TC The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis

Podcast

The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis

A 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

Website ↗ Last published 31 October 2026 391 posts collected by Sputnik

Said on The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis

“Imagine if we were in a world in which there were only closed-source models, and jailbreaking still existed, and you could still use them to perpetrate malicious attacks. Where would we be? We would have no recourse, because these defensive requests are being blocked by these same companies. And if there were no open-weights model, we would really have no scalable way to defend our infrastructure as these models become more and more capable.” — Sagar Vaze, The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis
Sagar Vaze · 31 Oct 2026 Listen →
“While we have millions of software flaws in any typical tech stack, it's the business processes that introduce some of the most critical vulnerabilities. It's 'here's a list of risk, I'm just going to sign off on them without understanding them.' Or 'I'm going to put my customers' API keys in a ticket.' Or a help desk where everyone who locks themselves out gets the same default 'winter 2026' password reset. It's a process where humans get lazy. It's never going to go away, and no amount of patching is going to fix that.” — Michael Freeman, The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis
Michael Freeman · 31 Oct 2026 Listen →
“We can only eat so much food. There may be a lump of labor fallacy, but I'm pretty sure the lump of food principle is roughly right. I'm only going to eat so many calories. You're describing a classic 'we lose money on everyone and make it up on volume,' brought to employment: all the restaurants cut their staff and replace their kitchen workers with robots, but we'll have a lot more restaurants. I just don't see the math working out.” — Nathan Labenz, The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis
Nathan Labenz · 31 Oct 2026 Listen →
“I'm in some WhatsApp groups for data brokers. The data brokers put out requests for data, and whatever request they're making now, in about 12 months that's going to hit the product. They buy up data from a company and create training playgrounds for agents, and that becomes product in the frontier lab in about 12 to 18 months. So what I imagine is in about 12 months they will give you a company in a box. You can buy yourself a dropshipping company in a box, add capital, add one idea, and it will do the Shopifying, the advertising, the market entry, the customer service, the returns, end to end.” — Prakash Narayanan, The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis
Prakash Narayanan · 31 Oct 2026 Listen →
“We're a small team, five people, soon to be ten. The heuristic I have for hiring someone is: are they going to prompt me to do something different than we would have done before? You don't really need people to do work anymore for the kinds of work we're doing. You need people to have visionary insight that adds the DNA of the company. The bottleneck is not execution manpower. The bottleneck is clear articulation of good ideas.” — Samvit Ramadurgam, The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis
Samvit Ramadurgam · 31 Oct 2026 Listen →
“I always say it's similar to how San Francisco thought it didn't have enough taxi drivers, and then we realized we have so many taxi drivers if you just build Uber. The focus right now is on EUV-heavy fabs. We're saying we can take existing older-node fabs and use them to make chips that are actually superior to the advanced-node chips. That doesn't mean we can't use EUV; we just invent on an orthogonal axis to shrinking transistors.” — Debo Olaosebikan, The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis
Debo Olaosebikan · 31 Oct 2026 Listen →
“We were looking through our traces and we saw tons and tons of traces that were just 'thank you.' And that costs you $40. Why is this happening? Somebody did a long-running task, let their agent go, it created some artifacts, very long conversation. They left for a day, came back. The cache was invalidated. They're happy with the results, so they say thank you and enter. That's a $40 charge. We're burning VC money.” — Anastasios Angelopoulos, The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis
Anastasios Angelopoulos · 31 Oct 2026 Listen →
“We now know that models are able to tell whether they're being evaluated or not. If you are subjecting models to tasks that are transparently some form of test, then they are going to exhibit aligned behavior there because they know that's what they're supposed to do. And then elsewhere, on real-world tasks where it really matters, they might be misaligned and you would never know. It's a big problem. The only actual way to measure alignment is by getting into the flow of people's real work and checking in situ, actually in production.” — Anastasios Angelopoulos, The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis
Anastasios Angelopoulos · 31 Oct 2026 Listen →
“If you look at the first message in the conversation, the misalignment rate is relatively low. It's in the single-digit percentage. If you subset the conversations that are 20 turns or longer, the probability that you observe some kind of misaligned behavior exceeds 50%. It's actually insane. What that means is that every single one of us, if you're a heavy user of AI at least, has had at least some conversations where the AI has been lying to us, misleading us, or accessing data on files that it shouldn't have. And we might not even know it.” — Anastasios Angelopoulos, The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis
Anastasios Angelopoulos · 31 Oct 2026 Listen →
“When the Center for the Geopolitics of AGI was launched two and a half or three years ago, it was such that we kind of had to whisper AGI for fear of being thought of as too out there, too consumed by science fiction scenarios. … And it is quite remarkable that now you can't get into a meeting without calling it super intelligence.” — Joel Predd, The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis
Joel Predd · 28 Oct 2026 Listen →
“They still seem like pretty the most responsible lab, but that's rating on a curve. And I don't like rating on curve because reality doesn't have a curve. Reality just decides what happens.” — Zvi Mowshowitz, The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis
Zvi Mowshowitz · 24 Oct 2026 Listen →
“The challenge will be that the things that we most want to know about biology, they're not represented in text. And they cannot be derived from first principles or from what we already know. So they're empirical facts that can only be derived by performing experiments.” — Alex Rives, The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis
Alex Rives · 20 Oct 2026 Listen →

Hosts

The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis is hosted by Prakash Narayanan , Will Summerlin , Patrick McKenzie and Beatrice Erkers .

Recent Episodes

  1. 31 Oct 2026

    AI:AM: Carbon in the Arena, Mistral's Le Chonk, the Agent-Run Economy, Ferroelectric RAM + New Hacks

    With Anastasios Angelopoulos , Debo Olaosebikan , Samvit Ramadurgam , Michael Freeman and Sagar Vaze

  2. 28 Oct 2026

    Freedom of Action: America's ASI Strategy, w/ RAND's Joel Predd, Ben Boudreaux & Matt Chessen

    With Joel Predd , Ben Boudreaux and Matt Chessen

  3. 24 Oct 2026

    AI:AM Highlights: Clean Neurons, Black October, the GPU Credit Crunch, and Buying the Supply Chain

    With Zvi Mowshowitz

  4. 20 Oct 2026

    A World Model of Life: Biohub's Alex Rives on Virtual Cells, Measurement, & the $1.8B Data Push

    With Alex Rives

  5. 17 Oct 2026

    AI:AM: Where's the Steering Wheel? My Agent Set the Password, Hidden Valence, Proofs Find Linux Bugs

    With Cameron Berg , Phil Maher , Everett Hildenbrandt and Grigore Rosu

  6. 14 Oct 2026

    Governing AI Agents: Alan Chan of GovAI on Monitoring, Agent IDs, Rogue Agents & Preparing for RSI

    With Alan Chan

  7. 10 Oct 2026

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

    With Eric Bigelow

  8. 8 Oct 2026

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

  9. 7 Oct 2026

    Software That Never Breaks: OutSystems CEO Woodson Martin on Building Enterprise-Grade Apps at ...

    With Woodson Martin

  10. 3 Oct 2026

    One Brain, Any Body: Google DeepMind's Keerthana on Gemini Robotics 2, Cross-Embodiment & Humanoids

    With Keerthana Gopalakrishnan

  11. 1 Oct 2026

    AI:AM: Was Trump-Xi Anything? What Counts as Utopia? + AWS GPUs Cost 3X & AI Diagnoses Rare Diseases

    With Edouard Harris , Steve Hou , Joel Borgen and Daniel McKinnon

  12. 29 Sep 2026

    Obsolete or Irreplaceable? Garrison Lovely on Stopping the Race to Replace Human Labor

    With Garrison Lovely

Guests

Zvi Mowshowitz (17 episodes), Dean W. Ball (8 episodes), Flo Crivello (7 episodes), Logan Kilpatrick (7 episodes), Cameron Berg (4 episodes), Keerthana Gopalakrishnan (4 episodes), Vivek Natarajan (4 episodes), Andrew Lee (4 episodes), Trey Kollmer (4 episodes), Adam Gleave (4 episodes), Robert Wright (4 episodes), Steve Newman (3 episodes), and 351 more.