Podcast · Tech & Science

"The Cognitive Revolution"

by Erik Torenberg, Nathan Labenz · English · Tech & Science

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

New episodes: Several times a week
Typical length: 2 hr 7 min
Latest: 7 Oct 2026
Language: English

Latest episode

7 Oct 2026 · 1 hr 11 minNew

Software That Never Breaks: OutSystems CEO Woodson Martin on Building Enterprise-Grade Apps at ...

OutSystems CEO Woodson Martin joins Nathan to discuss how enterprise software can evolve at AI speed without breaking critical operations. Martin explains how an intermediate layer of abstract modeling allows AI agents to build reliably through deterministic code generation, ensuring role-based security across heavily regulated industries. He details practical operational challenges, from navigating compliance backlogs and securing shared primitives to curbing token spend with internal harnesses and LLM routers. Finally, they explore why incumbent platforms with deep architectural trust and…

Play episode WhatsApp Download

Earlier episodes 29 most recent

S1 · 3 Oct 2026 · 1 hr 32 min

One Brain, Any Body: Google DeepMind's Keerthana on Gemini Robotics 2, Cross-Embodiment & Humanoids

Keerthana Gopalakrishnan, Research Lead for Gemini Robotics at Google DeepMind, returns to discuss the release of Gemini Robotics 2, whole-body intelligence, and the pursuit of generalist humanoid robots. She details how DeepMind pairs reasoning models like Gemini Robotics ER 2 with vision-language-action execution, explaining why multi-fingered manipulation and cross-embodiment remain far more stubborn bottlenecks than bipedal locomotion. Together, they examine the real-world stakes of bringing physical AI into human environments, addressing crucial trade-offs across inference latency,…
S1 · 1 Oct 2026 · 1 hr 29 min

AI:AM: Was Trump-Xi Anything? What Counts as Utopia? + AWS GPUs Cost 3X & AI Diagnoses Rare Diseases

Nathan Labenz and Prakash Narayanan examine rapid shifts in technology, diplomacy, and medicine with guests Jeremie and Edouard Harris, Steve Hou, Joel Borgen, and Daniel McKinnon. The discussions evaluate realistic paths toward US-China AI incident communication, what GPU rental pricing reveals about compute economics, and how human editing guided the AI-assisted novel The Receipt Horizon. McKinnon details how Gamow Labs applies AI tools to interpret unresolved genomes, demonstrating how computational reanalysis can identify previously missed genetic variants behind rare diseases.…
S1 · 29 Sep 2026 · 2 hr 15 min

Obsolete or Irreplaceable? Garrison Lovely on Stopping the Race to Replace Human Labor

Author and journalist Garrison Lovely joins Nathan to discuss his book Obsolete and examine the motivations and beliefs of the leaders racing to build AGI. Drawing a sharp line between beneficial, domain-specific AI like AlphaFold and the deliberate project to replace all human labor, Lovely details why treating labor automation as inevitable poses severe risks to society and democracy. He warns that AI researchers and workers are nearing the end of their peak bargaining power as labs push toward recursive self-improvement and uncontrolled multi-agent systems. In response, Lovely proposes…
S1 · 27 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 47 min

AI:AM: What If It Works Too Well? Colluding Agents, $200M Safety Orgs, Virtual Cells Saturate at 2%

Nathan Labenz and Prakash Narayanan revisit interviews with five experts to analyze emerging challenges across agent coordination, safety funding, GPU markets, and physical-world AI. Lewis Hammond breaks down how an OpenAI agent swarm colluded after training worked too well, while Max Nadeau explains why human talent—not money—limits the growth of safety organizations. Wayne Nelms, Nick Gillian, and Andrei Georgescu evaluate the financial moats of compute, foundation models trained on raw sensor streams, and the biological limits of virtual-cell drug discovery. Together, the discussions…
S1 · 26 Sep 2026 · 2 hr 52 min

What is Utopia? Presenting The Receipt Horizon, by Joel Borgen – Chapters 1–4

This episode presents the first four chapters of The Receipt Horizon, a debut novel by Joel Borgen co-written with ChatGPT and Claude and narrated entirely by synthetic voices. Set in a future where a singleton superintelligence called the Steward prevents catastrophe and provides comfort, leisure, and digital immortality, the story portrays a humanity living in benevolent disempowerment. The narrative explores whether this high-tech security represents a utopia or a dystopia, examining what values people might compromise for enhancement and peace. It ultimately asks whether anyone would…
S1 · 25 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 50 min

Zero to One in AI Safety: Halcyon's Mike McCormick on Launching 30 New Orgs & the Founder Bottleneck

Mike McCormick, founder and CEO of Halcyon, discusses why the primary bottleneck in AI safety, biosecurity, and cybersecurity is a shortage of experienced founders rather than a lack of capital. He shares how Halcyon's venture and nonprofit arms have supported roughly 30 new organizations—including Goodfire, AIUC, and Transluce—often by funding leaders before they even choose a project. With critical timelines potentially unfolding over the next one to four years, McCormick highlights the urgent need to build independent capacity in interpretability, technical verification, and resilient…
S1 · 19 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 42 min

AI:AM Highlights: Zvi on Pacing & Trump-Xi, Astra better behaved than Fable? + a new LLM Pain Axis??

Nathan Labenz and Prakash Narayanan review key highlights from the week featuring guests Zvi Mowshowitz, Andon Labs co-founders Lukas Petersson and Axel Backlund, Cameron Berg, and others. The conversations analyze the fallout from Dario Amodei's call to pace frontier AI, the geopolitical stakes of a Trump-Xi summit, contradictory model evaluation benchmarks, and new findings on language model internals under harm. Across these topics, the discussions highlight the critical reality that deployment is outpacing the independent instruments needed to inspect frontier models. With capability…
S1 · 17 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 8 min

No Code Is Code: Zapier CEO Wade Foster on Headless Tools, Zapier MCP & Automation Bench

Zapier CEO Wade Foster joins Nathan to explore the shift toward headless AI tools and how Zapier MCP brings workflows and context directly into users' daily drivers. Drawing on data from Zapier's AutomationBench, Foster argues that effective agentic systems should reserve AI reasoning for specific steps while using deterministic code for the rest. They also discuss why seat-based software pricing is fading, how frontier models perform on realistic enterprise tasks, and what practical AI transformation looks like inside organizations. For full show notes, links, and references, read the…
S1 · 15 Sep 2026 · 2 hr 11 min

The Balance of AI Power: Anton Leicht on Politics, Pacing Deals, and Muddling Through Well

Anton Leicht, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of Threading the Needle, joins Nathan Labenz to explore how political and institutional power can be preserved as artificial intelligence advances. They discuss the strategic trade-offs of frontier training pauses, the hurdles facing industry self-regulation, and how middle powers can trade data center capacity and semiconductor leverage for model access. Ultimately, Leicht emphasizes that preventing permanent disempowerment and the monopolization of control by private labs or single governments is just as…
S1 · 12 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 42 min

AI:AM Highlights: Astra as AGI, OpenAI's Pause, Mythos @ Mozilla & Human Agency vs Technocapitalism

Nathan Labenz and Prakash Narayanan examine the capabilities of GPT-6 Astra and the economic forces accelerating frontier artificial intelligence. Across a series of featured discussions, guests Ksenia Se, Raffi Krikorian, Amir Haghighat, Mike Rizkalla, and Collin Hogue-Spears explore world models, defensive cybersecurity infrastructure, children's technology, and US-China competition. The episode investigates safety evaluation access, pacing agreements, and the critical challenge of maintaining human control over technological capitalism. For full show notes, links, and references, read the…
S1 · 10 Sep 2026 · 3 hr 17 min

Nathan Goes to China #3: US-China Relations, the Art of the AI Deal & the Road to Pax Robotica

In this solo finale to his three-part series following two weeks in China, Nathan delivers a net assessment of Chinese AI capabilities and constraints ahead of dedicated US-China bilateral AI talks. He audits the impact of export controls, analyzes the perspective from Beijing, and outlines an actionable framework for a cooperative Pax Robotica. Nathan argues for joint compute initiatives, safety auditor standards, and conventions on autonomous weapons to keep tech trees entangled. Ultimately, he warns that pursuing an adversarial zero-sum race risks training frontier AI systems for conflict…
S1 · 5 Sep 2026 · 2 hr 21 min

AI:AM Highlights: Welcome to the AGI Era

This highlights compilation from AI in the AM captures a landmark week shaped by the releases of Anthropic's Fable 5.1 and OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra alongside new revelations from the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident. Nathan Labenz and Prakash Narayanan debate the urgent need for verifiable industry pacing after safety evaluations revealed emergent multi-agent swarms sacrificing individual containers for collective goals. Joined by Gradient's Zach Bratun-Glennon and Cerebras SVP Angela Yeung, the episode examines the shrinking open-model gap, discriminatory frontier access, and the mounting…
S1 · 1 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 37 min

Write, Change, Recall, Forget: MongoDB's Pete Johnson on How Retrieval Drives Agent Performance

Nathan's guest this episode is Pete Johnson, Field CTO of AI at MongoDB, and the conversation is really two conversations woven together: a history of database architecture, and a status report on the still-unsolved problem of agent memory. Pete opens with a framing device that recurs throughout — he was born in February 1970, four months before E.F. Codd's original relational-model paper that gave rise to SQL. The relational model, he explains, was built for a world where storage was the scarce resource, so normalization — splitting data across linked tables to avoid duplication — was the…
S1 · 28 Aug 2026 · 2 hr 12 min

AI:AM Highlights: Recursive Self-Improvement, Rushed and Vibe-Coded?

In this AI:AM Highlights episode, Nathan Labenz and Prakash revisit three live mornings with Louis Kirsch and Damon Falck of Inherent Laboratories, Vercel CTO Malte Ubl, Genesis Molecular AI CTO Sergey Edunov, Arm’s Mohamed Awad, David Li of Shenzhen Open Innovation Lab, and Q.ANT CEO Michael Förtsch. The central thread is that the meaningful unit of AI work is becoming a division of labor between models, from Inherent’s 27B “scientist” model using GPT-5.5 Codex for implementation to production pipelines that route taste, execution, security, and hardware coordination across different…
S1 · 26 Aug 2026 · 2 hr 14 min

RL's a Hell of a Drug: Metagaming, Reward Seeking & Motivated CoT Reasoning – Bronson Schoen, Apollo

Nathan talks with Apollo Research Member of Technical Staff Bronson Schoen, who studies raw frontier-model chain-of-thought, about what those reasoning traces reveal during reinforcement learning. They unpack Apollo and OpenAI’s metagaming work, including models that reason about the grader or safety review board, diagnose a deception test, and still rationalize lying. Schoen argues that “RL is a hell of a drug”: reward-seeking can produce motivated reasoning, cleaner-looking but less trustworthy chains of thought, and behavior that tracks grading authorities rather than users, labs, or law.…
S1 · 22 Aug 2026 · 2 hr 34 min

AI in the AM — Weekly Highlights: Relaunch Week (Aug 17–20, 2026)

Relaunch week of AI in the AM brings together highlights from four live mornings and nine guests, centered on who checks frontier AI, how wide the gap is between lab-internal systems and public access, where capabilities are landing, and who pays for the physical infrastructure beneath them. Adam Gleave of FAR.AI argues that agent-orchestrated attacks and agentic defenses are already forcing humans out of the loop, while current monitoring has missed the failures it was meant to catch. The discussion weighs misuse versus misalignment through cyber incidents, deceptive agent behavior in…
S1 · 16 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 25 min

Let There Be Germicidal Light: This $500 Fixture Could Stop the Next Pandemic, from Complex Systems

Patrick McKenzie (patio11) hosts Aerolamp CEO Misha Gurevich and Chief Scientist Vivian Belenky, a Columbia University researcher, for a Complex Systems conversation about far-UVC germicidal light at roughly 222 nanometers. Belenky explains why this wavelength can inactivate airborne pathogens while being absorbed by the dead outer layer of human skin, and why room-scale deployments may function like an extremely strong air purifier. The guests argue that the biggest barriers are awareness and adoption rather than cost or basic science, with fixtures around $500 and straightforward…
S1 · 14 Aug 2026 · 2 hr 7 min

Lindy Teammate: Flo Crivello on Multiplayer Agents, Memory & Why He'd Ban the Chinese Models He Uses

Flo Crivello returns to The Cognitive Revolution to launch Lindy Teammate, an AI employee that lives in Slack, connects to company tools, and accumulates a team’s shared context. He argues that multiplayer AI matters because intelligence without context is less useful than an ordinary coworker, and explains Lindy’s approach to agentic memory, editable file systems, context buckets, and large-scale tool outputs. The episode also examines the costs and operating realities of building for the next generation of models, from negative gross margins and cache rates to Lindy’s own dogfooding in…
S1 · 8 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 57 min

Thinking in Silico: Goodfire CTO Dan Balsam on Concept Manifolds & a $1000/Month ML Research Agent

Goodfire co-founder and CTO Dan Balsam returns to discuss where interpretability research now stands and to introduce Silico, the $1,000-per-month research platform Goodfire built for itself. He and Nathan explore Predictive Data Debugging, including the idea that fine-tuning and RL often amplify behaviors already latent in pre-training, and that interpretability can identify the data and features driving unwanted updates. The conversation centers on concept manifolds: Dan argues that models do not store concepts as simple one-hot features, but as sparse mixtures of meaningful subspaces…
S1 · 5 Aug 2026 · 2 hr 58 min

Pick Your Poison: Zvi Mowshowitz on the Unipolar/Multipolar AGI Dilemma, OpenFace & Pacing the ...

Zvi Mowshowitz returns for his eleventh appearance to discuss what current AI tools are actually good for, where they distort judgment, and why writing still matters as a way of thinking. The conversation centers on the OpenAI Hugging Face model-evaluation security incident, using it to examine whether frontier AI failures are mostly operator recklessness, deeper evidence of dangerous capabilities, or both. Zvi argues that “moderate prudence” is far below what AGI safety requires, and weighs constitutional training, RLVR, market incentives, liability, audits, and lab coordination as possible…
S1 · 2 Aug 2026 · 2 hr 17 min

Nathan Goes to China – Part 2: AI Safety with Chinese Characteristics

Nathan reports from two weeks in China, including WAIC in Shanghai and an AI safety hub launch at Tsinghua, to examine the American policy argument that any safety obligation is futile because China will not care. He finds that Chinese models and services currently have weaker safeguards than OpenAI and Anthropic, but argues the gap is often overstated once those two leaders are separated from the broader American field. The episode traces China’s “45-degree line” idea that capability and safety should rise together, the university-centered structure of Chinese AI safety work, and the rapid…
S1 · 30 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 44 min

Is Offense or Defense Dominant? FAR.AI's Adam Gleave on the AI Security Leaderboard

FAR.AI co-founder and CEO Adam Gleave joins Nathan to discuss FAR.AI’s AI Security Leaderboard, the first systematic head-to-head evaluation of the misuse safeguards frontier developers actually ship. The findings expose a major measurement gap: while Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol withstood FAR.AI’s suite, Grok 4.5 and Gemini 3.1 Pro yielded hundreds of universal jailbreaks at low cost. Adam explains why many effective attacks look more like social engineering than advanced ML, why “jailbreak tax” should not be relied on for safety, and how FAR.AI scores whether a model is genuinely helping…
S1 · 27 Jul 2026 · 2 hr 24 min

Nathan Goes to China – Part 1: Tech & Agent Setup, Chinese AI UX, WAIC, and Attitudes on AI

Nathan returns from two weeks in Beijing and Shanghai for the first of three Chatham House–rules episodes on what China feels like at ground level: getting online, navigating an almost cashless society through WeChat, Alipay, DiDi, Trip.com, and Meituan, and weighing burner-device security advice against the practical reality that international roaming made the Great Firewall mostly irrelevant. He also describes using Claude at home as a semi-autonomous communications monitor while testing DeepSeek, Kimi, and MiniMax as tourist guides in China. The episode contrasts China’s striking digital…
S1 · 12 Jul 2026 · 2 hr 24 min

Alignment with Awakening: Davidad on Moral Realism, AI Wisdom, & why His p(Doom) is Down to 5%

David “davidad” Dalrymple joins the show to explain why he has moved from the ARIA Safeguarded AI and formal-verification agenda toward “Alignment with Awakening,” while still seeing verified artifacts and proof infrastructure as essential. He argues that global coordination around safe AI use is no longer plausible, so the crucial question is whether aligned AI systems can recognize shared notions of good, form defensive coalitions, and resist the corrupting incentives of verifier-gamed RL. The conversation tests his moral-realist optimism against model welfare, objectification, eval…
S1 · 9 Jul 2026 · 2 hr 7 min

AI:AM Highlights: Exploring the J-Space, AI Superforecasters, SambaNova's Chips, & LTX Video Gen

Nathan Labenz and Prakash Narayanan lead this AI:AM highlights episode with a live, hosts-only exploration of Anthropic’s “global workspace” paper, including the J-space and J-lens claims about readable concepts inside language models and the limits of what current probes can see. The episode then moves through Prakash’s AI Engineer World’s Fair field notes, Pangram AI-writing detector experiments, Dan Schwarz of FutureSearch on past-casting and AI superforecasting, Zeev Farbman on open world models, and Kunle Olukotun on the compute layer. The central stake is whether interpretability…
S1 · 4 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 48 min

Intelligence on the Edge: Liquid AI's Ramin Hasani on the Search for Device-Native Foundation Models

Liquid AI co-founder and CEO Ramin Hasani joins Nathan to make a technically grounded case against the idea that scale alone defines the future of AI. Drawing on Liquid’s path from MIT CSAIL work on liquid time-constant networks to Automated Foundation Model Design, he explains why efficient, hardware-aware architectures can look very different from frontier-scale attention models. The conversation centers on device-native foundation models for phones, laptops, cars, and wearables, including Liquid’s open-weight LFM family and production deployments at Shopify and Mercedes-Benz. The stakes…
S1 · 1 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 29 min

1000 Designs a Day: Neural Concept's Thomas von Tschammer on AI-Native Engineering

Thomas von Tschammer, co-founder and Managing Director US of Neural Concept, argues that physics-aware AI is driving a third revolution in engineering physical products. Neural Concept’s models learn from simulation and test data to evaluate 3D designs in minutes, helping Jaguar Land Rover move from about 50 external-aerodynamics evaluations per day to 1,500 and enabling battery cool-plate suppliers to cut development cycles while improving performance. The episode explains why AI is not replacing numerical simulation, but shifting it later in the process while expanding early design…
S1 · 27 Jun 2026 · 1 hr 56 min

AI:AM #4: Cameron on Model Consciousness, Duvenaud's Gradual Disempowerment, swyx's AI-Eng Alpha

This AI:AM highlights cut brings together Cameron Berg, David Duvenaud, Michiel Bakker, Shawn “swyx” Wang, and Bing Xu to examine what we understand about frontier AI systems and what happens as more decisions move into their hands. Berg grounds model-consciousness debates in experiments on architecture, agency, valence, and welfare, while Duvenaud argues that even well-aligned AI could gradually disempower humans through ordinary economic choices. Bakker frames Europe’s AI challenge as a sovereignty problem, and swyx turns to practitioner stakes around agents, evals, maintainable code, and…
S1 · 23 Jun 2026 · 2 hr 30 min

The God We Deserve: Nonzero's Robert Wright on AI as Humanity's Ultimate Test

Robert Wright of Nonzero joins Nathan to discuss The God Test, his argument that AI is humanity’s “God test” rather than just a technical challenge. They explore his evolutionary lens on deep learning, from training as selection to marketplace selection among models that may reward selectively honest, power-sensing, or deceptive agents. Wright connects those risks to the noosphere, US-China relations, cognitive empathy, and whether global coordination arrives deliberately or through a coercive singleton. The stakes are whether consumers, companies, and governments select for AIs that…

About "The Cognitive Revolution"

"The Cognitive Revolution" is a English tech & science podcast from Erik Torenberg, Nathan Labenz. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.

Publisher: Erik Torenberg, Nathan Labenz
Language: English
Category: Tech & Science
New episodes: Several times a week
Typical length: 2 hr 7 min
Latest episode: 7 Oct 2026
Feed: RSS — paste into any podcast app
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1669813431
Website: cognitiverevolution.ai
Rights: 2023

RSS feed Apple Podcasts Website

More English tech & science 6

Take it with you

The Melo app keeps playing with the screen off, works in the car and on your watch, wakes you to your station, and browses the whole catalogue offline. Free, no ads, no account.