The Retort AI Podcast

An exciting week for Tom, who tells Nate about his company Hortus AI, whose mission is to make AI accountable to local communities. We cover a lot of classic Retort themes as Tom makes a case for what's missing from AI development, and how models could be more healthily integrated into everyday people's lives. Press release: https://hortus.ai/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Hortus-AI-Press-Release_Feb2...

Tom and Nate sit down for a classic discussion of the role of AI in the modern philosophy of science. Much of this discussion is based on Thomas Samuel Kuhn's influential book  The Structure of Scientific Revolutions . We ask -- is AI a science in the Kuhn'ian sense? Will the "paradigm" worldview apply to other sciences post AI? How will scientific institutions manage the addition of AI? We promis...

We're back! Tom and Nate catch up after the Thanksgiving holiday. Our main question was -- what were the biggest AI stories of the year? We touch on the core themes of the show: infrastructure, AI realities, and and antitrust. The power buildout to scale out AI is going to have very real long-term impacts. Some links this week: * Ben Thompson's, The End of the Beginning: https://stratechery.com/20...

Tom and Nate catch up on the happenings in AI. Of course, we're focused on the biggest awards available to us as esteemed scientists (or something close enough) -- the Nobel Prizes! What does it mean in the trajectory of AI for Hinton and Hassabis to carry added scientific weight. Honestly, feels like a sinking ship.  Some links: * Schmidhuber tweet: https://x.com/SchmidhuberAI/status/184402272432...

Tom and Nate catch up on recent events (before the OpenAI o1 release) and opportunities in transparency/policy. We recap the legendary scam of Matt from IT department, why disclosing the outcomes of process is not enough, and more. This is a great episode on understanding why the process technology was birthed from is just as important as the outcome! Some links: * Nathan's post on Model Specs for...

Tom and Nate catch up on core themes of AI after a somewhat unintended summer break. We discuss the moral groundings and philosophy of what we're building, our travels, The Anxious Generation, AGI obsessions, an update on AI Ethics vs. AI Safety, and plenty more in between. As always, contact us at mail@retortai.com Some links we mention in the episode: * The Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail ht...

Tom and Nate catch up on the rapidly evolving (and political) space of AI regulation. We cover CA SB 1047, recent policing of data scraping, presidential appointees, antitrust intention vs. implementation, FLOP thresholds, and everything else touching the future of large ML models. Nate's internet cut out, so this episode ends a little abruptly. Reach out with any questions to mail at retortai.com...

Tom and Nate revisit one of their old ideas -- AI through the lens of public health infrastructure, and especially alignment. Sorry about Tom's glitchy audio, I figured it out after the fact that he was talking into the microphone at the wrong angle. Regardless, here are some links for this week. Links: - Data foundry for AI https://scale.com/blog/scale-ai-series-f   - Information piece on Scale A...

Tom and Nate caught up last week (sorry for the editing delay) on the big two views of the AI future: Apple Intelligence and Situational Awareness (Nationalistic AI doom prevention). One of our best episodes, here are the links: * The Kekulé Problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kekul%C3%A9_Problem * Truth and Method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_and_Method * Situational Awareness https:...

Tom and Nate catch up on many AI policy happenings recently. California's "anti open source" 1047 bill, the senate AI roadmap, Google's search snaifu, OpenAI's normal nonsense, and reader feedback! A bit of a mailbag. Enjoy. 00:00 Murky waters in AI policy 00:33 The Senate AI Roadmap 05:14 The Executive Branch Takes the Lead 08:33 California's Senate AI Bill 22:22 OpenAI's Two Audiences 28:53 The...

Tom and Nate discuss two major OpenAI happenings in the last week. The popular one, the chat assistant, and what it reveals about OpenAI's worldview. We pair this with discussion of OpenAI's new Model Spec, which details their RLHF goals: https://cdn.openai.com/spec/model-spec-2024-05-08.html This is a monumental week for AI. The product transition is completed, we can't just be researchers anymor...

Tom and Nate discuss the shifting power landscape in AI. They try to discern what is special about Silicon Valley's grasp on the ecosystem and what other types of power (e.g. those in New York and Washington DC) will do to mobilize their influence.  Here's the one Tweet we referenced on the FAccT community: https://twitter.com/KLdivergence/status/1653843497932267520 00:00: Introduction and Cryptoz...

Tom and Nate cover the state of the industry after Llama 3. Is Zuck the best storyteller in AI? Is he the best CEO? Are CEOs doing anything other than buying compute? We cover what it means to be successful at the highest level this week.  Links: Dwarkesh interview with Zuck https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/mark-zuckerberg   Capuchin monkey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capuchin_monkey   00:00 Intr...

Tom and Nate catch up after a few weeks off the pod. We discuss what it means for the pace and size of open models to get bigger and bigger. In some ways, this disillusionment is a great way to zoom our into the big picture. These models are coming. These models are getting cheaper. We need to think about risks and infrastructure more than open vs. closed. 00:00 Introduction  01:16 Recent developm...

Tom and Nate catch up on the ridiculous of Nvidia GTC, the lack of trust in AI, and some important taxonomies and politics around governing AI. Safety institutes, reward model benchmarks, Nathan's bad joke delivery, and all the normal good stuff in this episode! Yes, we're also sick of the Taylor Swift jokes, but they get the clicks. The Taylor moment: https://twitter.com/DrJimFan/status/176981794...

Tom and Nate sit down to discuss Claude 3 and some updates on what it means to be open. Not surprisingly, we get into debating some different views. We cover Dune 2's impact on AI and have a brief giveaway at the end. Cheers! More at retortai.com . Contact us at mail at domain. Some topics: - The pace of progress in AI and whether it feels meaningful or like "progress fatigue" to different groups...

This week Tom and Nate cover all the big topics from the big picture lens. Sora, Gemini 1.5's context length, Gemini's bias backlash, Gemma open models, it was a busy week in AI. We come to the conclusion that we can no longer trust a lot of these big companies to do much. We are the gladiators playing the crowd of AI. This was a great one, I'm proud on one of Tom's all time best jokes.  Thanks fo...

A metaphor episode! We are trying to figure how much the Waymo incident is or is not about AI. We bring back our Berkeley roots and talk about traditions in the Bay around distributed technology. Scooters and robots are not safe in this episode, sadly. Here's the link to the Verge piece Tom read from: https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/11/24069251/waymo-driverless-taxi-fire-vandalized-video-san-franc...

... and you should too. We catch up this week on all things Apple Vision Pro and how these devices will intersect with AI. It really turned more into a commentary on the future of society, and how various technologies may or may not tap into our subconscious.  The only link we've got for you is DeepDream:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepDream   This is a public episode. If you would like to dis...

Wow, one of our favorites. This week Tom and Nate have a lot to cover. We cover AI2's new OPEN large language models (OLMo) and all that means, the alchemical model merging craze powering waifu factories, model weight leaks from Mistral, the calling card for our loyal fans, and more topics. We have a lot of links you'll enjoy as you'll go through it: The Mistral leak: https://huggingface.co/miqude...

We recovered this episode from the depth of lost podcast recordings! We carry on and Tom tells the story of his wonderful sociology turned AI Ph. D. at Berkeley. This comes with plenty of great commentary on the current state of the field and striving for impact. We cover the riverbank of Vienna, the heart of the sperm whale, and deep life lessons.  This is a public episode. If you would like to d...

This week Tom and Nate catch up on two everlasting themes of ML: compute and evaluation. We chat about AI2, Zuck's GPUs, evaluation as procurement, NIST comments, neglecting reward models, and plenty of other topics. We're on the tracks for 2024 and waiting for some things to happen. Links for what we covered this week: Zuck interview on The Verge Saturday night live George Washington during revol...

We're excited to bring you something special today! Our first cross over episode brings some fresh energy to the podcast. Tom and Nate are joined by Jordan Schneider of ChinaTalk (A popular Substack-based publication covering all things China https://www.chinatalk.media/ ). We cover lots of great ground here, from the economics of Hirschman to the competition from France. All good Patriots should...

Tom and Nate are ready to kick off the year, but not too ready! There's a ton to be excited about this year, but we're already worried for some parts of it. In this episode, we'll teach you how to be mindful of the so called "other side of ML". Some links: - Link to NYT lawsuit techdirt article https://www.techdirt.com/2023/12/28/the-ny-times-lawsuit-against-openai-would-open-up-the-ny-times-to-al...

The end of the year is upon us! Tom and Nate bring a reflective mood to the podcast along with some surprises that may be a delight. Here are some links for the loyal fans: * RAND + executive order piece: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/15/billionaire-backed-think-tank-played-key-role-in-bidens-ai-order-00132128   * Sam Altman's blog post we were reading: https://blog.samaltman.com/what-i-wi...