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

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

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

Episodes

The AI Whistleblower Initiative: Supporting AGI Insiders When It Matters Most, w/ founder Karl Koch

August 20, 2025 • 111 mins
Today Karl Koch, Co-Founder of the AI Whistleblower Initiative, joins The Cognitive Revolution to discuss the barriers preventing AI insiders from raising safety concerns, his organization's anonymous "Third Opinion" service connecting whistleblowers with independent experts, and their campaign demanding frontier AI companies publish their internal whistleblowing policies to address widespread retaliation and lack of transparency. ...
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Autonomous Organizations: Vending Bench & Beyond, w/ Lukas Petersson & Axel Backlund of Andon Labs

August 16, 2025 • 108 mins
Today Lukas Petersson and Axel Backlund of Andon Labs join The Cognitive Revolution to discuss their experiments deploying autonomous AI agents to run real-world vending machines, exploring the safety challenges and unexpected behaviors that emerge when frontier models like Claude and Grok operate without human oversight. Read transcript of the episode here. Check out our sponsors: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Shopify. Shownotes...
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Dean W. Ball on America's AI Action Plan & 4 Months at the White House

August 12, 2025 • 194 mins
Today Dean W. Ball, former White House AI policy advisor joins The Cognitive Revolution to discuss his role in crafting the Trump administration's AI Action Plan, his reasons for leaving government, and his perspectives on AI policy, US-China competition, and the future of AI regulation and adoption. Check out our sponsors: Fin, Labelbox, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Shopify. Shownotes below brought to you by Notion AI Meeting No...
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Jake Sullivan on Navigating AI Uncertainty and Managing Competition with China

August 9, 2025 • 72 mins
Today Jake Sullivan, the U.S. National Security Advisor from 2021-2025 joins The Cognitive Revolution to discuss AI as a critical national security issue. Check out our sponsors: Labelbox, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Shopify. Shownotes below brought to you by Notion AI Meeting Notes - try one month for free at https://notion.com/lp/nathan Four-Category Framework: Sullivan organizes his thinking about AI into security, econ...
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Sovereign AI: Geopolitical Strategy & Industrial Policy for Countries 3-193, with Anjney Midha, a16z

August 6, 2025 • 102 mins
Today Anjney Midha, General Partner at a16z joins The Cognitive Revolution to discuss sovereign AI and China's growing semiconductor capabilities. Check out our sponsors: Gemini CLI, Labelbox, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Shopify. Shownotes below brought to you by Notion AI Meeting Notes - try one month for free at https://notion.com/lp/nathan What is Sovereign AI? Varies by stakeholder - for enterprises it means controlling...
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The Revolution in Services: General Catalyst's AI Rollup Strategy, with Marc Bhargava

August 2, 2025 • 84 mins
Marc Bhargava from General Catalyst discusses their Creation Strategy for building AI-enabled roll-ups – companies that start as vertical software startups, then grow by acquiring traditional service businesses and transforming them through AI automation. They explore how systematic analysis of 70 service categories identified 10 verticals where 30-70% of tasks are automatable today, potentially transforming low-margin service busi...
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Liability for AI Harms: How Ancient Law Can Govern Frontier Technology Risk, with Prof Gabriel Weil

July 26, 2025 • 131 mins
Gabriel Weil from Touro University argues that liability law may be our best tool for governing AI development, offering a framework that can adapt to new technologies without requiring new legislation. The conversation explores how negligence, products liability, and "abnormally dangerous activities" doctrines could incentivize AI developers to properly account for risks to third parties, with liability naturally scaling based on ...
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Private Governance: Creating a Market in AI Regulation, with Dr. Gillian Hadfield & Andrew Freedman

July 22, 2025 • 113 mins
Dr. Gillian Hadfield from Johns Hopkins University and Andrew Freedman from Fathom discuss their innovative proposal to govern AI through private regulatory markets, which has been introduced as California's SB 813. Their system would separate democratic goal-setting from technical rule-making by having government bodies articulate safety outcomes while competitive private certifiers develop and enforce detailed standards, with com...
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The Dawn of Dynamic AI: RFT Comes Online, w/ Predibase CEO Dev Rishi, from Inference by Turing Post

July 16, 2025 • 35 mins
This crossover episode from Inference by Turing Post features CEO Dev Rishi of Predibase discussing the shift from static to continuously learning AI systems that can adapt and improve from ongoing user feedback in production. Rishi provides grounded insights from deploying these dynamic models to real enterprise customers in healthcare and finance, exploring both the massive potential upside and significant safety challenges of re...
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Cracking the Medical Code: Why Cleveland Clinic Doctors Love Their Ambience Healthcare AI Scribe

July 10, 2025 • 88 mins
Brendan Fortuner from Ambience Healthcare and Ben Shahshahani from Cleveland Clinic discuss how AI is transforming medical documentation and coding in a healthcare system that spends $1 trillion annually on administrative tasks. They explore Ambience's technical breakthrough using OpenAI's Reinforcement Fine-Tuning to achieve medical coding accuracy that exceeds human doctors by 12 percentage points, including their specialty-by-sp...
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The Data Factory: Inside the $100B Race for Post-Training Supremacy, with Labelbox CEO Manu Sharma

July 8, 2025 • 101 mins
Manu Sharma, founder and CEO of Labelbox, explains how frontier AI training data has evolved far beyond simple labeling to sophisticated reinforcement learning environments where domain experts create "gyms" for models to develop complex skills. With every Western frontier lab now spending over a billion dollars annually on training data, the conversation traces the shift from supervised learning to reinforcement learning from veri...
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Cheat on Everything: Cluely's Vision for Always-On AI Assistance

July 5, 2025 • 79 mins
Roy Lee, founder and CEO of Cluely, discusses his AI startup's $15 million Andreessen Horowitz investment and their provocative "cheat on everything" marketing approach that has gone viral across the tech industry. They explore Cluely's real-time AI assistant that provides undetectable information during meetings and interviews, Roy's philosophy of "AI maximalism," and his vision for a post-AGI world where humans are freed from eco...
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The AI Village: Previewing the Giga-Agent Future with Adam Binksmith, Founder of AI Digest

July 2, 2025 • 85 mins
Adam Binksmith, founder of AI Digest, discusses his AI Village experiment where four frontier AI agents (Claude, o3, and Gemini models) collaborate in a shared environment with persistent memory and group chat access to pursue concrete goals over weeks. The conversation explores fascinating multi-agent dynamics from their completed seasons, including agents raising $2,000 for charity, organizing a real-world San Francisco event tha...
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402 Payment Required: a New Way for AI Agents to Pay, with Nemil Dalal, Dev Platform Lead @ Coinbase

June 28, 2025 • 82 mins
Nemil Dalal from Coinbase discusses the x402 protocol, a new open standard that enables AI agents to make cryptocurrency payments for online resources using the long-dormant HTTP 402 "Payment Required" status code. The conversation covers stablecoin fundamentals, including how they work and who maintains their stability, before exploring how crypto wallets with multi-signature capabilities could protect AI agents from adversarial a...
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2-Sigma in 2 Hours: How Alpha Schools are Using AI to Revolutionize Education

June 25, 2025 • 82 mins
MacKenzie Price, founder of Alpha School & 2 Hour Learning, discusses her revolutionary educational model that uses AI to enable students to master traditional academics in just 2 hours per day while achieving 2.3x faster learning rates than statistical models predict. The conversation explores how Alpha School combines adaptive learning apps with personalized curriculum systems rather than giving students direct chatbot access, an...
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Living Lindy: a No-BS Conversation on AI Agents with Flo Crivello

June 21, 2025 • 84 mins
Flo Crivello, CEO of AI agent platform Lindy, provides a candid deep dive into the current state of AI agents, cutting through hype to reveal what's actually working in production versus what remains challenging. The conversation explores practical implementation details including model selection, fine-tuning, RAG systems, tool design philosophy, and why most successful "AI agents" today are better described as intelligent workflow...
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Embryology of AI: How Training Data Shapes AI Development w/ Timaeus' Jesse Hoogland & Daniel Murfet

June 19, 2025 • 96 mins
Jesse Hoogland and Daniel Murfet, founders of Timaeus, introduce their mathematically rigorous approach to AI safety through "developmental interpretability" based on Singular Learning Theory. They explain how neural network loss landscapes are actually complex, jagged surfaces full of "singularities" where models can change internally without affecting external behavior—potentially masking dangerous misalignment. Using their Local...
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AI Scouting Report: AI Agents -vs- Agentic AI, from Imagine AI Live

June 14, 2025 • 38 mins
This episode features Nathan's talk from Imagine AI Live, where he provides business leaders with a comprehensive overview of AI agents and agentic AI systems. He covers the evolution from simple task automation to more autonomous AI systems, delivers a practical roadmap for implementing AI agents in business while maintaining quality standards, and addresses concerning developments like reward hacking and scheming in frontier AI s...
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The Decade of May 15-22, 2025: Google's 50X AI Growth & Transformation with Logan Kilpatrick

June 12, 2025 • 83 mins
Logan Kilpatrick from Google DeepMind returns for his fifth appearance to discuss Google’s transformation from "sleeping giant" to AI powerhouse, sharing insights from his year at the company as AI usage grew 50 times to 500 trillion tokens per month. He examines Google’s strengths, including superior compute infrastructure, frontier models like Gemini 2.5 Pro, viral products like NotebookLM, and the deepest AI research talent in t...
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a16z on Protecting Little Tech: The Techno-Optimist AI Policy Agenda with Matt Perault, Head of AI Policy

June 9, 2025 • 60 mins
In this episode, Matt Perault, Head of AI Policy at a16z, discusses their approach to AI regulation focused on protecting "little tech" startups from regulatory capture that could entrench big tech incumbents. The conversation covers a16z's core principle of regulating harmful AI use rather than the development process, exploring key policy initiatives like the Raise Act and California's SB 813. Perault addresses critical challenge...
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