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PODCAST

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST)

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST)

Welcome! We engage in fascinating discussions with pre-eminent figures in the AI field. Our flagship show covers current affairs in AI, cognitive science, neuroscience and philosophy of mind with in-depth analysis. Our approach is unrivalled in terms of scope and rigour – we believe in intellectual diversity in AI, and we touch on all of the main ideas in the field with the hype surgically removed. MLST is run by Tim Scarfe, Ph.D (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ecsquizor/) and features regular

technology

All Episodes

00:24:19

Why Humans Are Still Powering AI [Sponsored]

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) ·

2025/11/03

Ever wonder where AI models actually get their "intelligence"? We reveal the dirty secret of Silicon Valley: behind every impressive AI system are thousands of real humans providing crucial data, feedback, and expertise.Guest: Phelim Bradley, CEO and Co-founder of ProlificPhelim Bradley runs Prolific, a platform that connects AI companies with verified human experts who help train and evaluate their models. Think of it as a sophisticated marketplace matching the right human expertise to

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00:40:59

The Universal Hierarchy of Life - Prof. Chris Kempes...

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) ·

2025/10/25

"What is life?" - asks Chris Kempes, a professor at the Santa Fe Institute.Chris explains that scientists are moving beyond a purely Earth-based, biological view and are searching for a universal theory of life that could apply to anything, anywhere in the universe. He proposes that things we don't normally consider "alive"—like human culture, language, or even artificial intelligence; could be seen as life forms existing on different "substrates".To understand

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00:59:53

Google Researcher Shows Life "Emerges From Code" -...

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) ·

2025/10/21

Blaise Agüera y Arcas explores some mind-bending ideas about what intelligence and life really are—and why they might be more similar than we think (filmed at ALIFE conference, 2025 - https://2025.alife.org/).Life and intelligence are both fundamentally computational (he says). From the very beginning, living things have been running programs. Your DNA? It's literally a computer program, and the ribosomes in your cells are tiny universal computers building you according to those

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01:19:39

The Secret Engine of AI - Prolific [Sponsored] (Sara...

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) ·

2025/10/18

We sat down with Sara Saab (VP of Product at Prolific) and Enzo Blindow (VP of Data and AI at Prolific) to explore the critical role of human evaluation in AI development and the challenges of aligning AI systems with human values. Prolific is a human annotation and orchestration platform for AI used by many of the major AI labs. This is a sponsored show in partnership with Prolific. **SPONSOR MESSAGES**—cyber•Fund https://cyber.fund/?utm_source=mlst is a founder-led investment firm accelerating the

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01:01:07

AI Agents Can Code 10,000 Lines of Hacking Tools In...

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) ·

2025/10/04

Dr. Ilia Shumailov - Former DeepMind AI Security Researcher, now building security tools for AI agentsEver wondered what happens when AI agents start talking to each other—or worse, when they start breaking things? Ilia Shumailov spent years at DeepMind thinking about exactly these problems, and he's here to explain why securing AI is way harder than you think.**SPONSOR MESSAGES**—Check out notebooklm for your research project, it's really powerfulhttps://notebooklm.google.com/—Take the

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01:08:27

New top score on ARC-AGI-2-pub (29.4%) - Jeremy Berman

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) ·

2025/09/27

We need AI systems to synthesise new knowledge, not just compress the data they see. Jeremy Berman, is a research scientist at Reflection AI and recent winner of the ARC-AGI v2 public leaderboard.**SPONSOR MESSAGES**—Take the Prolific human data survey - https://www.prolific.com/humandatasurvey?utm_source=mlst and be the first to see the results and benchmark their practices against the wider community!—cyber•Fund https://cyber.fund/?utm_source=mlst is a founder-led investment firm accelerating the

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02:03:48

Deep Learning is Not So Mysterious or Different -...

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) ·

2025/09/19

Professor Andrew Wilson from NYU explains why many common-sense ideas in artificial intelligence might be wrong. For decades, the rule of thumb in machine learning has been to fear complexity. The thinking goes: if your model has too many parameters (is "too complex") for the amount of data you have, it will "overfit" by essentially memorizing the data instead of learning the underlying patterns. This leads to poor performance on new, unseen data. This is known as the classic

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01:21:39

Karl Friston - Why Intelligence Can't Get Too Large...

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) ·

2025/09/10

In this episode, hosts Tim and Keith finally realize their long-held dream of sitting down with their hero, the brilliant neuroscientist Professor Karl Friston. The conversation is a fascinating and mind-bending journey into Professor Friston's life's work, the Free Energy Principle, and what it reveals about life, intelligence, and consciousness itself.**SPONSORS**Gemini CLI is an open-source AI agent that brings the power of Gemini directly into your terminal -

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01:34:52

The Day AI Solves My Puzzles Is The Day I Worry...

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) ·

2025/09/04

We are joined by Cristopher Moore, a professor at the Santa Fe Institute with a diverse background in physics, computer science, and machine learning.The conversation begins with Cristopher, who calls himself a "frog" explaining that he prefers to dive deep into specific, concrete problems rather than taking a high-level "bird's-eye view". They explore why current AI models, like transformers, are so surprisingly effective. Cristopher argues it's because the real world

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01:05:44

Michael Timothy Bennett: Defining Intelligence and...

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) ·

2025/08/28

Dr. Michael Timothy Bennett is a computer scientist who's deeply interested in understanding artificial intelligence, consciousness, and what it means to be alive. He's known for his provocative paper "What the F*** is Artificial Intelligence" which challenges conventional thinking about AI and intelligence.**SPONSOR MESSAGES***Prolific: Quality data. From real people. For faster

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01:45:38

Superintelligence Strategy (Dan Hendrycks)

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) ·

2025/08/14

Deep dive with Dan Hendrycks, a leading AI safety researcher and co-author of the "Superintelligence Strategy" paper with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang.*** SPONSOR MESSAGESGemini CLI is an open-source AI agent that brings the power of Gemini directly into your terminal - https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cliProlific: Quality data. From real people. For faster

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00:58:22

DeepMind Genie 3 [World Exclusive] (Jack Parker...

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) ·

2025/08/05

This episode features Shlomi Fuchter and Jack Parker Holder from Google DeepMind, who are unveiling a new AI called Genie 3. The host, Tim Scarfe, describes it as the most mind-blowing technology he has ever seen. We were invited to their offices to conduct the interview (not sponsored).Imagine you could create a video game world just by describing it. That's what Genie 3 does. It's an AI "world model" that learns how the real world works by watching massive amounts of video

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00:49:48

Large Language Models and Emergence: A Complex...

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) ·

2025/07/31

Prof. David Krakauer, President of the Santa Fe Institute argues that we are fundamentally confusing knowledge with intelligence, especially when it comes to AI.He defines true intelligence as the ability to do more with less—to solve novel problems with limited information. This is contrasted with current AI models, which he describes as doing less with more; they require astounding amounts of data to perform tasks that don't necessarily demonstrate true understanding or adaptation. He

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01:23:32

Pushing compute to the limits of physics

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) ·

2025/07/21

Dr. Maxwell Ramstead grills Guillaume Verdon (AKA “Beff Jezos”) who's the founder of Thermodynamic computing startup Extropic.Guillaume shares his unique path – from dreaming about space travel as a kid to becoming a physicist, then working on quantum computing at Google, to developing a radically new form of computing hardware for machine learning. He explains how he hit roadblocks with traditional physics and computing, leading him to start his company – building "thermodynamic

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02:16:22

The Fractured Entangled Representation Hypothesis...

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) ·

2025/07/06

Are the AI models you use today imposters?Please watch the intro video we did before this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1q6Hhz0MAgIn this episode, hosts Dr. Tim Scarfe and Dr. Duggar are joined by AI researcher Prof. Kenneth Stanley and MIT PhD student Akash Kumar to discuss their fascinating paper, "Questioning Representational Optimism in Deep Learning."Imagine you ask two people to draw a perfect skull. One is a brilliant artist who understands anatomy, the other is a machine that

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00:15:45

The Fractured Entangled Representation Hypothesis...

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) ·

2025/07/05

What if today's incredible AI is just a brilliant "impostor"? This episode features host Dr. Tim Scarfe in conversation with guests Prof. Kenneth Stanley (ex-OpenAI), Dr. Keith Duggar (MIT), and Arkash Kumar (MIT).While AI today produces amazing results on the surface, its internal understanding is a complete mess, described as "total spaghetti" [00:00:49]. This is because it's trained with a brute-force method (SGD) that’s like building a sandcastle: it looks right from

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02:07:07

Three Red Lines We're About to Cross Toward AGI...

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) ·

2025/06/24

What if the most powerful technology in human history is being built by people who openly admit they don't trust each other? In this explosive 2-hour debate, three AI experts pull back the curtain on the shocking psychology driving the race to Artificial General Intelligence—and why the people building it might be the biggest threat of all. Kokotajlo predicts AGI by 2028 based on compute scaling trends. Marcus argues we haven't solved basic cognitive problems from his 2001 research. The

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01:08:28

How AI Learned to Talk and What It Means - Prof....

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) ·

2025/06/17

We interview Professor Christopher Summerfield from Oxford University about his new book "These Strange New Minds: How AI Learned to Talk and What It". AI learned to understand the world just by reading text - something scientists thought was impossible. You don't need to see a cat to know what one is; you can learn everything from words alone. This is "the most astonishing scientific discovery of the 21st century."People are split: some refuse to call what AI does

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00:50:59

"Blurring Reality" - Chai's Social AI Platform...

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) ·

2025/05/26

"Blurring Reality" - Chai's Social AI Platform - sponsoredThis episode of MLST explores the groundbreaking work of Chai, a social AI platform that quietly built one of the world's largest AI companion ecosystems before ChatGPT's mainstream adoption. With over 10 million active users and just 13 engineers serving 2 trillion tokens per day, Chai discovered the massive appetite for AI companionship through serendipity while searching for product-market fit.CHAI sponsored this show

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01:13:58

Google AlphaEvolve - Discovering new science...

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) ·

2025/05/14

Today GoogleDeepMind released AlphaEvolve: a Gemini coding agent for algorithm discovery. It beat the famous Strassen algorithm for matrix multiplication set 56 years ago. Google has been killing it recently. We had early access to the paper and interviewed the researchers behind the work.AlphaEvolve: A Gemini-powered coding agent for designing advanced algorithmshttps://deepmind.google/discover/blog/alphaevolve-a-gemini-powered-coding-agent-for-designing-advanced-algorithms/Authors: Alexander

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