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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

150:47

Welcome to AI in the AM: RL for EE, Oversight w/out...

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

2026/04/15

This special AI in the AM episode features Sergiy Nesterenko of Quilter on using reinforcement learning for circuit board design, Andy Hall of Stanford on AI behavior in politics and new governance models, and Lukas Peterson and Axel Backlund of Andon Labs on their AI-run retail store in San Francisco. Nathan and Prakash also reflect on the pace of AI progress, the public reaction to existential risk, and why constructive civic action matters as AI systems grow more powerful and

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190:03

It's Crunch Time: Ajeya Cotra on RSI & AI-Powered AI...

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

2026/04/11

This cross-post from the 80,000 Hours podcast features Ajeya Cotra in conversation with Rob Wiblin about AI timelines, recursive self-improvement, and the “crunch time” window when AI could rapidly accelerate its own development. Ajeya explains why widespread, compounding automation may face fewer bottlenecks than many expect, and what that could mean for the world by 2050. They also discuss transparency, early warning systems, and the emerging strategy of using each generation of AI to align and

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94:16

Calm AI for Crazy Days: Inside Granola's Design...

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

2026/04/08

Sam Stephenson, co-founder of Granola, explains how a deliberately minimalist design philosophy helped turn the AI note-taking app into one of the fastest-growing products in the market. He shares why Granola focuses on doing one job exceptionally well, how note sharing drives growth, and what they’ve learned from surprising use cases, recipes, and constant user research. The conversation also covers privacy and consent, transcription and cost choices, team collaboration, and Sam’s hopes for AI

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115:38

Training the AIs' Eyes: How Roboflow is Making the...

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

2026/04/04

Joseph Nelson, CEO of Roboflow, breaks down the current state of computer vision and why it still lags behind language models in real-world understanding, latency, and deployment. He explains how Roboflow distills frontier vision capabilities into efficient, task-specific models using techniques like Neural Architecture Search and RF-DETR. The conversation covers Chinese leadership in vision, Meta and NVIDIA’s roles in the ecosystem, coding agents, and emerging S-curves from world models to

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104:42

Success without Dignity? Nathan finds Hope Amidst...

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

2026/04/01

This special cross-post from The Intelligence Horizon features Nathan Labenz in a wide-ranging conversation on compressed AI timelines, expert disagreement, and why he believes the singularity is near. They discuss interpretability, RL scaling, and the balance between extraordinary upside, like curing major diseases, and serious existential risks. Nathan explains his evolving p(doom), why he’s slightly more optimistic about robustly good AI, and how defense-in-depth strategies might keep society on

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95:52

Scaling Intelligence Out: Cisco's Vision for the...

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

2026/03/25

Vijoy Pandey of Outshift by Cisco lays out his vision for an “Internet of Cognition,” where AI agents can share context, build reputation, and collaborate safely at scale. He offers a useful mental model for superintelligence: progress has to scale in two directions — up, through better individual models, and out, through networks of agents and humans thinking together. The conversation explores how distributed, protocol-driven agent systems could give enterprises fine-grained permissions,

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98:55

Your Agent's Self-Improving Swiss Army Knife:...

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

2026/03/22

Karan Vaidya, CTO of Composio, explains how their “smart tool” platform lets AI agents access over 50,000 tools across 1,000+ apps through a single interface. He details how Composio handles tool discovery, authentication, sandboxes, and logging, and how an AI-powered feedback loop continuously improves tools in real time. The conversation explores avoiding model lock-in through robust skills and instructions, translating capabilities across model providers, and why the best agent use cases look

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206:43

Zvi's Mic Works! Recursive Self-Improvement, Live...

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

2026/03/19

Zvi Mowshowitz returns to survey the current AI landscape, from recursive self-improvement and the shift from the “beginning” to the “middle” of the AI story to what true AI end-game would look like. He and Nathan dig into AI-driven job loss, real-world productivity impacts, and the ethics of trying to escape a “permanent underclass.” They assess today’s AI live players, why Anthropic may be slightly ahead, and whether Chinese, xAI, or Meta can catch up. The conversation closes with Anthropic’s

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76:54

AI Scouting Report: the Good, Bad, & Weird @ the Law...

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

2026/03/16

This special AI Scouting Report episode from the Law & Artificial Intelligence Certificate Program surveys the current AI landscape for legal professionals. Nathan Labenz walks through the “Good, Bad, and Weird” of frontier models, from using AI to navigate his son’s cancer treatment to emerging forms of deception and reward hacking. He highlights how new systems are pushing the boundaries of math, physics, and legal performance while raising serious safety and governance questions. Listeners will

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103:12

Bioinfohazards: Jassi Pannu on Controlling Dangerous...

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

2026/03/11

Jassi Pannu, Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins, explains how rapidly advancing AI is transforming biological research and raising the risk of engineered pandemics. They map today’s biosecurity landscape, from pathogen detection and DNA sequencing to vaccine development, and examine how frontier models can already troubleshoot lab work and bypass data safeguards. The conversation introduces a proposed Biosecurity Data Level framework to restrict only the most dangerous functional biological data

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126:04

Try this at Home: Jesse Genet on OpenClaw Agents for...

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

2026/03/08

Jesse Genet shares how she built a team of AI agents to transform homeschooling, family life, and personal productivity without a software background. She explains how agents like an AI chief of staff, curriculum planner, and content creator help design personalized lessons, analyze kids’ learning, manage educational toys, and even run TikTok. The conversation covers practical delegation workflows, guardrails and trust, and why she treats AIs like employees with onboarding and clear roles. Jesse

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107:20

Don't Fight Backprop: Goodfire's Vision for...

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

2026/03/05

Dan Balsam and Tom McGrath from Goodfire return to explore the frontier of mechanistic interpretability and their new research pillar, Intentional Design. They explain the shift from sparse autoencoders to understanding geometric structure in latent spaces, and share a proof-of-concept method for reducing hallucinations using probes and RL. The conversation tackles concerns about reward hacking, principles for shaping the loss landscape instead of fighting backprop, and what this means for aligning

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138:32

Situational Awareness in Government, with UK AISI...

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

2026/03/01

Geoffrey Irving, Chief Scientist at the UK AI Security Institute, explains why our theoretical understanding of machine learning remains fragile even as models surpass experts on critical security tasks. He details AISI’s work on frontier model evaluations, red teaming, and threat modeling across biosecurity, cybersecurity, and loss-of-control risks. The conversation explores reward hacking, eval awareness, and why current safety techniques may struggle to deliver high reliability. Listeners will

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121:23

Universal Medical Intelligence: OpenAI's Plan to...

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

2026/02/25

Karan Singhal, Head of Health AI at OpenAI, explains how ChatGPT Health is achieving attending-physician-level performance and already serving hundreds of millions of users. He details how OpenAI works with over 250 doctors, built the 49,000-criteria HealthBench evaluation, and ran one of the first randomized trials of AI copilots in clinical care. The conversation explores privacy and safety safeguards, medical multimodality, N-of-1 treatment plans, and how AI could become a standard part of global

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55:29

Intelligence with Everyone: RL @ MiniMax, with Olive...

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

2026/02/22

Olive Song from MiniMax shares how her team trains the M series frontier open-weight models using reinforcement learning, tight product feedback loops, and systematic environment perturbations. This crossover episode weaves together her AI Engineer Conference talk and an in-depth interview from the Inference podcast. Listeners will learn about interleaved thinking for long-horizon agentic tasks, fighting reward hacking, and why they moved RL training to FP32 precision. Olive also offers a candid

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91:14

Mathematical Superintelligence: Harmonic's Vlad Tenev...

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

2026/02/18

Vlad Tenev and Tudor Achim from Harmonic explain how they built Aristotle, an AI system that reaches International Mathematical Olympiad gold-medal performance using formally verified Lean proofs. They unpack the architecture behind mathematical superintelligence, including Monte Carlo Tree Search, lemma guessing, and specialized geometry modules. The conversation explores how verifiable reasoning could harden mission-critical software, reshape mathematical practice, and lead to trustworthy

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142:59

Approaching the AI Event Horizon? Part 2, w/ Abhi...

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

2026/02/14

Abhi Mahajan (@owlposting) explains how AI is reshaping biology and medicine, including foundation models to predict cancer treatment response and why he’s both skeptical and optimistic about current results. Helen Toner unpacks CSET’s “When AI Builds AI” report and why automated AI R&D is a major source of strategic surprise. Jeremie Harris then explores our lack of control over superhuman AI systems, fragile US–China coordination, and how to maintain situational awareness in a rapidly shifting

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92:00

Approaching the AI Event Horizon? Part 1, w/ James...

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

2026/02/13

Part 1 of this live special dives into AI for Science, U.S. AI policy, and the behavior of AI agents in open-ended environments. James Zou explains how interpretability and virtual labs of AI agents can accelerate scientific discovery. Sam Hammond assesses the Biden administration’s AI policy, U.S.–Gulf AI deals, and the odds current AIs are conscious. Shoshannah Tekofsky shares insights from studying agent performance and emergent behavior in the AI Village.Use the Granola Recipe Nathan relies on

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76:07

AGI-Pilled Cyber Defense: Automating Digital...

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

2026/02/08

Alexis Carlier, founder of Asymmetric Security, explains how assuming AGI-level intelligent labor should transform cybersecurity from reactive triage to proactive, continuous digital forensics. He breaks down today’s threat landscape—from “spray and pray” cybercrime to nation-state IP theft and North Korean “remote workers.” The conversation explores Asymmetric’s AI agents for deep investigations, their services-first approach to business email compromise, and how specialized digital forensics may

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116:32

Infinite Code Context: AI Coding at Enterprise Scale...

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

2026/02/04

Blitzy founders Brian and Sid break down how their “infinite code context” system lets AI autonomously complete over 80% of major enterprise software projects in days. They dive into their dynamic agent architecture, how they choose and cross-check different models, and why they prioritize advances in AI memory over fine-tuning. The conversation also covers their 20¢/line pricing model, the path to 99%+ autonomous project completion, and what this all means for the future software engineering job

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338 results

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