copilot instead of delegation mode. If you need an ecommerce platform, check out our sponsor Shopify: https://shopify.com/cognitive for a $1/month trial period. Watch the rest of the series, "How I Use ChatGPT", here: https://www.youtube.com/@EveryInc We're hiring across the board at Turpentine...
Dec 20, 2023•1 hr 19 min•Ep 88•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, Marius Hobbhahn, CEO of Apollo Research, sits down with Nathan Labenz to discuss Apollo’s research in AI deception, interpretability, and affordances. If you need an ecommerce platform, check out our sponsor Shopify: https://shopify.com/cognitive for a $1/month trial period. 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 l...
Dec 15, 2023•2 hr 57 min•Transcript available on Metacast Balaji Srinivasan, investor, former CTO at Coinbase and GP at a16z, and writer of The Network State, joins Nathan to discuss polytheistic AI and AI gods, human-AI symbiosis, how AI will be controlled, and much more. If you need an ecommerce platform, check out our sponsor Shopify: https://shopify.com/cognitive for a $1/month trial period. 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 P...
Dec 12, 2023•2 hr 16 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, Nathan sits down with Alan Cowen, CEO and Chief Scientist at Hume AI, an emotional intelligence startup working on creating emotionally aware AI. If you need an ecommerce platform, check out our sponsor Shopify: https://shopify.com/cognitive for a $1/month trial period. 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 o...
Dec 09, 2023•1 hr 18 min•Ep 85•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, Nathan sits down with Nora Ammann, cofounder and CEO of PIBBSS (Principles of Intelligent Behavior in Biological and Social Systems), a research initiative focused on the principles of intelligent behavior in biological and social systems. If you need an ecommerce platform, check out our sponsor Shopify: https://shopify.com/cognitive for a $1/month trial period. We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal team on other projects he's incubating. He's hirin...
Dec 07, 2023•1 hr 27 min•Ep 84•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, Nathan chats with Josh Albrecht, CTO of Imbue. They discuss how to create agents for reasoning, reliability, and robustness. If you need an ecommerce platform, check out our sponsor Shopify: https://shopify.com/cognitive for a $1/month trial period. 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: eri...
Dec 02, 2023•1 hr 22 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, Nathan chats with Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, to discuss how AI might shape the future of code, software 2.0, and the open source question in AI. If you need an ecommerce platform, check out our sponsor Shopify: https://shopify.com/cognitive for a $1/month trial period. SPONSORS: Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business. Shopify powers 10% of ALL eCommerce in the US. And Shopify's the global force behind Allbirds, Rothy's, a...
Nov 29, 2023•1 hr 17 min•Transcript available on Metacast Nathan shares his perspective on Sam Altman’s firing from OpenAI, after being a part of the red team for GPT-4 and seeing how the board handled safety concerns. If you need an ecommerce platform, check out our sponsor Shopify: https://shopify.com/cognitive for a $1/month trial period. This is a developing story. This podcast was recorded on 11/21 at 12pm PST. SPONSORS: Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business. Shopify powers 10% of ALL eCommerce...
Nov 22, 2023•2 hr 54 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, Nathan and Erik discuss research out of Google Deepmind suggesting LLMs, Hemant Teneja’s responsible VC commitments, and why now is not the time for an ideological war on AI regulation. If you need an ecommerce platform, check out our sponsor Shopify: https://shopify.com/cognitive for a $1/month trial period. RECOMMENDED PODCAST: Every week investor and writer of the popular newsletter The Diff, Byrne Hobart, and co-host Erik Torenberg discuss today’s major inflection points in ...
Nov 17, 2023•1 hr 21 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, Nathan interviews Alex Watson, founder and CPO of Gretel AI, about the company's work in synthetic data. They discuss why we need synthetic data, Gretel’s new pre trained tabular LLM that creates synthetic data on a zero shot basis, privacy techniques to prevent LLM memorization, and more. If you need an ecommerce platform, check out our sponsor Shopify: https://shopify.com/cognitive for a $1/month trial period. We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal...
Nov 14, 2023•1 hr 23 min•Ep 80•Transcript available on Metacast We're joined by John Hayes, CEO and Cofounder of Ghost, a self-driving car startup using multimodal LLMs to solve the autonomous driving problem, that OpenAI just invested $5 million into. If you need 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 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, ...
Nov 09, 2023•2 hr 38 min•Ep 78•Transcript available on Metacast We’re deep diving into OpenAI DevDay with Logan Kilpatrick, Dev Relations Lead at OpenAI. If you need 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 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. SPONSORS: SHOPIFY: https://shopify.com/cognitive for a $1/month trial...
Nov 08, 2023•1 hr 16 min•Ep 77•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, Flo Crivello, founder of Lindy AI, joins Nathan to chat about Biden’s executive order, and the state of AI safety. They discuss Flo’s thoughts on the executive order, building AGI kill switches, self driving cars, and more. If you need an ERP platform, check out our sponsor NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive. SPONSORS: Netsuite | Omneky Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business. Shopify powers 10% of ALL eCommerce in the US....
Nov 03, 2023•55 min•Transcript available on Metacast Mark Humphries is a Professor of History at Wilfrid Laurier University, where he has published widely on various aspects of Canadian history. We invited Mark to do an episode after he reached out to tell us that hearing about how Nathan fine-tuned GPT-3.5 on GPT-4 reasoning helped him get over some hurdles in his own archival research. In addition, he chats about all the things that he'd tried that hadn't worked, and in the process proved himself to be one of the world's leading adopters of AI t...
Oct 31, 2023•2 hr 34 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
