"The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis
Erik Torenberg, Nathan Labenz
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A biweekly podcast where hosts Nathan Labenz and Erik Torenberg interview the builders on the edge of AI and explore the dramatic shift it will unlock in the coming years.
The Cognitive Revolution is part of the Turpentine podcast network. To learn more: turpentine.co
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2 days ago
Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch on AI-Powered Coding, Software 2.0, and the AI Open Source Question
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. Shopify powers 10% of ALL eCommerce in the US. And Shopify's the global force behind Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklinen, and 1,000,000s of other entrepreneurs across 175 countries.From their all-in-one e-commerce platform, to their in-person POS system – wherever and whatever you're selling, Shopify's got you covered. With free Shopify Magic, sell more with less effort by whipping up captivating content that converts – from blog posts to product descriptions using AI. Sign up for $1/month trial period: https://shopify.com/cognitive
With the onset of AI, it’s time to upgrade to the next generation of the cloud: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. OCI is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. Train ML models on the cloud’s highest performing NVIDIA GPU clusters.
Do more and spend less like Uber, 8x8, and Databricks Mosaic, take a FREE test drive of OCI at oracle.com/cognitive
NetSuite has 25 years of providing financial software for all your business needs. More than 36,000 businesses have already upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle, gaining visibility and control over their financials, inventory, HR, eCommerce, and more. If you're looking for an ERP platform ✅ head to NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive and download your own customized KPI checklist.
Omneky is an omnichannel creative generation platform that lets you launch hundreds of thousands of ad iterations that actually work customized across all platforms, with a click of a button. Omneky combines generative AI and real-time advertising data. Mention "Cog Rev" for 10% off.
X/SOCIAL
@labenz (Nathan)
@rauchg (Guillermo)
@CogRev_Podcast
TIMESTAMPS
(00:00:00) - Introductory comments
(00:03:43) - Rauch's background in open source software like Mootools and Next.js
(00:04:27) - Overview of Vercel and the front-end cloud concept
(00:06:15) - Productivity gains from Vercel's front-end infrastructure
(00:14:50) - Sponsors: Shopify | Omneky
(00:21:00) - Rauch getting inspired by GitHub Copilot code auto-completion
(00:24:00) - Launching Vercel's own AI product vZero: production-ready UI code from natural language prompts
(00:29:17) - Sponsors: Oracle | Netsuite
(00:30:00) - Transition to discussing the future of software development
(00:34:12) - vZero surpassing Rauch's own hand-coded website on accessibility
(00:51:00) - Discussion about focusing on the full stack beyond just the AI model
(00:54:00) - Concept of Software 2.0 using data and AI instead of classical code
(00:56:00) - Maintaining software 1.0 while aggressively expanding into 2.0 paradigm
(00:56:12) - Philosophical support for open source and skepticism about risks
(00:57:12) - How open source software tends to quickly improve over time
(00:57:47) - Prediction that AI may "ossify" existing software 1.0 technologies
(01:01:12) - AI enabling more grassroots innovation like Mark Zuckerberg originally did
(01:07:00) - Concerns about regulatory suppression of open source AI progress
(01:03:00) - Unpredictability of new risks that could emerge like impersonation
(01:11:00) - Rejecting AI doom narratives but staying vigilant on capabilities
(01:12:00) - Concluding thoughts on embracing AI progress with appropriate caution
playlist_add
Nov 22, 2023
Sam Altman Fired from OpenAI: NEW Insider Context on the Board’s Decision
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 commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business. Shopify powers 10% of ALL eCommerce in the US. And Shopify's the global force behind Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklinen, and 1,000,000s of other entrepreneurs across 175 countries. From their all-in-one e-commerce platform, to their in-person POS system – wherever and whatever you're selling, Shopify's got you covered. With free Shopify Magic, sell more with less effort by whipping up captivating content that converts – from blog posts to product descriptions using AI. Sign up for $1/month trial period: https://shopify.com/cognitive
With the onset of AI, it’s time to upgrade to the next generation of the cloud: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. OCI is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. Train ML models on the cloud’s highest performing NVIDIA GPU clusters.
Do more and spend less like Uber, 8x8, and Databricks Mosaic, take a FREE test drive of OCI at oracle.com/cognitive
NetSuite has 25 years of providing financial software for all your business needs. More than 36,000 businesses have already upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle, gaining visibility and control over their financials, inventory, HR, eCommerce, and more. If you're looking for an ERP platform ✅ head to NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive and download your own customized KPI checklist.
Omneky is an omnichannel creative generation platform that lets you launch hundreds of thousands of ad iterations that actually work customized across all platforms, with a click of a button. Omneky combines generative AI and real-time advertising data. Mention "Cog Rev" for 10% off.
X/SOCIAL
@labenz (Nathan)
@eriktorenberg (Erik)
@CogRev_Podcast
TIMESTAMPS:
00:00:00) - Preview
(00:03:00) - Getting early access to test GPT-4
(00:05:38) - Realizing the immense capabilities and lack of safety measures in GPT-4
(00:08:03) - Concerns over OpenAI's slow start on safety after testing GPT-4
(00:15:38) - Sponsors: Shopify | Omneky
(00:17:34) - GPT-4's lack of safety measures and willingness to provide harmful information
(00:18:20) - GPT-4 suggesting assassination to slow AI progress
(00:21:00) - OpenAI unable to provide details on plans to control future models
(00:23:00) - The failure of GPT-4's "safety edition" to properly constrain unsafe behavior
(00:29:00) - Sponsors: Netsuite | Oracle
(00:29:39) - Discussing concerns over GPT-4 capabilities with AI experts and leaders
(00:33:00) - An OpenAI board member not having tried GPT-4 despite its importance
(00:35:00) - Urging the board member to investigate the divergence between capabilities and controls
(00:36:00) - Getting removed from the GPT-4 testing program by OpenAI
(00:44:00) - OpenAI subsequently showing more seriousness on safety after the GPT-4 experience
(00:54:00) - An example safety issue in GPT-4 that still persists
(01:00:00) - Speculation on what may have triggered the OpenAI board's removal of Sam Altman as CEO
(01:06:00) - Altman's "quaint" remark and acknowledgement of GPT-5 training
(01:21:57) - The absence of explanation from the board
(01:23:56) - How Microsoft will emerge
(01:28:00) - Questioning if pursuing AGI should be the singular goal
(01:32:36) - Should OpenAI be open source?
(01:42:00) - Innane regulation of AI
The Cognitive Revolution is brought to you by the Turpentine Media network.
Producer: Vivian Meng
Executive Producers: Natalie Toren, and Erik Torenberg
Editor: Graham Bessellieu
For inquiries about guests or sponsoring the podcast, please email vivian@turpentine.co
playlist_add
Nov 17, 2023
AI Discourse Deranged: Assessing LLM Generalization Takes and Polarizing Regulatory Debate
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.
Ep Notes: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nKSEPkVajUzjBAvQNUqUD3p5Pz-xaz0dp-DVR8KJCc0/edit
RECOMMENDED PODCAST:
Every week investor and writer of the popular newsletter The Diff, Byrne Hobart, and co-host Erik Torenberg discuss today’s major inflection points in technology, business, and markets – and help listeners build a diversified portfolio of trends and ideas for the future.
Subscribe to “The Riff” with Byrne Hobart and Erik Torenberg: https://link.chtbl.com/theriff
SPONSORS:
Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business. Shopify powers 10% of ALL eCommerce in the US. And Shopify's the global force behind Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklinen, and 1,000,000s of other entrepreneurs across 175 countries.From their all-in-one e-commerce platform, to their in-person POS system – wherever and whatever you're selling, Shopify's got you covered. With free Shopify Magic, sell more with less effort by whipping up captivating content that converts – from blog posts to product descriptions using AI. Sign up for $1/month trial period: https://shopify.com/cognitive
With the onset of AI, it’s time to upgrade to the next generation of the cloud: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. OCI is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. Train ML models on the cloud’s highest performing NVIDIA GPU clusters.
Do more and spend less like Uber, 8x8, and Databricks Mosaic, take a FREE test drive of OCI at oracle.com/cognitive
NetSuite has 25 years of providing financial software for all your business needs. More than 36,000 businesses have already upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle, gaining visibility and control over their financials, inventory, HR, eCommerce, and more. If you're looking for an ERP platform ✅ head to NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive and download your own customized KPI checklist.
Omneky is an omnichannel creative generation platform that lets you launch hundreds of thousands of ad iterations that actually work customized across all platforms, with a click of a button. Omneky combines generative AI and real-time advertising data. Mention "Cog Rev" for 10% off.
X/SOCIAL
@labenz (Nathan)
@eriktorenberg (Erik)
@CogRev_Podcast
TIMESTAMPS:
(00:00:00) - Opening discussion of recent viral tweet claiming LLMs can't generalize
(00:03:27) - Waymo Safety Research
(00:10:12) - Response to Google Deepmind’s research claiming LLMs can’t generalize
(00:15:08) - Sponsors: Shopify | Omneky
(00:21:38) - Reproduction of the DeepMind research showing noise allows generalization
(00:26:02) - Helen of Transforrmers
(00:30:15) - Sponsors: Oracle | Netsuite
(00:32:36) - Continuation of Google Deepmind discussion
(00:42:47) - “The AI Executive Order will only continue to look more foolish from here”
(00:44:09) - The AI Scout mindset
(00:45:22) - Few humans can extrapolate beyond their training data
(00:48:45) - When does GPT-4 deceive its user?
(00:49:58) - Voluntary Responsible AI Commitments from VCs
(00:54:00) - Analysis of the commitments as basic common sense practices
(00:56:30) - No need for an ideological war
(00:57:00) - Discussion of critical reactions framing the commitments as capitulation
(01:00:00) - Concerns about the voluntary commitments enabling harmful regulation
(01:03:00) - Rebuttal that self-regulation can avoid heavy handed regulation
(01:08:00) - Self driving cars: the invisible lives you can save
(01:11:00) - Mysticism when it comes to AI
(01:12:03) - Suggestion that product liability law could address concerns
(01:15:00) - Challenge to defend rejecting product liability for AI systems
playlist_add
Nov 14, 2023
Synthetic Data with Alex Watson, Founder of Gretel AI
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/cognitive for a $1/month trial period.
SPONSORS:
Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business. Shopify powers 10% of ALL eCommerce in the US. And Shopify's the global force behind Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklinen, and 1,000,000s of other entrepreneurs across 175 countries.From their all-in-one e-commerce platform, to their in-person POS system – wherever and whatever you're selling, Shopify's got you covered. With free Shopify Magic, sell more with less effort by whipping up captivating content that converts – from blog posts to product descriptions using AI. Sign up for $1/month trial period: https://shopify.com/cognitive
ORACLE:
With the onset of AI, it’s time to upgrade to the next generation of the cloud: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. OCI is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. Train ML models on the cloud’s highest performing NVIDIA GPU clusters.
Do more and spend less like Uber, 8x8, and Databricks Mosaic, take a FREE test drive of OCI at oracle.com/cognitive
NETSUITE:
NetSuite has 25 years of providing financial software for all your business needs. More than 36,000 businesses have already upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle, gaining visibility and control over their financials, inventory, HR, eCommerce, and more. If you're looking for an ERP platform ✅ head to NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive and download your own customized KPI checklist.
OMNEKY:
Omneky is an omnichannel creative generation platform that lets you launch hundreds of thousands of ad iterations that actually work customized across all platforms, with a click of a button. Omneky combines generative AI and real-time advertising data. Mention "Cog Rev" for 10% off.
X/SOCIAL:
@labenz (Nathan)
@AlexWatson405 (Alex)
@Gretel_AI
@CogRev_Podcast
TIMESTAMPS:
(00:00:00) - Intro
(00:03:02) - Origins of the company name Gretel AI and initial vision around enabling data sharing while protecting privacy
(00:05:16) - Alex's background in data privacy and compliance from his previous startup Harvest AI, acquired by AWS
(00:06:37) - Early experimentation with language models in 2020
(00:07:24) - Using synthetic data to create additional examples and improve detection of rare disease
(00:12:50) - Why use synthetic data?
(00:17:02) - Sponsors: Shopify | Omneky
(00:19:00) - Training models to recreate real-world data distributions and using validators to detect unrealistic outputs
(00:21:30) - Generating tabular data row-by-row
(00:24:40) - Pre-training the Gretel tabular LLM on diverse internet data sets
(00:30:40) - Sponsors: Oracle | Netsuite
(00:34:00) - Using an agent planning architecture
(00:37:40) - Having the agent determine when to use code vs the LLM for different parts of the data
(00:39:41) - Example use case of adapting models with synthetic data samples for long-tail cases
(00:43:00) - Using reinforcement learning to intentionally generate more diverse and representative synthetic data
(00:48:20) - The importance of alignment checks and controls while still providing model openness and flexibility
(00:51:16) - The potential of efficient, lightweight models compared to massive LLMs like GPT-4
(00:56:00) - Analogizing model specialization to specialized parts of the brain
(01:06:04) - Using differential privacy techniques to prevent memorization and exposure of private data
(01:14:37) - Adding noise during training to blur memorization
(01:18:42) - Optimism that synthetic data quality issues reflect details not fully understood yet vs inherent problems
playlist_add
Nov 9, 2023
OpenAI Invests $5M Into the Self-Driving Race with John Hayes, Cofounder of Ghost Autonomy
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.
SPONSORS:
Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business. Shopify powers 10% of ALL eCommerce in the US. And Shopify's the global force behind Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklinen, and 1,000,000s of other entrepreneurs across 175 countries.From their all-in-one e-commerce platform, to their in-person POS system – wherever and whatever you're selling, Shopify's got you covered. With free Shopify Magic, sell more with less effort by whipping up captivating content that converts – from blog posts to product descriptions using AI.
Sign up for $1/month trial period: https://shopify.com/cognitive
With the onset of AI, it’s time to upgrade to the next generation of the cloud: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. OCI is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. Train ML models on the cloud’s highest performing NVIDIA GPU clusters.
Do more and spend less like Uber, 8x8, and Databricks Mosaic, take a FREE test drive of OCI at oracle.com/cognitive
NetSuite has 25 years of providing financial software for all your business needs. More than 36,000 businesses have already upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle, gaining visibility and control over their financials, inventory, HR, eCommerce, and more. If you're looking for an ERP platform ✅ head to NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive and download your own customized KPI checklist.
Omneky is an omnichannel creative generation platform that lets you launch hundreds of thousands of ad iterations that actually work customized across all platforms, with a click of a button. Omneky combines generative AI and real-time advertising data. Mention "Cog Rev" for 10% off.
X/SOCIAL:
@labenz (Nathan)
@ghosthayes (John)
@GhostAutonomy
@CogRev_Podcast
TIMESTAMPS:
00:00:00) - Introduction to John Hayes and Ghost Autonomy's partnership with OpenAI
(00:04:30) - The journey to founding Ghost, and how multimodal LLMs will change self-driving cars
(00:05:03) - John's background founding Pure Storage and moving into autonomy
(00:09:37) - Classic autonomy stack built off DARPA Urban Challenge
(00:13:24) - Overview of different self-driving technology stacks (Lidar vs cameras)
(00:14:03) - Sponsors: Shopify | Omneky
(00:25:39) - Different approaches to how we know self-driving cars work well enough for public deployment
(00:27:30) - Different gradations of autonomy in the self-driving industry
(00:32:21) - Sponsors: Netsuite | Oracle
(00:34:24) - Current state of robotaxis and China
(00:37:39) - Uncanny valley in the robotaxi world
(00:39:47) - Where Ghost fits into the autonomous driving landscape and their tech stack
(00:50:51) - Affordable radar systems
(00:51:54) - Ghost’s approach to interpretability
(00:53:27) - Using LLMs for driving
(00:54:59) - Partnership with OpenAI and how Ghost’s unique LLM solution to the self-driving problem
(00:57:40) - GPS’ unreliability which can be solved by multimodal approach
(01:02:31) - Hallucination is the best part of LLMs
(01:04:09) - Using maps as extended memory and storage for driving data
(01:09:20) - Ghost business model and the user experience
(01:13:30) - Talking to our software as the next wave of human-computer interaction
(01:16:37) - OpenAI as currently the only provider of advanced multimodal models
(01:18:52) - How society feels about self-driving cars
(01:24:17) - How self-driving cars should address fear and standing up for the technology
(01:29:30) - AI: China and the US, and why China is being pushed towards self-driving
(01:31:39) - Regulators in the US are responsive to consumers
(01:32:26) - VC subsidization of self-driving
(01:33:25) - John’s widest angle outlook on the AI revolution
playlist_add
Nov 7, 2023
OpenAI DevDay: Beyond the Headlines with Logan Kilpatrick, OpenAI's Dev Relations Lead
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.
SPONSORS:
SHOPIFY: https://shopify.com/cognitive for a $1/month trial period
Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business. Shopify powers 10% of ALL eCommerce in the US. And Shopify's the global force behind Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklinen, and 1,000,000s of other entrepreneurs across 175 countries.From their all-in-one e-commerce platform, to their in-person POS system – wherever and whatever you're selling, Shopify's got you covered. With free Shopify Magic, sell more with less effort by whipping up captivating content that converts – from blog posts to product descriptions using AI. Sign up for $1/month trial period: https://shopify.com/cognitive
With the onset of AI, it’s time to upgrade to the next generation of the cloud: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. OCI is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. Train ML models on the cloud’s highest performing NVIDIA GPU clusters.
Do more and spend less like Uber, 8x8, and Databricks Mosaic, take a FREE test drive of OCI at oracle.com/cognitive
NetSuite has 25 years of providing financial software for all your business needs. More than 36,000 businesses have already upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle, gaining visibility and control over their financials, inventory, HR, eCommerce, and more. If you're looking for an ERP platform ✅ head to NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive and download your own customized KPI checklist.
Omneky is an omnichannel creative generation platform that lets you launch hundreds of thousands of ad iterations that actually work customized across all platforms, with a click of a button. Omneky combines generative AI and real-time advertising data. Mention "Cog Rev" for 10% off.
X/SOCIAL:
@labenz (Nathan)
@OfficialLoganK (Logan)
@CogRev_Podcast
TIMESTAMPS:
(00:00:00) - Episode Preview
(00:02:08) - How many startups did OpenAI kill?
(00:05:50) - Current employee count at OpenAI
(00:06:59) - OpenAI's mission being focused on developing safe AGI to benefit humanity
(00:07:10) - How the GPT Store relates to AGI and progressing agent development
(00:08:22) - OpenAI's strategy to release AI iteratively so society can adapt
(00:10:50) - Safety considerations around the OpenAI Assistant release
(00:11:30) - Capability overhangs and is the internet ready for agents?
(00:14:13) - Why certain agent capabilities like planning aren't enabled yet by OpenAI
(00:15:28) - Sponsors: Shopify | Omneky
(00:17:34) - GPT-4-1106 Preview designation
(00:21:50) - 16k fine-tuning for 3.5 Turbo
(00:25:13) - GPT-4 Finetuning and how to join the experiment
(00:27:53) - Custom models: $2-3 million pricing to build a defensible business
(00:29:48) - Bringing costs down to bring custom models to more people
(00:30:19) - Sponsors: Oracle | Netsuite
(00:33:53) - Copyright shield
(00:35:42) - OpenAI doesn’t train on data you send to the API
(00:36:37) - New modalities and low res GPT vision
(00:37:26) - GPT Vision Assessment for Aesthetics
(00:42:30) - WhisperLarge v3
(00:44:15) - Text-to-speech API: the voice strategy and AI safety
(00:51:45) - Log probabilities coming soon
(00:53:45) - The evolution of plugins to GPTs: the challenges with plugins
(00:55:33) - GPT Instructions, expanded knowledge, and actions
(01:00:18) - How is auth handled with GPTs
(01:01:04) - Hybrid auth
(01:02:50) - GPT Assistant API Billing
(01:07:58) - AI Safety
(01:10:28) - OpenAI Jailbreaks and Bug Bounties
(01:11:57) - The OpenAI roadmap for a year from now
The Cognitive Revolution is brought to you by the Turpentine Media network.
Producer: Vivian Meng
Executive Producers: Amelia Salyers, and Erik Torenberg
Editor: Graham Bessellieu
For inquiries about guests or sponsoring the podcast, please email vivian@turpentine.co
playlist_add
Nov 2, 2023
Biden's Executive Order and AI Safety with Flo Crivello, Founder of Lindy AI
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: Oracle | Netsuite | Omneky
With the onset of AI, it’s time to upgrade to the next generation of the cloud: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. OCI is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. Train ML models on the cloud’s highest performing NVIDIA GPU clusters.
Do more and spend less like Uber, 8x8, and Databricks Mosaic, take a FREE test drive of OCI at oracle.com/cognitive
NetSuite has 25 years of providing financial software for all your business needs. More than 36,000 businesses have already upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle, gaining visibility and control over their financials, inventory, HR, eCommerce, and more. If you're looking for an ERP platform ✅ head to NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive and download your own customized KPI checklist.
Omneky is an omnichannel creative generation platform that lets you launch hundreds of thousands of ad iterations that actually work customized across all platforms, with a click of a button. Omneky combines generative AI and real-time advertising data. Mention "Cog Rev" for 10% off.
RECOMMENDED PODCAST:
Every week investor and writer of the popular newsletter The Diff, Byrne Hobart, and co-host Erik Torenberg discuss today’s major inflection points in technology, business, and markets – and help listeners build a diversified portfolio of trends and ideas for the future. Subscribe to “The Riff” with Byrne Hobart and Erik Torenberg: https://link.chtbl.com/theriff
TIMESTAMPS:
(00:00) Episode Preview
(00:06:42) The natural order of technological progress
(00:07:00) Self driving cars
(00:10:57) Where is Flo accelerationist?
(00:12:34) Artificial intelligence as a new form of life
(00:17:08) - Sponsors: Oracle | Omneky
(00:18:05) Silicon-based intelligence vs carbon-based intelligence
(00:24:36) Executive Order
(00:29:32) How would a GPU kill switch work?
(00:31:24) “Let’s not regulate model development, but applications”
(00:32:08) - Sponsor: Netsuite
(00:36:00) GPT-4 is the most critical component for AGI
(00:38:00) AGI in 2-8 years
(00:39:26) Eureka moment from a general system
(00:48:00) AI research with China
(00:52:00) Does AI have subjective experience? The Mu response
The Cognitive Revolution is brought to you by the Turpentine Media network.
Producer: Vivian Meng
Executive Producers: Amelia Salyers, and Erik Torenberg
Editor: Graham Bessellieu
For inquiries about guests or sponsoring the podcast, please email vivian@turpentine.co
playlist_add
Oct 31, 2023
Hardcore AI for History with Mark Humphries, Professor of History at Wilfred Laurier University
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 that hadn't worked, and in the process proved himself to be one of the world's leading adopters of AI technology in the field of history.
If you need an ERP platform, check out our sponsor NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive.
SPONSORS: NetSuite | Omneky
NetSuite has 25 years of providing financial software for all your business needs. More than 36,000 businesses have already upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle, gaining visibility and control over their financials, inventory, HR, eCommerce, and more. If you're looking for an ERP platform ✅ head to NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive and download your own customized KPI checklist.
Omneky is an omnichannel creative generation platform that lets you launch hundreds of thousands of ad iterations that actually work customized across all platforms, with a click of a button. Omneky combines generative AI and real-time advertising data. Mention "Cog Rev" for 10% off.
RECOMMENDED PODCAST:
Every week investor and writer of the popular newsletter The Diff, Byrne Hobart, and co-host Erik Torenberg discuss today’s major inflection points in technology, business, and markets – and help listeners build a diversified portfolio of trends and ideas for the future. Subscribe to “The Riff” with Byrne Hobart and Erik Torenberg: https://link.chtbl.com/theriff
TIMESTAMPS:
(00:00:00) - Episode Preview
(00:03:00) - The state of AI in history before recent advances like GPT-3
(00:06:00) - Mark's background and how he first got interested in AI
(00:09:00) - Using AI to process and search through vast amounts of archival material
(00:12:00) - The challenges of digitizing and searching handwritten historical documents
(00:15:00) - The massive scale of undiscovered archival material that could be processed by AI
(00:18:00) - How AI can help historians process more archival material than ever before
(00:20:11) - Sponsors: Netsuite | Omneky
(00:21:00) - Limitations on using commercial APIs for private archival documents
(00:24:00) - The cost of processing archival documents compared to hiring human transcribers
(00:27:00) - Comparing GPT's ability to transcribe historical handwriting vs more recent scripts
(00:33:00) - Tracing individuals through complex fur trade records using AI
(00:36:00) - Mark's approach to fine-tuning models for specific historical tasks
(00:39:00) - Challenges teaching AI models the nuances of historical writing
(00:42:00) - Privacy issues limiting the use of commercial APIs on restricted archival material
(00:45:00) - The gap between people's expectations of AI and what it can really do right now
(00:51:00) - Adapting assignments and student expectations to AI's current capabilities
(00:52:28) - Using chain of thought prompting to teach models precise historical tasks
(00:52:46) - Getting high accuracy on keyword tagging of archival documents using fine-tuning
(00:57:00) - Mark has crossed the threshold from promise to accelerating archival research
(01:00:00) - How to frame classification tasks to get the most value from AI models
(01:03:00) - Teaching AI models to pronounce tricky historical names and terms
(01:06:19) - Mark's experience using AI in the classroom over two semesters
(01:09:00) - Assignments that are better suited to the current strengths and weaknesses of AI
(01:11:45) - AI progress in education is lagging due to lack of institutional adoption
(01:12:00) - The trajectory of AI capabilities and the need for humans to exceed the model baseline
(01:27:49) - Lessons from history on economic transitions and the social contract
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Oct 26, 2023
AI Agents, VC Insights on AI, and Building in Public with Yohei Nakajima, Creator of BabyAGI
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.
SPONSORS: NetSuite | Omneky
NetSuite has 25 years of providing financial software for all your business needs. More than 36,000 businesses have already upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle, gaining visibility and control over their financials, inventory, HR, eCommerce, and more. If you're looking for an ERP platform ✅ head to NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive and download your own customized KPI checklist.
Omneky is an omnichannel creative generation platform that lets you launch hundreds of thousands of ad iterations that actually work customized across all platforms, with a click of a button. Omneky combines generative AI and real-time advertising data. Mention "Cog Rev" for 10% off.
LINKS:
BabyAGI: https://github.com/yoheinakajima/babyagi
Yohei's site: https://yoheinakajima.com/
X/SOCIAL
@labenz (Nathan)
@yoheinakajima (Yohei)
@CogRev_Podcast
TIMESTAMPS:
(00:10:59) - A large part of AI is trying to map human cognitive processes onto our software stack
(00:11:14) - Yohei’s TED AI talk: the opportunity for AI to strengthen human understanding
(00:13:29) - Yohei's journey to build AI projects and building in public
(00:14:04) - Yohei's lifelong interest in building tools and automating workflows for efficiency
(00:16:29) - Sponsors: Netsuite | Omneky
(00:22:05) - Building projects as a fun and exploratory practice
(00:23:53) - Single use software
(00:24:18) - Yohei’s home assessment price contesting project
(00:24:58) - The origins of BabyAGI as an autonomous startup founder prototype
(00:27:44) - Create as many paper clips as possible
(00:30:10) - Thoughts on going all in on a project and turning it into a company vs pursuing it on the side
(00:33:00) - Forking different versions of Baby AGI based on animal names
(00:34:24) - Yohei’s learnings about agents after iterating on six versions of Baby AGI
(00:36:24) - Yohei’s thoughts on generalist agents
(00:37:28) - Replit
(00:40:54) - Begin exploring AI automation with tasks you wish you had time for, not critical workflows
(00:42:32) - Automating outbound sales and recruiting workflows with AI
(00:46:19) - Where should people start learning about AI agents?
(00:48:23) - Will agents come online with GPT-4V?
(00:52:40) - The unique moment where both executives and engineers both want to implement AI
(00:54:59) - AI layers: hardware, software, tooling
(00:57:20) - Taxonomy of AI business models
(01:10:47) - Designing AI to provide value for senior citizens
(01:15:14) - The responsibility to nudge people positively with influential AI assistants
(01:19:24) - Advice on when and how startups should build in public
(01:22:24) - Perspective on existential risk from AI vs. its potential benefits
(01:15:30) - Responsibility to handle AI-human emotional connections well
(01:19:24) - Advice on when and how startups should build in public
(01:22:24) - Perspective on existential risk from AI vs. its potential benefits
The Cognitive Revolution is brought to you by the Turpentine Media network.
Producer: Vivian Meng
Executive Producers: Amelia Salyers, and Erik Torenberg
Editor: Graham Bessellieu
For inquiries about guests or sponsoring the podcast, please email vivian@turpentine.co
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Oct 24, 2023
RAG & Beyond: Semantic Storage and Retrieval
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: NetSuite | Omneky
NetSuite has 25 years of providing financial software for all your business needs. More than 36,000 businesses have already upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle, gaining visibility and control over their financials, inventory, HR, eCommerce, and more. If you're looking for an ERP platform ✅ head to NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive and download your own customized KPI checklist.
Omneky is an omnichannel creative generation platform that lets you launch hundreds of thousands of ad iterations that actually work customized across all platforms, with a click of a button. Omneky combines generative AI and real-time advertising data. Mention "Cog Rev" for 10% off.
LINKS:
Part 1 with Anton: https://youtu.be/ogy37CdIljg
X/SOCIAL:
@labenz (Nathan)
@atroyn (Anton)
@eriktorenberg (Erik)
@CogRev_Podcast
TIMESTAMPS:
(00:00:00) - Introduction by Nathan, setting up the conversation with Anton
(00:02:16) - Anton articulates Chroma's mission to build a horizontally scalable system
(00:03:06) - Rise in popularity of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
(00:05:00) - Anton explains what it means for Chroma to be in "wartime" mode right now
(00:06:03) - Chroma's focus on delivering a horizontally scalable cloud service for vector search and storage
(00:08:07) - Nathan describes his experience building a RAG application for a client profiling use case
(00:10:27) - Anton advises measuring retrieval quality and maximizing relevant information returned
(00:15:05) - Sponsors: Netsuite | Omneky
(00:17:02) - Popular use of open source vs. proprietary embedding models like Anthropic's Ada
(00:19:30) - The importance of keeping the RAG loop in house and not relying solely on external APIs
(00:23:31) - Approaches for adapting the embedding space based on user feedback
(00:27:41) - The huge amount of unstructured data that can now be processed by AI
(00:30:40) - Providing a unified interface to structured and unstructured data
(00:31:21) - Chroma's plans to bring more intelligence into the data layer
(00:32:13) - Analogies to Salesforce and Oracle in enterprise software partnerships
(00:33:15) - Much of the data going into Chroma has never been in a database before
(00:38:47) - Categories of organizations adapting to AI: legacy, AI-native, and AI-first
(00:40:55) - Where Chroma is seeing most of its growth right now
(00:42:48) - Retrieval as an important component for developing good agents
(00:46:20) - Interpretability work like Anthropic's circuit evaluation
(00:52:23) - Anton believes new tooling can make latent spaces accessible without AI expertise
(01:03:32) - Thinking of data as a control loop rather than static
(01:06:08) - Scaling constraints between search indexes vs. application databases
(01:09:10) - Potential for time as a dimension in embedding spaces
(01:10:55) - Language models discovering implicit representations of time and space
(01:13:46) - Likelihood of missing results due to representational issues vs. approximate nearest neighbor
(01:15:22) - Automatically handling small data sets without needing elaborate indexing
(01:16:11) - Partnerships with AI labs to mutually reinforce RAG applications
(01:17:20) - Anton's perspective on whether OpenAI will build its own database
(01:19:43) - Partnering with OpenAI and other labs to increase use of their models
(01:21:19) - Anton's experiments probing GPT's reasoning abilities with Game of Life
(01:25:41) - Closing thoughts on the conversation
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Oct 20, 2023
The Future of the Transformer Part 2 with Trey Kollmer
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: NetSuite | Omneky
NetSuite has 25 years of providing financial software for all your business needs. More than 36,000 businesses have already upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle, gaining visibility and control over their financials, inventory, HR, eCommerce, and more. If you're looking for an ERP platform ✅ head to NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive and download your own customized KPI checklist.
Omneky is an omnichannel creative generation platform that lets you launch hundreds of thousands of ad iterations that actually work customized across all platforms, with a click of a button. Omneky combines generative AI and real-time advertising data. Mention "Cog Rev" for 10% off.
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Every week investor and writer of the popular newsletter The Diff, Byrne Hobart, and co-host Erik Torenberg discuss today’s major inflection points in technology, business, and markets – and help listeners build a diversified portfolio of trends and ideas for the future. Subscribe to “The Riff” with Byrne Hobart and Erik Torenberg: https://link.chtbl.com/theriff
TIMESTAMPS:
(00:00:00) - Episode Preview
(00:01:11) - Paper: Think Before You Speak
(00:03:13) - Multimodal models for combining vision and language
(00:04:19) - Backspace Paper
(00:06:25) - Chain of thought prompting for step-by-step reasoning
(00:09:14) - Backspacing in language models to correct mistakes
(00:12:05) - Attention sinks for expanding context length
(0012:41) - Paper: Large Language Models as Analogical Reasoners
(00:15:24) - Pause tokens for language models to "think"
(00:18:23) - Analogical prompting to recall relevant examples
(00:20:52) - Long context windows for language models
(00:23:20) - Markdown works best for OpenAI
(00:24:23) - Ring attention to break memory constraints
(00:26:15) - Paper: StreamingLLMs
(00:27:46) - Potential for superhuman performance with longer contexts
(00:31:01) - Dynamic context window adjustment at runtime
(00:33:53) - Retention and memory capabilities for transformers
(00:37:12) - Planning algorithms combined with memory and scale
(00:39:49) - Paper: Ring Attention
(00:42:35) - Executive assistant prompting and critique
(00:45:23) - Self-RAG for language models to find own examples
(00:48:02) - Timelines and predictions for future capabilities
(00:50:37) - Applications like analyzing long texts and scripts
(00:53:15) - Local versus global attention in transformers
(00:55:59) - Architectural changes versus just training adjustments
(00:58:41) - Pre-training strategies like random start points
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Oct 18, 2023
The Future of the Transformer Part 1 with Trey Kollmer | H100 Chips will Supercharge AI Hardware
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
SPONSORS: NetSuite | Omneky
NetSuite has 25 years of providing financial software for all your business needs. More than 36,000 businesses have already upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle, gaining visibility and control over their financials, inventory, HR, eCommerce, and more. If you're looking for an ERP platform ✅ head to NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive and download your own customized KPI checklist.
Omneky is an omnichannel creative generation platform that lets you launch hundreds of thousands of ad iterations that actually work customized across all platforms, with a click of a butto…
playlist_add
Oct 13, 2023
The AI Scouting Report: Jailbreaks and Defense
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 sponsor, NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive
Questions or topics you want us to review for future episodes? Email TCR@turpentine.co
SPONSORS: NetSuite | Omneky
NetSuite has 25 years of providing financial software for all your business needs. More than 36,000 businesses have already upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle, gaining visibility and control over their financials, inventory, HR, eCommerce, and more. If you're looking for an ERP platform ✅ head to NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive and download your own customized KPI checklist.
Omneky is an omnichannel creative generation pla…
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Oct 10, 2023
AI is Supercharging Writers with Sudowrite's Founder, James Yu
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: http://netsuite.com/cognitive
Subscribe to the show Substack to join future conversations and submit questions to upcoming guests! https://cognitiverevolution.substack.com/
SPONSORS: NetSuite | Omneky
NetSuite has 25 years of providing financial software for all your business needs. More than 36,000 businesses have already upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle, gaining visibility and control over their financials, inventory, HR, eCommerce, and more. If you're looking for an ERP platform ✅ head to NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive and download your own customized KPI checklist.
Omneky is an…
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Oct 5, 2023
AI Engineers, Pendants, and Competition Between OpenAI and Developers with Swyx of Latent Space
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…). f you're looking for an ERP platform, check out our sponsor, NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive
Subscribe to the show Substack to join future conversations and submit questions to upcoming guests! https://cognitiverevolution.substack.com/
SPONSORS: NetSuite | Omneky
NetSuite has 25 years of providing financial software for all your business needs. More than 36,000 businesses have already upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle, gaining visibility and control over their financials, inventory, HR, eCommerce, and more. If you're looking for an ERP platform ✅ head to NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive and download your ow…
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Oct 3, 2023
Gunning for Google with Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas
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://netsuite.com/cognitive
SPONSORS: NetSuite | Omneky
NetSuite has 25 years of providing financial software for all your business needs. More than 36,000 businesses have already upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle, gaining visibility and control over their financials, inventory, HR, eCommerce, and more. If you're looking for an ERP platform ✅ head to NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive and download your own customized KPI checklist.
Omneky is an omnichannel creative generation platform that lets you launch hundreds of thousands of ad iterations that actually work customized across all platforms…
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Sep 29, 2023
OpenAI, Amazon's Anthropic Investment, and the Roman Empire with Zvi Mowshowitz
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 blog Don't Worry About the Vase
(https://thezvi.wordpress.com/) - Zvi is an information hyperprocessor who synthesizes vast amounts of new and ever-evolving information into extremely clear summaries that help educated people keep up with the latest news.
SPONSORS: NetSuite | Omneky
NetSuite has 25 years of providing financial software for all your business needs. More than 36,000 businesses have already upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle, gaining visibility and control over their financials, inventory, HR, eCommerce, and more. If you're looking for an ERP platform ✅ head to NetSuite: ht…
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Sep 26, 2023
OpenAI Fine-Tuning Update, Acceleration Debate, and Bundling AI Services
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
SPONSORS: NetSuite | Omneky
NetSuite has 25 years of providing financial software for all your business needs. More than 36,000 businesses have already upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle, gaining visibility and control over their financials, inventory, HR, eCommerce, and more. If you're looking for an ERP platform ✅ head to NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive and download your own customized KPI checklist.
Omneky is an omnichannel creative generation platform that lets you launch hundreds of thousands of ad iterations that actually work customized across all platforms, with a click of a button. Omneky combines generative AI and real-time advertising data. Mention "Cog Rev" for 10% off.
RECOMMENDED PODCAST:
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Sep 22, 2023
Universal Jailbreaks with Zico Kolter, Andy Zou, and Asher Trockman
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, check out our sponsor, NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive
TIMESTAMPS:
[00:00:00] - Introducing the podcast and guests Zico Kolter, Andy Zou, and Asher Trockman
[00:06:32] - Discussing the motivation and high-level strategy for the universal adversarial attack on language models
[00:09:33] - Explaining how the attacks work by adding nonsense tokens to maximize target sequence probability
[00:11:06] - Comparing to prior adversarial attacks in vision models
[00:13:47] - Details on the attack optimization process and discrete token search
[00:17:09] - The empirical notion of "mode switching…
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Sep 19, 2023
The Future of AI Security with Adam Wenchel, CEO of Arthur.ai
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, and the LLM-specific techniques Adam has developed. If you're looking for an ERP platform, check out our sponsor, NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive
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Sep 14, 2023
AI-Powered Filmmaking with Waymark's Stephen Parker and Josh Rubin
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, check out our sponsor, NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive
TIMESTAMPS
(00:00) Episode Preview
(00:01:00) Nathan’s introduction for Stephen Parker and Josh Rubin
(00:05:01) - The Frost is a 12-minute short film created using DALL-E 2 images.
(00:07:06) - The Frost started as an experiment to see if a narrative film could be created completely from AI imagery.
(00:08:38) - The filmmaking process was different because DALL-E images provided a starting point to build the story.
(00:10:38) - Parker started generating images with DALL-E 2 when he got access to the early preview.
(00:12:26) - P…
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Sep 12, 2023
Hollywood Strike Update and AI Roundup with Trey Kollmer
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.
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TIMESTAMPS:
(00:04:01) Hollywood and AI: updates on SAG-AFTRA and the WGA
(00:15:20) Sponsors: NetSuite | Omne…
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Sep 7, 2023
Why a16z Built a Town for AI People
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 lifeforms, and why they chose Javascript and Convex to build AI Town. If you're looking for an ERP platform, check out our sponsor, NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive
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Founding a business is just the tip of the iceberg; the real complexity comes with scaling it. On 1 to 1000, hosts Jack Altman and Erik Torenberg dig deep into the inevitable twists and turns operators encounter along the journey of turning an idea into a business. Hear all about the tactical challenges of scaling from the people that built up the world’s leading companies like Stripe, Ramp, and Latt…
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Sep 5, 2023
Cryptography Will Revolutionize AI Data Privacy with Daniel Kang
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 needed in a world where LLMs are increasingly embedded into our daily lives. If you're looking for an ERP platform, check out our sponsor, NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive
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Founding a business is just the tip of the iceberg; the real complexity comes with scaling it. On 1 to 1000, hosts Jack Altman and Erik Torenberg dig deep into the inevitable twists and turns operators encounter along the journey of turning an idea into a business. Hear all about the tactical challenges of scaling from the people that built up the world’s leading companies like Stripe, Ramp, an…
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Aug 31, 2023
How Hugging Face raised $235M
In this episode, Nathan and Erik sit down to analyze Hugging Face in light of its recent $235M Series D round. They analyze Hugging Face’s community and defensibility through the lens of other community businesses like ProductHunt and Yelp, assess its ability to fulfill its $4.5 billion valuation, and assess competitors and other notable companies in the space like Replit, Character, and Runway. If you're looking for an ERP platform, check out our sponsor, NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive
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The HR industry is at a crossroads. What will it take to construct the next generation of incredible businesses – and where can people leaders have the most business impact? Hosts Nolan Church and Kelli Dragovich have been through it all, the highs and the lows – IPOs, layoffs, executive turnover, board meetings, culture changes, and more. With a lineup of industry vets and experts, Nolan and Kelli break down the nitty-gritty details, trade offs, and dynamics of cons…
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Aug 29, 2023
E57: Google's PaLM 2 with Paige Bailey
In this episode, Nathan sits down with Paige Bailey, Lead Product Manager of Generative Models at Google Deepmind. In this conversation, they discuss what it's like to be a PM for an LLM as opposed to an app, defining ideal LLM behaviour, and reasoning - how do you distinguish real abilities vs pattern matching? If you're looking for an ERP platform, check out our sponsor, NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive
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The HR industry is at a crossroads. What will it take to construct the next generation of incredible businesses – and where can people leaders have the most business impact? Hosts Nolan Church and Kelli Dragovich have been through it all, the highs and the lows – IPOs, layoffs, executive turnover, board meetings, culture changes, and more. With a lineup of industry vets and experts, Nolan and Kelli break down the nitty-gritty details, trade offs, and dynamics of constructing high performing companies. Through unfiltered conversations that can only happ…
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Aug 25, 2023
E56: OpenAI’s GPT3.5 Turbo and the State of AI in Coding, Healthcare, and Education
Join Nathan Labenz and Erik Torenberg as they analyze the latest developments from OpenAI on GPT 3.5, compare GPT to other live player models like Llama2, and discuss the state of AI in coding, education, and healthcare. If you're looking for an ERP platform, check out our sponsor, NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive
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The HR industry is at a crossroads. What will it take to construct the next generation of incredible businesses – and where can people leaders have the most business impact? Hosts Nolan Church and Kelli Dragovich have been through it all, the highs and the lows – IPOs, layoffs, executive turnover, board meetings, culture changes, and more. With a lineup of industry vets and experts, Nolan and Kelli break down the nitty-gritty details, trade offs, and dynamics of constructing high performing companies. Through unfiltered conversations that can only happen between seasoned practitioners, Kelli and Nolan dive deep into the kind of leadership-leve…
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Aug 23, 2023
E55: Google’s Multimodal Med-PaLM with Vivek Natarajan and Tao Tu
In this episode, Nathan sits down with Vivek Natarajan and Tao Tu of Google’s Med-PaLM, diving into how they used one of the world’s largest medical datasets ever compiled to develop Med-PaLM M, an AI agent specialized in medical tasks. In this episode, they discuss: Med-PaLM M's “clinically superhuman” abilities and limitations, the rigorous testing and validation that went into the model, and their vision for AI to take over repetitive clerical tasks and allow doctors to focus on patients.
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The HR industry is at a crossroads. What will it take to construct the next generation of incredible businesses – and where can people leaders have the most business impact? Hosts Nolan Church and Kelli Dragovich have been through it all, the highs and the lows – IPOs, layoffs, executive turnover, board meetings, culture changes, and more. With a lineup of industry vets and experts, Nolan and Kelli break down the nitty-gritty details, trade offs, and dynamics of co…
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Aug 17, 2023
E54: The Presentation Revolution with Jon Noronha, Co-Founder of Gamma
In this episode, Nathan sits down with Jon Noronha, co-founder of Gamma. Gamma is a new medium for presenting ideas, allowing you to focus on your ideas and receive beautiful, engaging content without the formatting work. In this episode, Jon and Nathan discuss the journey of building Gamma, how to coax AI to do things well, and the opportunity for AI A/B testing. If you're looking for an ERP platform, check out our sponsor, NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive
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The HR industry is at a crossroads. What will it take to construct the next generation of incredible businesses – and where can people leaders have the most business impact? Hosts Nolan Church and Kelli Dragovich have been through it all, the highs and the lows – IPOs, layoffs, executive turnover, board meetings, culture changes, and more. With a lineup of industry vets and experts, Nolan and Kelli break down the nitty-gritty details, trade offs, and dynamics of constructing high performing companies…
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Aug 15, 2023
E53: The AI Revolution in Education with Shawn Jansepar, Director of Engineering at Khan Academy
In this episode, Nathan sits down with Shawn Jansepar, Director of Engineering at Khan Academy, to discuss their GPT-4 powered Socratic tutor, Khanmigo. In this conversation, Shawn and Nathan chat about Khan Academy’s collaboration with OpenAI and how they helped fine-tune GPT-4, how Khan Academy leveraged GPT-4 to build Khanmigo, and the impact of providing access to an AI tutor to any student. If you're looking for an ERP platform, check out our sponsor, NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive
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The HR industry is at a crossroads. What will it take to construct the next generation of incredible businesses – and where can people leaders have the most business impact? Hosts Nolan Church and Kelli Dragovich have been through it all, the highs and the lows – IPOs, layoffs, executive turnover, board meetings, culture changes, and more. With a lineup of industry vets and experts, Nolan and Kelli break down the nitty-gritty details, trade offs, and dynamics of cons…
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Aug 10, 2023
E52: Advancements in AI: Updating the Scouting Report, Task Automation, and Google Breakthroughs
Join Nathan Labenz and Erik Torenberg as they analyze the last month in AI advancements. Nathan takes us through the meaningful updates to his Scouting Report (released last month, linked below), discusses highlights from recent episodes of The Cognitive Revolution, and gives us a sneak peek at upcoming interviews with Google researchers. If you're looking for an ERP platform, check out our sponsor, NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive
RECOMMENDED PODCAST:
The HR industry is at a crossroads. What will it take to construct the next generation of incredible businesses – and where can people leaders have the most business impact? Hosts Nolan Church and Kelli Dragovich have been through it all, the highs and the lows – IPOs, layoffs, executive turnover, board meetings, culture changes, and more. With a lineup of industry vets and experts, Nolan and Kelli break down the nitty-gritty details, trade offs, and dynamics of constructing high performing companies. Through unfiltered conve…
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Aug 8, 2023
E51: Replit's VP of AI, Michele Catasta, on Artificial Developer Intelligence
In this episode, Nathan sits down with Replit’s VP of AI, Michele Catasta. Replit is building what CEO Amjad Masad calls "the perfect substrate for AGI." In this discussion, Michele and Nathan discuss Replit's state of AI development report, advantages when it comes to AI development, and the company's custom models. If you're looking for an ERP platform, check out our sponsor, NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive
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The HR industry is at a crossroads. What will it take to construct the next generation of incredible businesses – and where can people leaders have the most business impact? Hosts Nolan Church and Kelli Dragovich have been through it all, the highs and the lows – IPOs, layoffs, executive turnover, board meetings, culture changes, and more. With a lineup of industry vets and experts, Nolan and Kelli break down the nitty-gritty details, trade offs, and dynamics of constructing high performing companies. Through unfiltered conversations that can on…
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Aug 4, 2023
E50: The Future of Software Development with Tyler Angert of Replit
In this episode, Nathan sits down with Tyler Angert, Product Designer at Replit, to discuss the future of software development. Replit is building what CEO Amjad Masad calls "the perfect substrate for AGI." In this discussion, Tyler and Nathan discuss how Replit is leveraging AI to enhance its current product, bot-bot interactions, the design and ethical considerations around AI agents, and more. If you're looking for an ERP platform, check out our sponsor, NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive
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The HR industry is at a crossroads. What will it take to construct the next generation of incredible businesses – and where can people leaders have the most business impact? Hosts Nolan Church and Kelli Dragovich have been through it all, the highs and the lows – IPOs, layoffs, executive turnover, board meetings, culture changes, and more. With a lineup of industry vets and experts, Nolan and Kelli break down the nitty-gritty details, trade offs, and dynamics of const…
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Aug 2, 2023
E49: Open AI, Anthropic, and Meta | Analyzing the AI Frontier with Zvi
This isn't news, it's analysis! Nathan Labenz sits down for an with Zvi Mowshowitz, the writer behind Don't Worry About the Vase to talk about the major players in AI over the last few months. In this extended conversation, Nathan and Zvi debate if AI has attained the intelligence of a well-read college graduate (per OpenAI's Jan Leike), a live player analysis (who to count/ who not to count), and the role of independent red teaming organizations. 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 blog Don't Worry About the Vase (https://thezvi.wordpress.com/) - Zvi is an information hyperprocessor who synthesizes vast amounts of new and ever-evolving information into extremely clear summaries that help educated people keep up with the latest news. Highly recommend.
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The HR industry is at a crossroads. What will it take to construct the next generation of incre…
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Jul 27, 2023
E48: Mechanizing Mechanistic Interpretability with Arthur Conmy
Arthur Conmy sits down with Nathan Labenz for an accessible deep dive into the state of interpretability research online today. They discuss how pioneering researchers have painstakingly worked to isolate the sub-circuits within transformers that are responsible for different aspects of AI capabilities. Arthur also introduces us to a new ACDC approach that he and his co-authors have taken to automating some of the most time-consuming parts of this work. If you’re looking for an ERP platform, check out our sponsor, NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive
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The HR industry is at a crossroads. What will it take to construct the next generation of incredible businesses – and where can people leaders have the most business impact? Hosts Nolan Church and Kelli Dragovich have been through it all, the highs and the lows – IPOs, layoffs, executive turnover, board meetings, culture changes, and more. With a lineup of industry vets and experts, Nolan and Kelli break dow…
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Jul 25, 2023
E47: GPUMaxing with Dr. Ronen Dar of Run:ai
Nathan Labenz sits down with Dr. Ronen Dar, CTO and co-founder of Run:ai, an Israel-based company that helps enterprises train and deploy AI models by optimizing GPU usage. The discussion covers how chip makers can meet the soaring demands, geopolitical fears, to the best practices companies can secure compute capacity. If you’re looking for an ERP platform, check out our sponsor, NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive
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The HR industry is at a crossroads. What will it take to construct the next generation of incredible businesses – and where can people leaders have the most business impact? Hosts Nolan Church and Kelli Dragovich have been through it all, the highs and the lows – IPOs, layoffs, executive turnover, board meetings, culture changes, and more. With a lineup of industry vets and experts, Nolan and Kelli break down the nitty-gritty details, trade offs, and dynamics of constructing high performing companies. Through unfiltered conversations that ca…
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Jul 19, 2023
E46: AI Scouting Report - Part 2 of 3: Implementation Trends [Bonus YouTube Episode]
Head over to YouTube to watch Part 2 of The AI Scouting Report (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovm4MbQ4G9E), supported by slides and visual aides. In Part 2, Nathan Labenz builds on Part 1: AI Fundamental and delves into recent trends and practical applications for AI. Nathan's aim is to impart the equivalent of a high school AP course understanding to listeners in 90-minute installments.
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The HR industry is at a crossroads. What will it take to construct the next generation of incredible businesses – and where can people leaders have the most business impact? Hosts Nolan Church and Kelli Dragovich have been through it all, the highs and the lows – IPOs, layoffs, executive turnover, board meetings, culture changes, and more. With a lineup of industry vets and experts, Nolan and Kelli break down the nitty-gritty details, trade offs, and dynamics of constructing high performing companies. Through unfiltered conversations that can only happen between seasoned pra…
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Jul 13, 2023
E45: The AI Copilot Revolution with Div Garg of MULTI·ON
Nathan Labenz interviews Div Garg, founder of MULTI·ON, the world's first personal AI agent and life copilot. Div talks about the product strategy and roadmap for the MULTI·ON browser, their natural language approach to skills, and the steps they are taking to ensure user safety. Div explains how the platform uses a critic model to detect the success or failure of tasks, and how it can be used to book flights, order food, and more. Div also talks about the future of memory systems, such as the user profile feature, and how it can be used to improve the user experience.
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The HR industry is at a crossroads. What will it take to construct the next generation of incredible businesses – and where can people leaders have the most business impact? Hosts Nolan Church and Kelli Dragovich have been through it all, the highs and the lows – IPOs, layoffs, executive turnover, board meetings, culture changes, and more. With a lineup of industry vets and experts, Nolan and…
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Jul 11, 2023
E44: The AI Safety Debates with Zvi Mowshowitz
Nathan Labenz sits down with Zvi Mowshowitz, the writer behind Don't Worry About the Vase.
Zvi is an information hyperprocessor who synthesizes vast amounts of new and ever-evolving information into extremely clear summaries that help educated people keep up with the latest news. In this episode, we cover his AI safety worldview, an overview of the AI discourse, and who really matters in the AI debates.
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The HR industry is at a crossroads. What will it take to construct the next generation of incredible businesses – and where can people leaders have the most business impact? Hosts Nolan Church and Kelli Dragovich have been through it all, the highs and the lows – IPOs, layoffs, executive turnover, board meetings, culture changes, and more. With a lineup of industry vets and experts, Nolan and Kelli break down the nitty-gritty details, trade offs, and dynamics of constructing high performing companies. Through unfiltered conversations that can only happen betwee…
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Jul 6, 2023
E43: AI Scouting Report – Part 1 of 3: Fundamentals [Bonus YouTube Episode]
Head to a special YouTube presentation with visual aides (https://youtu.be/0hvtiVQ_LqQ), where Nathan Labenz synthesizes the core fundamentals of AI as simply, clearly, and literally as possible. Nathan's aim is to impart the equivalent of a high school AP course understanding to listeners in 90 minutes. This special episode is in part brought to you by Athena. You can use Nathan’s referral link (http://athenago.me/nathan-labenz) for a free first month of Athena services for qualified customers.
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The HR industry is at a crossroads. What will it take to construct the next generation of incredible businesses – and where can people leaders have the most business impact? Hosts Nolan Church and Kelli Dragovich have been through it all, the highs and the lows – IPOs, layoffs, executive turnover, board meetings, culture changes, and more. With a lineup of industry vets and experts, Nolan and Kelli break down the nitty-gritty details, trade offs, and dynamics of cons…
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Jul 4, 2023
E42: The Autonomy Revolution with Hayk Martiros of Skydio
In this episode, Nathan Labenz sits down with Hayk Martiros, VP of Autonomy at Skydio. Martiros leads the autonomy team, which holds the state of the art in complex autonomous flight. Skydio is the largest drone developer in the US, and recently raised $230M to expand its US manufacturing 10-fold, bringing its valuation to $2.2 billion. In this discussion, Hayk and Nathan discuss why Skydio will not weaponize its drones, Skydio’s systems and AI approach, and the considerations of choosing an autonomous system over a human agent.
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The HR industry is at a crossroads. What will it take to construct the next generation of incredible businesses – and where can people leaders have the most business impact? Hosts Nolan Church and Kelli Dragovich have been through it all, the highs and the lows – IPOs, layoffs, executive turnover, board meetings, culture changes, and more. With a lineup of industry vets and experts, Nolan and Kelli break down the nitty-gritty detai…
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Jul 1, 2023
E41: [Bonus Episode - Latent.space] Building the AI x UX Scenius with Linus Lee of Notion AI
[Bonus Episode] Latent.space hosts, Alessio and Swyx, sit down with Linus Lee of Notion AI to discuss Linus’ experience starting the AI/UX community, prompt engineering at Notion, and designing AI interfaces and agents.
The latent.space podcast aims to be the first place where AI engineers hear about the latest AI news and technology trends. We’ve had several guests in common – including Shreya Rajpal of Guardrails, Jonathan & Abhi from the recently acquired for $1.3B MosaicML, and also Riley Goodside from Scale AI – and also explored similar themes, including the question of which AI companies have durable business moats, and the flurry of experimentation going into AI agents right now. We recommend checking them out!
Keep up to date with Latent.space here:
Website: https://www.latent.space/
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2p7zZVwVF6Yk0Zsb4QmT7t?si=95fb033e3c014975
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/latent-space-the-ai-engineer-podcast-codege…
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Jun 29, 2023
E40: Meta's MEGABYTE Revolution with Lili Yu of Meta AI
Nathan Labenz sits down with Lili Yu, a researcher of Meta AI to discuss the paper she authored: MEGABYTE: Predicting Million-byte Sequences with Multiscale Transformers. In this conversation, they discuss the architecture and breakthroughs of their research, and the opportunity to eliminate the need for tokenization.
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The HR industry is at a crossroads. What will it take to construct the next generation of incredible businesses – and where can people leaders have the most business impact? Hosts Nolan Church and Kelli Dragovich have been through it all, the highs and the lows – IPOs, layoffs, executive turnover, board meetings, culture changes, and more. With a lineup of industry vets and experts, Nolan and Kelli break down the nitty-gritty details, trade offs, and dynamics of constructing high performing companies. Through unfiltered conversations that can only happen between seasoned practitioners, Kelli and Nolan dive deep into the kind of leadership-level s…
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Jun 27, 2023
E39: Seeing is Believing with MIT’s Ziming Liu
Ziming Liu is a Physics PhD student at MIT and IAIFI, advised by Prof. Max Tegmark. Ziming’s research is at the intersection of AI and physics. Today’s discussion goes in-depth on Liu’s paper “Seeing is Believing” where he presents Brain-Inspired Modular Training (BIMT), a method for making neural networks more modular and interpretable. The ability to see modules visually can complement current mechanistic interpretability strategies.
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The HR industry is at a crossroads. What will it take to construct the next generation of incredible businesses – and where can people leaders have the most business impact? Hosts Nolan Church and Kelli Dragovich have been through it all, the highs and the lows – IPOs, layoffs, executive turnover, board meetings, culture changes, and more. With a lineup of industry vets and experts, Nolan and Kelli break down the nitty-gritty details, trade offs, and dynamics of constructing high performing companies. Through unfiltere…
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Jun 22, 2023
E38: The Virtual Biopsy Revolution with Dr. Tanishq Mathew Abraham (Part 2 of 2)
Part 2 of Nathan's conversation with Tanishq Mathew Abraham focuses on Tanishq's work with virtual biopsy technology enabled by deep learning. This unique technology has the potential to address a number of important biomedical challenges; in particular, qOBM could help during live tumor and cancer removal surgeries.
Tanishq, a 19-year-old UC Davis grad and one of the youngest people in the world to receive a Ph.D, with a degree in biomedical engineering, is the founder of the Medical AI Research Center (MedARC). In case you haven’t yet listened to part 1, check it out! That episode goes deep on Tanishq’s first published paper: Reconstructions of the Mind’s Eye, which encompasses breakthrough research on reconstructing visual perceptions from fMRI scans into images.
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The HR industry is at a crossroads. What will it take to construct the next generation of incredible businesses – and where can people leaders have the most business impact? Hosts Nolan Church…
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Jun 20, 2023
E37: The Mind-Reading Revolution with Dr. Tanishq Mathew Abraham (Part 1 of 2)
In this episode, Nathan sits down with Tanishq Mathew Abraham, 19-year-old UC Davis grad and one of the youngest people in the world to receive a Ph.D, with a degree in biomedical engineering. Tanishq is the founder of the Medical AI Research Center (MedARC), and with his teammates, recently published a paper: Reconstructions of the Mind's Eye, which encompasses their breakthrough research on reconstructing visual perceptions from fMRI scans into images. In this episode, Nathan and Tanishq talk about the technology behind the fMRI-to-image project, developing the model, and future applications for this research.
Part 2 with Tanishq will be released as the next episode.
RECOMMENDED PODCAST:
The HR industry is at a crossroads. What will it take to construct the next generation of incredible businesses – and where can people leaders have the most business impact? Hosts Nolan Church and Kelli Dragovich have been through it all, the highs and the lows – IPOs, layoffs, executive turnove…
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Jun 16, 2023
E36: Your Model, Your Weights with MosaicML's Abhi Venigalla and Jonathan Frankle
In this episode, Nathan sits down with Jonathan Frankle, Chief Scientist, and Abhi Venigalla, Research Scientist of MosaicML. They chat about Mosaic’s custom LLMs, the customers seeking Mosaic out and what their journeys and use cases look like, and exciting developments in Mosaic’s research: including their new inference platform, as well as Mosaic’s MPT-7B-65k+ storywriter model.
RECOMMENDED PODCAST:
The HR industry is at a crossroads. What will it take to construct the next generation of incredible businesses – and where can people leaders have the most business impact? Hosts Nolan Church and Kelli Dragovich have been through it all, the highs and the lows – IPOs, layoffs, executive turnover, board meetings, culture changes, and more. With a lineup of industry vets and experts, Nolan and Kelli break down the nitty-gritty details, trade offs, and dynamics of constructing high performing companies. Through unfiltered conversations that can only happen between seasoned pract…
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Jun 13, 2023
E35: Stability AI’s Emad Mostaque and Slow Ventures’ Sam Lessin Discuss Investing in AI
In this episode, Nathan Labenz and Erik Torenberg host a discussion between Emad Mostaque, founder of Stability AI, and Sam Lessin, GP of Slow Ventures and former VP Product at Facebook. These influential technology thinkers tackle topics pertinent to evaluating whether AI is a good investment for venture capital. They talk about the attention and information economy, SaaS markets, how AI-created entertainment will impact society and our relationships, and AI disruption of highly-regulated industries.
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The HR industry is at a crossroads. What will it take to construct the next generation of incredible businesses – and where can people leaders have the most business impact? Hosts Nolan Church and Kelli Dragovich have been through it all, the highs and the lows – IPOs, layoffs, executive turnover, board meetings, culture changes, and more. With a lineup of industry vets and experts, Nolan and Kelli break down the nitty-gritty details, trade offs, and dynamics of…
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Jun 9, 2023
E34: The Consumer Rights Revolution with Joshua Browder of DoNotPay
In this episode, Nathan sits down with Joshua Browder of DoNotPay, the world’s first robot lawyer. They chat about the current state of AI use in law, what policymakers should consider in regulating AI, and the ethics of robo-lawyers for consumer use.
RECOMMENDED PODCAST:
The HR industry is at a crossroads. What will it take to construct the next generation of incredible businesses – and where can people leaders have the most business impact? Hosts Nolan Church and Kelli Dragovich have been through it all, the highs and the lows – IPOs, layoffs, executive turnover, board meetings, culture changes, and more. With a lineup of industry vets and experts, Nolan and Kelli break down the nitty-gritty details, trade offs, and dynamics of constructing high performing companies. Through unfiltered conversations that can only happen between seasoned practitioners, Kelli and Nolan dive deep into the kind of leadership-level strategy that often happens behind closed doors. Check out the fi…
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Jun 6, 2023
E33: The Tiny Model Revolution with Ronen Eldan and Yuanzhi Li of Microsoft Research
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 mechanism by training a series of models that range in size from just 1 million to a maximum of 33 million parameters – which is still just 2% the scale of GPT-2. In this conversation, Nathan, Ronen, and Yuanzhi touch on LM reasoning, emergence, interpretability, and what understanding can be extended to LLMs.
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The HR industry is at a crossroads. What will it take to construct the next generation of incredible businesses – and where can people leaders have the most business impact? Hosts Nolan Church and Kelli Dragovich have been through it all, the highs and the l…
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Jun 3, 2023
E32: [Bonus Episode - The AI Breakdown] Can OpenAI's New GPT Training Model Solve Math and AI Alignment At the Same Time?
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.
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The HR industry is at a crossroads. What will it take to construct the next generation of incredible businesses – and where can people leaders have the most business impact? Hosts Nolan Church and Kelli Dragovich have been through it all, the highs and the lows – IPOs, layoffs, executive turnover, board meetings, culture changes, and more. With a lineup of industry vets and experts, Nolan and Kelli break down the nitty-gritty details, trade offs, and dynamics of constructing high performing companies. Through unfiltered conversations that can only happen between seasoned practitioners, Kelli and Nolan dive deep into the kind…
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Jun 1, 2023
E31: Where are the Moats in AI? With Nathan Labenz and Erik Torenberg
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
Read about the 9 moats at length in our newsletter: https://cognitiverevolution.substack.com/p/the-leaked-google-memo-and-a
Leaderboard for AI rankings: https://lmsys.org/
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The HR industry is at a crossroads. What will it take to construct the next generation of incredible businesses – and where can people leaders have the most business impact? Hosts Nolan Church and Kelli Dragovich have been through it all, the highs and the lows – IPOs, layoffs, executive turnover, board meetings, culture changes, and more. With a lineup of industry vets and experts, Nolan and Kel…
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May 30, 2023
E30: The AI Revolution in Hollywood? With WGA writers Trey Kollmer, Sophia Lear, and Garrett Schabb
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 a rapidly changing AI landscape has the writers entwined in the wild possibilities and existential threats of paradigm-shifting technology. Other entertainment guilds and labor unions are watching closely.
Note: Nathan kicks off this episode with a longer-than-usual introduction and analysis as the subject matter of this episode requires some added context. If you would prefer to dive straight into the interviews, follow the timecodes below to skip ahead (and maybe give the intro a listen when you finish!)
More about our guests Trey Kollmer, Sophia Lear, and Garrett Schabb and their…
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May 25, 2023
E29: The AI Chip Revolution with Andrew Feldman of Cerebras
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 process that goes into chip design and manufacturing for an AI-focused chip.
This episode is the first part of our hardware exploration series focused on the people building at the forefront of hardware applications in AI.
LINKS:
Cerebras: https://www.cerebras.net/
Book: The Chip War by Chris Miller
RECOMMENDED PODCAST:
The HR industry is at a crossroads. What will it take to construct the next generation of incredible businesses – and where can people leaders have the most business impact? Hosts Nolan Church and Kelli Dragovich have been through it all, the highs and the lows –…
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May 23, 2023
E28: Keeping the AI Revolution on the Rails with Shreya Rajpal of Guardrails AI
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 like Guardrails allow developers to ask and answer entirely new kinds of questions.
Talking to Shreya really reinforced just how early we are in LLM’s impact on the software industry. We were introduced to Shreya’s work when recording our interview with Matt Welsh, the CEO of Fixie.AI (Ep 19: How AI Agents Will Change How We Work).
LINKS:
Guardrails AI: https://shreyar.github.io/guardrails/
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The HR industry is at a crossroads. What will it take to construct the next generation of incredible businesses – and where can people leaders have the most business impact? Hos…
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May 21, 2023
E27: “Google’s Med-PaLM and Med-PaLM2 with Vivek Natarajan”
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 of interest to anyone developing AI systems for high-stakes use cases, and the capabilities for Med-PaLM to equalize access to medical knowledge and care.
This episode is part of a series centered on talking to the people at the cutting edge of building AI-driven solutions in medicine.
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The HR industry is at a crossroads. What will it take to construct the next generation of incredible businesses – and where can people leaders have the most business impact? Hosts Nolan Church and Kelli Dragovich have been through it all, the highs and the lows – IPOs, layoffs, execu…
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May 19, 2023
E26: [Bonus Episode] Connor Leahy on AGI, GPT-4, and Cognitive Emulation w/ FLI Podcast
[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 new AI systems. FLI was founded by Jann Tallinn who we interviewed in Episode 16 of The Cognitive Revolution.
We think their podcast is excellent. They frequently interview critical thinkers in AI like Neel Nanda, Ajeya Cotra, and Connor Leahy - an episode we found particularly fascinating and is airing for our audience today.
The FLI Podcast also recently interviewed Nathan Labenz for a 2-part episode:
https://futureoflife.org/podcast/nathan-labenz-on-how-ai-will-transform-the-economy/
SUBSCRIBE: Future of Life Institute Podcast:
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/future-of-life-ins…
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May 16, 2023
E25: Revolutionizing Patient Care with Neal Khosla of Curai Health
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 healthcare may interact with different regulatory and social forces across the globe.
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The HR industry is at a crossroads. What will it take to construct the next generation of incredible businesses – and where can people leaders have the most business impact? Hosts Nolan Church and Kelli Dragovich have been through it all, the highs and the lows – IPOs, layoffs, executive turnover, board meetings, culture changes, and more. With a lineup of industry vets and experts, Nolan and Kelli break down the nitty-gritty details, trade offs, and dynamics of constructing high per…
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May 11, 2023
E24: The AI Revolution in Medicine with Dr. Isaac Kohane of Harvard Medical School
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 exploring and characterizing how AI is about to transform medicine.
The book is out May 13, 2023 and can be ordered here (or on Amazon by searching for "The AI Revolution in Medicine")
Regardless of the field you're in, Dr. Kohane's combination of deep immersion, enthusiastic exploration, pragmatic optimism, risk awareness, realism, and forward-thinking vision make this a worthy example for others to study and emulate.
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May 9, 2023
E23: Scouting the AI Revolution with Robert Scoble and "Ben's Bites" creator Ben Tossell
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 legends in their primes that he's now also something of a historian. https://scobleizer.blog/
Ben Tossell is the creator of Ben's Bites, an AI round up newsletter meant to be read in 5 minutes or less, read by over 90,000 subscribers. https://www.bensbites.co/
This episode caps off our series centered on talking to rising voices in AI media: people who are now only working overtime to understand everything going on in AI, but also creating thought leadership and educational content meant to help others get up to speed as well.
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May 4, 2023
E22: Helping Businesses Use AI with Rachel Woods of The AI Exchange
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-backed e-commerce startup, where she began to use chatGPT in her startup operations.
This episode is the second in a series centered on talking to rising voices in AI media: people who are now only working overtime to understand everything going on in AI, but also creating thought leadership and educational content meant to help others get up to speed as well.
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May 2, 2023
E21: VC Insights on Investing in Artificial Intelligence with Sarah Guo and Elad Gil of No Priors Podcast
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-AI interaction they are most interested in, and more.
Sarah is the founder of $100M AI-focused venture fund Conviction VC, which she launched last fall. She was previously General Partner at Greylock. Elad is a serial entrepreneur and a startup investor. He has invested in over 40 companies now worth $1B or more each, and is also author of the High Growth Handbook.
This episode is the first in a series centered on talking to rising voices in AI media, people who are now only working overtime to understand everything going on in AI, but also creating thought leadership and educational content…
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Apr 27, 2023
E20: The Great Implementation with Raza Habib, CEO of Humanloop
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, he shared a bunch of concrete examples of customer use cases, practical challenges that people face, and the strategies they use to overcome them.
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Apr 25, 2023
E19: The AI Agent Revolution with Matt Welsh of Fixie.ai
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 and end users can try them.
Agents hold the promise of handling not only the core cognitive work, but many of the messy implementation details as well – the searching & finding, sorting through & scanning, signing in & navigating, reading documentation & using APIs – all the manual ad hoc routing of information for which we act today as human plumbing.
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Apr 20, 2023
E18: Why Jailbreaking ChatGPT Is A Public Good with Alex Albert of The Prompt Report
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.
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The HR industry is at a crossroads. What will it take to construct the next generation of incredible businesses – and where can people leaders have the most business impact? Hosts Nolan Church and Kelli Dragovich have been through it all, the highs and the lows – IPOs, layoffs, executive turnover, board meetings, culture changes, and more. With a lineup of industry vets and experts, Nolan and Kelli break down the nitty-gritty details, trade offs, and dynamics of constructing high performing companies. Through unfiltered conversations that can only happen between seasoned practitioners, Kelli…
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Apr 18, 2023
E17: The Prompt Engineering Revolution with Riley Goodside
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-powered applications. Few have spent as much time on the language model frontier, so I hope you enjoy this unique conversation with Riley Goodside.
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Apr 13, 2023
E16: Pausing the AI Revolution? With Technologist Jaan Tallinn
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 fundamental AI research, all in an effort to support the teams that he believes most likely to lead us to AI safety, and to have a seat at the table at organizations that he worries might take on too much risk. He's also founded several philanthropic nonprofits, including the Future of Life Institute, which recently published the open letter calling for a six-month pause on training new AI systems. In this discussion, we focused on:
- the current state of AI development and safety
-Jan's expectations for possible economic transformation
- what catastrophic failure modes worry him most in the n…
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Apr 11, 2023
E15: Will GPT-4 Cause Economic Transformation?
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.
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The HR industry is at a crossroads. What will it take to construct the next generation of incredible businesses – and where can people leaders have the most business impact? Hosts Nolan Church and Kelli Dragovich have been through it all, the highs and the lows – IPOs, layoffs, executive turnover, board meetings, culture changes, and more. With a lineup of industry vets and experts, Nolan and Kelli break down the nitty-gritty details, trade offs, and dynamics of constructing high performing companies. Through unfiltered conversations that can only happen between seasoned practitioners, Kelli and Nolan dive deep into the kind of leadership-level strategy that often happens behind closed doors. Check out the first episode with the architect of Netflix’s culture deck Patty McCord.
https://link.chtbl.com/hrheretics…
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Apr 6, 2023
E14: The Reasoning Revolution with Ought's Jungwon Byun and Andreas Stuhlmüller
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, starting with literature review.
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The HR industry is at a crossroads. What will it take to construct the next generation of incredible businesses – and where can people leaders have the most business impact? Hosts Nolan Church and Kelli Dragovich have been through it all, the highs and the lows – IPOs, layoffs, executive turnover, board meetings, culture changes, and more. With a lineup of industry vets and experts, Nolan and Kelli break down the nitty-gritty details, trade offs, and dynamics of constructing high performing companies. Through unfiltered conversations that…
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Apr 4, 2023
E13: AI open letter debate, "pausers", and what we're all scared of with AI with Anton Troynikov and Flo Crivello [Moment of Zen]
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 this one!
Also, check out the debut of Erik's new long-form interview podcast Upstream, whose guests in the first two episodes were Balaji Srinivasan and Marc Andreessen. This coming season will feature interviews with Ezra Klein, David Sacks, Katherine Boyle, and more. Subscribe here:
Apple Podcasts: bit.ly/3z8TldL
Spotify: bit.ly/40letd0
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Mar 30, 2023
E12: The Robot Revolution with Keerthana Gopalakrishnan of Google Robotics
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 using robots to better understand ourselves, personal experiences using AI, and her hopes and fears about AI's impact on society.
This episode provides valuable insights into the current state and potential future of robotics and AI, with Keerthana's expertise offering unique perspectives on these fascinating topics.
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The HR industry is at a crossroads. What will it take to construct the next generation of incredible businesses – and where can people leaders have the most business impact? Hosts Nolan Church and Kelli Dragovich have been through it all, the highs and the l…
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Mar 28, 2023
E11: OpenAI's GPT-4 Discussion with Nathan Labenz and Erik Torenberg
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 weaknesses and limitations and shares the most concerning elements of GPT4. They end the episode pondering the arrival of GPT5 and whether we are in AI's "goldilocks moment."
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Mar 24, 2023
E10: The AI Voice Revolution with Mahmoud Felfel of Play.ht
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.
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The HR industry is at a crossroads. What will it take to construct the next generation of incredible businesses – and where can people leaders have the most business impact? Hosts Nolan Church and Kelli Dragovich have been through it all, the highs and the lows – IPOs, layoffs, executive turnover, board meetings, culture changes, and more. With a lineup of industry vets and experts, Nolan and Kelli break down the nitty-gritty details, trade offs, and dynamics of constructing high performing companies. Through unfiltered conversations that can only happen between seasoned practitioners, Kelli and Nolan dive deep into the kind of leadership-level strategy that often…
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Mar 22, 2023
E9: The AI Assistant Revolution with Flo Crivello of Lindy.AI
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.
Anyone who mentions "The Cognitive Revolution" when signing up for the Lindy beta will get priority access.
(0:00) Preview
(1:05) Sponsor: Omneky
(4:50) Flo demos Lindy
(9:21) Security and user experience
(11:55) How this AI moment compares to the Industrial Revolution and single use apps
(15:00) The dream AI assistant (19:54) Competition and advantages of startups
(24:28) Cost vs Quality
(31:19) How Lindy uses user data
(32:37) Context and data injection
(28:11) Comfort with ambiguity
(43:10) Use of guardrails and trust concerns
(47:26) AI safety and edge cases
(49:16) Impact on labor ma…
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Mar 17, 2023
E8: GPT4 - AI Unleashed on ChinaTalk Podcast
How will GPT4 change the world? How will US-China 'racing dynamics' play out and what are the implications for AI safety? Nathan Labenz was invited to record a special "emergency" episode of ChinaTalk podcast this week to discuss the implications GPT4 will have for policy, economics, and society. Thanks to Jordan Schneider of ChinaTalk, and fellow "AI justice league" guests Zvi Mowshowitz of 'Don't Worry About the Vase' and Matthew Mittelsteadt of Mercatus.
(0:00) Intro
(2:09) GPT-4 emergency podcast
(9:26) GPT-4 use cases
(22:51) What GPT-4 can and can’t do
(35:50) AI safety
(45:38) OpenAI v. Anthropic
(48:54) Governments’ role in AI
(55:50) AI will improve physical health and healthcare the most
(59:19) Facebook’s LLaMA model
(01:05:55) VR/AR
(01:08:59) Concerns with GPT4
(01:15:26) GPT-5 and GPT-6
(01:18:45) Optimism in the AI revolution
Thank you Omneky for sponsoring The Cognitive Revolution. Omneky is an omnichannel creative generation platform that lets you launch…
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Mar 14, 2023
E7: In Search of Truth with Aravind Srinivas of Perplexity AI
We talked to Aravind Srinivas about competing with the tech giants, Perplexity's product philosophy and obsession with maximizing value delivered to the user per unit time, and the features that makes Perplexity unique.
(0:00) Preview
(1:31) Introduction & Context
(08:06) Aravind’s vision for Perplexity as the world’s most truth-centric company
(9:29) Raising the average IQ of the world
(12:00) Aravind’s favorite tech entrepreneur
(15:12) “Anthropics” - Building your own model vs user experience
(33:00) Why is perplexity free
(43:00) Talking shop: Perplexity’s tech stack and speed
(1:06:00) Perplexity’s stance on guardrails on search
(1:19:48) Forecasting weakly general AGI: The four criteria
(1:28:00) Aravind’s perspective on OpenAI and the future of AGI
(1:39:00) The Cognitive Revolution’s rapid fire questions: Neuralink implant? Most used AI tools? AI hopes and fears?
Twitter handles:
@CogRev_Podcast
@AravSrinivas (Aravind)
@labenz (Nathan)
@eriktorenberg (Erik)…
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Mar 9, 2023
E6: The Computer Vision Revolution with Junnan Li and Dongxu Li of BLIP and BLIP2
As recently as January 2021, the challenge of "interpreting what is going on in a photograph" was considered "nowhere near solved." Today's guests Junnan Li and Dongxu Li changed that with their publication and open-sourcing of BLIP, which delivered state-of-the-art performance on image captioning and other vision-language tasks.
BLIP became the #18 most-cited AI paper of 2022, and now Junnan and Dongxu are back with BLIP-2, this time showing how small models can harness the power of existing foundation models to do multi-modal tasks.
We talked to Junnan and Dongxu about their research and how they see the trend toward connector models shaping the future.
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Mar 2, 2023
E5: The Embedding Revolution: Anton Troynikov on Chroma, Stable Attribution, and future of AI
(0:00) Preview
(1:17) Sponsor
(4:00) Anton breaks down the advantages of vector databases
(4:45) How embeddings have created an AI-native way to represent data
(11:50) Anton identifies the watershed moment and step changes in AI
(12:55) Open AI’s pricing
(18:50) How chroma works
(33:04) Stable Attribution and systematic bias
(36:48) How latent diffusion models work
(51:26) How AI is like the early days of aviation
(56:01) How Disney inspired the release of Stable Attribution
(59:53):Why noise can lead to generalization
(1:01:04) Nathan’s KPI for The Cognitive Revolution
(1:01:59) Other use cases for embedding
(1:03: 19) Anton touches on the applications for biotech
(1:04:35) Anton on doomerism hysteria and what actually worries him
(1:11:43) - Nathan sums up a plausible doomer scenario
(1:20:17)What AI tools does Anton use and why?
(1:22:55) Anton’s hopes
*Thank you Omneky for sponsoring The Cognitive Revolution. Omneky is an omnichannel creative generation platform that lets…
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Feb 23, 2023
E4: The AI Moment with Amjad Masad, Flo Crivello, Dan Romero, and Antonio Garcia Martinez
(0:00) Preview of the debate
(2:23) Sponsor
(3:10) Flo’s take on the AI moment and AGI
(5:45) Amjad’s take on the AI moment
(8:03) Antonio's skepticism about transhumanism
(9:10) Human tendencies color the debate about agency
(11:25) The inflection point is a jump in generality
(13:14) AI's effect on coding
(16:57) Weakness in current models
(19:18) Bounties and the future of work
(21:48) Antonio's skepticism around bounties
(25:00) Who will capture value, incumbents or startups?
(27:26) "All knowledge work will be automated in 20 years"
(30:10) Who will be the biggest beneficiaries of this shift?
(31:50) What AI companies should VCs invest in?
(32:26) Sponsor
Thank you Omneky for sponsoring The Cognitive Revolution. Omneky is an omnichannel creative generation platform that lets you launch hundreds of thousands of ad iterations that actually work, customized across all platforms, with a click of a button. Omneky combines generative AI and real-time advertising data, to generate pe…
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Feb 17, 2023
E3: The Empathy Revolution with Eugenia Kuyda of Replika
(01:08) Sponsor
(01:37) Introducing Eugenia
(03:25) Replika’s controversial choice to limit erotic roleplay functionality
(04:25) Eugenia's vision for Replika
(05:58) Augmented Reality is the Ultimate Modality
(07:52) Using Replika
(13:11) Profound stories about virtual assistants
(15:55) Eugenia on why Replika is more than just a painkiller or vitamin
(28:50) Replika's business model and profitability
(34:12) Users want their Replika to surprise them
(36:12) Why ChatGPT is not a conversational model
(49:26) Eugenia's prediction for the "next Iphone of personal AI"
(1:03:00) Eugenia’s AI tools/stack
(1:15:00) Eugenia comes back to discuss Erotic Roleplay controversy
(1:18:00) Replika’s first reaction to users ERP
(1: 22:00) How the product evolved from 90% scripts & retrieval models
(1:24:00) The definitive focus for Replika to stay in a PG13 zone
(1:26:00) “Normal” evolution given sci-fi depictions of AI romances
(1:30:00) Current AI ethics on sexuality
(1:37:07) R…
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Feb 10, 2023
E2: Why AI Will Cause a Cognitive Revolution with Nathan Labenz and Erik Torenberg
00:00 Coming Up
01:00 The Cognitive Revolution
01:20 Sponsor
01:39 Intro
02:09 Nathan’s path to AI
04:27 Founding Waymark
06:56 The future of AI is just starting
10:00 AI dramatically enhances human capabilities
10:50 Why we started The Cognitive Revolution and what to expect
14:55 Which guests will appear on the show and topics that will be discussed
18:59 Being replaced by an AI host
20:42 Unpacking the future of AI with “no new breakthroughs”
32:21 What’s underhyped and overhyped
43:46 The dangers of AI
44:51 Applying AI safely
52:19 Losing faith in technology
53:38 A new AI ecology
55:14 Facebook, Google and Open AI
58:00 Upside and downside case for AI
58:18 Sam Altman’s case for AI
01:09:25 Starting an AI company
01:18:22 Closing
01:18:46 Sponsor
Thank you Omneky for sponsoring The Cognitive Revolution. Omneky is an omnichannel creative generation platform that lets you launch hundreds of thousands of ad iterations that actually work, customized across al…
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Feb 3, 2023
E1: The Pixel Revolution with Playground AI 's Suhail Doshi
00:00 Intro
00:30: Image technology breakthroughs
00:45 The Cognitive Revolution
03:10 Intro to Suhail
03:43 Sponsor
07:04 Suhail’s path to AI
12:57 Suhail’s vision for Playground
17:58 Suhail’s cancellation on Twitter
19:06 AI artists are artists
20:25 Non-AI artists feel threatened by AI
26:47 Suhail on defensibility at AI companies
30:30 Playground’s product roadmap
33:01 Suhail on good design
35:55 Latent space
44:04 Building Playground with lessons learned from Mighty
53:55 Monitoring led to 2x improvement in the product
55:53 How people use Playground
1:03:48 AI is having it’s mobile moment
01:15:12 Finding, investing and building durable AI companies
01:22:06 Suhail’s kid’s best friends may be AI characters
01:23:20 AI religion
01:24:16 Conclusion
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