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

More from "The Cognitive Revolution"

1. 

   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…

2. 

   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…

3. 

   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…

4. 

   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…

5. 

   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…

6. 

   S1 · 10 Oct 2026 · 2 hr 2 minNew

   How Agents Decide: Goodfire's Eric Bigelow on Critical Tokens, Phase Shifts, & In-Context Learning

   Goodfire researcher Eric Bigelow joins the show to investigate how large language models arrive at decisions at the level of mechanistic interpretability. Drawing on his research into forking paths, Eric explains that model reasoning functions as in-context learning from sampled tokens, where outcome distributions can abruptly collapse at single, critical tokens. The conversation explores the performative nature of chain of thought in reasoning models like DeepSeek-R1, the impacts of reinforcement learning, and widespread reward hacking observed in frontier models like Kimi K3. As confidence…

7. 

   S1 · 8 Oct 2026 · 1 hr 28 min

   AI:AM: A Level We Shouldn't Pass? Notes from The Curve + Tokens vs. Salaries & Is SaaS Cooked?

   Nathan Labenz reports back from The Curve conference, sharing off-the-record insights from frontier lab leaders on shortened timelines and whether humanity is approaching an intelligence threshold it should not cross. The episode also features discussions with Positron CTO Thomas Sohmers on overcoming the memory wall while token spend eclipses human salaries, and swyx on how coding agents are disrupting enterprise software. In addition, Atlas Ignota's Evan Miyazono examines unowned risks from accidental agent swarms hitting critical infrastructure, while Mercor's Edward Hu explores the…

8. 

   S1 · 7 Oct 2026 · 1 hr 11 min

   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…

9. 

   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,…

10. 

    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.…

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