GenAI Level UP

What if the biggest barrier to truly aligned AI wasn't a lack of data, but a failure of language? We spend millions on retraining LLMs for every new preference—from a customer service bot that must be concise to a research assistant that must be exhaustive. This is fundamentally broken.

Today, we dissect the counterintuitive reason this approach is doomed and reveal a paradigm shift that replaces brute-force retraining with eleg...

What if an AI could do more than just learn from data? What if it could fundamentally improve its own intelligence, rewriting its source code to become endlessly better at its job? This isn't science fiction; it's the radical premise behind the Darwin Gödel Machine (DGM), a system that represents a monumental leap toward self-accelerating AI.

Most AI today operates within fixed, human-designed architectures. The DGM shatters that li...

The latest AI models promise a revolutionary leap: the ability to "think" through complex problems step-by-step. But is this genuine reasoning, or an incredibly sophisticated illusion? We move beyond the hype and standard benchmarks to reveal the startling truth about how these models perform under pressure.

Drawing from a groundbreaking study that uses puzzles—not standard tests—to probe AI's mind, we uncover the hard limits of tod...

Large Language Models have a notorious blind spot: long-term strategic planning. They can write a brilliant sentence, but can they execute a brilliant 10-turn game-winning strategy?

This episode unpacks a groundbreaking experiment that forces LLMs to level up or lose. We journey into the complex world of Settlers of Catan — a perfect testbed of resource management, luck, and tactical foresight—to explore a stunning new paper, "...

Reward engineering is one of the most brutal, time-consuming challenges in AI—a "black art" that forms the very foundation of how intelligent agents learn. For decades, it's been a manual process of trial, error, and intuition. But what if an AI could learn this art and perform it better than its human creators?

In this episode, we dissect EUREKA, a groundbreaking system from NVIDIA that automates reward design, achiev...

Imagine an AI that doesn't just write code, but evolves it—learning, adapting, and iteratively improving to conquer challenges that have stumped human ingenuity for over half a century. This isn't science fiction; this is AlphaEvolve, Google DeepMind's revolutionary coding agent that’s reshaping what we thought AI could achieve.

Forget one-shot code generation. AlphaEvolve orchestrates an autonomous pipeline where Large ...

AI leaps forward every week, but how do we cut through the noise and truly measure progress? This isn't just academic; it's fundamental to trusting and advancing AI. Forget marketing claims – this episode gives you the backstage pass to the essential field of LLM Evaluation, the engine driving genuine AI improvement.

As AI weaves into our lives, from automating tasks to creative endeavors, rigorously assessing its performance isn't ...

Large Language Models (LLMs) face significant challenges in effectively using a growing number of external tools, such as those defined by the Model Context Protocol (MCP). These challenges include prompt bloat and selection complexity. As the number of available tools increases, providing definitions for every tool in the LLM's context consumes an enormous number of tokens, risking overwhelming and confusing the model, which c...

In this episode, we dissect DeepSeek Prover V2, an open-source large language model pushing the boundaries of AI in formal theorem proving using Lean 4.

We unpack its innovative "cold start" training procedure, where the general-purpose DeepSeek-V3 is ingeniously used to generate initial training data by recursively decomposing complex problems into manageable subgoals.

Discover how this approach synthesizes informal, hum...

Quality Engineering (QE) professionals are well-positioned to transition into AI Improvement Engineering roles due to their deep knowledge of testing, quality assurance, and processes. This transition expands their role significantly – from assuring quality in products to improving the entire system that delivers them. The role demands augmenting traditional QE skillsets with knowledge of AI/ML fundamentals, MLOps, data analysis, a...

This episode delves into CaMeL, a novel defense mechanism designed to combat prompt injection attacks in Large Language Model (LLM) agents.

Inspired by established software security principles, CaMeL focuses on securing both control flows and data flows within agent operations without requiring changes to the underlying LLM.

We'll explore CaMeL's architecture, which features explicit isolation between two models: a Privileg...

In this episode, we unearth the untold story of how Google engineered one of the most powerful information retrieval systems in history—and why its early design principles still echo through today’s cutting-edge AI.

From scavenged servers to hyper-optimized global systems, we follow Google's relentless pursuit of scale, speed, and precision, drawing lessons from Jeff Dean’s landmark 2009 WSDM talk. (video, slides)

You’ll hear how...

[Level Up With Gen AI Series] We believe in harnessing the power of AI to unlock human potential.

We unpack Bill Gurley’s legendary talk “Running Down a Dream”—a no-fluff, high-octane blueprint for building a career that truly lights you up. Through vivid stories of Bobby Knight, Bob Dylan, and Danny Meyer, Gurley reveals five timeless principles that separate the dreamers from the doers:

• Find your real passion (not your LinkedIn...

[Level Up With Gen AI Series] We believe in harnessing the power of AI to unlock human potential.

Are you ready to take your creativity to the next level? In this episode, we explore the philosophy of David Ogilvy, one of the greatest advertising minds of all time. Learn about his concept of 'Divine Discontent' and how it can fuel your ambition, inspire courageous action, and unlock your full potential. We’ll also delve ...

Are you content with merely functional AI? David Ogilvy wouldn't be.

This podcast embodies his spirit of "divine discontent", pushing beyond the ordinary to explore the fundamental truths of Generative AI.

We delve into the essential building blocks, demanding not just understanding, but mastery. If you refuse to settle for "good enough" and aim for truly groundbreaking generative capabilities, then listen c...

How do you teach a sophisticated speech AI to understand and discuss images, especially when paired image-speech data is rare?

This episode unpacks MoshiVis, a new model that achieves just that. We explore the challenges of building Vision-Speech Models and how MoshiVis overcomes them with a unique one-stage training pipeline, synthetic dialogues, and efficient "perceptual augmentation" techniques built upon the Moshi speech LLM.

J...

Dive into the groundbreaking world of DeepSeek LLM, an open-source language model that's challenging the dominance of closed-source AI.

This episode unpacks the secrets behind DeepSeek's impressive capabilities, exploring its unique Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture that optimizes performance and allows it to run efficiently on consumer-grade hardware.

We'll delve into its multi-stage training process, from massiv...

Are current AI models hitting a memory wall? Join us as we delve into the fascinating research behind "Titans: Learning to Memorize at Test Time," an innovative approach to AI learning.

The podcast covers key concepts from the paper, including:

• The challenges of long-term memory in AI, noting that models like Transformers are good at understanding immediate relationships but struggle with retaining information from...

Join us for an in-depth exploration of the groundbreaking research paper, "Memory Layers at Scale." Discover how trainable key-value lookup mechanisms are transforming the landscape of AI by making large-scale models more efficient, accurate, and capable of continuous learning.

We'll unpack the innovations behind memory layers, including product-key lookup and parallel memory techniques, and discuss their implications for democrat...