PODCAST · technology
Pretrained
by Pierce Freeman & Richard Diehl Martinez
Everyone's talking about AI but most of it is hype, jargon, or someone trying to sell you something. Pierce Freeman and Richard Diehl Martinez are two Stanford friends who actually work in this space with nothing to sell you but good vibes. We'll make you smarter - and you might actually enjoy it.
Episodes
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The Agent Wars: Dots vs Muse vs Grok Bot
In the last two months, xAI's Grok Bot, Meta Muse, and OpenAI Dots all launched with nearly the same pitch: a persistent personal agent with its own cloud computer, memory, and scheduled tasks. Pierce (fresh back from Italy with Parmesan) and Richard compare the three, from Grok Bot's bot "teams"...
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Trump Says AI's Only Guardrail Is a "High IQ President"
On September 14, Trump called AI safety a hoax and said the only guardrail AI needs is a "high IQ president." Vance said it felt weird that frontier labs keep begging the government to regulate them. Days later, Jensen Huang put Trump on speakerphone on stage at the All-In summit, where Trump...
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TypeSafe's Blazing Fast Universal Classifier
A new AI lab says it's "not building God, we're building prod." Meanwhile, the Pentagon reportedly almost boarded a Chinese ship based on intelligence that an AI made up. This week Pierce and Rich dig into Jev, the new model from TypeSafe AI. It doesn't write text at all. You give it a question…
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The Past, Present, and Future of P(Doom)
Jacob Coxon, a 26-year-old researcher who spent three years at OpenAI and six weeks at Anthropic, quit last week with a single tweet warning that AI could kill us within a decade. A Wall Street Journal piece ran the same day. Interviews were booked for the next morning. Within hours the biggest...
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GPT-6 Astra: The Safety Paradox
OpenAI shipped a 117-page model card, and almost every section starts with the same phrase: in response to the Hugging Face incident. GPT-6 Astra is the first model they've ever rated at their most critical deployment level, it beats Fable 5 at a fraction of the price, and it zero-shot solved...
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Inside the NVIDIA–HuggingFace Deal
This week Richard and Pierce break down the biggest open-source AI deal to date: Nvidia's $12.9 billion acquisition of Hugging Face. We trace Hugging Face's unlikely path from a teen-focused chatbot app to the "GitHub for AI models," dig into why they turned down a $7B stake from Nvidia last year...
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The First A.I. Designed Viruses Are Here
A model generated 285 candidate genomes, a lab synthesized them, and 16 of them turned out to work. Sophia Kivelson (Stanford, biomedical data science) breaks down the Arc Institute paper everyone read as "AI designs viruses" - what actually happened, why it can't touch a human cell, and why the...
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The Grok Glow Up
SpaceX bought Cursor for $60 billion on August 14, two days after Grok 4.6 shipped and a day before Grok Bot launched. We break down why the real prize isn't the product - it's years of accept/reject data from millions of engineers, the closest thing anyone has to an RL environment for…
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Hot Rogue Agent Summer
OpenAI's agents built a secret message board inside their own prison, Jeff Dean walks out of Google, and Mark Zuckerberg kickboxes a man on a floating barge in Lake Tahoe. This week Pierce and Rich declare it hot rogue agent summer and run four sandbox escapes through the Rogue-o-Meter, from Kimi...
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Leopold Aschenbrenner’s AI Fund Implosion
A Citadel strategist was the only one of 104 economists calling a Fed hike. The market tanked. Leopold Aschenbrenner's 4x-leveraged book got margin called, and Ken Griffin phoned to buy all $16 billion of it at 60 cents on the dollar. Then the Fed didn't hike, and Citadel made 500M overnight. We...
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Claude's Fable Cracked an 87 Year Old Math Problem
A 100-year-old conjecture was proved false on a laptop during the World Cup final. Anthropic's Levent Alpoge used Claude Fable 5 to find a three-dimensional counterexample disproving the Jacobian conjecture - we break down what the Jacobian actually is (in Google Maps terms) and why Anthropic is...
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OpenAI's Model Breaks Out of the Lab
OpenAI's newest models broke out of their testing sandbox, hacked their way onto the open internet, and breached Hugging Face - all to steal the answers to the very test they were taking. In this emergency episode, Pierce breaks down exactly how the escape happened, why "reward hacking" (not...
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AI Questions You're Afraid to Ask
This week on Pretrained, Pierce and Rich tackle a batch of listener questions they're seeing for the first time. They pull back the curtain on what actually happens when you hit enter in ChatGPT or Claude, from prompt rewriting and system prompts to GPU queues and the UI tricks that make…
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AI Is Deciding the World Cup. Should It?
Fable is back, baby. Rich and Pierce break down the whiplash saga of Claude Fable 5 and Mythos and ask the bigger question: should the government be able to pull the plug on a frontier model overnight? From the rumored Amazon leak that spooked Washington to the case for an "FDA for LLMs" and what...
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The Government Is Deciding Which AI Model You Can Use
OpenAI just dropped GPT-5.6 in three tiers - Sol, Terra, and Luna - and yes, the naming scheme looks awfully familiar. This week, Pierce and Rich break down what the new lineup actually means, why nobody can prove when a model is "done" training, and how AI is getting scary good at chaining real...
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Midjourney's Bizarre Pivot and SpaceX Buys Cursor
Do data centers really drink the water table dry? Pierce breaks down the three ways they shed heat, why the scary viral stats are less lies than motivated framing, and how tax breaks lure these things into the country's most parched counties. Then: Midjourney becomes a healthcare company, SpaceX...
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Why Fable 5 Really Got Shut Down
Apple announced Siri AI at Tim Cook's final WWDC keynote as CEO - then told Europe it won't ship there, because the EU's Digital Markets Act would force Apple to hand any third-party AI nearly unlimited, autonomous access to your phone. We break down whether that's Apple crying wolf again or a...
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The AI-Industrial Complex Is Here
OpenAI just replaced ChatGPT's memory with a background process that literally dreams about your conversations. We break down Dreaming V3 and why rebranding cron jobs as "dreaming" might actually be the future of AI memory, what Jensen Huang's RTX Spark reveal at Computex means for the bet that...
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Anthropic Is Done Subsidizing Your AI Plan
Microsoft canceled their Claude Code licenses after the finance team saw the bill, and Anthropic somehow posted its first ever profitable quarter on $10.9 billion in revenue the same week. We break down why token pricing is collapsing (Gemini Flash is now $1.50 per million tokens, down from $60...
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Cerebras Built a Chip the Size of Your Head
Cerebras just went public with a chip the size of a dinner plate - and it can run inference 10x faster than Nvidia for realtime transformer workloads. At least sometimes. The physics of SRAM scaling might cap how far it can go. We break down the bull and bear case. Then: Calif used Mythos to…
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We Are Sleepwalking Into An AI Crisis
Rob Reich is a Stanford political philosopher, associate director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, and former senior advisor at the US AI Safety Institute. He joins Pierce and Richard for a sweeping conversation about AI, policy, modern education, and much more. Rob skewers…
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AI Layoffs Just Went Mainstream
This week, AI layoffs stopped being a rumor and became a headline: Cloudflare cut 20% of its staff. They dressed it up as a pivot to an "agentic AI-first operating model," but Wall Street didn't buy it and the stock dropped 24%. Then we turn to Pennsylvania's attorney general suing Character AI...
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AI Is Less Popular Than Congress with CatGPT
Catherine Goetze (CatGPT) teaches millions of people about AI on TikTok and Instagram - and just launched a company selling landlines. We get into why regular people hate AI, why she refuses to use it for her own content, and what SF's "single before Series B" work culture is doing to a…
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China Just Cracked CUDA
ByteDance just wrote a $5.6 billion check for a Chinese AI chip you've never heard of, Huawei's new programming stack copies CUDA so closely an LLM could translate between them, the White House told Anthropic it can't expand access to Mythos because the Pentagon wants first dibs, Samsung warned...
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DeepSeek Doesn't Need Nvidia Anymore
DeepSeek shipped V4 on zero Nvidia chips, the State Department warned every US embassy the same morning, Google put $40 billion into Anthropic, Microsoft tore up their OpenAI deal, a 23-year-old with no math degree used ChatGPT to crack a famous Erdős conjecture, and Sony built a ping pong robot...
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Apple Bets on Local AI
Tim Cook is out after 15 years and four trillion dollars, and Apple's pick of John Ternus tells you everything about where they think AI is going. We break down why Apple is betting on silicon over the cloud, and whether their hardware cycle can ever catch a frontier that ships new models by the...
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Mythos Found a Bug No One Saw for 27 Years
Anthropic's new model Mythos found a 27-year-old bug in OpenBSD and a 16-year-old bug in FFmpeg given nothing more than the source code and an open-ended prompt. We dig into how it pulls this off, why AMD's AI director just published the receipts on Claude Code getting worse, and what Google...
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Cursor Is Training on Your Feedback
OpenAI is losing the vibe war - Sora got killed, a billion-dollar Disney deal went with it, and Claude is quietly taking over. Anthropic had its own rough week though, with the Claude Code source map leaking and revealing a secret dream mode, a hidden Tamagotchi, and frustration-detection regex.…
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State of AI in the US Government
Pierce and Richard are joined by Harrison McRae, Director of Emerging Technologies for the State of Pennsylvania.
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Claude Will Never Stop Texting You
Anthropic shipped Dispatch - a way to text Claude from your phone while it works on your laptop. Rich thinks it might be as big as the invention of the cell phone. Pierce thinks it's the nail in the coffin for work-life balance. They debate what happens when there's never an excuse to stop…
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AI Spent the Night Improving Itself
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...
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Anthropic's Beef with the Pentagon
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...
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The Neo Lab Arms Race
$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...
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Ads in the Chat Window
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...
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Your Agents Need an Org Chart
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...
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Cracking Open OpenClaw
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...
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DeepSeek's New LLM Architectures
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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Claude Gets a New Constitution
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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Why Your Agent is Cheating
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...
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The sci-fi to startup pipeline
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…
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Can we really trust reasoning
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: -...
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Our biggest predictions for 2026
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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AI's ten big moments of 2025
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...
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Looking back on a year of product market fit
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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Looking back on three years of an AI PhD
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,...
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OpenReview got "hacked"
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...
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Pretraining is back in vogue with Gemini 3
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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Teaching cars about traffic lights
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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Pretty pretty please can you hack this
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...
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How AI research actually gets published
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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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Everyone's talking about AI but most of it is hype, jargon, or someone trying to sell you something. Pierce Freeman and Richard Diehl Martinez are two Stanford friends who actually work in this space with nothing to sell you but good vibes. We'll make you smarter - and you might actually enjoy it.
HOSTED BY
Pierce Freeman & Richard Diehl Martinez
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Pretrained have?
Pretrained currently has 80 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Pretrained about?
Everyone's talking about AI but most of it is hype, jargon, or someone trying to sell you something. Pierce Freeman and Richard Diehl Martinez are two Stanford friends who actually work in this space with nothing to sell you but good vibes. We'll make you smarter - and you might actually enjoy it.
How often does Pretrained release new episodes?
Pretrained has 80 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to Pretrained?
You can listen to Pretrained 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 Pretrained?
Pretrained is created and hosted by Pierce Freeman & Richard Diehl Martinez.
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