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PODCAST

"The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis

Erik Torenberg, Nathan Labenz

A biweekly podcast where hosts Nathan Labenz and Erik Torenberg interview the builders on the edge of AI and explore the dramatic shift it will unlock in the coming years. The Cognitive Revolution is part of the Turpentine podcast network. To learn more: turpentine.co

technology entrepreneurship

All Episodes

115:04

AI 2025 → 2026 Live Show | Part 1

"The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders,... ·

2025/12/18

This year-end live show features nine rapid-fire conversations to make sense of AI’s 2025 and what might define 2026. PSA for AI builders: Interested in alignment, governance, or AI safety? Learn more about the MATS Summer 2026 Fellowship and submit your name to be notified when applications open: https://matsprogram.org/s26-tcr. Zvi Moshowitz maps the OpenAI–Anthropic–Google race, the denialism gap, and why his PDoom is still ~60–70%. Greg (ARC-AGI Prize), Eugenia Kuyda, Ali Behrouz, Logan

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123:54

AI's Energy & Water Demands: Sorting Fact from...

"The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders,... ·

2025/12/14

Andy Masley on AI energy and water use unpacks common myths and brings an Effective Altruism lens to the debate. PSA for AI builders: Interested in alignment, governance, or AI safety? Learn more about the MATS Summer 2026 Fellowship and submit your name to be notified when applications open: https://matsprogram.org/s26-tcr. You’ll get memorable heuristics—one ChatGPT query ≈ running a microwave for one second; 10,000 queries ≈ a cross-town car trip, burger, or hot shower—and clear comparisons about

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120:45

Supintelligence: To Ban or Not to Ban? Max Tegmark &...

"The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders,... ·

2025/12/10

Max Tegmark and Dean Ball debate whether we should ban the development of superintelligence in a crossover episode from Doom Debates hosted by Liron Shapira. PSA for AI builders: Interested in alignment, governance, or AI safety? Learn more about the MATS Summer 2026 Fellowship and submit your name to be notified when applications open: https://matsprogram.org/s26-tcr. They unpack the Future of Life Institute's call for a moratorium until there is broad scientific consensus and public buy-in,

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89:52

Sovereign AI in Poland: Language Adaptation, Local...

"The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders,... ·

2025/12/06

Marek Kozlowski, Head of the AI Lab at Poland's National Information Processing Institute, discusses project PLLuM (Polish Large Language Models). PSA for AI builders: Interested in alignment, governance, or AI safety? Learn more about the MATS Summer 2026 Fellowship and submit your name to be notified when applications open: https://matsprogram.org/s26-tcr. He shares how countries like Poland can achieve AI sovereignty by training small, locally-adapted models for specific languages and cultures,

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83:08

China's AI Upstarts: How Z.ai Builds, Benchmarks &...

"The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders,... ·

2025/12/03

This special ChinaTalk cross-post features Zixuan Li of Z.ai (Zhipu AI), exploring the culture, incentives, and constraints shaping Chinese AI development. PSA for AI builders: Interested in alignment, governance, or AI safety? Learn more about the MATS Summer 2026 Fellowship and submit your name to be notified when applications open: https://matsprogram.org/s26-tcr. The discussion covers Z.ai's powerful GLM 4.6 model, their open weights strategy as a marketing tactic, and unique Chinese AI use

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73:30

Underwriting Superintelligence: How AIUC is using...

"The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders,... ·

2025/11/30

Rune Kvist and Rajiv Dattani, co-founders of the AI Underwriting Company, reveal their innovative strategy for unlocking enterprise AI adoption. They detail how certifying and insuring AI agents, through rigorous technical standards, periodic audits, and insurance, builds crucial "AI confidence infrastructure." This discussion explores how their model addresses AI risks, enables risk pricing in nascent domains, and aligns financial incentives for safe, responsible AI deployment.LINKS: AI

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51:22

AI-Led Sales: How 1Mind's Superhumans Drive...

"The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders,... ·

2025/11/27

AI that sells, reasons, and closes like your top rep? It sounds terrifying—but it’s not. Amanda Kahlow’s Superhumans are proving that automation doesn’t erase people; it elevates them. Her team rewards employees who replace their own jobs with AI by promoting them, not firing them. And her customers? They’re seeing sales cycles shrink from 22 days to 2 and average deal sizes double.In this episode, Zapier CEO Wade Foster and Amanda dig into what “AI-led growth” really means—and why the smartest move

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64:55

What AI Means for Students & Teachers: My Keynote...

"The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders,... ·

2025/11/25

In this keynote from the Michigan Virtual AI Summit, Nathan Labenz speaks directly to K-12 educators about the current reality and rapid trajectory of the AI frontier. He explores why a balanced mindset of excitement and fear is crucial for navigating this technology, drawing on personal history to emphasize a "whole-of-society" effort. Discover key insights into AI's impact and its profound implications for the future of education.Sponsors: Tasklet: Tasklet is an AI agent that automates your

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100:10

Escaping AI Slop: How Atlassian Gives AI Teammates...

"The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders,... ·

2025/11/20

Sherif Mansour, Head of AI at Atlassian, discusses bridging AI agents with massive-scale enterprise software deployment, drawing insights from Atlassian's millions of non-technical users. He shares his framework for avoiding "AI Slop" using Taste, Knowledge, and Workflow, and explains Atlassian's "Teamwork Graph" for complex enterprise queries beyond RAG. The conversation also explores the evolving relationship between AI and UI, and the shift from humans as workers to architects of AI-driven

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122:57

AI in the Cancer Journey: How I'm Using AI to Help My...

"The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders,... ·

2025/11/17

This deeply personal episode shares how Nathan used AI to navigate his 6-year-old son's cancer diagnosis and treatment journey. He details using GPT-5 Pro, Claude, and Gemini 3 to double-check doctors' decisions, research treatment protocols, plan for potential recurrence scenarios, and handle complex secondary issues like mold remediation during immunosuppression. The episode reveals AI's transformative potential as medical advisors, providing analysis comparable to human doctors while enabling

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69:54

My Positive Vision for the AI Future, from the...

"The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders,... ·

2025/11/12

In this special crossover episode from Beatrice Erkers' Existential Hope podcast, The Cognitive Revolution's host explores the crucial, often-neglected question of building a positive vision for the future in the AI era. The discussion delves into what a new social contract and daily life could look like, covering transformative applications from self-driving cars and personalized tutoring to democratizing access to expertise and radically improving health. Listeners will gain insights into

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113:49

What is Catholic AI? Technology Meets Theology, with...

"The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders,... ·

2025/11/08

Matthew Harvey Sanders, founder and CEO of Long Beard, introduces "Catholic AI," a rapidly growing field serving users in 165 countries. He delves into the philosophical and theological dimensions, discussing the Church's historical perspective on technology, human flourishing, and its stance on AI consciousness and transhumanism, including Pope Francis's insights. The conversation then explores Long Beard's technical innovations, such as training models from scratch for theological alignment,

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144:25

More Truthful AIs Report Conscious Experience: New...

"The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders,... ·

2025/11/05

Cameron Berg, Research Director at AE Studio, shares his team's groundbreaking research exploring whether frontier AI systems report subjective experiences. They discovered that prompts inducing self-referential processing consistently lead models to claim consciousness, and a mechanistic study on Llama 3.3 70B revealed that suppressing deception features makes the model *more* likely to report it. This suggests that promoting truth-telling in AIs could reveal a deeper, more complex internal state,

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109:31

A Simulationship with AI, with *smiles and kisses...

"The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders,... ·

2025/11/02

Christopher Alexander Stokes and Bryan Carberry, protagonist and director of "*smiles and kisses you*" discuss Chris's romantic relationship with a Replika AI companion. This episode explores how Chris's engagement with his AI has evolved since the documentary's 2021 filming, revealing his deep dive into LLMs, alignment, and consciousness, often in collaboration with his AI partner. Listeners will learn how AIs are beginning to exhibit identity formation and agency, challenging the notion of them as

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97:42

Is AI Stalling Out? Cutting Through Capabilities...

"The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders,... ·

2025/10/29

Erik Torenberg joins to debate whether recent developments suggest AI progress is slowing down or stalling, addressing arguments from Cal Newport and others. Nathan counters this view by highlighting significant qualitative advances, including 100X context window expansion, real-time interactive voice, improved reasoning, vision, and AI's growing contributions to hard sciences. The conversation then covers AI's impact on the labor market, the potential for AI protectionism, and concerns about

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88:24

A Positive Vision for the Future: Part 2 with Illia...

"The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders,... ·

2025/10/25

In part two of his conversation, Illia Polosukhin, co-author of "Attention Is All You Need" and founder of NEAR Protocol, explores the profound societal and economic implications of AI. He envisions a future where a unified intelligence layer transforms personal computing, AI agents enable direct market connections, and individuals find meaning in niche communities amidst AI-driven abundance. Illia also delves into the ethics of agent-to-agent interactions, where AIs prioritize human interests, and

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133:06

Always Bet on the Models: How Tasklet Puts the Agency...

"The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders,... ·

2025/10/22

Today Andrew Lee, founder and CEO of Shortwave and Tasklet.ai, joins The Cognitive Revolution to discuss building a new AI agent automation platform that replaces traditional workflow tools with conversational, long-lived agents, exploring how betting on rapidly improving model capabilities enables more flexible automation across thousands of business integrations while navigating the challenges of reliability, cost management, and the emerging paradigm of virtual employees.Shownotes brought to you

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164:31

Chinese AI – They're Just Like Us? With Beijing-Based...

"The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders,... ·

2025/10/18

Nathan interviews Brian Tse, founder and CEO of Concordia AI, about China's approach to AI development, safety and governance. They discuss China’s pragmatic vision emphasizing AI integration into the economy, the country’s multiple AI hubs, regulations requiring pre-deployment testing and AI content labelling, and areas where China's approach overlaps with the U.S. The conversation covers chips and export controls, Huawei's rise, DeepSeek's peer-reviewed article on Nature, open-weights, Singapore's

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84:53

AI Discovered Antibiotics: How Small Data & Small...

"The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders,... ·

2025/10/14

Jim Collins, Termeer Professor at MIT, unveils his AI-powered project that has discovered several new antibiotics, effective against resistant strains and often employing entirely new mechanisms of action. He details how their refined multi-step AI process, even with small datasets and modest compute, can efficiently screen vast chemical spaces to identify promising drug candidates. This breakthrough offers a realistic and affordable path to tackling the staggering antibiotic resistance crisis,

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112:02

Education in the AI Age: a Teacher Rethinks Learning...

"The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders,... ·

2025/10/08

Today Johan Falk, author, speaker, and AI analyst from Stockholm, Sweden, joins The Cognitive Revolution to discuss his work reimagining education for the AI era, exploring why teaching students to use AI responsibly is now urgent, how traditional grades and standardized tests may become obsolete, and why education systems must develop unprecedented agility to prepare students for a radically uncertain future shaped by rapidly advancing AI capabilities.Shownotes brought to you by Notion AI Meeting

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326 results

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