"The Cognitive Revolution"
Erik Torenberg, Nathan Labenz
▶ Webplayer- Business
- Entrepreneurship
- Society
- Culture
- Technology
Erik Torenberg, Nathan Labenz
▶ WebplayerA 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
Listen in the Podli app 🎧
Follow your favourite podcasts, listen offline and in the car with CarPlay and Android Auto, and always pick up where you left off. Free to try.
Sep 29, 2026 · 2:14:41
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…
Sep 27, 2026 · 1:47:18
Nathan Labenz and Prakash Narayanan revisit interviews with five experts to analyze emerging challenges across agent coordination, safety funding, GPU markets, and physical-world…
Sep 26, 2026 · 2:51:54
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.…
Sep 25, 2026 · 1:50:11
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…
Sep 19, 2026 · 1:41:50
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,…
Sep 17, 2026 · 1:08:01
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…
Sep 15, 2026 · 2:10:56
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…
Sep 12, 2026 · 1:42:06
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…
Sep 10, 2026 · 3:17:07
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…
Sep 5, 2026 · 2:20:44
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…
Sep 1, 2026 · 1:36:43
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…
Aug 28, 2026 · 2:11:56
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…
Aug 26, 2026 · 2:14:23
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…
Aug 22, 2026 · 2:33:41
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…
Aug 16, 2026 · 1:25:13
Patrick McKenzie (patio11) hosts Aerolamp CEO Misha Gurevich and Chief Scientist Vivian Belenky, a Columbia University researcher, for a Complex Systems conversation about…
Aug 14, 2026 · 2:06:53
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.…
Aug 8, 2026 · 1:57:21
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…
Aug 5, 2026 · 2:57:51
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…
Aug 2, 2026 · 2:17:10
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…
Jul 30, 2026 · 1:44:27
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…
Jul 27, 2026 · 2:24:01
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…
Jul 12, 2026 · 2:23:57
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…
Jul 9, 2026 · 2:07:00
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…
Jul 4, 2026 · 1:47:58
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…
Jul 1, 2026 · 1:29:22
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…
Jun 27, 2026 · 1:56:22
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…
Jun 23, 2026 · 2:29:40
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…
Jun 21, 2026 · 2:14:52
Zvi Mowshowitz joins AI in the AM to unpack Anthropic's Fable system card, including its FrontierMath leap, troubling Vending-Bench behavior, decision-theory drift, and signs…
Jun 20, 2026 · 2:39:03
Dean Ball, author of Hyperdimensional and until now a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation, joins Nathan to announce he is joining OpenAI to build a team…
Jun 17, 2026 · 1:46:10
Andreas Stuhlmüller and Jungwon Byun return to discuss how Elicit is building trusted reasoning workflows for scientific research as frontier models grow more powerful but less…
Jun 13, 2026 · 1:44:47
Week 2 highlights follows Anthropic’s Fable launch in real workflows, from safety gates and API refusals to autonomous coding, 3D world-building, and a Claude-run Twitter…
Jun 10, 2026 · 1:46:20
Rebecca Hinds, author of "Your Best Meeting Ever" and Head of the Work AI Institute at Glean, breaks down the surprising findings from the new Work AI Index 2026 report surveying…
Jun 6, 2026 · 1:22:56
This first highlights edition of the morning experiment tracks a week of fast-moving AI frontier news, from closed-door recursive self-improvement debates to OpenAI’s call for…
Jun 3, 2026 · 3:00:03
Ali Behrouz, grad student at Cornell and Google researcher, discusses his potentially transformative work on new architectures for continual learning in AI. His paper "Nested…
Jun 1, 2026 · 2:32:30
Daniel Miessler returns to discuss Nathan's newly built personal AI infrastructure, including a Claude Code instance with a 1 GB database of five years of digital history and two…
May 26, 2026 · 1:42:10
Ben Todd, co-founder of 80,000 Hours and author of the newly rewritten book by the same name, shares his latest thinking on how individuals can position their careers to improve…
May 24, 2026 · 2:13:23
Jeffrey Ladish, Executive Director of Palisade Research, discusses his team's findings on AI shutdown resistance and self-replication, revealing how current models sometimes take…
May 20, 2026 · 59:22
Logan Kilpatrick and Tulsee Doshi of Google DeepMind join for a first-ever in-person episode recorded just days before Google I/O, covering headline launches like Gemini 3.5…
May 15, 2026 · 1:33:03
Andrew Lee, CEO of Tasklet, returns for his fourth appearance to share how his team has once again rewritten their entire agent stack, now emphasizing file system context,…
May 9, 2026 · 1:27:15
Diarmuid Gill and Liva Ralaivola of Criteo join Nathan Labenz to unpack how modern ad tech works, from millisecond-speed recommendation systems and realtime bidding to the role…
May 6, 2026 · 1:23:00
Laura Burkhauser, CEO of Descript, explains how the company is navigating the tension between powerful AI tools and creator backlash against “slop.” She shares how Descript…
May 1, 2026 · 1:46:35
Kyle Corbitt, founder of OpenPipe, breaks down reinforcement learning and custom fine-tuning for modern AI models. He explains how RL differs from supervised fine-tuning, why…
Apr 26, 2026 · 2:38:01
This edition of AI in the AM features Anna Patterson on Ceramic.ai’s pivot to low-cost enterprise search for LLMs, designed to combine public and private data with stronger…
Apr 23, 2026 · 3:33:44
Cameron Berg returns to discuss the latest research on AI consciousness and model welfare. He breaks down new evidence for model introspection, including studies showing that…
Apr 19, 2026 · 2:09:52
Steve Newman, creator of Writely and founder of the Golden Gate Institute for AI, shares the personal AI toolkit and vibe-coding practices that have reshaped how he works. He…
Apr 15, 2026 · 2:30:47
This special AI in the AM episode features Sergiy Nesterenko of Quilter on using reinforcement learning for circuit board design, Andy Hall of Stanford on AI behavior in politics…
Apr 11, 2026 · 3:10:03
This cross-post from the 80,000 Hours podcast features Ajeya Cotra in conversation with Rob Wiblin about AI timelines, recursive self-improvement, and the “crunch time” window…
Apr 8, 2026 · 1:34:16
Sam Stephenson, co-founder of Granola, explains how a deliberately minimalist design philosophy helped turn the AI note-taking app into one of the fastest-growing products in the…
Apr 4, 2026 · 1:55:38
Joseph Nelson, CEO of Roboflow, breaks down the current state of computer vision and why it still lags behind language models in real-world understanding, latency, and…
Apr 1, 2026 · 1:44:42
This special cross-post from The Intelligence Horizon features Nathan Labenz in a wide-ranging conversation on compressed AI timelines, expert disagreement, and why he believes…
Mar 25, 2026 · 1:35:52
Vijoy Pandey of Outshift by Cisco lays out his vision for an “Internet of Cognition,” where AI agents can share context, build reputation, and collaborate safely at scale. He…
Mar 22, 2026 · 1:38:55
Karan Vaidya, CTO of Composio, explains how their “smart tool” platform lets AI agents access over 50,000 tools across 1,000+ apps through a single interface. He details how…
Mar 19, 2026 · 3:26:43
Zvi Mowshowitz returns to survey the current AI landscape, from recursive self-improvement and the shift from the “beginning” to the “middle” of the AI story to what true AI…
Mar 16, 2026 · 1:16:54
This special AI Scouting Report episode from the Law & Artificial Intelligence Certificate Program surveys the current AI landscape for legal professionals. Nathan Labenz walks…
Mar 11, 2026 · 1:43:12
Jassi Pannu, Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins, explains how rapidly advancing AI is transforming biological research and raising the risk of engineered pandemics. They map…
Mar 8, 2026 · 2:06:04
Jesse Genet shares how she built a team of AI agents to transform homeschooling, family life, and personal productivity without a software background. She explains how agents…
Mar 5, 2026 · 1:47:20
Dan Balsam and Tom McGrath from Goodfire return to explore the frontier of mechanistic interpretability and their new research pillar, Intentional Design. They explain the shift…
Mar 1, 2026 · 2:18:32
Geoffrey Irving, Chief Scientist at the UK AI Security Institute, explains why our theoretical understanding of machine learning remains fragile even as models surpass experts on…
Feb 25, 2026 · 2:01:23
Karan Singhal, Head of Health AI at OpenAI, explains how ChatGPT Health is achieving attending-physician-level performance and already serving hundreds of millions of users. He…
Feb 22, 2026 · 55:29
Olive Song from MiniMax shares how her team trains the M series frontier open-weight models using reinforcement learning, tight product feedback loops, and systematic environment…
Feb 18, 2026 · 1:31:14
Vlad Tenev and Tudor Achim from Harmonic explain how they built Aristotle, an AI system that reaches International Mathematical Olympiad gold-medal performance using formally…
Feb 14, 2026 · 2:22:59
Abhi Mahajan (@owlposting) explains how AI is reshaping biology and medicine, including foundation models to predict cancer treatment response and why he’s both skeptical and…
Feb 13, 2026 · 1:32:00
Part 1 of this live special dives into AI for Science, U.S. AI policy, and the behavior of AI agents in open-ended environments. James Zou explains how interpretability and…
Feb 8, 2026 · 1:16:07
Alexis Carlier, founder of Asymmetric Security, explains how assuming AGI-level intelligent labor should transform cybersecurity from reactive triage to proactive, continuous…
Feb 5, 2026 · 1:56:32
Blitzy founders Brian and Sid break down how their “infinite code context” system lets AI autonomously complete over 80% of major enterprise software projects in days. They dive…
Feb 1, 2026 · 1:02:12
This crossover episode from the Latent Space podcast features Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan on the 10-year anniversary of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and their expanded…
Jan 29, 2026 · 1:36:37
Kevin Frazier and Alan Rozenshtein explore how AI is reshaping the legal profession, from “secret cyborg” lawyers using tools like Harvey to the uncertain future of junior…
Jan 25, 2026 · 2:11:00
Dominic Williams, President & Chief Scientist of the DFINITY Foundation and CEO of Caffeine AI, explains the Internet Computer and his vision of a “sovereign cloud where AI…
Jan 22, 2026 · 2:23:38
In this AMA-style episode, Nathan takes on listener questions about whether fine-tuning is really on the way out, what emergent misalignment and weird generalization results tell…
Jan 18, 2026 · 2:28:11
Daniel Miessler shares his Personal AI Infrastructure (PAI) framework and vision for a future where single human owners are supported by armies of AI agents. He explains his…
Jan 14, 2026 · 1:39:20
Baris Gultekin, VP of AI at Snowflake, explains how “bringing AI to the data” is reshaping enterprise AI deployment under strict security and governance requirements. PSA for AI…
Jan 9, 2026 · 1:54:39
In this AMA episode, Nathan gives an update on his son Ernie’s cancer treatment and how frontier AI models are helping him navigate complex medical decisions. PSA for AI…
Jan 4, 2026 · 1:54:14
Ryan Kidd, Co-Executive Director of MATS, shares an inside view of the AI safety field and the world’s largest AI safety research talent pipeline. PSA for AI builders: Interested…
Jan 1, 2026 · 1:16:05
This cross-post episode from the Future of Life Institute podcast features Luke Drago, co-author of The Intelligence Curse and co-founder of Workshop Labs, in conversation with…
Dec 27, 2025 · 1:15:41
Emmett Shear and Séb Krier debate whether today’s AI alignment paradigm—focused on control and instruction-following—is fundamentally flawed. PSA for AI builders: Interested in…
Dec 24, 2025 · 1:39:00
Kathleen Fisher and Byron Cook dive into automated reasoning and formal verification as tools for building truly secure software systems. PSA for AI builders: Interested in…
Dec 19, 2025 · 1:39:36
This year-end live show features nine rapid-fire conversations to make sense of AI’s 2025 and what might define 2026. PSA for AI builders: Interested in alignment, governance, or…
Dec 18, 2025 · 1:55:04
This year-end live show features nine rapid-fire conversations to make sense of AI’s 2025 and what might define 2026. PSA for AI builders: Interested in alignment, governance, or…
Dec 14, 2025 · 2:03:54
Andy Masley on AI energy and water use unpacks common myths and brings an Effective Altruism lens to the debate. PSA for AI builders: Interested in alignment, governance, or AI…
Dec 10, 2025 · 2:00:45
Max Tegmark and Dean Ball debate whether we should ban the development of superintelligence in a crossover episode from Doom Debates hosted by Liron Shapira. PSA for AI builders:…
Dec 6, 2025 · 1:29:52
Marek Kozlowski, Head of the AI Lab at Poland's National Information Processing Institute, discusses project PLLuM (Polish Large Language Models). PSA for AI builders: Interested…
Dec 3, 2025 · 1:23:08
This special ChinaTalk cross-post features Zixuan Li of Z.ai (Zhipu AI), exploring the culture, incentives, and constraints shaping Chinese AI development. PSA for AI builders:…
Nov 30, 2025 · 1:13:30
Rune Kvist and Rajiv Dattani, co-founders of the AI Underwriting Company, reveal their innovative strategy for unlocking enterprise AI adoption. They detail how certifying and…
Nov 27, 2025 · 51:22
AI that sells, reasons, and closes like your top rep? It sounds terrifying—but it’s not. Amanda Kahlow’s Superhumans are proving that automation doesn’t erase people; it elevates…
Nov 25, 2025 · 1:04:55
In this keynote from the Michigan Virtual AI Summit, Nathan Labenz speaks directly to K-12 educators about the current reality and rapid trajectory of the AI frontier. He…
Nov 20, 2025 · 1:40:10
Sherif Mansour, Head of AI at Atlassian, discusses bridging AI agents with massive-scale enterprise software deployment, drawing insights from Atlassian's millions of…
Nov 17, 2025 · 2:02:57
This deeply personal episode shares how Nathan used AI to navigate his 6-year-old son's cancer diagnosis and treatment journey. He details using GPT-5 Pro, Claude, and Gemini 3…
Nov 12, 2025 · 1:09:54
In this special crossover episode from Beatrice Erkers' Existential Hope podcast, The Cognitive Revolution's host explores the crucial, often-neglected question of building a…
Nov 8, 2025 · 1:53:49
Matthew Harvey Sanders, founder and CEO of Long Beard, introduces "Catholic AI," a rapidly growing field serving users in 165 countries. He delves into the philosophical and…
Nov 5, 2025 · 2:24:25
Cameron Berg, Research Director at AE Studio, shares his team's groundbreaking research exploring whether frontier AI systems report subjective experiences. They discovered that…
Nov 2, 2025 · 1:49:31
Christopher Alexander Stokes and Bryan Carberry, protagonist and director of "*smiles and kisses you*" discuss Chris's romantic relationship with a Replika AI companion. This…
Oct 29, 2025 · 1:37:42
Erik Torenberg joins to debate whether recent developments suggest AI progress is slowing down or stalling, addressing arguments from Cal Newport and others. Nathan counters this…
Oct 25, 2025 · 1:28:24
In part two of his conversation, Illia Polosukhin, co-author of "Attention Is All You Need" and founder of NEAR Protocol, explores the profound societal and economic implications…
Oct 22, 2025 · 2:13:06
Today Andrew Lee, founder and CEO of Shortwave and Tasklet.ai, joins The Cognitive Revolution to discuss building a new AI agent automation platform that replaces traditional…
Oct 18, 2025 · 2:44:31
Nathan interviews Brian Tse, founder and CEO of Concordia AI, about China's approach to AI development, safety and governance. They discuss China’s pragmatic vision emphasizing…
Oct 14, 2025 · 1:24:53
Jim Collins, Termeer Professor at MIT, unveils his AI-powered project that has discovered several new antibiotics, effective against resistant strains and often employing…
Oct 8, 2025 · 1:52:02
Today Johan Falk, author, speaker, and AI analyst from Stockholm, Sweden, joins The Cognitive Revolution to discuss his work reimagining education for the AI era, exploring why…
Oct 5, 2025 · 1:34:04
Today Eoghan McCabe and Fergal Reid of Intercom join The Cognitive Revolution to discuss building their AI customer service agent Fin, exploring how they achieved a 65%…
Oct 2, 2025 · 1:00:33
Today’s special crosspost features a16z General Partner Anjney Midha with Liam Fedus and Ekin Dogus Cubuk of Periodic Labs. They discuss experiments in training frontier AI…
Sep 28, 2025 · 2:16:08
Today, Emad Mostaque, founder of Intelligent Internet, joins The Cognitive Revolution to discuss his book "The Last Economy" and his radical "intelligence theory" framework for…
Listen in the Podli app 🎧
Follow your favourite podcasts, listen offline and in the car with CarPlay and Android Auto, and always pick up where you left off. Free to try.
Your podcast? Get the Podli badge for your site
