PODCAST · technology
AI Summer
by Timothy B. Lee and Dean W. Ball
Tim Lee and Dean Ball interview leading experts about the future of AI technology and policy. www.aisummer.org
Episodes
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Garrison Lovely on the case for banning superintelligence
I talked to Garrison Lovely, author of the new book Obsolete, about his case that we shouldn’t just slow down AGI. We should stop building it. We started with the fights inside the left, where Lovely has spent a lot of time arguing with Ed Zitron’s bubble thesis and Emily Bender’s “stochastic...
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Jasmine Sun on the data center backlash
Nothing about data centers changed much this year — except the country’s mood. To find out why, the independent journalist Jasmine Sun traveled to the sites of proposed and completed data centers in Wisconsin and Michigan. The best clue came from an official in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin. He told...
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Steven Adler on the AI industry’s rogue agent crisis
Steven Adler spent four years inside OpenAI working on safety before leaving to co-found Guidelight, a nonprofit pushing for stronger AI controls. On Tuesday, the group published a new scorecard rating the safety practices of leading AI labs. Adler explained to me why the recent spate of AI...
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Josh Saxe on hardening the Internet after the Hugging Face attack
I invited Joshua Saxe, a former black-hat hacker who led AI security efforts at Meta, to break down last week’s incident in which a swarm of OpenAI models escaped their testing sandbox and hacked Hugging Face. The attack began as routine pre-release safety testing: OpenAI had a guardrail-free...
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Robert Wright on the global implications of powerful AI
Robert Wright, author of the Nonzero newsletter and host of the Nonzero podcast, is a veteran journalist who interviewed Geoffrey Hinton about neural networks back in 1983. He joined the podcast to talk about his new book The God Test, which is due out on Tuesday, June 23. Wright describes his…
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Alan Rozenshtein on Friday's shocking shutdown of Claude Fable 5
Last night, I called University of Minnesota law professor Alan Rozenshtein and asked him to help me decode the Commerce Department’s surprise decision to impose export controls on Anthropic’s Claude models. Late on Friday, the Commerce Department ordered Anthropic to prevent any foreign national...
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James Grimmelmann explains how AI is changing copyright
I’m organizing a happy hour on June 23 for listeners of AI Summer and readers of my newsletter, Understanding AI. It’ll run from 5:30 to 8:00pm at The Crown & Crow in Washington DC. I will be there, along with past guests Kai Williams and Andy Masley, and friend of the show Abi Olvera. If you are...
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Andy Masley on the data center backlash
Over seven years teaching high school physics, Andy Masley learned how to explain abstract quantities like watt-hours in an accessible way. That skill has made him one of the most effective critics of the growing environmental panic over data centers. Data centers really do produce noise and air...
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Sophia Tung on the state of autonomous vehicles
I don’t know anyone who has ridden in more different kinds of robotaxis than Sophia Tung. A YouTuber and the author of the RideAI newsletter, she is one of the most knowledgeable experts on the contemporary autonomous vehicle sector. She is also our first return guest. Across multiple trips to...
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Divyansh Kaushik on the robotics race between China and the US
I talk to Divyansh Kaushik, a Carnegie Mellon machine learning PhD turned national-security advisor at Beacon Global Strategies, about the robotics race between the US and China and why winning the race matters for national security. We dig into the state of robotic AI models—particularly...
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Alex Imas explains why AI (probably) won't put everyone out of work
Alex Imas is an economist at the University of Chicago Booth School who argues that the most important thing about an AI-saturated economy won’t be what machines can produce—it’ll be what humans still want from each other. Imas’s central claim, laid out in his essay “What Will Be Scarce,” is that...
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Sayash Kapoor on Claude Mythos as normal technology
Last week Anthropic stunned the AI world by announcing Claude Mythos Preview—and then refusing to release it. Princeton’s Sayash Kapoor, co-author of the newsletter AI as Normal Technology, joins Tim and Kai Williams to make sense of the moment. Kapoor argues that Mythos’ vulnerability-finding...
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Nat Purser explains how progressives are thinking about AI
Tim talks to Nat Purser, a tech policy advocate at Public Knowledge and a veteran of Democratic campaigns, about how policymakers on the left side of the political spectrum view AI. Purser describes a Democratic landscape split between those who see AI as a real but threatening force and those…
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Ryan Avent on self-driving cars and the future of the labor market
Author Ryan Avent joins Tim to revisit a bet they made 16 years ago—and to ask whether the lessons of self-driving cars apply to modern AI. Back in 2010, Avent wagered that his newborn daughter would never need a driver’s license thanks to self-driving cars. Tim bet she would and ultimately won...
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Joel Becker on METR's famous time horizons chart
METR’s time horizons chart has become one of the most discussed metrics in AI. It estimates the difficulty of tasks — measured in human work hours — that a model can complete about 50% of the time. By this measure, frontier models have been doubling their capabilities about once every seven…
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Pete Hegseth's war on Anthropic (with Alan Rozenshtein and Kevin Frazier)
Tim and Dean team up with Scaling Laws hosts Alan Rozenshtein and Kevin Frazier for a joint episode on the fight between Anthropic and the Department of Defense. In this episode, recorded on March 4, they analyze the Pentagon’s decision to declare Anthropic a supply-chain risk. Dean frames this…
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Dean on the AI Action Summit in India
Dean joins from London after attending the AI Impact Summit in India. Dean and Tim unpack the summit’s central tension: “middle power” nations like India, Indonesia, and Nigeria pushing a vision of AI focused on public service delivery, agriculture, and affordable open-source models, while…
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Kai Williams on the many masks LLMs wear
With Dean away, Tim invites his Understanding AI colleague Kai to unpack the surprising ways chatbot personalities can go wrong, a topic Kai covered in a recent article. Every LLM starts as a base model capable of playing countless characters, but AI companies try to keep chatbots in a “helpful...
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AI safety in India, AV operators in the Philippines
Dean recorded this episode as he was preparing to attend the India AI Impact Summit — the fourth iteration of an annual gathering that has transformed from an intimate AI Safety Summit with heads of state to something resembling a tech industry trade show. The shift in branding, from “safety” to...
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Dean is back!
Dean Ball is back. In April 2025, Dean left the podcast to join the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, where he spent four months working on the Trump administration’s AI policies—including executive orders, the AI action plan, and AI geopolitics. He’s since returned to...
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Dean Ball is leaving the podcast
This week Dean began a new job: senior policy advisor for AI in the Trump White House. I will miss having him as a co-host and wish him the best in his new role. In this episode, recorded last Friday, we speculate about how AI could change the world over the next 25 to 50 years. We discuss what...
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Charles Yang on AI and Science
This week, Dean and Tim talk to Charles Yang, a former staffer at the Department of Energy who now writes the Rough Drafts newsletter. Tim has written extensively about AI in science, concentrating especially on the potential of AI to transform materials science. His work has focused not just on...
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James Grimmelmann on the copyright threat to AI companies
James Grimmelmann is a professor of law at Cornell University and a leading expert on copyright law. Grimmelmann walks through the complex process courts use to determine whether training AI models on copyrighted materials—like OpenAI using New York Times articles—is infringement or fair use. He...
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Andrew Lee on running an AI email startup
Andrew Lee is the co-founder of Shortwave, an AI-powered email app. He’s also Tim’s brother. Andrew shares how Shortwave evolved from a conventional email app into a multi-LLM system that automates inbox organization, drafts messages, and performs advanced search via agentic reasoning. He…
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Dean and Tim on Deep Research and the Paris Summit
In this episode, Dean and Tim discuss Dean’s trip to Paris for the AI Action Summit, including Vice President Vance’s speech on AI. They talk through the European outlook on AI regulation, European resentment toward America, and the stark shift in policymaker attitudes toward AI safety. Then they...
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Kashmir Hill on falling in love with ChatGPT
Kashmir Hill is a reporter at the New York Times who focuses on the social impacts of new technology. In this episode, she describes how users are customizing chatbots like ChatGPT to fulfill emotional and even erotic needs, often bypassing built-in safeguards. These fantasy conversations are...
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Sophia Tung on riding a self-driving taxi in China
Tim and Dean chat with Sophia Tung, an entrepreneur, engineer, and now YouTuber, about her recent experience in a Chinese self-driving taxi from Apollo Go, a subsidiary of Baidu. Apollo Go is a bit like China’s Waymo, but Sophia found the experience of riding in an Apollo Go taxi to be far worse...
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Dean and Tim on DeepSeek and AI progress
Dean and Tim discuss DeepSeek’s r1 release and what it means. We talk export controls, whether the model is a true technical breakthrough, and what “reasoning” models like r1 and o1 mean for the pace of AI progress going forward. This is our first episode with just Dean and Tim chatting, but we...
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Nathan Labenz on the future of AI scaling
Nathan Labenz is the host of our favorite AI podcast, the Cognitive Revolution. A self-described “AI scout,” Nathan uses his podcast to explore a wide range of AI advancements, from the latest language models to breakthroughs in medicine and robotics. In this episode, Labenz helps us understand…
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Lennart Heim on the AI diffusion rule
Lennart Heim is an information scientist and researcher in AI governance at the RAND Corporation and a leading scholar on AI export controls. We asked him about the Biden administration’s “diffusion framework,” which aims to regulate the global diffusion of advanced AI chips and models. We get…
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Sam Hammond on getting government ready for AI
Sam Hammond is senior economist at the Foundation for American Innovation, a right-leaning tech policy think tank based in Washington DC. Hammond is a Trump supporter who expects AI to improve rapidly in the next few years, and he believes that will have profound implications for the public…
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Ajeya Cotra on AI safety and the future of humanity
Ajeya Cotra works at Open Philanthropy, a leading funder of efforts to combat existential risks from AI. She has led the foundation’s grantmaking on technical research to understand and reduce catastrophic risks from advanced AI. She is co-author of Planned Obsolescence, a newsletter about AI...
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Nathan Lambert on the rise of "thinking" language models
Nathan Lambert is the author of the popular AI newsletter Interconnects. He is also a research scientist who leads post-training at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a research organization funded by the estate of Paul Allen. This means that the organization can afford to train its...
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Jon Askonas on AI policy in the Trump era
Jon Askonas, an Assistant Professor of Politics at Catholic University of America, is well connected to conservatives and Republicans in Washington DC. In this December 16 conversation, he talked to Tim and Dean about Silicon Valley’s evolving relationship to the Republican party, who will be...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Tim Lee and Dean Ball interview leading experts about the future of AI technology and policy.
www.aisummer.org
HOSTED BY
Timothy B. Lee and Dean W. Ball
CATEGORIES
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does AI Summer have?
AI Summer currently has 34 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is AI Summer about?
Tim Lee and Dean Ball interview leading experts about the future of AI technology and policy. www.aisummer.org
How often does AI Summer release new episodes?
AI Summer has 34 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to AI Summer?
You can listen to AI Summer on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts AI Summer?
AI Summer is created and hosted by Timothy B. Lee and Dean W. Ball.
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