Hidden Layers: AI and the People Behind It

What if AI could design proteins to help your immune system find and kill cancer cells? That's not a hypothetical — it's what 28 teams across 40 countries attempted in the Bits-to-Binders Challenge, an open-science competition organized by PhD students at the University of Texas at Austin. In this episode, Ron sits down with three of the organizers — Clay Kosonocky, Daryl Barth, and Aaron Feller —...

What can we actually learn from the recent Anthropic code leak? In this episode of Hidden Layers, Ron Green, Michael Wharton, and Dr. ZZ Si unpack what the leak reveals about how a frontier AI company may be building agentic systems in practice. They explore Anthropic’s apparent approach to memory, skills, and context compaction, and why the biggest takeaway is not model weights, but the harness a...

Is the AI bubble narrative itself a bubble? Billions of dollars are flowing into chips, data centers, and frontier models. From the outside, it can look speculative. But from inside the industry, the signal looks very different. In this episode of Hidden Layers, Ron Green is joined by Michael Wharton and Dr. ZZ Si to discuss what it actually feels like to build with AI today. They explore rapid ad...

Are AI coding tools actually replacing programmers, or just changing how software gets built? In this episode of Hidden Layers, Ron Green sits down with Dr. ZZ Si and Michael Wharton to unpack what has shifted with modern coding agents, what has not, and where the hype breaks down. They share concrete examples from their own workflows, including how coding tools have moved from autocomplete to han...

What if the most powerful AI in your organization isn’t the biggest model you can buy, but the one trained on data only you own? In this episode of Hidden Layers, Ron Green is joined by Dr. ZZ Si and Michael Wharton to break down why domain-specific AI models consistently outperform general-purpose systems in real enterprise environments. They explore how narrowly scoped models deliver higher accu...

2025 was another defining year for artificial intelligence. In this special AI Year in Review episode of Hidden Layers, Ron Green is joined by Emma Pirchalski, Michael Wharton, and Dr. ZZ Si to break down what actually mattered in AI this year. The team recaps the biggest developments from 2025, revisits their predictions from 2024 to see what held up (and what didn’t), and shares honest, experien...

Artificial intelligence is shifting from prediction to autonomy—and “agentic AI” is leading the charge. In this episode of Hidden Layers, KUNGFU.AI’s Ron Green, Dr. ZZ Si, and Michael Wharton unpack what it really means for machines to act on their own, what’s hype versus real progress, and how far we are from true artificial general intelligence (AGI). They discuss how coding agents are transform...

In this episode of Hidden Layers, Ron is joined by Michael Wharton and Dr. ZZ Si to explore one of the most pressing and puzzling issues in AI: hallucinations. Large language models can tackle advanced topics like medicine, coding, and physics, yet still generate false information with complete confidence. The discussion unpacks why hallucinations happen, whether they’re truly inevitable, and what...

In this episode of Hidden Layers, we dive into the most important AI developments of the month. We cover OpenAI’s highly anticipated and controversial GPT-5 release, debate where we really are on the AGI timeline, explore groundbreaking new world models like Google’s Genie 3 and Tencent’s Huanyuan Gamecraft, and unpack Meta’s DINO V3 image encoder breakthrough.

In this episode of Hidden Layers, host Ron talks with Dr. Hannah Lu, assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin and core faculty at the Odin Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences. Dr. Lu is pioneering the use of AI-powered surrogate models to make complex scientific simulations—like CO₂ absorption in geological formations—faster, more accurate, and more useful for real...

In this episode of Hidden Layers: Decoded, Ron Green, Dr. ZZ Si, and Michael Wharton unpack July’s biggest AI developments—from flawed reasoning tests to surprising training breakthroughs. Apple’s “Illusion of Thinking” paper draws sharp critiques—from both humans and language models. Meta revives a forgotten 2019 attention mechanism to reshape scaling laws. Video generation tools from BlackForest...

In this episode of Hidden Layers , Ron Green sits down with Dr. Karl Friston—world-renowned neuroscientist and originator of the Free Energy Principle—and Dan Mapes, founder of Verses AI and the Spatial Web Foundation. Together, they explore how neuroscience is beginning to reshape artificial intelligence. They break down complex but powerful ideas like active inference, biologically plausible AI,...

In this episode of Hidden Layers: Decoded, Ron Green, Dr. ZZ Si, and Michael Wharton explore the latest AI breakthroughs, including Sakana AI’s biologically-inspired “Continuous Thought Machines,” the self-taught coding model Absolute Zero, and Salesforce’s unified vision-language system BLIP3-o. They discuss the growing importance of reinforcement learning in a data-constrained world, Google’s di...

In this episode of Hidden Layers, Ron Green sits down with Dr. Risto Miikkulainen — Vice President of AI Research at Cognizant Advanced AI Labs and Professor of Computer Science at UT Austin — to explore the fascinating world of evolutionary computation. They dive deep into the differences between supervised learning, reinforcement learning, and evolutionary techniques, and why evolutionary approa...

In this episode of Hidden Layers , Ron Green talks with Dr. ZZ Si, Michael Wharton, and Reed Coke about recent AI developments. They cover Anthropic’s work on Claude 3.5 and model interpretability, OpenAI’s GPT-4 image generation and its underlying architecture, and a new approach to latent reasoning from the Max Planck Institute. They also discuss synthetic data in light of NVIDIA’s acquisition o...

In this episode of Hidden Layers, host Ron Green sits down with Dr. Anna Ivanova, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Georgia Tech and Director of the Language, Intelligence, and Thought Lab. Dr. Ivanova's research explores the intricate relationship between language, cognition, and artificial intelligence, shedding light on how the brain processes language and how large language models (LLMs) co...

In this episode of Hidden Layers: Decoded, Ron Green, Dr. ZZ Si, and Michael Wharton explore the latest AI breakthroughs, including DeepSeek’s R1 model, Meta’s work on intuitive physics, and Stanford’s S1 model. They discuss the rise of cost-effective reinforcement learning, diffusion-based language models, and DeepMind’s advances in geometry-solving AI. The team also dives into AI-driven biology...

In this episode of Hidden Layers, host Ron Green speaks with Dr. Peter Stone, a leading expert in AI and robotics, about the evolution of autonomous systems. They explore multi-agent AI, RoboCup’s ambitious goal of creating robot soccer players that can beat humans by 2050, and the ongoing hardware vs. software challenge in robotics. Dr. Stone shares insights on the power of large language models,...

In this episode of Hidden Layers: Decoded, we dive into cutting-edge AI advancements over the last month. Explore Agentic AI and innovations like DeepMind Genie 2 and Cosmos Text2World, transforming virtual environments. Discover breakthroughs like RStar Math and DeepSeek v3, delivering efficiency and performance in reasoning and problem-solving. We also discuss test-time scaling, coding agents, a...

In this special 2024 AI Year in Review, Ron is joined by AI experts ZZ Si (Co-Founder & Distinguished Engineer), Emma Pirchalski (AI Strategist), and Michael Wharton (VP of Engineering) to reflect on the most important AI moments of 2024. They come together to discuss the defining stories, key breakthroughs, and major challenges that shaped AI in 2024. Ron leads the conversation, drawing out t...

In this episode of Hidden Layers: Decoded, Ron Green teams up with KUNGFU.AI 's ZZ Si and Michael Wharton to explore groundbreaking advancements in artificial intelligence. From DeepMind’s AlphaFold 3 revolutionizing computational biology to debates on the limits of scaling AI models, the conversation covers all the latest AI news from the last month. Highlights include robotic surgery advancement...

In this episode of "Hidden Layers," Ron Green dives into the transformative impact of AI on software development with Peter Wang, Chief AI and Innovation Officer at Anaconda. They discuss the rise of AI coding assistants, tools like GitHub Copilot and Cursor, and their potential to change how developers work. From coding support to the future of AI-native languages, they explore whether AI could r...

In this episode of Hidden Layers, Ron Green is joined by KUNGFU.AI 's Michael Wharton and Dr. Steve Kramer to discuss the latest news in AI. They cover OpenAI’s leadership turnover, the rise of smaller, more efficient AI models, and the growing importance of AI governance. Plus, they explore Meta's Llama 3.2, a new multimodal model, and share insights from recent AI conferences. The conversation c...

In this episode of Hidden Layers , host Ron Green talks with Cole Camplese, the Chief Information Officer at the University of Texas at Austin, about the transformative impact of AI in higher education. With over 25 years of experience in driving digital transformation, Cole discusses how AI is reshaping universities, from personalized learning to addressing the digital divide. They explore the ch...

In this episode of Hidden Layers , Ron Green and Michael Wharton dive into the latest advancements in artificial intelligence, with news from DeepMind, OpenAI, Waymo, Apple, and more. They discuss OpenAI's rumored Strawberry initiative, which promises enhanced reasoning capabilities for ChatGPT, the groundbreaking potential of Alpha Proteo for computational biology, and new developments in autonom...