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

Nathan Labenz sits down with Ronen Eldan and Yuanzhi Li of Microsoft Research to discuss the small natural language dataset they created called TinyStories. Tiny Stories is designed to reflect the full richness of natural language while still being small to support research with modest compute budgets.  Using this dataset, they began to explore aspects of language model performance, behavior, and...

This 20-min episode comes from our friend Nathaniel Whittemore's excellent daily podcast The AI Breakdown Podcast. This episode aired on June 1, 2023, and covers the latest developments from OpenAI, including new features, a cybersecurity grant program, and their new process rewards model for trading. We hope you enjoy it as much as we do. We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's...

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. LINKS: Nathan’s Twitter thread on AI moats that sparked this discussion: https://twitter.com/labenz/status/1654853321876815872...

Today’s episode is a deep dive into the collision of AI and the future of entertainment, against the backdrop of the still-raging Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike. Nathan Labenz sits down with Trey Kollmer, Sophia Lear, and Garrett Schabb – all seasoned television writers and Guild members – to discuss the labor dispute. While the strike encompasses many dynamics, the timely intersection with...

Nathan Labenz sits down with Andrew Feldman, CEO and Co-Founder of Cerebras Systems, a company building a new class of computer system for accelerating AI and changing the future of work. Cerebras Systems is the creator of the world’s largest chip, at 2.6 trillion transistors. In this episode, they discuss the founding story of Cerebras, the experience of creating the world’s largest chip, and the...

Nathan Labenz sits down with engineer Shreya Rajpal, the creator of Guardrails AI, a new Python library that allows developers to add a layer of output, validation and correction to their code. Practically guardrails can ensure a reliable interface between language models and more traditional deterministic software systems. At the same time, mind-bending and potentially risky use case frameworks l...

Nathan sits down with Vivek Natarajan, research scientist at Google Health. Vivek leads the Google Brain moonshot behind Med-PaLM, Google’s flagship medical large language model, featured in The Economist, The Scientific American, CNBC, and Forbes. In this episode, they discuss the foundational models that Vivek and team built before Med-PaLM, the techniques used to develop Med-PaLM which will be...

[Bonus Episode] Future of Life Institute Podcast host Gus Docker interviews Conjecture CEO Connor Leahy to discuss GPT-4, magic, cognitive emulation, demand for human-like AI, and aligning superintelligence. You can read more about Connor's work at https://conjecture.dev Future of Life Institute is the organization that recently published an open letter calling for a six-month pause on training ne...

Nathan and Erik sit down with Neal Khosla, founder of Curai Health, a venture-backed virtual care startup using AI to provide low-cost primary healthcare. Prior to his current role at Curai, Neal was a machine learning researcher at Google and Stanford. In this episode, they discuss the current state of AI in medicine, what the future patient experience may look like, and how developments in AI he...

Nathan sits down with Professor Zak Kohane, the Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School, and co-author of the new book, The AI Revolution in Medicine, for which Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO wrote the foreword to the book. Professor Kohane was among a select few people to receive early preview and research access to GPT-4 in the fall of 2022, and his approach to expl...

Nathan Labenz sits down with prominent – and notably prescient – AI media figures Robert Scoble and Ben Tossell. They discuss what the work of being an AI scout looks like, how to bring the mainstream along with emerging AI developments, and their predictions and hopes for AI. Robert Scoble is a long-time Silicon Valley technology explorer and connector, a futurist who's met so many technology leg...

Nathan Labenz sits down with Rachel Woods, founder of The AI Exchange, an AI education platform with over 130,000 subscribers on TikTok. They discuss Rachel’s experience consulting for public and private companies on AI strategy, how teams should think about their AI strategy, and how Rachel uses AI in her own business. Rachel was previously a data scientist at Meta, and a founder of a venture-bac...

Nathan Labenz and Erik Torenberg sit down with Sarah Guo and Elad Gil, notable investors and co-hosts of the AI-focused No Priors podcast. They discuss how Sarah and Elad are approaching AI investment opportunities right now, how that differs from how they've thought about investing in the past, where in the stack from hardware to applications they expect to see value accrue, what modes of human-A...

Raza Habib is on the front lines of LLM implementation as CEO of Humanloop, a Y Combinator backed startup that helps companies of all kinds, small and large bridge the gap from API access to successful LLM deployment. Nathan sat down with Raza to hear what he has learned in the process of helping so many companies on their LLM implementation journeys – and he did not disappoint – as you'll hear, h...

Nathan Labenz sits down with Matt Welsh, the CEO and co-founder of Fixie. AI which just raised $17M in seed funding. The technology world's attention has turned en masse to AI agents over the last month, but Matt, a former Harvard professor and ex-Google, has been focused on AI agents for longer over at Fixie. The platform is currently in developer preview mode, where developers can build agents a...

Nathan dives in with Alex Albert, a 22-year-old computer science student at the University of Washington, who has become a prolific creator of Jailbreakchat.com and author over at The Prompt Report.com. This is Alex's first podcast appearance! Please enjoy this thought-provoking conversation with Alex Albert as part of 'Prompt Engineering Week' at The Cognitive Revolution. We're hiring across the...

For anyone who discovered this show on Twitter, Riley (@goodside) likely needs no introduction – after all, he spent most of 2022 posting his explorations of OpenAI's text-davinci-002, and quickly became one of the must-follow accounts in AI. Riley Goodside is the world's first Staff Prompt Engineer at Scale AI, and is an expert in prompting large language models and integrating them into AI-power...

Nathan Labenz dives in with Jaan Tallinn, a technologist, entrepreneur (Kazaa, Skype), and investor (DeepMind and more) whose unique life journey has intersected with some of the most important social and technological events of our collective lifetime. Jaan has since invested in nearly 180 startups, including dozens of AI application layer companies and some half dozen startup labs that focus on...

Nathan Labenz and Erik Torenberg delve into the upcoming economic transformation and the future of work in light of the threshold crossed by GPT-4. 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, check out: eriktorenberg.com. REC...

We've looked forward to today's episode since we launched the show! Andreas Stuhlmuller and Jungwon Byun are the co-founders of Ought, a product-driven research lab that develops mechanisms for delegating open-ended thinking to advanced machine learning systems. Their flagship product, Elicit (elicit.org), is an AI research assistant that helps researchers accelerate time-consuming workflows, star...

Anton Troynikov of Chroma and Flo Crivello of Lindy AI join The Cognitive Revolution cohosts Nathan Labenz and Erik Torenberg to debate the issues raised in the AI open letter, which advocates for a 6-month pause on AI system trainings. This episode was recorded on March 31st and was first released as a Moment of Zen episode (airing April 1). Subscribe to Moment of Zen for more timely debates like...

Nathan Labenz talks to Google Robotics researcher Keerthana Gopalakrishnan (@keerthanpg) about how they train robots at Google, and how robots contextualize their environment and complete tasks through supervised learning. They go deep on integrating language models for commands and how to approach translating them, as well as the importance of robotics safety. Keerthana also shares how we’re usin...

In this episode, hosts Nathan Labenz and Erik Torenberg delve into the exciting and concerning aspects of GPT4, the latest large multimodal model from OpenAI. Nathan, who was a Red Teamer for GPT4, shares his experience working with the model, using it for real-life scenarios, and how he found it to be human-level rather than human-like intelligence. Nathan also highlights some of its fundamental...

The development of ultra-realistic human voices is upon us, and Mahmoud Felfel's company Play.ht is leading the next generation of text-to-voice models. In this episode, we discuss the challenges and opportunities of automating a more human voice, as well as concerns about deep fakes and user safety. We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal team on other projects he's in...

People have long been imagining AI assistants. Flo Crivello (founder of Teamflow) is turning that dream into a reality with the ambitious project Lindy. Flo sits down with Nathan on Lindy's announcement day to talk about this unique moment in AI, Lindy's capabilities, single-use apps, and how he sees the global impact that AI-powered employees can have on the future of work. We're hiring across th...