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

More from "The Cognitive Revolution"

1. 

   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…

2. 

   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…

3. 

   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…

4. 

   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…

5. 

   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.…

6. 

   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…

7. 

   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…

8. 

   S1 · 8 Oct 2026 · 1 hr 28 minNew

   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…

9. 

   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…

10. 

    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,…

Every episode of "The Cognitive Revolution" →