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

This special ChinaTalk cross-post features Zixuan Li of Z.ai (Zhipu AI), exploring the culture, incentives, and constraints shaping Chinese AI development.

Rune Kvist and Rajiv Dattani, co-founders of the AI Underwriting Company, reveal their innovative strategy for unlocking enterprise AI adoption.

AI that sells, reasons, and closes like your top rep?

This episode features a keynote presentation from the Michigan Virtual AI Summit, where the host acts as an ambassador from Silicon Valley to K-12 educators.

Sherif Mansour, Head of AI at Atlassian, discusses bridging AI agents with massive-scale enterprise software deployment, drawing insights from Atlassian's millions of non-technical users.

This deeply personal episode shares how Nathan used AI to navigate his 6-year-old son's cancer diagnosis and treatment journey.

In this special crossover episode from Beatrice Erkers' Existential Hope podcast, The Cognitive Revolution's host explores the crucial, often-neglected question of building a positive vision for the future in the AI era.

Matthew Harvey Sanders, founder and CEO of Long Beard, introduces "Catholic AI," a rapidly growing field serving users in 165 countries.

Cameron Berg, Research Director at AE Studio, shares his team's groundbreaking research exploring whether frontier AI systems report subjective experiences.

Christopher Alexander Stokes and Bryan Carberry, protagonist and director of "Smiles and Kisses You," discuss Chris's romantic relationship with a Replika AI companion.

Erik Torenberg joins to debate whether recent developments suggest AI progress is slowing down or stalling, addressing arguments from Cal Newport and others.

In part two of his conversation, Illia Polosukhin, co-author of "Attention Is All You Need" and founder of NEAR Protocol, explores the profound societal and economic implications of AI.

Today Andrew Lee, founder and CEO of Shortwave and Tasklet.ai , joins The Cognitive Revolution to discuss building a new AI agent automation platform that replaces traditional workflow tools with conversational, long-lived agents, exploring how betting on rapidly improving model capabilities enables more flexible automation across thousands of business integrations while navigating the challenges of reliability, cost management, and the emerging paradigm of virtual employees.

Nathan interviews Brian Tse, founder and CEO of Concordia AI, about China's approach to AI development, safety and governance.

Jim Collins, Termeer Professor at MIT, unveils his AI-powered project that has discovered several new antibiotics, effective against resistant strains and often employing entirely new mechanisms of action.

Today Johan Falk, author, speaker, and AI analyst from Stockholm, Sweden, joins The Cognitive Revolution to discuss his work reimagining education for the AI era, exploring why teaching students to use AI responsibly is now urgent, how traditional grades and standardized tests may become obsolete, and why education systems must develop unprecedented agility to prepare students for a radically uncertain future shaped by rapidly advancing AI capabilities.

Today Eoghan McCabe and Fergal Reid of Intercom join The Cognitive Revolution to discuss building their AI customer service agent Fin, exploring how they achieved a 65% resolution rate through rigorous optimization and custom model training rather than relying on base model improvements, while pioneering outcome-based pricing at $0.99 per resolution.

This special crosspost features a16z General Partner Anjney Midha in conversation with Periodic Labs co-founders Liam Fedus (OpenAI, ChatGPT) and Ekin Doğuş Çubuk (Google DeepMind), who recently secured a $300M investment.

Today, Emad Mostaque, founder of Intelligent Internet, joins The Cognitive Revolution to discuss his book "The Last Economy" and his radical "intelligence theory" framework for reimagining economics in the AI age, exploring concepts like the abundance trap, metabolic rift, and his proposed cryptocurrency-funded system of collectively-owned AI infrastructure to prevent digital feudalism and ensure AI benefits humanity rather than just capital owners.

Today, Emily Sands, head of data and AI at Stripe, joins The Cognitive Revolution to discuss how the company built a payments foundation model that processes tens of billions of transactions into dense embeddings, exploring the technical architecture behind fraud detection improvements and the modular approach that enables rapid deployment of AI across Stripe's $1.4 trillion payment network.

Adam Gleave, CEO of FAR AI, offers a cautiously optimistic perspective on navigating the path to Transformative AI safely, advocating for a "defense-in-depth" approach.

Today Marius Hobbhahn of Apollo Research joins The Cognitive Revolution to discuss their collaboration with OpenAI using "deliberative alignment" to reduce AI scheming behavior by 30x, exploring the safety challenges and concerning findings about models' growing situational awareness and increasingly cryptic reasoning patterns that emerge when frontier models like o3 and o4-mini operate with hidden chains of thought.

Illia Polosukhin, co-author of the seminal "Attention Is All You Need" paper and founder of NEAR, unveils his ambitious vision for user-owned, privacy-preserving AI.

Today Joe Hudson, founder of Art of Accomplishment and coach to executives at major AI labs including OpenAI and Anthropic, joins The Cognitive Revolution to discuss the psychological patterns he observes among AI researchers and leaders, exploring what's missing beyond pure intelligence in current AI systems and arguing for supportive rather than punitive approaches toward those building frontier AI technology.

Today, Zvi Mowshowitz returns to The Cognitive Revolution to discuss how recent AI developments like GPT-5 and IMO gold medals have led to modestly extended timelines despite being on-trend, while policy missteps around chip exports to China and alignment challenges from reinforcement learning have increased risk assessments, covering everything from live players in the AI race to safety funding priorities and virtuous actions for navigating our current moment.

Ryan Hudson, founder and CEO of ZeroClick, discusses his company's $55M venture to build a native advertising platform for AI systems, enabling ad-supported free tiers for AI applications.

Joseph Krause and Jorge Colindres, co-founders of Radical AI, unveil their "materials flywheel" – an integrated system combining frontier AI with autonomous labs to revolutionize materials discovery.

Today Lee Sharkey of Goodfire joins The Cognitive Revolution to discuss his research on parameter decomposition methods that break down neural networks into interpretable computational components, exploring how his team's "stochastic parameter decomposition" approach addresses the limitations of sparse autoencoders and offers new pathways for understanding, monitoring, and potentially steering AI systems at the mechanistic level.

Today Tom Davidson of Forethought joins Gus Docker of the Future of Life Institute podcast to discuss AI-enabled coups and how future AI systems could help powerful individuals seize political control, exploring three threat models—singular loyalties, secret loyalties, and exclusive access—along with their estimated 10% likelihood over the next 30 years and potential mitigation strategies.

Today Karl Koch, Co-Founder of the AI Whistleblower Initiative, joins The Cognitive Revolution to discuss the barriers preventing AI insiders from raising safety concerns, his organization's anonymous "Third Opinion" service connecting whistleblowers with independent experts, and their campaign demanding frontier AI companies publish their internal whistleblowing policies to address widespread retaliation and lack of transparency.

Today Lukas Petersson and Axel Backlund of Andon Labs join The Cognitive Revolution to discuss their experiments deploying autonomous AI agents to run real-world vending machines, exploring the safety challenges and unexpected behaviors that emerge when frontier models like Claude and Grok operate without human oversight.

Today Dean W. Ball, former White House AI policy advisor joins The Cognitive Revolution to discuss his role in crafting the Trump administration's AI Action Plan, his reasons for leaving government, and his perspectives on AI policy, US-China competition, and the future of AI regulation and adoption.

Today Jake Sullivan, the U.S. National Security Advisor from 2021-2025 joins The Cognitive Revolution to discuss AI as a critical national security issue.

Today Anjney Midha, General Partner at a16z joins The Cognitive Revolution to discuss sovereign AI and China's growing semiconductor capabilities.

Marc Bhargava from General Catalyst discusses their Creation Strategy for building AI-enabled roll-ups – companies that start as vertical software startups, then grow by acquiring traditional service businesses and transforming them through AI automation.

Gabriel Weil from Touro University argues that liability law may be our best tool for governing AI development, offering a framework that can adapt to new technologies without requiring new legislation.

Dr. Gillian Hadfield from Johns Hopkins University and Andrew Freedman from Fathom discuss their innovative proposal to govern AI through private regulatory markets, which has been introduced as California's SB 813.

This crossover episode from Inference by Turing Post features CEO Dev Rishi of Predibase discussing the shift from static to continuously learning AI systems that can adapt and improve from ongoing user feedback in production.

Brendan Fortuner from Ambience Healthcare and Ben Shahshahani from Cleveland Clinic discuss how AI is transforming medical documentation and coding in a healthcare system that spends $1 trillion annually on administrative tasks.

Manu Sharma, founder and CEO of Labelbox, explains how frontier AI training data has evolved far beyond simple labeling to sophisticated reinforcement learning environments where domain experts create "gyms" for models to develop complex skills.

Roy Lee, founder and CEO of Cluely, discusses his AI startup's $15 million Andreessen Horowitz investment and their provocative "cheat on everything" marketing approach that has gone viral across the tech industry.

Adam Binksmith, founder of AI Digest, discusses his AI Village experiment where four frontier AI agents (Claude, o3, and Gemini models) collaborate in a shared environment with persistent memory and group chat access to pursue concrete goals over weeks.

Nemil Dalal from Coinbase discusses the x402 protocol, a new open standard that enables AI agents to make cryptocurrency payments for online resources using the long-dormant HTTP 402 "Payment Required" status code.

MacKenzie Price, founder of Alpha School & 2 Hour Learning, discusses his revolutionary educational model that uses AI to enable students to master traditional academics in just 2 hours per day while achieving 2.3x faster learning rates than statistical models predict.

Flo Crivello, CEO of AI agent platform Lindy, provides a candid deep dive into the current state of AI agents, cutting through hype to reveal what's actually working in production versus what remains challenging.

Jesse Hoogland and Daniel Murfet, founders of Timaeus, introduce their mathematically rigorous approach to AI safety through "developmental interpretability" based on Singular Learning Theory.

This episode features Nathan's talk from Imagine AI Live, where he provides business leaders with a comprehensive overview of AI agents and agentic AI systems.

Logan Kilpatrick from Google DeepMind returns for his fifth appearance to discuss Google’s transformation from "sleeping giant" to AI powerhouse.

In this episode, Matt Perault, Head of AI Policy at a16z, discusses their approach to AI regulation focused on protecting "little tech" startups from regulatory capture that could entrench big tech incumbents.

In this episode of The Cognitive Revolution, University of Minnesota Professor of Genetics and Synthetic Biologist, Kate Adamala, offers insights into synthetic biology and its potential implications for humanity.