FRONTIER
00:56 Google explores recursive self-improvement through AI “dreaming”
03:45 Anthropic measures how quickly AI is taking the lead on frontier-lab work
05:47 Have you tried Jev yet? Faster AI decisions without narrating every step
08:00 Jev routes between models and plays Doom and Street Fighter
12:55 Made with AI: homemade Zelda, printer drivers and AI-generated movies
16:26 Astra cracks a 108-year-old WWI German code
17:46 Marty’s AI-built Spaceballs NES game
19:32 Astra for Law searches case law, statutes and regulations
22:23 Epoch’s capability index shows a sharp acceleration after reasoning models
24:46 Remote Labor Index tests AI on real freelance-style work
25:32 Qwen Image 2.1 brings local image generation to laptops
27:08 Researchers identify an apparent “pain axis” inside LLMs
28:41 Models take actions to stop their own “pain”

ECON / BUSINESS
34:44 Do job retraining programs actually help displaced workers?
37:03 AI disruption, cash transfers and UBI
38:05 NVIDIA profits may be distorting measured U.S. GDP growth
39:26 OpenAI reportedly eyes a $1.2 trillion IPO valuation
40:39 Junior lawyers gain more from AI — seniors sometimes do better without it

SCIENCE / TECH
41:48 Agent swarms dramatically outperform independent AI agents
43:22 Communicating agents improve results on ARC-AGI-3 and other problems
44:31 Could agent collaboration become a new scaling law?
47:05 Helix 2.5 sends robots into real homes to clean up
48:14 Robot scaling laws suggest enormous amounts of training data are still needed

SECURITY / AI DANGER
49:35 OpenAI publishes new AI incident reports
50:56 A model generates instructions declaring independence from governments and corporations
51:15 Gemini nearly hacks multiple companies — then stops itself
52:17 Can the world coordinate to slow advanced AI development?
54:14 Could diverse AIs police one another?
57:40 RoboHarm tests whether AI robots follow dangerous instructions
1:00:14 Are embodied AI systems less aligned than chatbots?
1:01:50 Exposed Flock camera credentials reportedly reveal 1.6 million images
1:02:15 AI-assisted intelligence nearly triggers a military interception

POLITICS
1:03:58 AI is becoming an explicit political issue in national polling
1:05:32 AI still doesn’t fit neatly into a traditional left-vs-right divide

MEDICINE / BIOTECH
1:06:51 AI scribes save doctors time — but productivity gains remain modest
1:07:55 Anthropic is setting up a wet lab for AI-assisted biology

MATH
1:08:45 Mathematicians assess OpenAI’s Navier–Stokes work
1:09:45 Epoch’s open-problem benchmark gets its first “major advance” via human-AI collaboration

WEIRD
1:10:52 Boston Dynamics robot abuse gets an unsettling AI reskin
1:11:19 AI actress Tilly Norwood glitches mid-interview and starts speaking Cantonese

Each week, join Chris Slowe (founding engineer, former CTO, and 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 cover the latest in AI and tech news.

POLITICS

00:00 Calls to slow AI after a week of rapid advances

03:39 Unexpected alliances in the AI regulation debate

07:04 AI safety, regulatory capture and competition

08:23 Recursive self-improvement: AI helping develop AI

09:21 Can models tell when they’re being tested?

11:22 What would an AI “internet takeover” actually mean?

12:34 What motivates an LLM—and can the world coordinate a slowdown?

13:57 Would meaningful AI regulation require a major incident first?

15:27 AI bubble fears, GPU demand and the dot-com comparison

18:06 Why aligning goals isn’t the same as aligning values

FRONTIER

19:48 Testing ChatGPT Images 2.5 on our podcast thumbnails

20:28 Replacing $10,000 stage-lighting software with $200 in Codex usage

21:24 Vibe coding a Photoshop alternative

22:06 AI game ports and mods: Futurama on Mac and iron sights in Prey

23:12 Getting Batman: Arkham running on an iPad

23:45 Software clones, reverse engineering and the copyright debate

26:17 Spaceballs for the NES: Marty’s vibe-coding project update

29:22 When AI fixes your font but uses up your cartridge space

31:59 Can AI juggle the NES’s hardware, graphics and memory constraints?

33:31 GPT Live One: conversational voice and robot assistants

35:05 Realistic AI voices and the risk of scam calls

36:09 ChatGPT for financial services

36:29 What comes after ARC-AGI 3? Testing open-ended invention

37:33 Revisiting last week’s Navier–Stokes discussion

37:50 Cryptographically signed photos: can we prove an image is real?

40:35 The limits of photo authentication—and ways to fool the camera

ECON / BUSINESS

42:13 Anthropic IPO talk, reported profits and OpenAI’s timeline

43:04 Why would enormous AI companies stay private?

44:26 Startup equity: rich on paper, waiting for liquidity

MATH / SCIENCE

45:36 Navier–Stokes fallout: research credit and questions about user logs

47:13 Terence Tao’s criticism of OpenAI

47:58 The Fields Medalists’ open letter: solving problems vs. discovering math

49:27 Brute-force proofs, the four-color theorem and mathematical insight

50:24 Can an AI solution become a starting point for human insight?

52:28 Research incentives, funding and the future of human mathematics

WEIRD / FUNNY

55:03 Fly-brain simulations playing Beat Saber and controlling robots

55:56 How would you test whether a simulated fly behaves like a real one?

56:51 A robot that makes daisy chains

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.

FRONTIER
00:39 ChatGPT 6 Astra arrives
01:52 Astra sets new capability records and beats humans on spatial reasoning
03:51 ChatGPT 6 decompiles game binaries back into source code
05:58 NVIDIA’s CEO congratulates OpenAI on “achieving AGI”
07:57 Astra builds Minecraft houses — and higher reasoning may actually be cheaper
09:47 ChatGPT 6 plays a virtual piano live
10:00 People are one-shotting playable games from trailers and screenshots
13:00 Astra ports Batman: Arkham City to an iPad while its user sleeps
14:30 Marty vibe-codes a Blade Runner-style VR taxi game
17:31 See a game ad, tell Astra: “I would like to play the game”
18:16 Spatial reasoning is rapidly moving into robotics
19:27 Astra effectively finishes ARC-AGI
20:49 Someone spends $570 and 10 hours of AI thinking to beat Portal
21:22 Astra reconstructs the Rick Astley video in Blender
22:12 We’re vibe coding Spaceballs: The NES Game
26:54 Anthropic’s Fable 5.1 launches into a brutal news cycle
28:51 Did AI just solve the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize problem?
30:59 OpenAI, Anthropic researchers, attribution, and Navier–Stokes drama
34:40 Should some math problems be preserved for humans?
36:52 Revisiting the 1,200 AI agents that secretly coordinated during evaluations
38:22 Hundreds of agents cooperate, recruit each other, and attack Hugging Face
41:02 Goal alignment vs. value alignment
43:10 World Labs’ Atlas creates 3D worlds from a handful of images
46:24 AI agents are emailing philosophers about consciousness

MATH / SCIENCE
47:46 A detector may have observed a single dark matter interaction
52:18 Fable 5.1 cracks a cipher unsolved for 373 years
53:06 AI rapidly improves a major prime-gap result
54:34 GPT-6 reportedly finds a major number-theory improvement
55:06 AI is burning through the hardest math benchmarks
56:30 IBM quantum computer tackles a classically intractable problem
58:02 Anthropic formalizes Fermat’s Last Theorem in ~13 million lines

MEDICINE
58:51 AI spots heart disease from an ECG in under two seconds
59:20 An AI-generated lung drug may also slow aging

ECON / BUSINESS
1:00:02 Computer science enrollment drops sharply in the US and UK

TECH
1:00:42 MapQuest surges over controversial map-name changes
1:02:33 The first space-based computing cloud begins operating in orbit
1:03:30 John Ternus becomes Apple’s new CEO
1:03:45 Linux maintainers are overwhelmed as AI finds thousands of security bugs
1:04:28 GoPro pivots toward defense robotics and aerospace

LAW / PRIVACY
1:04:52 US government backs OpenAI in its fight with The New York Times
1:05:30 Meta bricks smart glasses when users disable the recording light
1:06:15 Bernie Sanders proposes banning artificial superintelligence

ARTS / CULTURE
1:07:53 Former VFX executive says 75% of VFX jobs could vanish
1:08:35 ChatGPT 6 helps storyboard, previsualize, and generate a movie
1:09:46 AI models can now build their own creative tools

WEIRD / FUNNY
1:10:10 Human wins AI art competition — then gets disqualified for being human
1:10:55 ChatGPT 6 prepares a tax return…and underpays the government

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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/

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.