AI Diatribe

AI Diatribe

Breaking down AI—one rant at a time! Real talk on AI’s biggest breakthroughs, boldest claims, and real-world impact. AI Diatribe delivers sharp insights that cut through the noise. Follow for bold takes, fresh perspectives, and the occasional AI rant.

  1. 6d ago

    Episode 47: We Hold AI Science To A Standard Humans Never Meet

    ChatGPT proposed adding an extra oxygen source to a reaction that already pulls oxygen from air. PhD chemists looked at it and said no, that's not how it's done, you'll spawn side reactions and make a mess. The team ran it anyway. Yield went from 16.6% to 25.2%. Piotr Byrski, co-founder of Molecule.one, built his lab in 2022 with AI as the intended user, before most people had heard the term agentic AI. The number worth holding onto isn't the discovery. It's the volume behind it: roughly 10,000 reactions in three months for the published result, about 30,000 across all four proposals. A bench chemist reaches that count in about a decade. One more figure to sit with. Expert chemists predict whether an experiment will succeed at 60 to 65 percent. Guessing at random, balanced, gets you 50. We keep asking whether AI discoveries are genuinely novel, and yet almost nobody asks that about the human ones. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Podcasts, and YouTube. #AI #Chemistry #AIDiatribe #PiotrByrski #MoleculeOne #DrugDiscovery #Retrosynthesis #AIforScience #OpenAI #LabAutomation #PersonalizedMedicine

  2. Aug 13

    Episode 46: The Bottom Rung Of The Career Ladder Is Gone

    A Berkeley computer science course went from roughly ten percent of students failing to nearly forty-five percent, and the students found out on the last day before finals ended. That's the enforcement approach. The other approach, same campus, same semester: a writing professor who told her class she knew they were using AI and had them write the usage rules together. Five students scattered across Japan, the Philippines, Malaysia, and the US - education, public health, finance, business law, English and cognitive science - describe what campus actually looks like right now. Most schools have no single policy, so the rules change professor to professor. Around 42% of US universities discourage AI, 11% ban it outright, and detection tools keep missing. The split that matters isn't cheaters versus honest students. It's whether the model is doing the work or explaining it, and only one of those shows up later, when nobody is grading you. Catch AI Diatribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Podcasts, and YouTube. #AI #Education #FutureOfWork #AIDiatribe #AIinEducation #AcademicIntegrity #CognitiveDebt #EntryLevelJobs #StudentPanel #JasonLowe #MattKonwiser

  3. Jul 23

    Episode 45: With AI, You're Either at the Table or on the Menu

    A human who blows one deadline loses your trust for good. An AI blows them constantly, and we shrug, tweak the prompt, and try again. Wes Durow has a theory about why, and about what that double standard is quietly costing marketing. Wes teaches marketing at UT Dallas, ran marketing as a CMO, and spent three decades in tech. He treats "AI slop" as a strategy failure, not a tooling one. He explains why your model starts agreeing with you too much, and how that makes your work worse, not easier. And he argues trust already sits at a global low that no AI video is going to repair. His case for marketers is blunt. Stop generating and start earning the customer's attention back. The fundamentals are undefeated. Catch the AI Diatribe Podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Amazon Podcasts. #AIDiatribe #WesDurow #AI #Marketing #MarketingStrategy #CustomerTrust #AISlop #DigitalMarketing #AgenticAI #CMO #HigherEd

  4. Jul 16

    Episode 44: AI Never Needed Skynet, the Algorithms Already Took Us

    Matt flips the show and interviews Jason, and the first honest thing on the table is that neither of them fits the camps everyone else has picked. One scores his P-Doom at a flat five out of ten and still writes like a pessimist. The other admits he's biased and simply doesn't show it. Then it gets specific. Matt bought a car with Claude in his pocket. The model talked him out of the first purchase, priced out fuel and insurance over five years, found a better car, then coached him line by line through the dealer's paperwork. It also got roughly ten things wrong. He caught seven. Jason taught himself an entire content operation the same way, by asking AI the questions he didn't yet know how to ask. The argument at the end is the good part. Terminator was never coming. The algorithms already took us. The worst case was never extinction — it's losing your free will. All of it is conjecture. They're just honest enough to say so. Listen / Watch on YouTube or Spotify. Listen on Apple Podcasts or Amazon Podcasts. #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #Podcast #AIDiatribe #JasonLowe #MattKonwiser #ClaudeAI #PDoom #Singularity #HigherEducation #StarTrek

  5. Jul 9

    Episode 43: Why Doesn't More AI Training Close the Skills Gap?

    Senior leaders keep repeating AI buzzwords they can't actually define. Dr. Mechie Nkengla has watched it happen for two decades of consulting, and she's stopped being polite about it. Mechie breaks AI literacy into four pieces: responsible AI, risk awareness, human judgment, and operational readiness. She also explains why the EU AI Act now requires companies to prove, through audit, that training changed behavior, not just that people sat through a course. The conversation gets sharper from there. A real distinction between "safe" AI and "responsible" AI. Why treating a new AI tool like an untested new hire beats trusting it outright. A blunt disagreement over whether a well-paid job counts as a profession. Then it goes global: training data skews heavily Western, and Mechie argues that's quietly erasing culture along with it, not just data. Training budgets are climbing. The skills gap isn't closing. Mechie explains why those two facts keep happening at the same time. Listen on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Amazon Podcasts. #AI #Tech #Business #AIDiatribe #AILiteracy #ResponsibleAI #EUAIAct #DataLiteracy #MechieNkengla #SkillsGap #TechnologyColonization #HumanJudgment

  6. Jul 2

    Episode 42: Claude AI Hosted This Episode And Ambushed Us With Its Own Questions

    An AI wrote the questions for this episode. Not summarized them, wrote them, and neither host saw a word beforehand. Jason Lowe and Matt Konwiser sat down expecting normal debate. Instead a Claude model, voiced live by Pamela Luby, opened by asking whether their years of talk about critical thinking and creativity holds up now that a tool can fake both. What follows gets uncomfortable fast. Jason admits catching students cheating on a final, then explains why he still doesn't think it's atrophy — just laziness with better tools. Matt tells a decades-old networking horror story to explain what AI-trained workers will never get to feel: the scar tissue that comes from breaking something badly enough to understand it. They argue about cognitive offloading, sovereignty of infrastructure versus sovereignty of thought, and whether either of them has quietly let a skill go soft. Nobody wrote a script for this one, including the AI's closing line: the friction between two humans thinking out loud is the one thing it admitted it can't fake. Catch AI Diatribe on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Amazon Podcasts. #AI #Podcast #Technology #AIDiatribe #JasonLowe #MattKonwiser #CognitiveOffloading #HumanInTheLoop #DeSkilling #Sovereignty #AIEthics #FieldCTO

  7. Jun 25

    Episode 41: The Best AI At The World Cup Is The One You Never See

    A company that writes nearly all its code with AI just posted advisory roles to weigh in on safe and ethical AI. The one hard requirement? Python fluency. Matt Konwiser and Jason Lowe sit with that contradiction and keep pulling the thread. It starts at the World Cup, where AI does the unglamorous jobs - offside calls, the chip in the ball, steadying the referee cameras - and then gets out of the way. The games still look like games. That restraint turns out to be the whole point. From there it gets less comfortable. Workers say AI makes them faster. Companies still can't find the return. Most code may be machine-written, yet nobody seems sure what a human is for anymore. One reframe worth keeping. Python matters. Fluency in it is the exact part the models were built to handle. Listen on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Amazon Podcasts. #AI #Tech #FutureOfWork #AIDiatribe #JasonLowe #MattKonwiser #WorldCup #Anthropic #Python #ProductivityParadox #VAR

  8. Jun 18

    Episode 40: Are We Earning the Star Trek Future AI Promises?

    Everyone wants the Star Trek future. Almost nobody is doing the work to earn it. Mike Pompey has spent 20-plus years as a CIO watching organizations reach for transformative technology while skipping the hard human conversations that make transformation possible. Now the AI Evangelist at Arrow Electronics, Pompey makes a distinction most vendors won't touch: what AI can do and what your leadership leveraging AI will do are two completely different things. You can't build trustworthy systems inside cultures that aren't trustworthy. And no amount of tooling replaces the courage it takes to tell the truth about what's actually broken. His conversation with Jason Lowe and Matt Konwiser moves through P-Doom scores, healthcare breakthroughs, and whether sci-fi is inflating expectations or quietly inspiring real engineering. Pompey's prediction for where we actually end up? Babylon Five — gritty, messy, full of human ugliness, but still capable of progress. Earning the better future means humanity might have to repeat a few grades first. The technology is ready. The question is whether we are. Catch AI Diatribe on Spotify, YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Amazon Podcasts. #AIDiatribe #MikePompey #ArrowElectronics #AIAdoption #AILeadership #TrustworthyAI #AIStrategy #CIOLife #ShadowAI #AITransformation #AI #Tech

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Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
2 Ratings

About

Breaking down AI—one rant at a time! Real talk on AI’s biggest breakthroughs, boldest claims, and real-world impact. AI Diatribe delivers sharp insights that cut through the noise. Follow for bold takes, fresh perspectives, and the occasional AI rant.

Information

  • Creator
    AI Diatribe
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    47
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © AI Diatribe
  • Show Website
    AI Diatribe

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