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PODCAST

Pretrained

Pierce Freeman & Richard Diehl Martinez

10 years after studying at Stanford, two friends have somehow become AI experts. One builds startups, the other studies at Cambridge - together they break down LLMs and machine learning with zero BS and maximum banter.

technology tech news

All Episodes

50:55

AI Spent the Night Improving Itself

Pretrained ·

2026/03/18

Karpathy dropped a project where an AI agent spent 12 hours improving its own training loop. Then the guys get into OpenClaw spreading to China and what it means when agentic tools land in a culture that's already way ahead on adoption. Yann LeCun raises a billion dollars to prove every other AI lab is thinking about intelligence wrong. And finally, trouble at Grok: layoffs, SpaceX fixers parachuted in, and only 2 of the original 12 founders still standing. Is XAI a real frontier lab or

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41:07

Anthropic's Beef with the Pentagon

Pretrained ·

2026/03/07

Richard and Pierce are back in a brand new studio, fresh off Pierce's snowless ski trip to Japan. This week: Anthropic picks a fight with the Pentagon over three words and ends up blacklisted as a national security risk. Then the guys break down speculative speculative decoding, Chinese labs have been running industrial-scale operations to scrape Claude's capabilities, and the team behind Qwen quietly starts falling apart, right as their best model yet drops.

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74:26

The Neo Lab Arms Race

Pretrained ·

2026/02/20

$126 billion in AI funding has been raised across 30+ "neo-labs". Most of them will fail.Pierce and Rich map the landscape - from Thinking Machines' $12B valuation on vibes alone to Ilya's SSI. Plus: why OpenAI might be the Fairchild Semiconductor of AI, whether Stanford professors make good founders, and the Sauron's Eye problem of building in a frontier lab's blind spot.

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72:48

Ads in the Chat Window

Pretrained ·

2026/02/19

The day of reckoning: OpenAI is putting ads in ChatGPT. Pierce and Rich unpack how it actually works, why the shopping use case might be the wrong starting point, and what happens when sub-agents try to sell things to each other. Also: OpenClaw's Peter Steinberger gets acquihired by OpenAI, Waymo builds a world model for self-driving, Mistral's Voxtral takes on Whisper, and the model release arms race hits a new peak.

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66:59

Your Agents Need an Org Chart

Pretrained ·

2026/02/13

Richard and Pierce go deep on the agent swarm era. Rich argues we're living through a paradigm shift in how we interact with AI: from copy-pasting ChatGPT to orchestrating hundreds of parallel agents. They cover Anthropic's opinionated swarm architecture, why corporate org structures might be the right mental model for agent design, the liability problem when no human reviews the code, thinking tokens as a tuning knob, and whether a 100,000-line AI-generated C compiler is impressive or

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73:53

Cracking Open OpenClaw

Pretrained ·

2026/02/11

Pierce and Richard dissect OpenClaw (née Claudebot, née MoltBot) - also known as the desktop agent everyone's installing on their Mac Minis. They cover the 400+ malicious packages that hit Claw Hub in one week, slop squatting, trust networks for open source, Kimi 2.5's agent swarm mode, and newspapers that think Waymo is controlled by joysticks in the Philippines.

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60:08

DeepSeek's New LLM Architectures

Pretrained ·

2026/01/30

Pierce and Richard break down DeepSeek's latest model architecture moves in Manifold-Constrained Hyper Connections and Engram memory. Are these conceptually sound? Will they hop the pond over to US frontier labs?

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74:27

Claude Gets a New Constitution

Pretrained ·

2026/01/28

Richard's finally back in San Francisco! The gang covers Claude's new constitution, reinforcement learning with AI instead of human feedback, why Apple went with Gemini for their new Siri revamp, homographic encryption, a $480m fundraising round for Humans& (note the ampersand), and much more.

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60:59

Why Your Agent is Cheating

Pretrained ·

2026/01/21

Pierce and Richard are back for the second listener mailbag. They break down what reward hacking really is and why models so often learn the wrong lesson, explain practical fine-tuning (from pre-training to prompting), unpack why LLMs use tokens instead of words, how context length is a hardware versus mathematic limitation, and much more.

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90:58

The sci-fi to startup pipeline

Pretrained ·

2026/01/14

Pierce and Richard are joined by Bella Cooper-Brown, Oxford material scientist turned science fiction author. They cover why defense tech companies name themselves after Lord of the Rings, Asimov's three laws of robotics, why engineers don't read enough fiction, the intersection of material science and AI research, how speculative fiction shapes the tech we build, and the ethics of AI companions and relationships.📚 Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley (1818)📚 Snow Crash

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51:14

Can we really trust reasoning

Pretrained ·

2026/01/07

Pierce and Richard cover the news that dropped over the holiday break. Getting breaking news incorporated within chatbots, OpenAI's "code red" over Google's Gemini 3, benchmarking the reliability of chain of thought to introspect model behavior, and a review of Claude Skills.Further reading:- https://www.wired.com/story/us-invaded-venezuela-and-captured-nicolas-maduro-chatgpt-disagrees- https://fortune.com/2025/12/02/sam-altman-declares-code-red-google-gemini-ceo-sundar-pichai/-

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37:05

Our biggest predictions for 2026

Pretrained ·

2025/12/19

We should really be on Polymarket. Pierce and Richard make their bets on GPT-6, competition between the different letters of FAANG, dynamic websites calibrated to user preferences, and increasing quality of OSS models.

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92:34

AI's ten big moments of 2025

Pretrained ·

2025/12/17

It's been a long year in the world of AI. Benchmarks are now almost totally saturated; the financial bubble keeps growing; spending more on inference compute; increasing competition from open source models; agents finally reach the mainstream; the frankly horrible job market for people out of school; multi-model models are back and increasing converging on transformer architectures. We cover them all in our anything goes holiday recap show. Plus - all the things that didn't happen this

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38:38

Looking back on a year of product market fit

Pretrained ·

2025/12/12

Pierce reflects on his own 2025. Thoughts on choosing the right buyer persona, scaling an AI business from zero lines in a github repo, the feeling of finally reaching product market fit, boring versus interesting businesses, and more.

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56:22

Looking back on three years of an AI PhD

Pretrained ·

2025/12/10

Richard takes the hot seat for the first episode of our 2025 recap series where we spend the rest of December looking back on what this year meant to us personally and in the world of AI/ML. We cover what it's like to defend a thesis in the UK, the difficulty of training meta-learning models, choosing a well scoped research topic, how to define small models, and what's needed to make them better.

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67:11

OpenReview got "hacked"

Pretrained ·

2025/12/03

OpenAI is rolling out shopping support to their users and plotting an ads rollout to challenge Google's ad business, we get a peek behind the curtain on SOTA image generation models with the release of Alibaba's Z-Image (and speculate this might be how nano banana has great text performance), and OpenReview exposes the identities behind double blind reviews.

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61:05

Pretraining is back in vogue with Gemini 3

Pretrained ·

2025/11/28

Pierce and Richard cover OpenAI's new long range model compression in Codex, initial takeaways of Gemini 3.0 and Nano Banana Pro, Nvidia chip exports to the UAE and Saudi Arabia, and Cloudstrike's global outage. Plus - why Pierce prefers chicken to turkey.

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76:57

Teaching cars about traffic lights

Pretrained ·

2025/11/21

Richard and Pierce break down the 5 levels of autonomy, whether Elon has a point about RGB vs lidar systems, sensor fusion algorithms, end to end learning in driving simulations, and more.

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66:12

Pretty pretty please can you hack this

Pretrained ·

2025/11/19

Pierce and Richard cover the news that Yann LeCunn is planning to depart Meta to focus on world models, Cursor 2.0 and their new home trained Composer coding model, Kimi K2 has great generalization performance for an open model but is lagging on code, Microsoft creates a super data center across 700 miles, and Anthropic reports the first hacking campaign orchestrated by AI.Further

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67:53

How AI research actually gets published

Pretrained ·

2025/11/16

Richard and Pierce talk about the major AI conferences, walk through the history of NeurIPS/ICML/ICLR, and retrofitting the peer review system.

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50 results

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