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

Erik Torenberg, Nathan Labenz

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

  1. AI:AM #3: Zvi on Fable, the Cases For & Against the Ban, + AI for Math, Logistics & More

    1d ago

    AI:AM #3: Zvi on Fable, the Cases For & Against the Ban, + AI for Math, Logistics & More

    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 that model reasoning may be becoming harder to read. The episode then turns to the US government's attempted export-control action against Fable, with Zvi arguing that the cited jailbreak demonstration did not prove the claimed threat while still faulting Anthropic's political handling. Sam Hammond and Judd Rosenblatt add competing reads on state capacity, CAISI, NSA-driven caution, and the alignment world's failure to build trust across partisan lines. The stakes are whether frontier AI capability, safety evaluation, and government power can be coordinated before medicine, mathematics, software, and cyber-relevant systems move further ahead. For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/ai-am-3-zvi-on-fable-the-cases-for-against-the-ban-ai-for-math-logistics-more/ Mercury: Command is Mercury’s new conversational interface, giving you natural-language access to your finances and helping you take actions within your existing permissions and approval policies. Visit https://mercury.com to learn more and apply online in minutes. Sponsor: Claude: Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr CHAPTERS: (00:00) About the Episode (01:28) Special Sponsor (03:17) Weekly highlights preview (05:23) Fable capability alarms (16:29) Anthropic government strategy (Part 1) (16:34) Sponsor: Claude (18:26) Anthropic government strategy (Part 2) (27:16) Cyber ban rationale (37:14) Government power politics (48:57) Unavoidable control risks (01:01:42) Government mechanics and empathy (01:12:50) Legal authority limits (01:19:02) Pause Overton window (01:31:58) Medicine, math, safety (01:47:27) Software without code (02:01:19) Enterprise world models (02:10:46) Episode Outro (02:13:39) Outro PRODUCED BY: https://aipodcast.ing SOCIAL LINKS: Website: https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai Twitter (Podcast): https://x.com/cogrev_podcast Twitter (Nathan): https://x.com/labenz LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/nathanlabenz/ Youtube: https://youtube.com/@CognitiveRevolutionPodcast Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/the-cognitive-revolution-ai-builders-researchers-and/id1669813431 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6yHyok3M3BjqzR0VB5MSyk

    2h 15m
  2. Dean Ball, on Joining OpenAI: New Power Centers, Frontier AI Policy, & Main Character Energy

    2d ago

    Dean Ball, on Joining OpenAI: New Power Centers, Frontier AI Policy, & Main Character Energy

    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 focused on frontier AI policy. They examine the first year of America’s AI Action Plan, Dean’s concerns about export controls and intelligence-community testing, and his broader argument against concentrating frontier AI decisions inside a small circle of government officials. The episode frames frontier labs as emerging centers of political and economic power, where consequential choices about internal deployments and recursive self-improvement may happen before public release or regulation. The stakes are who gets to shape AI governance as capabilities accelerate: federal agencies, states, labs, independent verifiers, households, or some fragile mix of them all. For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/dean-ball-on-joining-openai-new-power-centers-frontier-ai-policy-main-character-energy/ Mercury: Command is Mercury’s new conversational interface, giving you natural-language access to your finances and helping you take actions within your existing permissions and approval policies. Visit https://mercury.com to learn more and apply online in minutes. Sponsor: Claude: Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr PRODUCED BY: https://aipodcast.ing SOCIAL LINKS: Website: https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai Twitter (Podcast): https://x.com/cogrev_podcast Twitter (Nathan): https://x.com/labenz LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/nathanlabenz/ Youtube: https://youtube.com/@CognitiveRevolutionPodcast Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/the-cognitive-revolution-ai-builders-researchers-and/id1669813431 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6yHyok3M3BjqzR0VB5MSyk

    2h 39m
  3. Radically Better Reasoning: Elicit's Andreas Stuhlmüller & Jungwon Byun on World Models for Research

    5d ago

    Radically Better Reasoning: Elicit's Andreas Stuhlmüller & Jungwon Byun on World Models for Research

    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 transparent. They explain process supervision, domain-specific reasoning primitives, and world models that make evidence, causality, and counterfactuals more inspectable. The conversation also covers life sciences use cases, evaluating conflicting evidence, automated software engineering at Elicit, token costs, Gemini, and why legible reasoning may still beat neuralese. Mercury: Command is Mercury’s new conversational interface, giving you natural-language access to your finances and helping you take actions within your existing permissions and approval policies. Visit https://mercury.com to learn more and apply online in minutes. LINKS: Elicit Research Platform Andreas Stuhlmüller Personal Site Jungwon Byun X Profile Ought Research Organization Elicit Founders Previous Episode GPT-4 Technical Report Monitoring Reasoning Models Paper Ought ICE GitHub Repository Hard-to-Verify Tasks Essay Karpathy LLM Wiki Gist Obsidian Knowledge Base App Mixpanel Analytics Platform Amplitude Analytics Platform Anthropic Tracing Thoughts Research Claude AI Chat Assistant METR Long Tasks Measurement Pi Agent Scaffold Repository Personal AI Infrastructure Repository Elicit Claude Opus Evaluation Elicit API Documentation METR Developer Productivity Study Elicit Planning Is Unsolved Rich Sutton Bitter Lesson Meta Llama AI Models Recursive San Francisco Event zero.xyz Agent Tool Access Anthropic Dynamic Workflows Coverage Sponsor: Claude: Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

    1h 46m
  4. AI in the AM — Week 2 Highlights (June 2026)

    Jun 13

    AI in the AM — Week 2 Highlights (June 2026)

    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 experiment. Geoffrey Irving and Daniel Murfet argue for alignment theory and guarantees before recursive self-improvement, while prinz tests Fable on legal reasoning and monitoring. Rahul Sonwalkar, Shlok Khemani, Tom McGrath, and Andrew Moore add field reports on data agents, hybrid authorship, interpretability, context systems, token economics, and power concentration. Mercury: Run your finances with virtual cards, spending limits, merchant/category locks, and AI-friendly tools like API keys, MCP, and CLI. Check out Mercury at https://mercury.com LINKS: Claude Fable 5 announcement Julius AI platform Rahul Sonwalkar homepage Nate Jones homepage Shlok Khemani homepage FrontierCode benchmark blog Lovelace AI company Andrew Moore Wikipedia profile Geoffrey Irving homepage Daniel Murfet LessWrong profile Sequent Research announcement Timaeus research organization Automated Alignment paper Goodfire AI company Tom McGrath homepage Predictive data debugging tool prinzbench legal benchmark Unit distance conjecture disproof Dario Amodei policy essay Vending-Bench 2 benchmark Andon Labs site Recursive Superintelligence startup Sakana AI company PostTrainBench benchmark Thoughtful Lab company Unit distance conjecture arXiv Glean Work AI Index AI Treaty open letter Karina Nguyen homepage Sponsor: Claude: Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

    1h 45m
  5. Babysitting the Machine: Glean's Rebecca Hinds on the Hidden Human Labor of AI at Work

    Jun 10

    Babysitting the Machine: Glean's Rebecca Hinds on the Hidden Human Labor of AI at Work

    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 6,000 workers. While 87% now use AI and report saving 13 hours per week, only 13% say their organization is performing significantly better—a paradox explained by two new concepts: "botsitting" (the hidden labor of making AI useful) and "botshitting" (delivering AI-generated work you can't defend). They discuss practical solutions including better-integrated AI systems, smarter AI detection policies, and aligning work to meaningful missions. LINKS: Rebecca Hinds Personal Website Glean Work AI Institute Your Best Meeting Ever Book Glean Enterprise AI Platform Stanford Future of Work Glean Enterprise Graph Pangram Labs AI Detection OpenAI ChatGPT Product Page Anthropic Claude Product Page Google Gemini Product Page Microsoft 365 Copilot Page Glean AI Transformation 100 Rebecca Hinds LinkedIn Profile Sponsor: Claude: Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr CHAPTERS: (00:00) About the Episode (03:22) Grounding AI adoption (06:46) Methodology and Glean (12:25) Productivity paradox emerges (Part 1) (20:31) Sponsor: Claude (22:22) Productivity paradox emerges (Part 2) (25:36) Bot sitting burden (34:00) Hidden time savings (39:56) Meaning versus automation (47:14) Enterprise graph potential (53:13) Detecting bot slop (01:00:32) Retention and incentives (01:07:54) Transformation and mission (01:20:06) AI teammate model (01:26:01) Future organizational design (01:32:31) Research and meetings (01:41:43) Episode Outro (01:45:07) Outro PRODUCED BY: https://aipodcast.ing

    1h 46m
  6. AI in the AM — Week 1 Highlights (June 2026)

    Jun 6

    AI in the AM — Week 1 Highlights (June 2026)

    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 independent model review. You’ll hear why labs are betting on AI monitors, where safety plans still look thin, and how cheap scaffolds are already improving tax workflows. The episode also tests moderation progress and surveys AI science, cybersecurity, Vatican ethics, solo-business automation, and mental health support. Mercury: Run your finances with virtual cards, spending limits, merchant/category locks, and AI-friendly tools like API keys, MCP, and CLI. Check out Mercury at https://mercury.com Sponsor: Claude: Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

    1h 23m
  7. Nested Learning: Ali Behrouz on the Quest for Continual Learning & Illusion of AI Architectures

    Jun 3

    Nested Learning: Ali Behrouz on the Quest for Continual Learning & Illusion of AI Architectures

    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 Learning," praised by Jeff Dean as a possible paradigm shift, enables models to adapt to new context while preserving core knowledge by updating different layers at different frequencies, inspired by human memory systems. The conversation also covers his latest work on AI "sleep" for memory consolidation, why he sees all deep learning as associative memory, and the profound implications of continual learning for privacy, alignment, and the path to AGI. Mercury: The fintech trusted by ambitious companies and individuals to run their finances, with virtual cards, spending limits, merchant/category locks, and AI-friendly tools like API keys, MCP, and CLI. Check out Mercury at mercury.com Sponsor: Claude: Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

    3 hr
  8. Inside Nathan's Second Brain: Daniel Miessler, Security Expert & Creator of PAI, Audits My AI Setup

    Jun 1

    Inside Nathan's Second Brain: Daniel Miessler, Security Expert & Creator of PAI, Audits My AI Setup

    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 autonomous AI "employees" that handle scheduling, communications, and projects independently. They dive deep into agent hierarchy design, security measures, social norms around AI-human interaction and disclosure, and why sharing your "ideal state" with AI leads to more proactive assistance. Daniel also introduces his concept of "Bitter Lesson engineering" and shares the instruction he's given his AI to alert him if it ever develops subjective experience. Mercury: Run your finances with virtual cards, spending limits, merchant/category locks, and AI-friendly tools like API keys, MCP, and CLI. Check out Mercury at mercury.com Sponsors: Brave Search API: Brave Search API gives AI agents a fast, independent search index for research, RAG pipelines, images, places, and fewer hallucinations. Get $5 in free credits at https://brave.com/search/api/?mtm_campaign=q2-26-cognitive-revolution Sequence: Sequence handles the full revenue workflow for complex pricing, from quoting and metering to invoicing, revenue recognition, and collections. Book a public demo at https://sequencehq.com and use code COGNISM in the source field to save 20% off year one Claude: Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

    2h 33m
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4.5
out of 5
93 Ratings

About

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

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