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"The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis
30 episodes
Let There Be Germicidal Light: This $500 Fixture Could Stop the Next Pandemic, from Complex Systems
Aug 16, 2026 · 1 hr 25 min
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 a…
Lindy Teammate: Flo Crivello on Multiplayer Agents, Memory & Why He'd Ban the Chinese Models He Uses
Aug 14, 2026 · 2 hr 7 min
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…
Thinking in Silico: Goodfire CTO Dan Balsam on Concept Manifolds & a $1000/Month ML Research Agent
Aug 8, 2026 · 1 hr 57 min
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…
Pick Your Poison: Zvi Mowshowitz on the Unipolar/Multipolar AGI Dilemma, OpenFace & Pacing the ...
Aug 5, 2026 · 2 hr 58 min
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 con…
Nathan Goes to China – Part 2: AI Safety with Chinese Characteristics
Aug 2, 2026 · 2 hr 17 min
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…
Is Offense or Defense Dominant? FAR.AI's Adam Gleave on the AI Security Leaderboard
Jul 30, 2026 · 1 hr 44 min
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 t…
Nathan Goes to China – Part 1: Tech & Agent Setup, Chinese AI UX, WAIC, and Attitudes on AI
Jul 27, 2026 · 2 hr 24 min
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 DeepS…
Alignment with Awakening: Davidad on Moral Realism, AI Wisdom, & why His p(Doom) is Down to 5%
Jul 12, 2026 · 2 hr 24 min
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…
AI:AM Highlights: Exploring the J-Space, AI Superforecasters, SambaNova's Chips, & LTX Video Gen
Jul 9, 2026 · 2 hr 7 min
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 mo…
Intelligence on the Edge: Liquid AI's Ramin Hasani on the Search for Device-Native Foundation Models
Jul 4, 2026 · 1 hr 48 min
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 Liq…
1000 Designs a Day: Neural Concept's Thomas von Tschammer on AI-Native Engineering
Jul 1, 2026 · 1 hr 29 min
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 replaci…
AI:AM #4: Cameron on Model Consciousness, Duvenaud's Gradual Disempowerment, swyx's AI-Eng Alpha
Jun 27, 2026 · 1 hr 56 min
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 sovere…
The God We Deserve: Nonzero's Robert Wright on AI as Humanity's Ultimate Test
Jun 23, 2026 · 2 hr 30 min
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 s…
AI:AM #3: Zvi on Fable, the Cases For & Against the Ban, + AI for Math, Logistics & More
Jun 21, 2026 · 2 hr 15 min
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 c…
Dean Ball, on Joining OpenAI: New Power Centers, Frontier AI Policy, & Main Character Energy
Jun 20, 2026 · 2 hr 39 min
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 cent…
Radically Better Reasoning: Elicit's Andreas Stuhlmüller & Jungwon Byun on World Models for Research
Jun 17, 2026 · 1 hr 46 min
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, an…
AI in the AM — Week 2 Highlights (June 2026)
Jun 13, 2026 · 1 hr 45 min
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 system…
Babysitting the Machine: Glean's Rebecca Hinds on the Hidden Human Labor of AI at Work
Jun 10, 2026 · 1 hr 46 min
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 practica…
AI in the AM — Week 1 Highlights (June 2026)
Jun 6, 2026 · 1 hr 23 min
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. M…
Nested Learning: Ali Behrouz on the Quest for Continual Learning & Illusion of AI Architectures
Jun 3, 2026 · 3 hr
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 de…
Inside Nathan's Second Brain: Daniel Miessler, Security Expert & Creator of PAI, Audits My AI Setup
Jun 1, 2026 · 2 hr 33 min
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 c…
Your Biggest Lever: Designing your AI Career for Maximum Impact, with 80,000 Hours founder Ben Todd
May 26, 2026 · 1 hr 42 min
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…
All Compute Is Food: Palisade's Jeffrey Ladish on AI Shutdown Resistance, Self-Replication & Ecology
May 24, 2026 · 2 hr 13 min
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. Jeffre…
The Model Eats the Scaffolding: DeepMind's Logan Kilpatrick & Tulsee Doshi on 3.5 Flash, Omni & More
May 20, 2026 · 59 min
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 know…
Three Kinds of Software Survive: Tasklet's Andrew Lee on Competing to be a Horizontal Platform
May 15, 2026 · 1 hr 33 min
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 com…
Milliseconds to Match: Criteo's AdTech AI & the Future of Commerce w/ Diarmuid Gill & Liva Ralaivola
May 9, 2026 · 1 hr 27 min
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…
"Descript Isn't a Slop Machine": Laura Burkhauser on the AI Tools Creators Love and Hate
May 6, 2026 · 1 hr 23 min
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. LINKS: Laura Burkhause…
The RL Fine-Tuning Playbook: CoreWeave's Kyle Corbitt on GRPO, Rubrics, Environments, Reward Hacking
May 1, 2026 · 1 hr 47 min
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. Sponsors: Sequence: Sequence handle…
AI in the AM: 99% off search, GPT-5.5 is "clean", model welfare analysis, & efficient analog compute
Apr 26, 2026 · 2 hr 38 min
This edition of AI in the AM features Anna Patterson on Ceramic.ai’s pivot to low-cost enterprise search for LLMs, designed to combine public and private data with stronger fact-checking. Lukas Petersson returns with new Andon Labs results on Opus 4.7 and GPT-5.5, including surprising differences in performance, behavior, and “ruthless” tactics. Zvi Mowshowitz unpacks model welfare and how to interpret troubling model behavior, while Naveen Verma explains EnCharge AI’s analog in-memory computing…
Does Learning Require Feeling? Cameron Berg on the latest AI Consciousness & Welfare Research
Apr 23, 2026 · 3 hr 34 min
Cameron Berg returns to discuss the latest research on AI consciousness and model welfare. He breaks down new evidence for model introspection, including studies showing that systems can detect interventions on their own internal states and sometimes resist them. They also examine Anthropic's work on functional emotions, the implications of Claude's welfare reports, and Berg's new ideas about how reinforcement learning may shape positive and negative experience. The conversation makes the case f…
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