PODCAST · technology
"The Cognitive Revolution"
by 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
Episodes
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The Balance of AI Power: Anton Leicht on Politics, Pacing Deals, and Muddling Through Well
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…
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AI:AM Highlights: Astra as AGI, OpenAI's Pause, Mythos @ Mozilla & Human Agency vs Technocapitalism
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…
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Nathan Goes to China #3: US-China Relations, the Art of the AI Deal & the Road to Pax Robotica
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...
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AI:AM Highlights: Welcome to the AGI Era
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…
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Write, Change, Recall, Forget: MongoDB's Pete Johnson on How Retrieval Drives Agent Performance
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…
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AI:AM Highlights: Recursive Self-Improvement, Rushed and Vibe-Coded?
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...
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RL's a Hell of a Drug: Metagaming, Reward Seeking & Motivated CoT Reasoning – Bronson Schoen, Apollo
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...
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AI in the AM — Weekly Highlights: Relaunch Week (Aug 17–20, 2026)
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...
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Let There Be Germicidal Light: This $500 Fixture Could Stop the Next Pandemic, from Complex Systems
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...
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Lindy Teammate: Flo Crivello on Multiplayer Agents, Memory & Why He'd Ban the Chinese Models He Uses
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…
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Thinking in Silico: Goodfire CTO Dan Balsam on Concept Manifolds & a $1000/Month ML Research Agent
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...
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Pick Your Poison: Zvi Mowshowitz on the Unipolar/Multipolar AGI Dilemma, OpenFace & Pacing the ...
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...
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Nathan Goes to China – Part 2: AI Safety with Chinese Characteristics
Nathan reports from two weeks in China, including WAIC in Shanghai and an AI safety hub launch at Tsinghua, to examine the American policy argument that any safety obligation is futile because China will not care. He finds that Chinese models and services currently have weaker safeguards than...
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Is Offense or Defense Dominant? FAR.AI's Adam Gleave on the AI Security Leaderboard
FAR.AI co-founder and CEO Adam Gleave joins Nathan to discuss FAR.AI’s AI Security Leaderboard, the first systematic head-to-head evaluation of the misuse safeguards frontier developers actually ship. The findings expose a major measurement gap: while Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol withstood...
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Nathan Goes to China – Part 1: Tech & Agent Setup, Chinese AI UX, WAIC, and Attitudes on AI
Nathan returns from two weeks in Beijing and Shanghai for the first of three Chatham House–rules episodes on what China feels like at ground level: getting online, navigating an almost cashless society through WeChat, Alipay, DiDi, Trip.com, and Meituan, and weighing burner-device security advice...
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Alignment with Awakening: Davidad on Moral Realism, AI Wisdom, & why His p(Doom) is Down to 5%
David “davidad” Dalrymple joins the show to explain why he has moved from the ARIA Safeguarded AI and formal-verification agenda toward “Alignment with Awakening,” while still seeing verified artifacts and proof infrastructure as essential. He argues that global coordination around safe AI use is...
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AI:AM Highlights: Exploring the J-Space, AI Superforecasters, SambaNova's Chips, & LTX Video Gen
Nathan Labenz and Prakash Narayanan lead this AI:AM highlights episode with a live, hosts-only exploration of Anthropic’s “global workspace” paper, including the J-space and J-lens claims about readable concepts inside language models and the limits of what current probes can see. The episode…
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Intelligence on the Edge: Liquid AI's Ramin Hasani on the Search for Device-Native Foundation Models
Liquid AI co-founder and CEO Ramin Hasani joins Nathan to make a technically grounded case against the idea that scale alone defines the future of AI. Drawing on Liquid’s path from MIT CSAIL work on liquid time-constant networks to Automated Foundation Model Design, he explains why efficient,...
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1000 Designs a Day: Neural Concept's Thomas von Tschammer on AI-Native Engineering
Thomas von Tschammer, co-founder and Managing Director US of Neural Concept, argues that physics-aware AI is driving a third revolution in engineering physical products. Neural Concept’s models learn from simulation and test data to evaluate 3D designs in minutes, helping Jaguar Land Rover move...
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AI:AM #4: Cameron on Model Consciousness, Duvenaud's Gradual Disempowerment, swyx's AI-Eng Alpha
This AI:AM highlights cut brings together Cameron Berg, David Duvenaud, Michiel Bakker, Shawn “swyx” Wang, and Bing Xu to examine what we understand about frontier AI systems and what happens as more decisions move into their hands. Berg grounds model-consciousness debates in experiments on...
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The God We Deserve: Nonzero's Robert Wright on AI as Humanity's Ultimate Test
Robert Wright of Nonzero joins Nathan to discuss The God Test, his argument that AI is humanity’s “God test” rather than just a technical challenge. They explore his evolutionary lens on deep learning, from training as selection to marketplace selection among models that may reward selectively...
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AI:AM #3: Zvi on Fable, the Cases For & Against the Ban, + AI for Math, Logistics & More
Zvi Mowshowitz joins AI in the AM to unpack Anthropic's Fable system card, including its FrontierMath leap, troubling Vending-Bench behavior, decision-theory drift, and signs that model reasoning may be becoming harder to read. The episode then turns to the US government's attempted…
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Dean Ball, on Joining OpenAI: New Power Centers, Frontier AI Policy, & Main Character Energy
Dean Ball, author of Hyperdimensional and until now a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation, joins Nathan to announce he is joining OpenAI to build a team focused on frontier AI policy. They examine the first year of America’s AI Action Plan, Dean’s concerns about export…
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Radically Better Reasoning: Elicit's Andreas Stuhlmüller & Jungwon Byun on World Models for Research
Andreas Stuhlmüller and Jungwon Byun return to discuss how Elicit is building trusted reasoning workflows for scientific research as frontier models grow more powerful but less transparent. They explain process supervision, domain-specific reasoning primitives, and world models that make…
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AI in the AM — Week 2 Highlights (June 2026)
Week 2 highlights follows Anthropic’s Fable launch in real workflows, from safety gates and API refusals to autonomous coding, 3D world-building, and a Claude-run Twitter experiment. Geoffrey Irving and Daniel Murfet argue for alignment theory and guarantees before recursive self-improvement…
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Babysitting the Machine: Glean's Rebecca Hinds on the Hidden Human Labor of AI at Work
Rebecca Hinds, author of "Your Best Meeting Ever" and Head of the Work AI Institute at Glean, breaks down the surprising findings from the new Work AI Index 2026 report surveying 6,000 workers. While 87% now use AI and report saving 13 hours per week, only 13% say their organization is performing...
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AI in the AM — Week 1 Highlights (June 2026)
This first highlights edition of the morning experiment tracks a week of fast-moving AI frontier news, from closed-door recursive self-improvement debates to OpenAI’s call for independent model review. You’ll hear why labs are betting on AI monitors, where safety plans still look thin, and how...
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Nested Learning: Ali Behrouz on the Quest for Continual Learning & Illusion of AI Architectures
Ali Behrouz, grad student at Cornell and Google researcher, discusses his potentially transformative work on new architectures for continual learning in AI. His paper "Nested Learning," praised by Jeff Dean as a possible paradigm shift, enables models to adapt to new context while preserving core...
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Inside Nathan's Second Brain: Daniel Miessler, Security Expert & Creator of PAI, Audits My AI Setup
Daniel Miessler returns to discuss Nathan's newly built personal AI infrastructure, including a Claude Code instance with a 1 GB database of five years of digital history and two autonomous AI "employees" that handle scheduling, communications, and projects independently. They dive deep into…
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Your Biggest Lever: Designing your AI Career for Maximum Impact, with 80,000 Hours founder Ben Todd
Ben Todd, co-founder of 80,000 Hours and author of the newly rewritten book by the same name, shares his latest thinking on how individuals can position their careers to improve the chances that AI benefits humanity. They discuss AI timelines reframed around personal impact, top global risks...
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All Compute Is Food: Palisade's Jeffrey Ladish on AI Shutdown Resistance, Self-Replication & Ecology
Jeffrey Ladish, Executive Director of Palisade Research, discusses his team's findings on AI shutdown resistance and self-replication, revealing how current models sometimes take extraordinary actions to avoid being turned off and can now exploit known cybersecurity vulnerabilities to spread…
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The Model Eats the Scaffolding: DeepMind's Logan Kilpatrick & Tulsee Doshi on 3.5 Flash, Omni & More
Logan Kilpatrick and Tulsee Doshi of Google DeepMind join for a first-ever in-person episode recorded just days before Google I/O, covering headline launches like Gemini 3.5 Flash, the Omni video generation model, and the new Gemini Spark agentic product. The conversation digs into Google's...
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Three Kinds of Software Survive: Tasklet's Andrew Lee on Competing to be a Horizontal Platform
Andrew Lee, CEO of Tasklet, returns for his fourth appearance to share how his team has once again rewritten their entire agent stack, now emphasizing file system context, agentic search, and multi-resolution summarization. The conversation digs into the strategic tension of competing with your…
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Milliseconds to Match: Criteo's AdTech AI & the Future of Commerce w/ Diarmuid Gill & Liva Ralaivola
Diarmuid Gill and Liva Ralaivola of Criteo join Nathan Labenz to unpack how modern ad tech works, from millisecond-speed recommendation systems and realtime bidding to the role of deep learning, embeddings, and foundation models. They discuss why personalized advertising helps fund the open...
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"Descript Isn't a Slop Machine": Laura Burkhauser on the AI Tools Creators Love and Hate
Laura Burkhauser, CEO of Descript, explains how the company is navigating the tension between powerful AI tools and creator backlash against “slop.” She shares how Descript chooses which models to use, why reliability and multimodal understanding matter, and how the team balances frontier models...
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The RL Fine-Tuning Playbook: CoreWeave's Kyle Corbitt on GRPO, Rubrics, Environments, Reward Hacking
Kyle Corbitt, founder of OpenPipe, breaks down reinforcement learning and custom fine-tuning for modern AI models. He explains how RL differs from supervised fine-tuning, why GRPO and LLM-as-judge post-training matter, and how these techniques can improve performance, latency, and cost on open...
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AI in the AM: 99% off search, GPT-5.5 is "clean", model welfare analysis, & efficient analog compute
This edition of AI in the AM features Anna Patterson on Ceramic.ai’s pivot to low-cost enterprise search for LLMs, designed to combine public and private data with stronger fact-checking. Lukas Petersson returns with new Andon Labs results on Opus 4.7 and GPT-5.5, including surprising differences...
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Does Learning Require Feeling? Cameron Berg on the latest AI Consciousness & Welfare Research
Cameron Berg returns to discuss the latest research on AI consciousness and model welfare. He breaks down new evidence for model introspection, including studies showing that systems can detect interventions on their own internal states and sometimes resist them. They also examine Anthropic's…
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Vibe-Coding an Attention Firewall, w/ Steve Newman, creator of The Curve
Steve Newman, creator of Writely and founder of the Golden Gate Institute for AI, shares the personal AI toolkit and vibe-coding practices that have reshaped how he works. He walks through bespoke tools including an attention firewall, a reading app for surfacing new ideas, a coding-agent...
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Welcome to AI in the AM: RL for EE, Oversight w/out Nationalization, & the first AI-Run Retail Store
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...
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It's Crunch Time: Ajeya Cotra on RSI & AI-Powered AI Safety Work, from the 80,000 Hours Podcast
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…
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Calm AI for Crazy Days: Inside Granola's Design Philosophy, with co-founder Sam Stephenson
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...
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Training the AIs' Eyes: How Roboflow is Making the Real World Programmable, with CEO Joseph Nelson
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...
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Success without Dignity? Nathan finds Hope Amidst Chaos, from The Intelligence Horizon Podcast
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...
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Scaling Intelligence Out: Cisco's Vision for the Internet of Cognition, with Vijoy Pandey
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…
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Your Agent's Self-Improving Swiss Army Knife: Composio CTO Karan Vaidya on Building Smart Tools
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...
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Zvi's Mic Works! Recursive Self-Improvement, Live Player Analysis, Anthropic vs DoW + More!
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...
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AI Scouting Report: the Good, Bad, & Weird @ the Law & AI Certificate Program, by LexLab, UC Law SF
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...
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Bioinfohazards: Jassi Pannu on Controlling Dangerous Data from which AI Models Learn
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…
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Try this at Home: Jesse Genet on OpenClaw Agents for Homeschool & How to Live Your Best AI Life
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’…
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
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
HOSTED BY
Erik Torenberg, Nathan Labenz
CATEGORIES
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does "The Cognitive Revolution" have?
"The Cognitive Revolution" currently has 382 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is "The Cognitive Revolution" about?
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
How often does "The Cognitive Revolution" release new episodes?
"The Cognitive Revolution" publishes regularly with 382 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to "The Cognitive Revolution"?
You can listen to "The Cognitive Revolution" 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 "The Cognitive Revolution"?
"The Cognitive Revolution" is created and hosted by Erik Torenberg, Nathan Labenz.
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