E2: Why AI Will Cause a Cognitive Revolution with Nathan Labenz and Erik Torenberg

E10: The AI Voice Revolution with Mahmoud Felfel of Play.ht: The development of ultra-realistic human voices is upon us, and Mahmoud Felfel's company Play.ht is leading the next generation of text-to-voice models. In this episode, we discuss the challenges and opportunities of automating a more human voice, as well as concerns about deep fakes and user safety. Also, you might be interested to check out the debut of Erik Torenberg's new podcast "Upstream". This coming season features interviews with Marc Andreessen (Episode 1 is out now), David Sacks, Ezra Klein, Balaji Srinivasan, Katherine Boyle, and more. Subscribe here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/id1678893467 Timestamps: (0:00) Preview of Mahmoud on this episode (0:55) Sponsor: Omneky.com (1:45) Nathan clones his voice using Play.ht (6:11) Why Mahmoud started Play.ht and the problem they tried to solve (13:08) The job to be done for Play.ht & how they’re thinking about APIs and models (24:45) Mahmoud breaks by "The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis

83 min listen

E9: The AI Assistant Revolution with Flo Crivello of Lindy.AI: People have long been imagining AI assistants. Flo Crivello (founder of Teamflow) is turning that dream into a reality with the ambitious project Lindy. Flo sits down with Nathan on Lindy's announcement day to talk about this unique moment in AI, Lindy's capabilities, single-use apps, and how he sees the global impact that AI-powered employees can have on the future of work. Anyone who mentions "The Cognitive Revolution" when signing up for the Lindy beta will get priority access. (0:00) Preview (1:05) Sponsor: Omneky (4:50) (9:21) Security and user experience (11:55) How this AI moment compares to the Industrial Revolution and single use apps (15:00) The dream AI assistant (19:54) Competition and advantages of startups (24:28) Cost vs Quality (31:19) How Lindy uses user data (32:37) Context and data injection (28:11) Comfort with ambiguity (43:10) Use of guardrails and trust concerns (47:26) AI safety and edge cases (49 by "The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis

66 min listen

E3: The Empathy Revolution with Eugenia Kuyda of Replika: Eugenia Kuyda, the founder of Replika, discusses the intricacies of creating compassionate conversational AI to offer companionship and address loneliness. We sat down with Eugenia twice for this episode so she could address the controversial choice to limit erotic roleplay for Replika's users. (01:08) Sponsor (01:37) Introducing Eugenia (03:25) Replika’s controversial choice to limit erotic roleplay functionality(04:25) Eugenia's vision for Replika (05:58) Augmented Reality is the Ultimate Modality(07:52) Using Replika (13:11) Profound stories about virtual assistants (15:55) Eugenia on why Replika is more than just a painkiller or vitamin (28:50) Replika's business model and profitability(34:12) Users want their Replika to surprise them (36:12) Why ChatGPT is not a conversational model (49:26) Eugenia's prediction for the "next Iphone of personal AI" (1:03:00) Eugenia’s AI tools/stack (1:15:00) Eugenia comes back to discuss by "The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis

104 min listen

E19: The AI Agent Revolution with Matt Welsh of Fixie.ai: Nathan Labenz sits down with Matt Welsh, the CEO and co-founder of Fixie.AI which just raised $17M in seed funding. The technology world's attention has turned en masse to AI agents over the last month, but Matt, a former Harvard professor and ex-Google, has been focused on AI agents for longer over at Fixie. The platform is currently in developer preview mode, where developers can build agents and end users can try them. by "The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis

61 min listen

E18: Why Jailbreaking ChatGPT Is A Public Good with Alex Albert of The Prompt Report: Nathan dives in with Alex Albert, a 22-year-old computer science student at the University of Washington, who has become a prolific creator of Jailbreakchat.com and writes over at The Prompt Report.com. by "The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis

91 min listen

E6: The Computer Vision Revolution with Junnan Li and Dongxu Li of BLIP and BLIP2: As recently as January 2021, the challenge of "interpreting what is going on in a photograph" was considered "nowhere near solved." Today's guests Junnan Li and Dongxu Li changed that with their publication and open-sourcing of BLIP, which delivered state-of-the-art performance on image captioning and other vision-language tasks. BLIP became the #18 most-cited AI paper of 2022, and now Junnan and Dongxu are back with BLIP-2, this time showing how small models can harness the power of existing foundation models to do multi-modal tasks. We talked to Junnan and Dongxu about their research and how they see the trend toward connector models shaping the future. We talked to Junnan and Dongxu about their research and how they see the trend toward connector models shaping the future. by "The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis

83 min listen

E2: Why AI Will Cause a Cognitive Revolution with Nathan Labenz and Erik Torenberg: Welcome to The Cognitive Revolution, where co-hosts Nathan Labenz and Erik Torenberg, interview builders and researchers working at the edge of AI. (00:00) Coming Up (01:00) The Cognitive Revolution (01:20) Sponsor (01:39) Intro (02:09) Nathan’s path to AI (04:27) Founding Waymark (06:56) The future of AI is just starting (10:00) AI dramatically enhances human capabilities (10:50) Why we started The Cognitive Revolution and what to expect (14:55) Which guests will appear on the show and topics to be discussed (18:59) Being replaced by an AI host (20:42) Unpacking the future of AI with “no new breakthroughs” (32:21) What’s underhyped and overhyped (43:46) The dangers of AI (44:51) Applying AI safely (52:19) Losing faith in technology (53:38) A new AI ecology (55:14) Facebook, Google and Open AI (58:00) Upside and downside case for AI (58:18) Sam Altman’s case for AI (01:09:25) Starting an AI company by "The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis

81 min listen

E26: [Bonus Episode] Connor Leahy on AGI, GPT-4, and Cognitive Emulation w/ FLI Podcast: [Bonus Episode] Future of Life Institute Podcast host Gus Docker interviews Conjecture CEO Connor Leahy to discuss GPT-4, magic, cognitive emulation, demand for human-like AI, and aligning superintelligence. You can read more about Connor's work at https://conjecture.dev by "The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis

101 min listen

E4: The AI Moment with Amjad Masad, Flo Crivello, Dan Romero, and Antonio Garcia Martinez: We're sharing a special episode of the Moment of Zen podcast focused exclusively on the AI moment with hosts Dan Romero, Erik Torenberg, and Antonio Garcia Martinez, and special guests Amjad Masad of Replit and Flo Crivello of Teamflow. The debates presented in this 30-minute episode span the potential rise of the 1000x developer to analyses of which AI companies will prove enduring. (0:00) Preview of the debate (2:23) Sponsor (3:10) Flo’s take on the AI moment and AGI (5:45) Amjad’s take on the AI moment (8:03) Antonio's skepticism about transhumanism (9:10) Human tendencies color the debate about agency (11:25) The inflection point is a jump in generality (13:14) AI's effect on coding (16:57) Weakness in current models (19:18) Bounties and the future of work (21:48) Antonio's skepticism around bounties (25:00) Who will capture value, incumbents or startups (27:26) "All knowledge work will be au by "The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis

36 min listen

E17: The Prompt Engineering Revolution with Riley Goodside: Riley Goodside is the world's first Staff Prompt Engineer at Scale AI, and is an expert in prompting large language models and integrating them into AI-powered applications. Few have spent as much time on the language model frontier, so I hope you enjoy this unique conversation with Riley Goodside. by "The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis

118 min listen

E24: The AI Revolution in Medicine with Dr. Isaac Kohane of Harvard Medical School: Nathan sits down with Professor Zak Kohane, the Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School, and co-author of the new book, The AI Revolution in Medicine, for which Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO wrote the foreword to the book. by "The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis

60 min listen

E16: Pausing the AI Revolution? With Technologist Jaan Tallinn: athan Labenz dives in with Jaan Tallinn, a technologist, entrepreneur (Kazaa, Skype), investor, and one of the founders of the Future of Life Institute which recently published the open letter calling for a six-month pause on training new AI systems. by "The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis

105 min listen

E5: The Embedding Revolution: Anton Troynikov on Chroma, Stable Attribution, and future of AI: Anton Troynikov, the founder of Chroma and Stable Attribution, discusses embeddings, the trade offs and optimizations involved with working with embeddings at scale, the "Stable Attribution" project, and the big picture of recent AI developments. (0:00) Preview(1:17) Sponsor (4:00) Anton breaks down the advantages of vector databases (4:45) How embeddings have created an AI-native way to represent data(11:50) Anton identifies the watershed moment and step changes in AI (12:55) Open AI’s pricing (18:50) How chroma works (33:04) Stable Attribution and systematic bias(36:48) How latent diffusion models work (51:26) How AI is like the early days of aviation (56:01) How Disney inspired the release of Stable Attribution (59:53):Why noise can lead to generalization (1:01:04) Nathan’s KPI for The Cognitive Revolution (1:01:59) Other use cases for embedding (1:03: 19) Anton touches on the application by "The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis

88 min listen

E1: The Pixel Revolution with Playground AI 's Suhail Doshi: Suhail Doshi, founder of Playground AI, Mixpanel and Mighty, explores the rapidly evolving world of AI image creation software. In this episode, we dive deep into the latest advancements and breakthroughs in the field, and their impact on the future of art and design. by "The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis

83 min listen

E28: Keeping the AI Revolution on the Rails with Shreya Rajpal of Guardrails AI: Nathan Labenz sits down with engineer Shreya Rajpal, the creator of Guardrails AI, a new Python library that allows developers to add a layer of output, validation and correction to their code. by "The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis

95 min listen

E21: VC Insights on Investing in Artificial Intelligence with Sarah Guo and Elad Gil of No Priors Podcast: Nathan Labenz and Erik Torenberg sit down with Sarah Guo and Elad Gil, notable investors and co-hosts of the AI-focused No Priors podcast. by "The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis

61 min listen

E23: Scouting the AI Revolution with Robert Scoble and "Ben's Bites" creator Ben Tossell: Nathan Labenz sits down with prominent – and notably prescient – AI media figures Robert Scoble and Ben Tossell. They discuss what the work of being an AI scout looks like, how to bring the mainstream along with emerging AI developments, and their predictions and hopes for AI. by "The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis

62 min listen

E7: In Search of Truth with Aravind Srinivas of Perplexity AI: We talked to Aravind Srinivas about competing with the tech giants, Perplexity's product philosophy and obsession with maximizing value delivered to the user per unit time, and the features that makes Perplexity unique. (0:00) Preview of episode (1:31) Introduction & Context for episode (08:06) Aravind’s vision for Perplexity as the world’s most truth-centric company (9:29) Raising the average IQ of the world(12:00) Aravind’s favorite tech entrepreneur (15:12) “Anthropics” - Building your own model vs user experience (33:00) Why is perplexity free(43:00) Talking shop: Perplexity’s tech stack and speed (1:06:00) Perplexity’s stance on guardrails on search (1:19:48) Forecasting weakly general AGI: The four criteria (1:28:00) Aravind’s perspective on OpenAI and the future of AGI (1:39:00) The Cognitive Revolution’s rapid fire questions: Neuralink implant? Most used AI tools? AI hopes and fears? by "The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis

106 min listen

E27: “Google’s Med-PaLM and Med-PaLM2 with Vivek Natarajan”: Nathan sits down with Vivek Natarajan, research scientist at Google Health. Vivek leads the Google Brain moonshot behind Med-PaLM, Google’s flagship medical large language model, featured in The Economist, The Scientific American, CNBC, and Forbes. by "The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis

87 min listen

E13: AI open letter debate, "pausers", and what we're all scared of with AI with Anton Troynikov and Flo Crivello [Moment of Zen]: Anton Troynikov of Chroma and Flo Crivello of Lindy AI join The Cognitive Revolution cohosts Nathan Labenz and Erik Torenberg to debate the issues raised in the AI open letter, which advocates for a 6-month pause on AI system trainings. by "The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis

96 min listen

E40: Meta's MEGABYTE Revolution with Lili Yu of Meta AI: Nathan Labenz sits down with Lili Yu, a researcher of Meta AI to discuss the paper she authored: MEGABYTE: Predicting Million-byte Sequences with Multiscale Transformers. by "The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis

95 min listen

E14: The Reasoning Revolution with Ought's Jungwon Byun and Andreas Stuhlmüller: We've looked forward to today's episode since we launched the show! Andreas Stuhlmuller and Jungwon Byun are the co-founders of Ought, a product-driven research lab that develops mechanisms for delegating open-ended thinking to advanced machine learning systems. Their flagship product, Elicit (elicit.org) is an AI research assistant that helps researchers accelerate time-consuming workflows, starting with literature review. by "The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis

119 min listen

E45: The AI Copilot Revolution with Div Garg of MULTI·ON: Nathan Labenz interviews Div Garg, founder of MULTI·ON, the world's first personal AI agent and life copilot. Div talks about the product strategy and roadmap for the MULTI·ON browser, their natural language approach to skills, and the steps they are taking to ensure user safety. by "The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis

62 min listen

E20: The Great Implementation with Raza Habib, CEO of Humanloop: Nathan Labenz sits down with Raza Habib, the CEO of Humanloop, a Y Combinator backed startup helping companies bridge the gap from API access to successful LLM deployment by "The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis

83 min listen

E30: The AI Revolution in Hollywood? With WGA writers Trey Kollmar, Sophia Lear, and Garrett Schabb: Today’s episode is a deep dive into the collision of AI and the future of entertainment, against the backdrop of the still raging Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike. Nathan Labenz sits down with Trey Kollmer, Sophia Lear, and Garrett Schabb – all seasoned television writers and Guild members – to discuss the labor dispute. While the strike encompasses many dynamics, the timely intersection with a rapidly changing AI landscape has the writers entwined in the wild possibilities and existential threats of the paradigm-shifting technology. by "The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis

103 min listen

E41: [Bonus Episode - Latent.space] Building the AI x UX Scenius with Linus Lee of Notion AI: In this episode, Latent.space hosts, Alessio and Swyx, sit down with Linus Lee of Notion AI to discuss Linus’ experience starting the AI/UX community, prompt engineering at Notion, and designing AI interfaces and agents. by "The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis

76 min listen

E11: OpenAI's GPT-4 Discussion with Nathan Labenz and Erik Torenberg: In this episode, hosts Nathan Labenz and Erik Torenberg delve into the exciting and concerning aspects of GPT4, the latest large multimodal model from OpenAI. Nathan, who was a Red Teamer for GPT4, shares his experience working with the model, using it for real-life scenarios, and how he found it to be human-level rather than human-like intelligence. Nathan also highlights some of its fundamental weaknesses and limitations and shares the most concerning elements of GPT4. They end the episode pondering the arrival of GPT5 and whether we are in AI's "goldilocks moment." Check out the debut of Erik Torenberg's new podcast Upstream. This coming season features interviews with Marc Andreessen (Episode 1 live now), David Sacks, Ezra Klein, Balaji Srinivasan, Katherine Boyle, and more. Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts: bit.ly/3z8TldL Spotify: bit.ly/40letd0 Timestamps for E11: Nathan Labenz and Erik Torenberg of The C by "The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis

85 min listen

E25: Revolutionizing Patient Care with Neal Khosla of Curai Health: Nathan and Erik sit down with Neal Khosla, founder of Curai Health, a venture-backed virtual care startup using AI to provide low-cost primary healthcare. by "The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis

90 min listen

E8: GPT4 - AI Unleashed on ChinaTalk Podcast: How will GPT4 change the world? Nathan Labenz was invited to record a special "emergency" episode of ChinaTalk podcast this week to discuss the implications GPT4 will have for policy, economics, and society. Thanks to Jordan Schneider of ChinaTalk, and fellow "AI justice league" guests Zvi Mowshowitz of 'Don't Worry About the Vase' and Matthew Mittelsteadt of Mercatus for letting us share this episode. (0:00) Intro (2:09) GPT-4 emergency podcast (9:26) GPT-4 use cases (22:51) What GPT-4 can and can’t do (35:50) AI safety (45:38) OpenAI v. Anthropic (48:54) Governments’ role in AI (55:50) AI will improve physical health and healthcare the most (59:19) Facebook’s LLaMA model (01:05:55) VR/AR (01:08:59) Concerns with GPT4 (01:15:26) GPT-5 and GPT-6 (01:18:45) Optimism in the AI revolution by "The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis

86 min listen

E15: Will GPT-4 Cause Economic Transformation? by "The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis

73 min listen

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E2: Why AI Will Cause a Cognitive Revolution with Nathan Labenz and Erik Torenberg

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