In this episode, Nathan chats with Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, to discuss how AI might shape the future of code, software 2.0, and the open source question in AI. If you need an ecommerce platform, check out our sponsor Shopify: https://shopify.com/cognitive for a $1/month trial period. SPONSORS: Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business. Shopify powers 10% of ALL eCommerce in the US. And Shopify's the global force behind Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklinen, and 1,000,000s of other entrepreneurs across 175 countries.From their all-in-one e-commerce platform, to their in-person POS system – wherever and whatever you're selling, Shopify's got you covered. With free Shopify Magic, sell more with less effort by whipping up captivating content that converts – from blog posts to product descriptions using AI. Sign up for $1/month trial period: https://shopify.com/cognitive With the onset of AI, it’s time to upgrade to the next generation

Nathan shares his perspective on Sam Altman’s firing from OpenAI, after being a part of the red team for GPT-4 and seeing how the board handled safety concerns. If you need an ecommerce platform, check out our sponsor Shopify: https://shopify.com/cognitive for a $1/month trial period.  This is a developing story. This podcast was recorded on 11/21 at 12pm PST. SPONSORS:  Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business. Shopify powers 10% of ALL eCommerce in the US. And Shopify's the global force behind Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklinen, and 1,000,000s of other entrepreneurs across 175 countries. From their all-in-one e-commerce platform, to their in-person POS system – wherever and whatever you're selling, Shopify's got you covered. With free Shopify Magic, sell more with less effort by whipping up captivating content that converts – from blog posts to product descriptions using AI. Sign up for $1/month trial period: https://shopify.com/cog

In this episode, Nathan and Erik discuss research out of Google Deepmind suggesting LLMs, Hemant Teneja’s responsible VC commitments, and why now is not the time for an ideological war on AI regulation. If you need an ecommerce platform, check out our sponsor Shopify: https://shopify.com/cognitive for a $1/month trial period.  RECOMMENDED PODCAST: Every week investor and writer of the popular newsletter The Diff, Byrne Hobart, and co-host Erik Torenberg discuss today’s major inflection points in technology, business, and markets – and help listeners build a diversified portfolio of trends and ideas for the future. Subscribe to “The Riff” with Byrne Hobart and Erik Torenberg: https://link.chtbl.com/theriff SPONSORS:  Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business. Shopify powers 10% of ALL eCommerce in the US. And Shopify's the global force behind Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklinen, and 1,000,000s of other entrepreneurs across 175 countries.

In this episode, Flo Crivello, founder of Lindy AI, joins Nathan to chat about Biden’s executive order, and the state of AI safety. They discuss Flo’s thoughts on the executive order, building AGI kill switches, self driving cars, and more. If you need an ERP platform, check out our sponsor NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive. SPONSORS: Oracle | Netsuite | Omneky With the onset of AI, it’s time to upgrade to the next generation of the cloud: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. OCI is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. Train ML models on the cloud’s highest performing NVIDIA GPU clusters. Do more and spend less like Uber, 8x8, and Databricks Mosaic, take a FREE test drive of OCI at oracle.com/cognitive NetSuite has 25 years of providing financial software for all your business needs. More than 36,000 businesses have already upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle, gaining visibility and control over their financials, inventory, HR, eCommerc

Mark Humphries is a Professor of History at Wilfrid Laurier University, where he has published widely on various aspects of Canadian history. We invited Mark to do an episode after he reached out to tell us that hearing about how Nathan fine-tuned GPT-3.5 on GPT-4 reasoning helped him get over some hurdles in his own archival research. In addition, he chats about all the things that he'd tried that hadn't worked, and in the process proved himself to be one of the world's leading adopters of AI technology in the field of history. If you need an ERP platform, check out our sponsor NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive. SPONSORS: NetSuite | Omneky NetSuite has 25 years of providing financial software for all your business needs. More than 36,000 businesses have already upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle, gaining visibility and control over their financials, inventory, HR, eCommerce, and more. If you're looking for an ERP platform ✅ head to NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive and downl

In this episode, Yohei Nakajima, creator of BabyAGI and GP at Untapped Capital, chats with Nathan about the opportunity for AI to strengthen human understanding, AI agents, and his insights on investing in AI projects. If you need an ERP platform, check out our sponsor NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive. SPONSORS: NetSuite | Omneky NetSuite has 25 years of providing financial software for all your business needs. More than 36,000 businesses have already upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle, gaining visibility and control over their financials, inventory, HR, eCommerce, and more. If you're looking for an ERP platform ✅ head to NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive and download your own customized KPI checklist. Omneky is an omnichannel creative generation platform that lets you launch hundreds of thousands of ad iterations that actually work customized across all platforms, with a click of a button. Omneky combines generative AI and real-time advertising data. Mention "Cog Rev" for

Anton Troynikov, cofounder of Chroma, joins Nathan Labenz to discuss the importance of keeping the retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) loop in house, what it means for Chroma to be in “wartime” mode right now, and how much of the data going into Chroma has never been in a database before. If you need an ERP platform, check out our sponsor NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive. SPONSORS: NetSuite | Omneky NetSuite has 25 years of providing financial software for all your business needs. More than 36,000 businesses have already upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle, gaining visibility and control over their financials, inventory, HR, eCommerce, and more. If you're looking for an ERP platform ✅ head to NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive and download your own customized KPI checklist. Omneky is an omnichannel creative generation platform that lets you launch hundreds of thousands of ad iterations that actually work customized across all platforms, with a click of a button. Omneky combin

Trey Kollmer returns to discuss the latest AI research revelations with Nathan Labenz. They explore how new techniques will shave 10% off global compute needs, how analogical prompting beats few-shot prompting, and how compressive historical records can increase LLM memory and retention abilities. If you need an ERP platform, check out our sponsor NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive. SPONSORS: NetSuite | Omneky NetSuite has 25 years of providing financial software for all your business needs. More than 36,000 businesses have already upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle, gaining visibility and control over their financials, inventory, HR, eCommerce, and more. If you're looking for an ERP platform ✅ head to NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive and download your own customized KPI checklist. Omneky is an omnichannel creative generation platform that lets you launch hundreds of thousands of ad iterations that actually work customized across all platforms, with a click of a button. Omneky

In this episode, Nathan is joined by James Yu, Founder of Sudowrite, an AI writing tool.They discuss how James started Sudowrite after using GPT-3 for his own fiction writing, how Sudowrite is able to be a supportive writing partner, and Yu's experience developing its tech stack and working through the backlash he's received. f you're looking for an ERP platform, check out our sponsor, NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive Subscribe to the show Substack to join future conversations and submit questions to upcoming guests! https://cognitiverevolution.substack.com/ SPONSORS: NetSuite | Omneky NetSuite has 25 years of providing financial software for all your business needs. More than 36,000 businesses have already upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle, gaining visibility and control over their financials, inventory, HR, eCommerce, and more. If you're looking for an ERP platform ✅ head to NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive and download your own customized KPI checklist. Omneky is an o

In this episode, Aravind Srinivas of Perplexity AI returns to the show. They discuss Perplexity’s growth to millions of queries per day, CEO Aravind’s favourite Perplexity use cases, and how Perplexity ships fast in a competitive landscape against Google and major AI live players creating their own search engines. If you're looking for an ERP platform, check out our sponsor, NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive SPONSORS: NetSuite | Omneky NetSuite has 25 years of providing financial software for all your business needs. More than 36,000 businesses have already upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle, gaining visibility and control over their financials, inventory, HR, eCommerce, and more. If you're looking for an ERP platform ✅ head to NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive and download your own customized KPI checklist. Omneky is an omnichannel creative generation platform that lets you launch hundreds of thousands of ad iterations that actually work customized across all platforms, with

In this episode, Nathan sits down with Jon Noronha, co-founder of Gamma. Gamma is a new medium for presenting ideas, allowing you to focus on your ideas and receive beautiful, engaging content without the formatting work. In this episode, Jon and Nathan discuss the journey of building Gamma, how to coax AI to do things well, and the opportunity for AI A/B testing. If you're looking for an ERP platform, check out our sponsor, NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive TIMESTAMPS: (00:00:00) - Preview (00:01:23) - Nathan introduces Jon Noronha (00:06:36) - Intro - Jon Noronha introduces himself and Gamma (00:09:36) - Gamma's origin story: building the "anti-PowerPoint" pre-GPT-3 (00:13:15) - From using AI for onboarding to generating near-complete presentations. (00:15:11) - Sponsors: Netsuite | Omneky (00:18:01) - If Notion and Canva had a baby (00:23:35) - Searching for the right structure for AI, landing on HTML (00:28:16) - Degrees of freedom - developing a constrained vocabulary of se

Nathan Labenz sits down with Lili Yu, a researcher of Meta AI to discuss the paper she authored: MEGABYTE: Predicting Million-byte Sequences with Multiscale Transformers. In this conversation, they discuss the architecture and breakthroughs of their research, and the opportunity to eliminate the need for tokenization. The Cognitive Revolution is a part of the Turpentine podcast network. Learn more: www.turpentine.co LINK: MEGABYTE Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.07185.pdf TIMESTAMPS: (00:00) Episode preview (07:41) Takeaways from Lili Yu's paper: MEGABYTE: Predicting Million-byte Sequences with Multiscale Transformers (17:00) Architecture (24:59) Embeddings (27:43) Different local models (34:23) Encoder model (36:35) Transformer Architecture (48:10) Choosing patch size (01:08) What happens when you scale up? (01:19:20) Big picture for Meta AI (01:22:57) Responsible AI (01:27:02) China and AI TWITTER: @labenz (Nathan) @liliyu_lili (Lili) @eriktorenberg (Erik) @cogrev_podcast SPONS

People have long been imagining AI assistants. Flo Crivello (founder of Teamflow) is turning that dream into a reality with the ambitious project Lindy. Flo sits down with Nathan on Lindy's announcement day to talk about this unique moment in AI, Lindy's capabilities, single-use apps, and how he sees the global impact that AI-powered employees can have on the future of work. Anyone who mentions "The Cognitive Revolution" when signing up for the Lindy beta will get priority access.  (0:00) Preview  (1:05) Sponsor: Omneky  (4:50) Flo demos Lindy (9:21) Security and user experience  (11:55) How this AI moment compares to the Industrial Revolution and single use apps  (15:00) The dream AI assistant (19:54) Competition and advantages of startups  (24:28) Cost vs Quality  (31:19) How Lindy uses user data  (32:37) Context and data injection  (28:11) Comfort with ambiguity  (43:10) Use of guardrails and trust concerns  (47:26) AI safety and edge cases  (49:16) Impact on labor markets  (50:27)

How will GPT4 change the world? How will US-China 'racing dynamics' play out and what are the implications for AI safety? Nathan Labenz was invited to record a special "emergency" episode of ChinaTalk podcast this week to discuss the implications GPT4 will have for policy, economics, and society. Thanks to Jordan Schneider of ChinaTalk, and fellow "AI justice league" guests Zvi Mowshowitz of 'Don't Worry About the Vase' and Matthew Mittelsteadt of Mercatus.    (0:00) Intro (2:09) GPT-4 emergency podcast (9:26) GPT-4 use cases (22:51) What GPT-4 can and can’t do (35:50) AI safety (45:38) OpenAI v. Anthropic  (48:54) Governments’ role in AI (55:50) AI will improve physical health and healthcare the most (59:19) Facebook’s LLaMA model (01:05:55) VR/AR (01:08:59) Concerns with GPT4 (01:15:26) GPT-5 and GPT-6 (01:18:45) Optimism in the AI revolution Thank you Omneky for sponsoring The Cognitive Revolution. Omneky is an omnichannel creative generation platform that lets you launch hundreds o

We talked to Aravind Srinivas about competing with the tech giants, Perplexity's product philosophy and obsession with maximizing value delivered to the user per unit time, and the features that makes Perplexity unique.(0:00) Preview(1:31) Introduction & Context(08:06) Aravind’s vision for Perplexity as the world’s most truth-centric company(9:29)  Raising the average IQ of the world(12:00) Aravind’s favorite tech entrepreneur(15:12) “Anthropics” - Building your own model vs user experience(33:00) Why is perplexity free(43:00) Talking shop: Perplexity’s tech stack and speed(1:06:00) Perplexity’s stance on guardrails on search(1:19:48) Forecasting weakly general AGI: The four criteria(1:28:00) Aravind’s perspective on OpenAI and the future of AGI(1:39:00) The Cognitive Revolution’s rapid fire questions: Neuralink implant? Most used AI tools? AI hopes and fears? Twitter handles:@CogRev_Podcast@AravSrinivas (Aravind)@labenz (Nathan)@eriktorenberg (Erik) Join 1000's of subscribers of our S

As recently as January 2021, the challenge of "interpreting what is going on in a photograph" was considered "nowhere near solved."  Today's guests Junnan Li and Dongxu Li changed that with their publication and open-sourcing of BLIP, which delivered state-of-the-art performance on image captioning and other vision-language tasks. BLIP became the #18 most-cited AI paper of 2022, and now Junnan and Dongxu are back with BLIP-2, this time showing how small models can harness the power of existing foundation models to do multi-modal tasks. We talked to Junnan and Dongxu about their research and how they see the trend toward connector models shaping the future.Timestamps: (00:00) Preview (01:17) Sponsor (01:35) Intro (05:50) Convergence of AI techniques (07:33) Evolution of BLIP to BLIP-2 (08:12) How BLIP-2 unlocked multimodal functionality (12:43) The size, training dynamics, and optimization function of BLIP (20:15) Practical/Business applications of BLIP (29:43) Efficiency of BLIP-2 comp

(0:00)  Preview(1:17) Sponsor (4:00) Anton breaks down the advantages of vector databases(4:45) How embeddings have created an AI-native way to represent data(11:50) Anton identifies the watershed moment and step changes in AI(12:55) Open AI’s pricing(18:50) How chroma works(33:04) Stable Attribution and systematic bias(36:48) How latent diffusion models work(51:26) How AI is like the early days of aviation(56:01) How Disney inspired the release of Stable Attribution(59:53):Why noise can lead to generalization(1:01:04) Nathan’s KPI for The Cognitive Revolution(1:01:59) Other use cases for embedding(1:03: 19) Anton touches on the applications for biotech(1:04:35) Anton on doomerism hysteria and what actually worries him(1:11:43) - Nathan sums up a plausible doomer scenario(1:20:17)What AI tools does Anton use and why?(1:22:55) Anton’s hopes*Thank you Omneky for sponsoring The Cognitive Revolution. Omneky is an omnichannel creative generation platform that lets you launch hundreds of tho

(0:00) Preview of the debate (2:23) Sponsor (3:10) Flo’s take on the AI moment and AGI (5:45) Amjad’s take on the AI moment (8:03) Antonio's skepticism about transhumanism (9:10) Human tendencies color the debate about agency (11:25) The inflection point is a jump in generality (13:14) AI's effect on coding (16:57) Weakness in current models (19:18) Bounties and the future of work (21:48) Antonio's skepticism around bounties (25:00) Who will capture value, incumbents or startups? (27:26) "All knowledge work will be automated in 20 years" (30:10) Who will be the biggest beneficiaries of this shift? (31:50) What AI companies should VCs invest in? (32:26) SponsorThank you Omneky for sponsoring The Cognitive Revolution. Omneky is an omnichannel creative generation platform that lets you launch hundreds of thousands of ad iterations that actually work, customized across all platforms, with a click of a button. Omneky combines generative AI and real-time advertising data, to generate persona

(01:08) Sponsor(01:37) Introducing Eugenia (03:25) Replika’s controversial choice to limit erotic roleplay functionality(04:25) Eugenia's vision for Replika(05:58) Augmented Reality is the Ultimate Modality(07:52) Using Replika(13:11)  Profound stories about virtual assistants(15:55) Eugenia on why Replika is more than just a painkiller or vitamin(28:50) Replika's business model and profitability(34:12) Users want their Replika to surprise them(36:12) Why ChatGPT is not a conversational model(49:26) Eugenia's prediction for the "next Iphone of personal AI"(1:03:00) Eugenia’s AI tools/stack  (1:15:00) Eugenia comes back  to discuss Erotic Roleplay controversy (1:18:00) Replika’s first reaction to users ERP(1: 22:00) How the product evolved from 90% scripts & retrieval models(1:24:00) The definitive focus for Replika to stay in a PG13 zone(1:26:00) “Normal” evolution given sci-fi depictions of AI romances(1:30:00) Current AI ethics on sexuality(1:37:07) Response to journalists misportray

00:00 Coming Up 01:00 The Cognitive Revolution 01:20 Sponsor 01:39 Intro 02:09 Nathan’s path to AI  04:27 Founding Waymark 06:56 The future of AI is just starting  10:00 AI dramatically enhances human capabilities  10:50 Why we started The Cognitive Revolution and what to expect 14:55 Which guests will appear on the show and topics that will be discussed 18:59 Being replaced by an AI host 20:42 Unpacking the future of AI with “no new breakthroughs”  32:21 What’s underhyped and overhyped 43:46 The dangers of AI 44:51 Applying AI safely  52:19 Losing faith in technology 53:38 A new AI ecology 55:14 Facebook, Google and Open AI 58:00 Upside and downside case for AI  58:18 Sam Altman’s case for AI 01:09:25 Starting an AI company 01:18:22 Closing 01:18:46 Sponsor  Thank you Omneky for sponsoring The Cognitive Revolution. Omneky is an omnichannel creative generation platform that lets you launch hundreds of thousands of ad iterations that actually work, customized across all platforms, with

00:00 Intro 00:30: Image technology breakthroughs 00:45 The Cognitive Revolution 03:10 Intro to Suhail 03:43 Sponsor 07:04 Suhail’s path to AI 12:57 Suhail’s vision for Playground 17:58 Suhail’s cancellation on Twitter 19:06 AI artists are artists 20:25 Non-AI artists feel threatened by AI 26:47 Suhail on defensibility at AI companies 30:30 Playground’s product roadmap 33:01 Suhail on good design 35:55 Latent space 44:04 Building Playground with lessons learned from Mighty 53:55 Monitoring led to 2x improvement in the product 55:53 How people use Playground 1:03:48 AI is having it’s mobile moment 01:15:12 Finding, investing and building durable AI companies 01:22:06 Suhail’s kid’s best friends may be AI characters   01:23:20 AI religion 01:24:16 Conclusion   Thank you Omneky for sponsoring The Cognitive Revolution. Omneky is an omnichannel creative generation platform that lets you launch hundreds of thousands of ad iterations that actually work, customized across all platforms, with a