"The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis

In this episode, Nathan sits down with Robin Hanson, associate professor of economics at George Mason University and researcher at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute. They discuss the comparison of human brains to LLMs and legacy software systems, what it would take for AI and automation to significantly impact the economy, our relationships with AI and the moral weight it has, and much more. T...

In this conversation, Nathan is joined by Azeem Azhar, founder and writer of the Exponential View. They discuss why startups are likely to drive the true disruption in the industry, what forward thinking leaders are doing today to retrain their teams for AI, why Azeem agrees with Sam Altman’s comments that AGI will likely arrive soon, new governance mechanisms for the AI age, and more. Try the Bra...

In this episode, Zvi Mowshowitz returns to the show to discuss OpenAI’s Sora model, Google’s Gemini announcement, Anthropic’s Sleeper Agents, and other live player analysis. Try the Brave search API for free for up to 2000 queries per month at https://brave.com/api Definitely also take a moment to subscribe to Zvi's blog Don't Worry About the Vase  (https://thezvi.wordpress.com/) - Zvi is an infor...

Note: This conversation contains themes of suicidal ideation, in the context of academic research. Please watch from (21:41) onwards if you would like to skip past this content. In this conversation, Nathan sits down with Eugenia Kuyda, Replika's Founder and CEO. They discuss recent research published in Nature conducted by Stanford on Replika user interactions, how Replika is providing their user...

In this episode, a16z partners Justine Moore and Anish Acharya join Nathan to discuss the AI Abundance Agenda, their latest thesis for consumer AI. They discuss the intersection of weird and working, and their investment pillars in AI for creativity and productivity, companionship, and wellness and growth. Looking for a search API? Try the Brave search API for free for up to 2000 queries per month...

In this episode, Dr Michael Levin, Distinguished Professor of Biology at Tufts University, joins Nathan to discuss embodied minds, his research into limb regeneration and collective intelligence, cognitive light cones, and much more. Michael and the Levin Lab work at the intersection of biology, artificial life, bioengineering, synthetic morphology, and cognitive science. LINKS: The Levin Lab and...

In this episode, Nathan sits down with Max Bennett, author of the book: A Brief History of Intelligence. They discuss the five major breakthroughs in evolution that resulted in human brains and cognition. They delve deeper into the workings of each breakthrough, the evolution of intelligence, and how AI can benefit from understanding these principles. If you need an ecommerce platform, check out o...

In today's episode Yohei Nakajima, GP at Untapped Capital and Creator of BabyAGI, returns to the show. Together with Nathan, they watch Yohei’s TEDAI Talk, unpacking themes on collective intelligence, identity, and how AI can help us better understand one another. If you need an ecommerce platform, check out our sponsor Shopify: https://shopify.com/cognitive for a $1/month trial period. We're hiri...

In this episode, Nathan sits down with Sander Schulhoff, Cofounder and CEO of Learnprompting.org. They discuss the business model, the keys to prompting that every user of language models should know, negative prompting, prompt hacking, and more. If you need an ecommerce platform, check out our sponsor Shopify: https://shopify.com/cognitive for a $1/month trial period. LINKS: - Learnprompting.org:...

In this episode, Nathan sits down with Suhail Doshi, founder of Playground AI. They discuss the current state of AI image generation, how Suhail is building Playground while the technology for vision and image generation is still maturing, thought to image reconstruction, and more. If you need an ecommerce platform, check out our sponsor Shopify: https://shopify.com/cognitive for a $1/month trial...

In this episode, Nathan sits down with tech lawyer Cecilia Zeniti, Founder & CEO of GC AI, the AI for in-house counsel. They discuss the origins of IP law in the US Constitution to promote creativity, the "fair use doctrine" and how OpenAI could argue ChatGPT is transformative, Google's patenting strategy around the transformer, and much more. If you need an ecommerce platform, check out our spons...

In this episode, Nathan sits down with Div Garg, founder of Multion, to discuss the current state and future outlook of AI agents. They discuss benchmarking real-world tasks, the promise and perils of consumer AI adoption, predictions that 2024 may be a breakout year for personal bots, and more. If you need an ecommerce platform, check out our sponsor Shopify: https://shopify.com/cognitive for a $...

In this episode, Nathan sits down with Juan Sequeda, Principal Scientist and Head of AI Lab at data.world. They discuss how knowledge graphs can be your organization's "brain" for AI, integrating structured and unstructured data, benchmarking enterprise AI systems, and more. If you need an ecommerce platform, check out our sponsor Shopify: https://shopify.com/cognitive for a $1/month trial period....

In this episode, Nathan sits down with Gabe Gomes, Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and researcher behind Coscientist: the first non-organic, intelligent being to design, plan, and execute a chemistry experiment. They discuss how Coscientist allows scientists to use natural language to control remote experiments on Emerald Cloud Lab, how it will democratize scientific knowledge,...

In this episode, Nathan sits down with Dan O’Connell, Chief Strategy Officer at Dialpad. They discuss building their own language models using 5 billion minutes of business calls, custom speech recognition models for every customer, and the challenges of bringing AI into business. If you need an ecommerce platform, check out our sponsor Shopify: https://shopify.com/cognitive for a $1/month trial p...

We're sharing a few of Nathan's favorite AI scouting episodes from other shows. Today, Shane Legg, Cofounder at Deepmind and its current Chief AGI Scientist, shares his insights with Dwarkesh Patel on AGI's timeline, the new architectures needed for AGI, and why multimodality will be the next big landmark. If you need an ecommerce platform, check out our sponsor Shopify: https://shopify.com/cognit...

We're sharing a few of Nathan's favorite AI scouting episodes from other shows. Today: Nita Farahani shares her insights with 80,000 Hours' Luisa Rodriguez on the current state of neurotechnology and its potential impacts on various fields, including work, healthcare, privacy, and even human cognition. The discussion includes Farahani's assessment of devices like SmartCap and Neuralink, the concep...

For the end of the year, we're going to repost a few of Nathan's favorite AI scouting episodes from other shows. Today: Samuel Hammond joins the Future of Life Institute podcast to discuss how AGI will transform economies, governments, institutions, and other power structures. If you need an ecommerce platform, check out our sponsor Shopify: https://shopify.com/cognitive for a $1/month trial perio...

In today's conversation, Nathan joins Rob Wiblin, host of The 80,000 Hours Podcast to discuss why we need more AI scouts, OpenAI's safety record, and redteaming frontier models. If you need an ecommerce platform, check out our sponsor Shopify: https://shopify.com/cognitive for a $1/month trial period. We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal team on other projects he's i...

In this episode, Nathan does an emergency pod deep dive into Mamba, a new state space model architecture. If you need an ecommerce platform, check out our sponsor Shopify: https://shopify.com/cognitive for a $1/month trial period. We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal team on other projects he's incubating. He's hiring a Chief of Staff, EA, Head of Special Projects, I...

In this video, Nathan chats to Dan Shipper, CEO and Co-founder of Every, for the series "How I Use Chat-GPT". They discuss Nathan's prompting techniques for creative and cognitive labour, and using GPT in copilot instead of delegation mode. If you need an ecommerce platform, check out our sponsor Shopify: https://shopify.com/cognitive for a $1/month trial period. Watch the rest of the series, "How...

In this episode, Marius Hobbhahn, CEO of Apollo Research, sits down with Nathan Labenz to discuss Apollo’s research in AI deception, interpretability, and affordances. If you need an ecommerce platform, check out our sponsor Shopify: https://shopify.com/cognitive for a $1/month trial period. We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal team on other projects he's incubating....

Balaji Srinivasan, investor, former CTO at Coinbase and GP at a16z, and writer of The Network State, joins Nathan to discuss polytheistic AI and AI gods, human-AI symbiosis, how AI will be controlled, and much more. If you need an ecommerce platform, check out our sponsor Shopify: https://shopify.com/cognitive for a $1/month trial period. We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's...

In this episode, Nathan sits down with Alan Cowen, CEO and Chief Scientist at Hume AI, an emotional intelligence startup working on creating emotionally aware AI. If you need an ecommerce platform, check out our sponsor Shopify: https://shopify.com/cognitive for a $1/month trial period. We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal team on other projects he's incubating. He's...

In this episode, Nathan sits down with Nora Ammann, cofounder and CEO of PIBBSS (Principles of Intelligent Behavior in Biological and Social Systems), a research initiative focused on the principles of intelligent behavior in biological and social systems. If you need an ecommerce platform, check out our sponsor Shopify: https://shopify.com/cognitive for a $1/month trial period. We're hiring acros...