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Dan and guest Paul Ford discuss Claude Opus 4.5's capabilities as a coding model. The episode explores how this tool can keep coding and coding autonomously without tripping over itself, marking new possibilities for software development. They examine design principles behind Claude Code, practical applications in building software, and broader implications of AI's evolution in development workflo...

Stewart Butterfield is the co-founder of Slack and Flickr, two of the most influential products in internet history. After selling Slack to Salesforce in one of tech's biggest acquisitions, he's been focused on family, philanthropy, and creative projects. In this rare podcast appearance, Stewart shares the product frameworks and leadership principles that most contributed to his success. From util...

There's a ubiquitous prop in just about every police procedural and conspiracy thriller: a cork board pinned with documents, newspaper clippings, and Polaroid photos, all connected by a web of red string. They go by many names, including pin boards, string boards, evidence boards, investigation walls, conspiracy walls, and walls of crazy. These boards can be vehicles of insight or manifestations o...

The episode features an interview with Dwarkesh Patel, a prominent podcaster known for going deep with subjects rather than oversimplifying content. The conversation covers his rise as an interviewer, particularly in AI discussions, and announces his upcoming book The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, co-authored with Gavin Leech and published through Stripe Press. The interview was recorded in...

This is one of the finalists in the 2025 review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I'll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you've read them all, I'll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked. Just as we don't accept students using AI to write their essays, we will not accept districts using AI t...

In his landmark multi-volume biography of Stalin, Stephen Kotkin shows how totalitarian power worked not just through terror from above, but through millions of everyday decisions from below. Currently a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution after 33 years at Princeton, Kotkin brings both deep archival work and personal experience to his understanding of Soviet life, having lived in Magnitogorsk...

Beset by colonial controversy, difficult finances and the discovery of a thief on the inside, Britain’s No 1 museum is in deep trouble. Can it restore its reputation? By Charlotte Higgins

Artificial general intelligence — an A.I. system that can beat humans at almost any cognitive task — is arriving in just a couple of years. That’s what people tell me — people who work in A.I. labs, researchers who follow their work, former White House officials. A lot of these people have been calling me over the last couple of months trying to convey the urgency. This is coming during President...

In the first episode of the Solid Podcast, we talked with Dennis Wingo, founder of Skycorp, in the former NASA McDonald’s where he’s been restoring the first images of the moon taken from space. After an hour of recounting his techno-archaeology exploits — reverse-engineering the arcane analog image-transmission systems that NASA’s engineers developed in the 1960s — Dennis paused and said, “and th...

We’re kicking off our newest series, the O’Reilly Solid Podcast, with an episode recorded in the manager’s office of a McDonald’s at NASA’s Ames Research Center. David Cranor and I (Jon Bruner) visited McMoon’s, as it’s known, to talk with Dennis Wingo, founder of two audacious “techno archaeology” efforts. In the first episode, we discuss the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project, which has rescue...

Narrated by David Duchovny, Searching for Hobey Baker re-contextualizes and brings to life the story of one of the greatest college athletes who has largely been lost to history. After Hobey Baker makes his triumphant Princeton hockey debut against Williams, we travel back to his early days attending St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire. He develops a reputation as both an athletic phenom and a kind...

Dharmesh Shah is the co-founder and CTO of HubSpot (currently valued at $30 billion) and one of the most fascinating founders I’ve ever met. Dharmesh is the keeper of HubSpot’s Culture Code, built ChatSpot (an AI chatbot built on top of HubSpot CRM) and a game called WordPlay (which grew to 16 million users), and also founded and writes for OnStartups, a top-ranking startup blog and community with...

From copyright violations to environmental concerns to the looming threat of the singularity, AI is a hot-button topic these days. Paul and Rich talk through many facets of this conversation, and discuss how they think about the AI components of Aboard. Plus: A little roleplay in which we learn that Paul thinks Aboard is an earnest mid-century cartoon character.

To better understand how neural networks learn to simulate writing, researchers trained simpler versions on synthetic children’s stories.

Demis Hassabis - Scaling, Superhuman AIs, AlphaZero atop LLMs, Rogue Nations Threat Wednesday 28 February 2024 https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/podcast Open in Pocket Casts Share Here is my episode with Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind We discuss: Why scaling is an artform Adding search, planning, AlphaZero type training atop LLMs Making sure rogue nations can't steal weights The right way to a...

When the great apes at Furuvik Zoo broke free from their enclosure last winter, the keepers faced a terrible choice. This is the story of the most dramatic 72 hours of their lives. By Imogen West-Knights.

Ryan sits down with Bob Nardo, Founding Head of School and Executive Director at Libertas School of Memphis. They discuss why the principles of Montessori work, and how they can be applied to successful organizations of all kinds.

Parmesan is a food—but it’s not just a food. Italy’s beloved cheese is often paired with a deep craving for tradition and identity. But its history also involves intrepid immigrants, lucrative businesses and an American version that’s probably available in your local grocery store. After a notorious debunker of Italian-cuisine myths claims this Wisconsin-made product is the real deal, we embark on...

The world is engaged in a multitrillion-dollar project to decarbonize the economy to slow or reverse climate change. But what exactly does that mean? How optimistic should we be that we can pull this off? And what new technology do we need to build to make it happen? This is a mega-pod with two guests. Ramez Naam is a writer, speaker, and one of the best technologists I know at explaining the prog...

Nathan and Erik analyze the moats of the most powerful companies in AI. The paradigm-shifting technology has led to a flourishing open-source community with market share. Yet, the big players have key competitive advantages that can be examined from many different angles.