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

In this episode, Nathan chats with Josh Albrecht, CTO of Imbue. They discuss how to create agents for reasoning, reliability, and robustness. 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 S...

In this episode, Nathan chats with Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, to discuss how AI might shape the future of code, software 2.0, and the open source question in AI. If you need an ecommerce platform, check out our sponsor Shopify: https://shopify.com/cognitive for a $1/month trial period. SPONSORS: Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business. Shopi...

Nathan shares his perspective on Sam Altman’s firing from OpenAI, after being a part of the red team for GPT-4 and seeing how the board handled safety concerns. If you need an ecommerce platform, check out our sponsor Shopify: https://shopify.com/cognitive for a $1/month trial period.  This is a developing story. This podcast was recorded on 11/21 at 12pm PST. SPONSORS:  Shopify is the global comm...

In this episode, Nathan and Erik discuss research out of Google Deepmind suggesting LLMs, Hemant Teneja’s responsible VC commitments, and why now is not the time for an ideological war on AI regulation. If you need an ecommerce platform, check out our sponsor Shopify: https://shopify.com/cognitive for a $1/month trial period.  RECOMMENDED PODCAST: Every week investor and writer of the popular news...

In this episode, Nathan interviews Alex Watson, founder and CPO of Gretel AI, about the company's work in synthetic data. They discuss why we need synthetic data, Gretel’s new pre trained tabular LLM that creates synthetic data on a zero shot basis, privacy techniques to prevent LLM memorization, and more. If you need an ecommerce platform, check out our sponsor Shopify: https://shopify.com/cognit...

We're joined by John Hayes, CEO and Cofounder of Ghost, a self-driving car startup using multimodal LLMs to solve the autonomous driving problem, that OpenAI just invested $5 million into. If you need an ERP platform, check out our sponsor NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive. We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal team on other projects he's incubating. He's hiring...

We’re deep diving into OpenAI DevDay with Logan Kilpatrick, Dev Relations Lead at OpenAI. If you need an ERP platform, check out our sponsor NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive. 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, Investment Associate, and more. For a list of JDs,...

In this episode, Flo Crivello, founder of Lindy AI, joins Nathan to chat about Biden’s executive order, and the state of AI safety. They discuss Flo’s thoughts on the executive order, building AGI kill switches, self driving cars, and more. If you need an ERP platform, check out our sponsor NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive. SPONSORS: Netsuite | Omneky Shopify is the global commerce platform...

Mark Humphries is a Professor of History at Wilfrid Laurier University, where he has published widely on various aspects of Canadian history. We invited Mark to do an episode after he reached out to tell us that hearing about how Nathan fine-tuned GPT-3.5 on GPT-4 reasoning helped him get over some hurdles in his own archival research. In addition, he chats about all the things that he'd tried tha...

In this episode, Yohei Nakajima, creator of BabyAGI and GP at Untapped Capital, chats with Nathan about the opportunity for AI to strengthen human understanding, AI agents, and his insights on investing in AI projects. If you need an ERP platform, check out our sponsor NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive. We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal team on other project...

Anton Troynikov, cofounder of Chroma, joins Nathan Labenz to discuss the importance of keeping the retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) loop in house, what it means for Chroma to be in “wartime” mode right now, and how much of the data going into Chroma has never been in a database before. If you need an ERP platform, check out our sponsor NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive. SPONSORS: NetSuit...

Trey Kollmer returns to discuss the latest AI research revelations with Nathan Labenz. They explore how new techniques will shave 10% off global compute needs, how analogical prompting beats few-shot prompting, and how compressive historical records can increase LLM memory and retention abilities. If you need an ERP platform, check out our sponsor NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive. SPONSORS:...

Trey Kollmer joins Nathan Labenz for a roundup of the latest AI research! They discuss Microsoft’s Self-Taught Optimizer (STOP) research and Google’s FreshLLMs, how H100 chips will supercharge development of programs with GPT-4 level compute, LLM representation of space and time, and more! If you're looking for an ERP platform, check out our sponsor, NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive We're h...

Nathan Labenz synthesizes recent research in mechanistic interpretability and AI safety, how top players in the space like Anthropic and OpenAI are addressing them, and jailbreaks like the Calvin and Hobbes one you may have seen online. Nathan's aim is to impart the equivalent of a high school AP course understanding to listeners in 90 minutes. If you're looking for an ERP platform, check out our...

In this episode, Nathan is joined by James Yu, Founder of Sudowrite, an AI writing tool. They discuss how James started Sudowrite after using GPT-3 for his own fiction writing, how Sudowrite is able to be a supportive writing partner, and Yu's experience developing its tech stack and working through the backlash he's received. f you're looking for an ERP platform, check out our sponsor, NetSuite:...

In this episode, Nathan sits down with Swyx of Latent Space to chat about AI engineers and tools to check out, competitive dynamics between OpenAI, other foundation model providers, and developers, and if Swyx would wear an AI Horcrux. We also learn that Nathan lived in the same dorm as Mark Zuckerberg back in his college days (and was a late adopter to Facebook…). If you're looking for an ERP pla...

In this episode, Aravind Srinivas of Perplexity AI returns to the show. They discuss Perplexity’s growth to millions of queries per day, CEO Aravind’s favourite Perplexity use cases, and how Perplexity ships fast in a competitive landscape against Google and major AI live players creating their own search engines. If you're looking for an ERP platform, check out our sponsor, NetSuite: http://netsu...

Zvi Mowshowitz, the writer behind Don't Worry About the Vase, returns to catch up with Nathan on everything OpenAI, Amazon-Anthropic collab, and Google Deepmind. They also discuss Perplexity, deepfakes, and software bundling vs the Roman Empire. If you're looking for an ERP platform, check out our sponsor, NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive Definitely also take a moment to subscribe to Zvi's...

Nathan and Erik chat OpenAI GPT-3.5 fine tuning updates, using GPT 4 outputs to fine-tune 3.5, when to accelerate, and AI bundles. If you're looking for an ERP platform, check out our sponsor, NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive 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,...

In this episode, Nathan sits down with three researchers at Carnegie Mellon studying adversarial attacks and mimetic initialization: Zico Kolter, Andy Zou, and Asher Trockman. They discuss: the motivation behind researching universal adversarial attacks on language models, how the attacks work, and the short term harms and long term risks of these jailbreaks. If you're looking for an ERP platform,...

In this episode, Nathan sits down with Adam Wenchel, CEO of Arthur.ai. Adam founded the AI security company back in 2019, before GPT-2 existed. In this episode, Adam shares his unique perspective on the AI security landscape, drawing from years building commercial AI systems. They discuss the attacks Adam set out to defend against, the changing priorities of executives in the rush to adopt LLMs, a...

In this episode, Nathan sits down with Stephen Parker and Josh Rubin of Waymark, and creators of The Frost, an AI-powered 12 minute short film. In this episode, we get a behind the scenes look at their creative process, the prompting and creative techniques they used to generate and animate the DALL-E results, and an overview of the current state of AI art. If you're looking for an ERP platform, c...

In this episode, Trey Kollmer, WGA Writer and Co-Executive of the show Ghosts, returns to the show to discuss updates to the Hollywood Strikes, including news on SAG-AFTRA and WGA. Trey and Nathan chat why actors are joining the strikes, how AI will change acting as a profession, Trey’s views on reasoning and how he’s experimenting with GPT-4, and much, much more. We're hiring across the board at...

In this episode, Nathan sits down with three members of the a16z x Convex AI Town project: Yoko Li (Partner, a16z), Martin Casado (GP, a16z), and James Cowling (CTO, Convex). AI Town is a virtual town where AI agents live, interact, and socialize. They discuss how AI Town originated from Yoko’s companion app project, unpredictability as a feature in LLMs and interacting with models like they are l...

In this episode, Nathan sits down with Daniel Kang, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois. Kang has done pioneering work bringing zero knowledge cryptographic proofs to AI. In this episode, they chat about the cryptographic theory behind Daniel's work, how cryptography allows us to balance the tradeoff between privacy and authenticity, and how cryptography usage is...