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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

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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94:04

The Customer Service Revolution: Building Fin, with...

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

2025/10/05

Today Eoghan McCabe and Fergal Reid of Intercom join The Cognitive Revolution to discuss building their AI customer service agent Fin, exploring how they achieved a 65% resolution rate through rigorous optimization and custom model training rather than relying on base model improvements, while pioneering outcome-based pricing at $0.99 per resolution.Shownotes brought to you by Notion AI Meeting Notes - try one month for free at: https://notion.com/lp/nathan Sponsors: Linear: Linear is the

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60:33

Training an AI Scientist with Feedback from Reality,...

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

2025/10/02

Today’s special crosspost features a16z General Partner Anjney Midha with Liam Fedus and Ekin Dogus Cubuk of Periodic Labs. They discuss experiments in training frontier AI models on real-world physics lab experiments—rather than digital reward functions—and how coupling language models with automated materials synthesis could accelerate the discovery of room-temperature superconductors and transform R&D in advanced manufacturing. Shownotes brought to you by Notion AI Meeting Notes - try one month

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136:08

The Machines Are Taking Our Jobs - Thank God? Emad...

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

2025/09/28

Today, Emad Mostaque, founder of Intelligent Internet, joins The Cognitive Revolution to discuss his book "The Last Economy" and his radical "intelligence theory" framework for reimagining economics in the AI age, exploring concepts like the abundance trap, metabolic rift, and his proposed cryptocurrency-funded system of collectively-owned AI infrastructure to prevent digital feudalism and ensure AI benefits humanity rather than just capital owners.Shownotes brought to you by Notion AI Meeting

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81:09

Stripe's Payments Foundation Model: How Data & Infra...

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

2025/09/25

Today, Emily Sands, head of data and AI at Stripe, joins The Cognitive Revolution to discuss how the company built a payments foundation model that processes tens of billions of transactions into dense embeddings, exploring the technical architecture behind fraud detection improvements and the modular approach that enables rapid deployment of AI across Stripe's $1.4 trillion payment network.Check out our sponsors: Google Gemini Notebook LM, Linear, AGNCY, Claude, Oracle Cloud

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87:00

Full-Stack AI Safety: Why Defense-in-Depth Might...

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

2025/09/20

Today Adam Gleave, co-founder and CEO of FAR.AI, joins The Cognitive Revolution to discuss his cautiously optimistic vision for post-AGI futures and AI capability timelines across three distinct tiers, exploring the safety challenges and alignment techniques needed as FAR.AI scales from foundational research to policy advocacy to ensure their innovations actually get deployed in real-world systems.Check out our sponsors: Fin, Linear, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Shownotes below brought to you by

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128:56

Can We Stop AI Deception? Apollo Research Tests...

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

2025/09/18

Today Marius Hobbhahn of Apollo Research joins The Cognitive Revolution to discuss their collaboration with OpenAI using "deliberative alignment" to reduce AI scheming behavior by 30x, exploring the safety challenges and concerning findings about models' growing situational awareness and increasingly cryptic reasoning patterns that emerge when frontier models like o3 and o4-mini operate with hidden chains of thought.Check out our sponsors: Fin, Linear, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Shownotes

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93:08

User-Owned AI: On-Chain Training, Inference, and...

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

2025/09/13

Illia Polosukhin, co-author of the seminal "Attention Is All You Need" paper and founder of NEAR, unveils his ambitious vision for user-owned, privacy-preserving AI. This technical deep dive explores NEAR's foundational infrastructure, from its proof-of-stake consensus and leveraging NVIDIA's confidential computing for private inference with minimal overhead. Listeners will discover how NEAR aims to decentralize model training with cryptographically guaranteed returns and how blockchain can provide

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104:57

Coaching the Creators: Inside the Minds Building...

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

2025/09/10

Today Joe Hudson, founder of Art of Accomplishment and coach to executives at major AI labs including OpenAI and Anthropic, joins The Cognitive Revolution to discuss the psychological patterns he observes among AI researchers and leaders, exploring what's missing beyond pure intelligence in current AI systems and arguing for supportive rather than punitive approaches toward those building frontier AI technology.Check out our sponsors: Linear, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Shownotes below brought

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193:14

Zvi Mowshowitz on Longer Timelines, RL-induced Doom,...

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

2025/09/06

Today, Zvi Mowshowitz returns to The Cognitive Revolution to discuss how recent AI developments like GPT-5 and IMO gold medals have led to modestly extended timelines despite being on-trend, while policy missteps around chip exports to China and alignment challenges from reinforcement learning have increased risk assessments, covering everything from live players in the AI race to safety funding priorities and virtuous actions for navigating our current moment.Check out our sponsors: Linear,

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111:02

In-AI Advertising: Better Answers for Users, Big...

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

2025/09/03

Today Ryan Hudson, Founder and CEO of ZeroClick, joins The Cognitive Revolution to discuss creating advertising infrastructure for AI applications through paid inference-time consideration of advertiser content, examining how to build sustainable monetization for free-tier AI services while learning from the successes and failures of social media's attention economy.Read the full transcript:

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296 results

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