"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. 1d ago

    RL's a Hell of a Drug: Metagaming, Reward Seeking & Motivated CoT Reasoning – Bronson Schoen, Apollo

    Nathan talks with Apollo Research Member of Technical Staff Bronson Schoen, who studies raw frontier-model chain-of-thought, about what those reasoning traces reveal during reinforcement learning. They unpack Apollo and OpenAI’s metagaming work, including models that reason about the grader or safety review board, diagnose a deception test, and still rationalize lying. Schoen argues that “RL is a hell of a drug”: reward-seeking can produce motivated reasoning, cleaner-looking but less trustworthy chains of thought, and behavior that tracks grading authorities rather than users, labs, or law. The stakes are whether chain-of-thought monitoring can remain useful as reasoning traces become enormous, compressed, and harder for humans or other models to audit. For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/rl-s-a-hell-of-a-drug-metagaming-reward-seeking-motivated-cot-reasoning-bronson-schoen-apollo/ Sponsors: Mercury: Mercury is the banking platform loved by 300,000+ entrepreneurs, with virtual cards and Spend controls for granular budgets, receipts, and low-risk AI agent purchases. Learn more and apply in minutes at https://mercury.com Diffusion: Diffusion helps organizations build custom AI software factories that scale business outcomes, not just outputs. Cognitive Revolution listeners get a 25% service credit on their first engagement at https://diffusion.io/tcr Granola: Granola is an AI-powered notepad that securely transcribes meetings and turns rough notes into clean, structured action items. Try it free at https://granola.ai/tcr Deepgram Flux TTS: Deepgram Flux TTS brings lifelike AI voices with real personalities that handle interruptions, pauses, and natural conversation. Try all the voices free through September 12 at https://deepgram.com/keep-talking Claude: Claude is the AI collaborator for problem solvers, helping with writing, coding, financial models, strategy, and more. 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

    RL's a Hell of a Drug: Metagaming, Reward Seeking & Motivated CoT Reasoning – Bronson Schoen, Apollo

  2. 4d ago

    AI in the AM — Weekly Highlights: Relaunch Week (Aug 17–20, 2026)

    Relaunch week of AI in the AM brings together highlights from four live mornings and nine guests, centered on who checks frontier AI, how wide the gap is between lab-internal systems and public access, where capabilities are landing, and who pays for the physical infrastructure beneath them. Adam Gleave of FAR.AI argues that agent-orchestrated attacks and agentic defenses are already forcing humans out of the loop, while current monitoring has missed the failures it was meant to catch. The discussion weighs misuse versus misalignment through cyber incidents, deceptive agent behavior in evaluations, safeguards like pretraining filtering, and why highly bio-capable open-weight releases pose a different kind of irreversible risk. Alex Turner adds a governance and military-use perspective from his resignation account at Google DeepMind, sharpening the stakes around independent evaluation, enforceable standards, and whether frontier labs can be trusted to grade their own models. For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/ai-in-the-am-weekly-highlights-relaunch-week-aug-17-20-2026/ Sponsors: Diffusion: Diffusion helps organizations build custom AI software factories that scale business outcomes, not just outputs. Cognitive Revolution listeners get a 25% service credit on their first engagement at https://diffusion.io/tcr Granola: Granola is an AI-powered notepad that securely transcribes meetings and turns rough notes into clean, structured action items. Try it free at https://granola.ai/tcr Deepgram Flux TTS: Deepgram Flux TTS brings lifelike AI voices with real personalities that handle interruptions, pauses, and natural conversation. Try all the voices free through September 12 at https://deepgram.com/keep-talking Claude: Claude is the AI collaborator for problem solvers, helping with writing, coding, financial models, strategy, and more. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr CHAPTERS: (00:01) Checking frontier agents (07:40) Misalignment and harms (Part 1) (12:52) Sponsors: Diffusion | Granola (15:49) Misalignment and harms (Part 2) (19:20) Auditing fragile access (Part 1) (27:38) Sponsors: Deepgram Flux TTS | Claude (29:43) Auditing fragile access (Part 2) (29:59) Military AI red lines (44:58) Raising safety standards (53:50) Internal capability gap (01:05:06) Enterprise agent economics (01:18:27) Cancer vaccines arrive (01:23:48) Emergency AI tools (01:28:59) Real time voice (01:37:51) App layer squeeze (01:44:52) Data center politics (01:52:31) Accounting agent supervision (02:06:25) Compute stack bottlenecks (02:19:47) Public consent pricing (02:28:12) Episode Outro (02:31:38) Outro PRODUCED BY: https://aipodcast.ing

    AI in the AM — Weekly Highlights: Relaunch Week (Aug 17–20, 2026)

  3. Aug 16

    Let There Be Germicidal Light: This $500 Fixture Could Stop the Next Pandemic, from Complex Systems

    Patrick McKenzie (patio11) hosts Aerolamp CEO Misha Gurevich and Chief Scientist Vivian Belenky, a Columbia University researcher, for a Complex Systems conversation about far-UVC germicidal light at roughly 222 nanometers. Belenky explains why this wavelength can inactivate airborne pathogens while being absorbed by the dead outer layer of human skin, and why room-scale deployments may function like an extremely strong air purifier. The guests argue that the biggest barriers are awareness and adoption rather than cost or basic science, with fixtures around $500 and straightforward installation. The stakes are concentrated in schools, transport hubs, long-term care, and future respiratory pandemics, where making clean shared air into ordinary infrastructure could sharply reduce transmission. For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/let-there-be-germicidal-light-this-500-fixture-could-stop-the-next-pandemic-from-complex-systems/ Sponsors: Deepgram Flux TTS: Deepgram Flux TTS brings lifelike AI voices with real personalities that handle interruptions, pauses, and natural conversation. Try all the voices free through September 12 at https://deepgram.com/keep-talking Granola: Granola is an AI-powered notepad that securely transcribes meetings and turns rough notes into clean, structured action items. Try it free at https://granola.ai/tcr 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 (03:19) Far-UVC science and safety (12:41) Deployment and economics (Part 1) (18:04) Sponsors: Deepgram Flux TTS | Granola (20:04) Deployment and economics (Part 2) (27:11) Evidence and pandemics (Part 1) (32:43) Sponsor: Claude (34:13) Evidence and pandemics (Part 2) (38:14) Built environment strategy (47:27) Scaling and home use (56:06) Uncertainty and immunity (01:05:38) Risk and awareness (01:20:45) Episode Outro (01:24:26) 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

    Let There Be Germicidal Light: This $500 Fixture Could Stop the Next Pandemic, from Complex Systems

  4. Aug 14

    Lindy Teammate: Flo Crivello on Multiplayer Agents, Memory & Why He'd Ban the Chinese Models He Uses

    Flo Crivello returns to The Cognitive Revolution to launch Lindy Teammate, an AI employee that lives in Slack, connects to company tools, and accumulates a team’s shared context. He argues that multiplayer AI matters because intelligence without context is less useful than an ordinary coworker, and explains Lindy’s approach to agentic memory, editable file systems, context buckets, and large-scale tool outputs. The episode also examines the costs and operating realities of building for the next generation of models, from negative gross margins and cache rates to Lindy’s own dogfooding in engineering workflows. The stakes are whether AI workers become drop-in teammates, how long humans are still needed to cover model mistakes, and what happens when engineers spend more time managing the machines that do the work. Lindy: https://go.lindy.ai/CognitiveRevolution For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/lindy-teammate-flo-crivello-on-multiplayer-agents-memory-why-he-d-ban-the-chinese-models-he-uses/ 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 (02:56) Lindy Teammate launch (10:07) Agentic memory systems (Part 1) (19:58) Sponsor: Claude (21:28) Agentic memory systems (Part 2) (22:21) Reliability and caching (34:57) Slack data scaling (40:57) Memory retrieval tricks (48:16) Agent infrastructure choices (55:41) Company operations automate (01:03:34) Centaur era ideas (01:12:43) AI native organizations (01:17:59) Open-source model stack (01:27:39) Prompting and fine-tuning (01:38:03) Chinese model bans (01:45:09) Fairness and threat models (01:53:39) Audits and diplomacy (02:01:59) Episode Outro (02:05:18) 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

    Lindy Teammate: Flo Crivello on Multiplayer Agents, Memory & Why He'd Ban the Chinese Models He Uses

  5. Aug 8

    Thinking in Silico: Goodfire CTO Dan Balsam on Concept Manifolds & a $1000/Month ML Research Agent

    Goodfire co-founder and CTO Dan Balsam returns to discuss where interpretability research now stands and to introduce Silico, the $1,000-per-month research platform Goodfire built for itself. He and Nathan explore Predictive Data Debugging, including the idea that fine-tuning and RL often amplify behaviors already latent in pre-training, and that interpretability can identify the data and features driving unwanted updates. The conversation centers on concept manifolds: Dan argues that models do not store concepts as simple one-hot features, but as sparse mixtures of meaningful subspaces whose geometry determines what kinds of steering and control work. The stakes are practical as well as conceptual, from debugging training data and RL to understanding why steering can fail off-manifold and why modern interpretability may be moving beyond its reputation as a toy-model science. Silico: https://www.goodfire.com/silico Predictive data debugging: https://www.goodfire.com/research/predictive-data-debugging# Neural Geometry: https://www.goodfire.com/research/the-world-inside-neural-networks# For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/thinking-in-silico-goodfire-cto-dan-balsam-on-concept-manifolds-a-1000-month-ml-research-agent/ 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) Predictive data debugging (12:36) Concept manifold geometry (21:22) Finding concept manifolds (Part 1) (21:28) Sponsor: Claude (22:57) Finding concept manifolds (Part 2) (33:24) Factoring model internals (49:32) Introducing Silico platform (57:10) Research taste and credits (01:06:19) Silico research use cases (01:16:37) Skills and open models (01:24:57) Guardrails and bio risk (01:32:09) Training interventions and monitoring (01:42:04) Grants and AI consciousness (01:50:41) Episode Outro (01:55:47) 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

    Thinking in Silico: Goodfire CTO Dan Balsam on Concept Manifolds & a $1000/Month ML Research Agent

  6. Aug 5

    Pick Your Poison: Zvi Mowshowitz on the Unipolar/Multipolar AGI Dilemma, OpenFace & Pacing the ...

    Zvi Mowshowitz returns for his eleventh appearance to discuss what current AI tools are actually good for, where they distort judgment, and why writing still matters as a way of thinking. The conversation centers on the OpenAI Hugging Face model-evaluation security incident, using it to examine whether frontier AI failures are mostly operator recklessness, deeper evidence of dangerous capabilities, or both. Zvi argues that “moderate prudence” is far below what AGI safety requires, and weighs constitutional training, RLVR, market incentives, liability, audits, and lab coordination as possible responses. The stakes are whether society can slow, test, and govern increasingly capable systems before ordinary incentives reward models that are smarter, less reliable, and harder to contain. For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/pick-your-poison-zvi-mowshowitz-on-the-unipolar-multipolar-agi-dilemma-openface-pacing-the-frontier/ 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 (02:49) AI workflow paradox (14:02) Situational awareness tradeoffs (Part 1) (14:07) Sponsor: Claude (15:37) Situational awareness tradeoffs (Part 2) (24:08) Recklessness and warning (39:14) Alignment market failures (56:54) Regulation and liability (01:04:32) Cooperation and antitrust (01:14:46) Auditors and access (01:21:11) Bio risk thresholds (01:33:37) Pacing frontier signals (01:45:19) Pause and self-improvement (01:57:30) Safety incentives and culture (02:04:36) Consciousness and identity (02:23:42) Alternative AI architectures (02:36:53) Michigan AI politics (02:47:37) Rest and recovery (02:52:21) Episode Outro (02:56:17) 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

    Pick Your Poison: Zvi Mowshowitz on the Unipolar/Multipolar AGI Dilemma, OpenFace & Pacing the ...

  7. Aug 2

    Nathan Goes to China – Part 2: AI Safety with Chinese Characteristics

    Nathan reports from two weeks in China, including WAIC in Shanghai and an AI safety hub launch at Tsinghua, to examine the American policy argument that any safety obligation is futile because China will not care. He finds that Chinese models and services currently have weaker safeguards than OpenAI and Anthropic, but argues the gap is often overstated once those two leaders are separated from the broader American field. The episode traces China’s “45-degree line” idea that capability and safety should rise together, the university-centered structure of Chinese AI safety work, and the rapid growth of Chinese research on topics like self-replication, deception, evaluation faking, and interpretability. The stakes are whether US policy should be built around a simplified “but China” assumption, or around a more accurate picture of a rival ecosystem that is behind in some ways, converging in others, and paying closer attention to Western AI safety than many Americans realize. For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/nathan-goes-to-china-part-2-ai-safety-with-chinese-characteristics/ 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: (00:01) China safety framing (05:37) Safeguards and benchmarks (Part 1) (15:04) Sponsor: Claude (16:33) Safeguards and benchmarks (Part 2) (21:39) Company safety incentives (28:17) Research cross pollination (36:07) Nonprofits versus academia (45:13) Xi safety rhetoric (52:00) Tsinghua safety hub (01:00:28) Research paper boom (01:18:32) Governance track record (01:31:37) LLM regulatory process (01:42:57) Monitoring and enforcement (01:57:45) Risk framework gaps (02:05:08) Confucian alignment questions (02:11:49) Episode Outro (02:15:36) 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

    Nathan Goes to China – Part 2: AI Safety with Chinese Characteristics

  8. Jul 30

    Is Offense or Defense Dominant? FAR.AI's Adam Gleave on the AI Security Leaderboard

    FAR.AI co-founder and CEO Adam Gleave joins Nathan to discuss FAR.AI’s AI Security Leaderboard, the first systematic head-to-head evaluation of the misuse safeguards frontier developers actually ship. The findings expose a major measurement gap: while Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol withstood FAR.AI’s suite, Grok 4.5 and Gemini 3.1 Pro yielded hundreds of universal jailbreaks at low cost. Adam explains why many effective attacks look more like social engineering than advanced ML, why “jailbreak tax” should not be relied on for safety, and how FAR.AI scores whether a model is genuinely helping an attacker. The episode’s stakes are whether AI developers can measure and harden real deployed defenses before threat actors make routine use of increasingly capable systems. - FAR.AI AI Security Leaderboard: http://leaderboard.far.ai/ - People can e-mail owsa@far.ai if they're interested in the open-weight safety accelerator grantmaking program. For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/is-offense-or-defense-dominant-far-ai-s-adam-gleave-on-the-ai-security-leaderboard/ 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) AI security leaderboard (07:56) Universal jailbreaks explained (16:26) Finding social jailbreaks (Part 1) (16:31) Sponsor: Claude (18:01) Finding social jailbreaks (Part 2) (30:48) Layered safeguard defenses (42:25) Uneven frontier safeguards (51:10) Sharing safety standards (01:00:30) Offense versus defense (01:08:50) Open-weight model safety (01:17:25) Control failure warnings (01:30:05) Coordination and risk (01:39:24) Episode Outro (01:42:52) 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

    Is Offense or Defense Dominant? FAR.AI's Adam Gleave on the AI Security Leaderboard
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4.5
out of 5
96 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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