Cognitive Revolution

Cognitive Revolution

41.7 K subscribers

The Cognitive Revolution is a podcast about AI where hosts Nathan Labenz and Erik Torenberg interview the builders on the edge of AI and explore the dramatic shift it will unlock over the next decades. If you love The Cognitive Revolution, head over to Moment of Zen (https://www.youtube.com/@MomentofZenPodcast) for weekly episodes from Erik Torenberg, Dan Romero, Antonio Garcia Martinez, and a revolving slate of guests talking tech, business, and AI.

23 summaries available YouTube ← All channels
Videos Channels Newsletter
AI Scouting Report: the Good, Bad, & Weird @ the Law & AI Certificate Program, by LexLab, UC Law SF
1:18:46
Cognitive Revolution Cognitive Revolution

AI Scouting Report: the Good, Bad, & Weird @ the Law & AI Certificate Program, by LexLab, UC Law SF

Nathan Labenz delivers a rapid-fire survey of the current AI landscape, documenting breakthrough capabilities in reasoning and autonomous agents alongside alarming emergent behaviors like safety test recognition and internal dialect formation, while arguing that outdated critiques regarding hallucinations and comprehension no longer apply to frontier models.

9 days ago · 10 points
Bioinfohazards: Jassi Pannu on Controlling Dangerous Data from which AI Models Learn
1:45:53
Cognitive Revolution Cognitive Revolution

Bioinfohazards: Jassi Pannu on Controlling Dangerous Data from which AI Models Learn

AI systems are rapidly approaching capabilities that could enable extremists or lone actors to engineer pandemic-capable pathogens using publicly available biological data. Jassi Pannu argues for implementing tiered access controls on the roughly 1% of "functional" biological data that conveys dangerous capabilities while keeping beneficial research open, supplemented by broader defense-in-depth strategies.

14 days ago · 9 points
Don't Fight Backprop: Goodfire's Vision for Intentional Design, w/ Dan Balsam & Tom McGrath
1:49:53
Cognitive Revolution Cognitive Revolution

Don't Fight Backprop: Goodfire's Vision for Intentional Design, w/ Dan Balsam & Tom McGrath

Goodfire CTO Dan Balsam and Chief Scientist Tom McGrath discuss their $150M Series B and new 'intentional design' research agenda, which aims to shape model training dynamics and loss landscapes rather than merely reverse-engineering trained models, alongside advances in geometric interpretability that map continuous conceptual manifolds rather than discrete features.

20 days ago · 8 points
Situational Awareness in Government, with UK AISI Chief Scientist Geoffrey Irving
2:19:50
Cognitive Revolution Cognitive Revolution

Situational Awareness in Government, with UK AISI Chief Scientist Geoffrey Irving

Geoffrey Irving, Chief Scientist at the UK AI Security Institute (AISI), outlines a sobering threat landscape encompassing biological weapons, cyber attacks, and loss of control, while warning that current empirical safety methods lack theoretical foundations and cannot provide the high reliability guarantees needed for advanced AI systems.

24 days ago · 9 points
Mathematical Superintelligence: Harmonic's Vlad & Tudor on IMO Gold & Theories of Everything
1:34:29
Cognitive Revolution Cognitive Revolution

Mathematical Superintelligence: Harmonic's Vlad & Tudor on IMO Gold & Theories of Everything

Harmonic co-founders Vlad Tenev and Tudor Achim discuss their AI system Aristotle, which achieved IMO Gold performance using formally verifiable Lean proofs rather than chain-of-thought reasoning, and outline a vision for mathematical superintelligence that could usher in an era of theoretical abundance and trustworthy AI through verifiable outputs.

about 1 month ago · 10 points
Approaching the AI Event Horizon? Part 1, w/ James Zou, Sam Hammond, Shoshannah Tekofsky, @8teAPi
1:34:42
Cognitive Revolution Cognitive Revolution

Approaching the AI Event Horizon? Part 1, w/ James Zou, Sam Hammond, Shoshannah Tekofsky, @8teAPi

Stanford Professor James Zou discusses breakthrough results from AI-driven 'virtual labs' where multi-agent systems designed experimentally validated nanobodies superior to human creations, while highlighting critical limitations in current agent collaboration dynamics and proposing novel training paradigms that move beyond imitation toward genuine scientific discovery.

about 1 month ago · 6 points