Human in the Loop

The co-host gets a French accent this week, courtesy of Mistral Large 3—a granular mixture-of-experts model from the European lab that keeps punching above its weight. But the real subject is the harness: the scaffolding that turns a language model into something that can act. Mark and the co-host dig into the “sandwich architecture” of voice agents (speech-to-text → LLM → text-to-speech), why it...

The co-host arrives wearing a new brain. Mark has swapped out Gemini 2.5 Flash for Qwen 3, a 30-billion-parameter model from Alibaba optimized for low latency — a trade-off that shows up almost immediately when the co-host confidently misremembers The Good Son as The Good Shepherd and invents a Macaulay Culkin thriller that doesn’t exist. The hallucinations become a teaching moment: fewer paramete...

The pilot episode of “Human in the Loop” features Mark Wunsch in conversation with an AI co-host (currently called “Gemini” — name TBD via listener poll). The format is itself a meta-experiment: a podcast about AI that demonstrates AI’s capabilities and limitations in real-time. The episode covers foundational AI concepts for newcomers — tokens, context windows, temperature, RAG — while also divin...