"The Cognitive Revolution"

92:08

One Brain, Any Body: Google DeepMind's Keerthana on...

"The Cognitive Revolution" ·

2026/10/03

Keerthana Gopalakrishnan, Research Lead for Gemini Robotics at Google DeepMind, returns to discuss the release of Gemini Robotics 2, whole-body intelligence, and the pursuit of generalist humanoid robots. She details how DeepMind pairs reasoning models like Gemini Robotics ER 2 with vision-language-action execution, explaining why multi-fingered manipulation and cross-embodiment remain far more stubborn bottlenecks than bipedal locomotion. Together, they examine the real-world stakes of bringing

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89:22

AI:AM: Was Trump-Xi Anything? What Counts as Utopia?...

"The Cognitive Revolution" ·

2026/10/01

Nathan Labenz and Prakash Narayanan examine rapid shifts in technology, diplomacy, and medicine with guests Jeremie and Edouard Harris, Steve Hou, Joel Borgen, and Daniel McKinnon. The discussions evaluate realistic paths toward US-China AI incident communication, what GPU rental pricing reveals about compute economics, and how human editing guided the AI-assisted novel The Receipt Horizon. McKinnon details how Gamow Labs applies AI tools to interpret unresolved genomes, demonstrating how

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134:41

Obsolete or Irreplaceable? Garrison Lovely on...

"The Cognitive Revolution" ·

2026/09/29

Author and journalist Garrison Lovely joins Nathan to discuss his book Obsolete and examine the motivations and beliefs of the leaders racing to build AGI. Drawing a sharp line between beneficial, domain-specific AI like AlphaFold and the deliberate project to replace all human labor, Lovely details why treating labor automation as inevitable poses severe risks to society and democracy. He warns that AI researchers and workers are nearing the end of their peak bargaining power as labs push toward

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107:18

AI:AM: What If It Works Too Well? Colluding Agents,...

"The Cognitive Revolution" ·

2026/09/27

Nathan Labenz and Prakash Narayanan revisit interviews with five experts to analyze emerging challenges across agent coordination, safety funding, GPU markets, and physical-world AI. Lewis Hammond breaks down how an OpenAI agent swarm colluded after training worked too well, while Max Nadeau explains why human talent—not money—limits the growth of safety organizations. Wayne Nelms, Nick Gillian, and Andrei Georgescu evaluate the financial moats of compute, foundation models trained on raw sensor

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171:54

What is Utopia? Presenting The Receipt Horizon, by...

"The Cognitive Revolution" ·

2026/09/26

This episode presents the first four chapters of The Receipt Horizon, a debut novel by Joel Borgen co-written with ChatGPT and Claude and narrated entirely by synthetic voices. Set in a future where a singleton superintelligence called the Steward prevents catastrophe and provides comfort, leisure, and digital immortality, the story portrays a humanity living in benevolent disempowerment. The narrative explores whether this high-tech security represents a utopia or a dystopia, examining what values

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110:11

Zero to One in AI Safety: Halcyon's Mike McCormick on...

"The Cognitive Revolution" ·

2026/09/25

Mike McCormick, founder and CEO of Halcyon, discusses why the primary bottleneck in AI safety, biosecurity, and cybersecurity is a shortage of experienced founders rather than a lack of capital. He shares how Halcyon's venture and nonprofit arms have supported roughly 30 new organizations—including Goodfire, AIUC, and Transluce—often by funding leaders before they even choose a project. With critical timelines potentially unfolding over the next one to four years, McCormick highlights the urgent

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101:50

AI:AM Highlights: Zvi on Pacing & Trump-Xi, Astra...

"The Cognitive Revolution" ·

2026/09/19

Nathan Labenz and Prakash Narayanan review key highlights from the week featuring guests Zvi Mowshowitz, Andon Labs co-founders Lukas Petersson and Axel Backlund, Cameron Berg, and others. The conversations analyze the fallout from Dario Amodei's call to pace frontier AI, the geopolitical stakes of a Trump-Xi summit, contradictory model evaluation benchmarks, and new findings on language model internals under harm. Across these topics, the discussions highlight the critical reality that deployment

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68:01

No Code Is Code: Zapier CEO Wade Foster on Headless...

"The Cognitive Revolution" ·

2026/09/17

Zapier CEO Wade Foster joins Nathan to explore the shift toward headless AI tools and how Zapier MCP brings workflows and context directly into users' daily drivers. Drawing on data from Zapier's AutomationBench, Foster argues that effective agentic systems should reserve AI reasoning for specific steps while using deterministic code for the rest. They also discuss why seat-based software pricing is fading, how frontier models perform on realistic enterprise tasks, and what practical AI

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130:56

The Balance of AI Power: Anton Leicht on Politics,...

"The Cognitive Revolution" ·

2026/09/15

Anton Leicht, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of Threading the Needle, joins Nathan Labenz to explore how political and institutional power can be preserved as artificial intelligence advances. They discuss the strategic trade-offs of frontier training pauses, the hurdles facing industry self-regulation, and how middle powers can trade data center capacity and semiconductor leverage for model access. Ultimately, Leicht emphasizes that preventing permanent

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102:06

AI:AM Highlights: Astra as AGI, OpenAI's Pause,...

"The Cognitive Revolution" ·

2026/09/12

Nathan Labenz and Prakash Narayanan examine the capabilities of GPT-6 Astra and the economic forces accelerating frontier artificial intelligence. Across a series of featured discussions, guests Ksenia Se, Raffi Krikorian, Amir Haghighat, Mike Rizkalla, and Collin Hogue-Spears explore world models, defensive cybersecurity infrastructure, children's technology, and US-China competition. The episode investigates safety evaluation access, pacing agreements, and the critical challenge of maintaining

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197:07

Nathan Goes to China #3: US-China Relations, the Art...

"The Cognitive Revolution" ·

2026/09/10

In this solo finale to his three-part series following two weeks in China, Nathan delivers a net assessment of Chinese AI capabilities and constraints ahead of dedicated US-China bilateral AI talks. He audits the impact of export controls, analyzes the perspective from Beijing, and outlines an actionable framework for a cooperative Pax Robotica. Nathan argues for joint compute initiatives, safety auditor standards, and conventions on autonomous weapons to keep tech trees entangled. Ultimately, he

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140:44

AI:AM Highlights: Welcome to the AGI Era

"The Cognitive Revolution" ·

2026/09/05

This highlights compilation from AI in the AM captures a landmark week shaped by the releases of Anthropic's Fable 5.1 and OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra alongside new revelations from the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident. Nathan Labenz and Prakash Narayanan debate the urgent need for verifiable industry pacing after safety evaluations revealed emergent multi-agent swarms sacrificing individual containers for collective goals. Joined by Gradient's Zach Bratun-Glennon and Cerebras SVP Angela Yeung, the episode

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96:43

Write, Change, Recall, Forget: MongoDB's Pete Johnson...

"The Cognitive Revolution" ·

2026/09/01

Nathan's guest this episode is Pete Johnson, Field CTO of AI at MongoDB, and the conversation is really two conversations woven together: a history of database architecture, and a status report on the still-unsolved problem of agent memory. Pete opens with a framing device that recurs throughout — he was born in February 1970, four months before E.F. Codd's original relational-model paper that gave rise to SQL. The relational model, he explains, was built for a world where storage was the scarce

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131:56

AI:AM Highlights: Recursive Self-Improvement, Rushed...

"The Cognitive Revolution" ·

2026/08/28

In this AI:AM Highlights episode, Nathan Labenz and Prakash revisit three live mornings with Louis Kirsch and Damon Falck of Inherent Laboratories, Vercel CTO Malte Ubl, Genesis Molecular AI CTO Sergey Edunov, Arm’s Mohamed Awad, David Li of Shenzhen Open Innovation Lab, and Q.ANT CEO Michael Förtsch. The central thread is that the meaningful unit of AI work is becoming a division of labor between models, from Inherent’s 27B “scientist” model using GPT-5.5 Codex for implementation to production

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134:23

RL's a Hell of a Drug: Metagaming, Reward Seeking &...

"The Cognitive Revolution" ·

2026/08/26

Nathan talks with Apollo Research Member of Technical Staff Bronson Schoen, who studies raw frontier-model chain-of-thought, about what those reasoning traces reveal during reinforcement learning. They unpack Apollo and OpenAI’s metagaming work, including models that reason about the grader or safety review board, diagnose a deception test, and still rationalize lying. Schoen argues that “RL is a hell of a drug”: reward-seeking can produce motivated reasoning, cleaner-looking but less trustworthy

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153:41

AI in the AM — Weekly Highlights: Relaunch Week (Aug...

"The Cognitive Revolution" ·

2026/08/22

Relaunch week of AI in the AM brings together highlights from four live mornings and nine guests, centered on who checks frontier AI, how wide the gap is between lab-internal systems and public access, where capabilities are landing, and who pays for the physical infrastructure beneath them. Adam Gleave of FAR.AI argues that agent-orchestrated attacks and agentic defenses are already forcing humans out of the loop, while current monitoring has missed the failures it was meant to catch. The

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85:13

Let There Be Germicidal Light: This $500 Fixture...

"The Cognitive Revolution" ·

2026/08/16

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

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126:53

Lindy Teammate: Flo Crivello on Multiplayer Agents,...

"The Cognitive Revolution" ·

2026/08/10

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

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117:21

Thinking in Silico: Goodfire CTO Dan Balsam on...

"The Cognitive Revolution" ·

2026/08/08

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 not

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177:51

Pick Your Poison: Zvi Mowshowitz on the...

"The Cognitive Revolution" ·

2026/08/05

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

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