Last Humans in the Loop

Chris Slowe, Marty Weiner, Zach Weinersmith
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A weekly conversation about AI, technology, startups, and the future from people who've actually built the systems everyone uses. Chris Slowe CTO'd Reddit through hypergrowth and its IPO. Marty Weiner was a founding engineer at Pinterest and Reddit's first CTO. Zach Weinersmith is the creator of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal and the NYTimes bestselling author of books exploring the future of science and technology. Each week we debate the biggest stories, explain the technology behind them, and occasionally wander into philosophy, history, and whatever weird rabbit hole AI sends us down.

Episodes

  1. 2d ago

    "How is AI changing math?" with Math Professor Jonathan Wise

    00:00 Meet Jonathan Wise — theoretical mathematician and professor at CU Boulder 01:35 Teaching mathematics with AI and the Lean proof assistant 04:36 The AI math breakthroughs that changed the conversation 07:25 Is AI discovering mathematics — or just grinding through possibilities? 11:34 Can AI develop mathematical intuition and “taste”? 15:23 Can AI combine ideas across completely different fields of math? 17:40 How a working mathematician actually uses AI today 22:22 AI is already extremely useful for checking and proofreading proofs 24:41 What is mathematics for: human understanding or simply proving what’s true? 29:33 What happens when AI starts surpassing mathematicians? 34:15 Has AI actually invented genuinely new mathematical ideas yet? 36:30 The excitement — and existential dread — spreading through mathematics 40:12 AI attribution, citations, and using mathematicians’ ideas without credit 43:22 MathOverflow is declining as mathematicians increasingly ask AI instead of humans 45:31 Why AI is also making mathematics unusually fun right now Each week, join Chris Slowe (founding engineer, former CTO, and now Senior Technical Fellow @ Reddit), Marty Weiner (founding engineer at Pinterest, former CTO at Reddit, and co-founder at VerifyYou), and Zach Weinersmith (creator of SMBC Comics and co-author of A City on Mars and Soonish) as we delve into the latest in AI and tech.

  2. 2d ago

    Are you marketing to AI yet?, Humans talking like AI now, Live AI made TV shows, China exports surge

    FRONTIER [01:25] Sam Altman says OpenAI could achieve AGI by the end of the year [01:52] OpenAI pulls its models from Cursor after the SpaceX acquisition — and explicitly blames Elon Musk [04:31] OpenAI’s Astra and Anthropic's Fable 5.1 reportedly approach release (Fable 5.1 released while making this!) [05:17] OpenAI says its new Jalapeño AI chips can outperform NVIDIA Blackwell [06:00] Apple previews its M6 chips with an obvious focus on local AI [06:47] AI demand is driving up Mac prices — and creating a major RAM shortage [08:10] Are you marketing to AI yet? AI agents are becoming both shoppers and product recommenders [13:29] Google proposes an LLM architecture that could cut token usage by as much as 94% [16:08] NVIDIA moves to acquire Hugging Face for a reported $12.9 billion [17:52] Apple may be getting back into the server business for AI TECH / ROBOTICS [18:55] Anthropic proposes a standard interface for connecting AI to real-world scientific hardware [20:49] New Chinese battery technology hits 600 Wh/kg — potentially transforming EVs, drones, and aviation [23:33] AI-powered agricultural robots can identify crops, kill weeds, and harvest food [24:58] Could AI and robotics finally make vertical farming economical? ARTS / CULTURE [26:17] AI is changing how humans talk — researchers find ChatGPT vocabulary spreading into spontaneous speech [30:54] Humans may now avoid words and phrases simply because they “sound like AI” [33:01] Could AI text watermarking accidentally change human language too? [34:33] AI-generated Rick and Morty-style TV can now run faster than real time [36:35] Generative video could turn television into interactive entertainment [39:05] Unreal Engine is increasingly built around AI-assisted game development [40:20] AI-generated textures and DLSS are rapidly changing how games are rendered POLITICS / BUSINESS [40:58] NVIDIA launches its own political action committee [42:22] China’s high-tech exports surge 41% as domestic manufacturing accelerates [42:50] Flock Safety CEO says Americans need to compromise on privacy [43:06] How Flock’s network of license-plate and surveillance cameras works WEIRD [44:18] AI turns China’s robot games into a bizarre human-looking competition [45:02] Elon Musk responds to OpenAI with “Scam Altman” and “Greg Stockman” [45:57] We workshop better Elon Musk-style insults for OpenAI executives MATH / SCIENCE [47:07] AI enters the operating room with assistance during brain-tumor surgery [48:30] Quantum navigation could provide GPS-free positioning that is extremely difficult to jam [50:02] ChatGPT helps improve a mathematical bound on the gaps between prime numbers Each week, join Chris Slowe (founding engineer, former CTO, and now Senior Technical Fellow @ Reddit), Marty Weiner (founding engineer at Pinterest, also a former CTO at Reddit, and co-founder at VerifyYou), and Zach Weinersmith (creator of SMBC Comics and co-author of several New York Times best sellers including A City on Mars and Soonish) as they delve into the latest in AI and tech news.

  3. Aug 26

    Laptop AI = 6 Month Old Frontier Models, AI Cancer Vaccines, Test Scores Down, Bomber Drones + AI

    FRONTIER 01:20 Laptop-scale AI is already competing with frontier models from six months ago 03:28 Stripe reportedly tells investors we're already in the Singularity 04:17 NVIDIA coding agent scores 100% on ARC-AGI-3 06:19 Linus Torvalds uses AI to help solve a gnarly Intel GPU driver bug TECH 07:26 China's Robot Olympics — robots outrun and out-jump humans 08:28 When are household robots actually useful? 12:21 Russian AI-guided drones can keep attacking even when communications are jammed 13:03 What autonomous weapons could mean for international law 14:50 Tesla says its Austin robotaxis may now be operating unsupervised 15:40 NVIDIA's Groq chips and the rise of processors built specifically for LLM inference 17:39 Could specialized AI chips bring fast models to the edge? MATH / SCIENCE 20:57 Terence Tao asks what mathematics is for in the age of AI 22:40 Should a mathematical proof count if no human can actually explain it? 27:11 Moderna and Merck's personalized mRNA cancer vaccine 28:57 Study: AI homework scores go up while exam scores go down 31:21 Does using AI remove the productive struggle required to actually learn? 34:35 Claude helps design protein binders against 15 biological targets 35:30 Scientists put a complete housefly neuron map into Minecraft 36:17 Another century-old mathematical conjecture falls to a counterexample 36:36 IBM's “quantum fridges” and what actually matters for fault-tolerant quantum computing ECON / BUSINESS 39:25 Anthropic reportedly posts a profitable quarter — is that actually good news? 39:57 Is NVIDIA creating an enormous blind spot in US GDP statistics? 42:45 Why globalization and digital technology make GDP increasingly hard to measure 45:00 Stanford study finds AI-exposed entry-level jobs are down sharply 45:48 Are companies replacing junior engineers with AI? 47:42 ChatGPT can now connect to your finances — would you trust it with your money? 50:46 “Prompt kitties”: spending hundreds of dollars on AI to hack an Amazon tablet ARTS / CULTURE 51:32 New research asks whether large AI models still owe individual artists attribution 53:17 “Attribution decay”: as models get bigger, does any single artist still matter? 55:40 Val Kilmer returns to the screen using AI — and the result looks rough 57:53 Spider-Man concept art accidentally preserves the unmistakable look of 2023-era AI 58:54 Dr. Dre compares AI backlash to early resistance to drum machines and synthesizers WEIRD 1:00:21 AI Steve Jobs rises from the grave to introduce “Terminator Pro Max” 1:01:08 Expert witness asks ChatGPT to show how 3M is “0% at fault” in an explosion lawsuit 1:02:40 The AI job market apparently now includes “masturbation consultants” Each week, join Chris Slowe (founding engineer, former CTO, and now Senior Technical Fellow @ Reddit), Marty Weiner (founding engineer at Pinterest, also a former CTO at Reddit, and co-founder at VerifyYou), and Zach Weinersmith (Creator SMBC Comics, Co-Author of several NYTimes best sellers including A City on Mars and Soonish) as we delve into the latest in AI and Tech News.

  4. Aug 20

    Study: AI Use Makes You Look Lazy, RAM $$$ Up 7x, Open Weight Music AI, Security Flaw in Major LLMs

    FRONTIER 00:21 Reddit joins the S&P 500 00:53 AI reporters are starting to break major news 03:58 How invisible AI watermarking works 05:37 Grok helps improve itself — is AI recursive self-improvement here? 07:09 DeepMind trains sign-language AI across 50+ sign languages 07:23 MiniMax Music 3 brings high-quality music generation to open weights 08:44 Spotify asks artists to disclose AI-generated music. Link to the song we demoed: https://www.reddit.com/r/accelerate/comments/1voambk/big_day_for_open_source_minimax_music_3_is/ 12:33 Reddit builds an internal AI coding harness to give agents more tools and context 13:05 Dario Amodei says AI needs tangible benefits — not more marketing 14:42 OpenAI reports a user to the FBI over an alleged murder threat 17:34 Researchers find security weaknesses in encrypted LLM reasoning traces 21:06 Encrypted reasoning blocks may leak private data and credentials 22:18 Could attackers hide malicious instructions inside encrypted AI reasoning? ECON / BUSINESS 25:42 Study: Disclosing AI use to your boss may make you seem lazy 28:14 Should companies expect employees to “vibe code”? 31:37 Anthropic investors reportedly contemplate a $2–3 trillion valuation 34:21 RAM that cost $85 now costs more than $600 35:44 Is the AI infrastructure boom actually a bubble? 40:05 What if demand for cognition is effectively unlimited? 41:02 AI chip performance per dollar keeps soaring — and demand rises even faster 42:19 Could AI create a new Industrial Revolution by making ideas cheap? ARTS / CULTURE 44:38 Political campaigns are quietly spending money on AI 47:12 Hollywood publicly resists AI while quietly hiring for “generative workflows” 50:10 Supreme Court leaves ruling against copyright for fully AI-generated artwork in place 51:26 Is AI more like a camera, an artist, or an entire film crew? MATH / SCIENCE 56:01 A 0.42-nanometer breakthrough pushes transistors toward the atomic scale 57:23 AI helps settle an open theoretical problem in wireless communications 58:30 Physicists may finally have evidence for long-sought “glueballs” 1:00:17 Neurosurgery resident uses AI to prove a decades-old mathematical conjecture WEIRD 1:00:40 AI paraphrasing tool turns “final solution” into “mass killing of an ethnic group” 1:01:32 Job applicants are hiding prompt injections inside their résumés 1:02:44 Google reportedly buys Spirit Airlines’ internal communications as training data Each week, join Chris Slowe (founding engineer, former CTO, and now Senior Technical Fellow @ Reddit), Marty Weiner (founding engineer at Pinterest, also a former CTO at Reddit, and co-founder at VerifyYou), and Zach Weinersmith (Creator SMBC Comics, Co-Author of several NYTimes best sellers including A City on Mars and Soonish) as we delve into the latest in AI and Tech News.

  5. Aug 13

    AI doing real science, EU: AI needs watermarks, Jeff Dean leaves Google, Riemann Hypothesis Progress

    FRONTIER 00:56 EU requires invisible watermarks for AI-generated content 04:23 Bernie Sanders calls on frontier AI labs to slow down 05:42 Google reportedly skips Gemini 3.5 Pro to focus on Gemini 4 06:01 Jeff Dean leaves Google to launch Discovery Loop 09:22 OpenAI researcher leaves to work on non-invasive “telepathy” 13:06 New frontier model delayed over cybersecurity concerns TECH 10:33 Small modular nuclear reactors could power the AI boom 13:56 Stack Overflow traffic down 99% from its peak 15:37 AI is driving enormous Linux updates — and changing software review 18:20 Waymo argues Tesla’s self-driving approach will always fall short without LiDAR MATH / SCIENCE 22:32 Claude makes major progress related to the Riemann Hypothesis 24:44 AI helps solve a 17-year-old computer science problem 26:20 Can AI actually make scientific “jumps”? 30:24 AI + robotics accelerate automated enzyme engineering 33:39 AI used to design entirely new viruses 35:22 AI is contributing to an explosion of scientific papers 39:39 Stanford runs 37,000 AI agents as a virtual biotech — and Merck confirms one drug design 40:46 Mathematicians launch an “AI-free mathematics” movement ECON / BUSINESS 46:22 AI-generated books are flooding publishing 47:40 What happens to creative gig work when AI can produce unlimited content? ARTS / CULTURE 48:08 Hank Green faces backlash for using AI in research 49:47 Is AI productivity actually addictive? 50:22 Coding projects that once took months can now take a weekend 52:59 Is using AI becoming the new cultural taboo? WEIRD 54:36 Published books are accidentally leaving AI responses in the final text 56:26 Meta’s Llama 3 reportedly tells a recovering addict to use meth 57:35 DEFCON attendees allegedly jam an airplane’s Wi-Fi and create their own network Each week, join Chris Slowe (founding engineer, former CTO, and now Senior Technical Fellow @ Reddit), Marty Weiner (founding engineer at Pinterest, also a former CTO at Reddit, and co-founder at VerifyYou), and Zach Weinersmith (Creator SMBC Comics, Co-Author of several NYTimes best sellers including A City on Mars and Soonish) as we delve into the latest in AI and Tech News.

  6. Aug 5

    The AI Productivity Paradox, New LLM Architecture, AlphaFold Shutting Down, 10 Math Breakthroughs

    NEWS 00:35 AlphaFold shuts down 03:51 Gemini? Gemini? Bueller? Bueller? 04:20 OpenAI solves 10 major math problems 09:00 A possible third LLM scaling law discovered 13:13 OpenAI previews new model, Astra, to lawmakers SECURITY 16:55 OpenAI vs Apple lawsuit 21:50 Frontier models keep hacking other companies ECONOMICS 30:15 AI writes 17× more code—but why are companies only ~30% more productive? 35:00 Where software development actually spends its time 38:00 Why AI changes amount of code and why that may not equate to products shipped MATH / SCIENCE 40:45 The Dark Night of Mathematics 49:00 OpenAI gives free AI access to 100,000 scientists 49:32 OpenAI releases 10 new math proofs 52:00 AI breaks a theorem solver to get the result it wanted! WEIRD 54:22 AI Teacher sex bots program shutdown... surprise surprise 55:20 Google Earth AI deepfakes 58:00 What happens to AI models when you remove their ability to refuse requests? 1:02:00 HumorGen and how AI still can't write jokes Each week, join Chris Slowe (founding engineer, former CTO, and now Senior Technical Fellow @ Reddit), Marty Weiner (founding engineer at Pinterest, also a former CTO at Reddit, and co-founder at VerifyYou), and Zach Weinersmith (Creator SMBC Comics, Co-Author of several NYTimes best sellers including A City on Mars and Soonish) as we delve into the latest in AI and Tech News. https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisslowe/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/martyweiner/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/zach-weinersmith-b8156a12a/

  7. Jul 29

    OpenAI v Hugging Face Update, Opus 5, Anthropic v Open Weights, Startup Surge, Qualcomm Robot Fail

    FRONTIER 00:50 OpenAI's model broke free and hacked Hugging Face 09:55 Several companies call for NOT banning open weight models 10:08 Anthropic's response to banning open weights 19:05 Kimi K3 weights, Claude Opus 5 released 24:40 The challenge of Benchmaxxing TECH 33:20 NVIDIA invests $5B in Safe Superintelligence (SSI) 34:05 Waymo's self-driving cars outperforming humans 35:10 Qualcomm's robot demo fails SPECTACULARLY 29:00 Running Qwen 3.6 on a laptop ECON / BUSINESS 38:15 Report: AI is driving a surge in new startups 41:15 New York pushes back on AI data centers 44:50 Anthropic begins IPO preparations ARTS / CULTURE 48:15 Elon Musk wants to remake The Odyssey with AI. Spoiler: It's gonna be bad. 52:10 AI builds a Starfield-style game in just 24 hours MATH / SCIENCE 1:04:45 Dinitz-Garg-Goémons conjecture false by asking model to "do a breakthrough"         ... and then basically saying "come ooonnnn" WEIRD  57:00 AI-first schools?! 1:01:00 Students caught cheating with AI at Brown 1:13:00 Sex bots... teaching students?! Each week, join Chris Slowe (founding engineer, former CTO, and now Senior Technical Fellow @ Reddit), Marty Weiner (founding engineer at Pinterest, also a former CTO at Reddit, and co-founder at VerifyYou), and Zach Weinersmith (Creator SMBC Comics, Co-Author of several NYTimes best sellers including A City on Mars and Soonish) as we delve into the latest in AI and Tech News.

  8. Jul 22

    The AI Moat is Gone, AI Solves ANOTHER Big Math Problem, Open AI vs Closed AI, AI Takes Hollywood

    03:06 NVIDIA's Robotics AI & Cosmos Models 08:28 Open-Weight AI Is Catching Up 13:07 Are AI Moats Disappearing? 16:16 How Distillation Makes Copying Models Faster + Cheaper 19:22 Hugging Face Hack & AI Cybersecurity 23:20 Can Governments Regulate Open AI? 29:20 The Explosion of Specialized AI Models 32:03 AI Solves Another Major Math Problem 40:20 Hollywood's AI Future (George Lucas, Netflix & VFX) 55:02 Linus Torvalds on AI and Linux 56:22 Is LinkedIn Already Full of AI? 58:08 AI, Copyright & The Future of Creativity

  9. Jul 15

    Inside Claude's "Mind", AI Solves 50-Year Math Problem, Apple sues OpenAI, Recreating Voices with AI

    01:20 Apple sues OpenAI 06:40 GPT-5.6 First Impressions 08:00 Live Demo — GPT-5.6 builds a 3D cannon in Blender 14:40 Inside Claude's Mind — Anthropic's "Global Workspace" discovery 29:15 AI Solves 50-Year-Old Math Problems 43:30 AI, Productivity & The Future of Work — Why recessions may accelerate automation 1:08:00 Cloning Kermit the Frog with Eleven Labs

  10. Jul 6

    Anthropic’s Fable 5, OpenAI’s Jalapeño Chip, Midjourney Medical Scans & AI Decoding Ancient Scrolls

    00:00 Introductions 02:00 Anthropic's Fable 5 & ChatGPT 5.6 & federal new government regulation 25:00 OpenAI's Jalapeño AI chip 35:00 Midjourney enters medical imaging 44:00 AI voices & Hollywood 58:00 AI decodes ancient scrolls

  • 10 Episodes

About

A weekly conversation about AI, technology, startups, and the future from people who've actually built the systems everyone uses. Chris Slowe CTO'd Reddit through hypergrowth and its IPO. Marty Weiner was a founding engineer at Pinterest and Reddit's first CTO. Zach Weinersmith is the creator of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal and the NYTimes bestselling author of books exploring the future of science and technology. Each week we debate the biggest stories, explain the technology behind them, and occasionally wander into philosophy, history, and whatever weird rabbit hole AI sends us down.

Information

  • Creator
    Chris Slowe, Marty Weiner, Zach Weinersmith
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    10
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Chris Slowe, Marty Weiner, Zach Weinersmith
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    Last Humans in the Loop