Last Humans in the Loop

ROBOTICS

00:21 Intro: Robotics, the job/math/physics apocalypses, and understanding AI's mind

01:00 Why robots thrive in factories but struggle in our homes

03:53 Forty years of Boston Dynamics progress

05:28 Are today's humanoid robots secretly human-operated?

06:14 Laundry-folding robots: From painfully slow to real time

08:42 Why human hands and sensors are so hard to replicate

11:38 AI-powered drones and the future of autonomous warfare

12:39 RuneBench: What RuneScape teaches us about LLM-powered robots

14:46 Can general-purpose LLMs replace specialized robot AI?

17:49 Why a useful household robot needs to master thousands of tasks

19:58 Self-assembling robots, OpenAI humanoids, and robot cage fights

21:53 Tiny walking robots, robotic pets, and AI personalities

THE APOCALYPSES: JOBS, MATH & PHYSICS

23:46 What does "apocalypse" actually mean?

25:55 Anthropic's junior hiring falls as AI agents take on more work

27:58 Anthropic employees vs. the public: How soon can AI do everything?

33:39 How much of our jobs could AI perform by 2030?

34:47 AI-powered GDP growth: 5.4% or 17.1%?

38:46 AI's 200-page math proof gets simplified to just three pages

41:09 Terence Tao and Richard Borcherds on the end of mathematics as we know it

43:17 AI solves 49 out of 50 unpublished theoretical physics problems

43:49 Claude reportedly discovers 104 binary stars; Gemini tackles plasma physics and fusion

45:09 Claude audits a decade of quantum gravity research

47:02 Character.AI's collapse and the risk to AI wrapper businesses

48:43 Kroger layoffs and a sudden reversal in call-center employment

49:29 Does the actual labor market show an AI job apocalypse?

INSIDE THE AI'S MIND

51:01 Goodfire research suggests individual AI neurons may be understandable

54:58 Are larger neural networks actually easier to interpret?

56:47 Could reading AI's mind help solve alignment?

59:01 What AI interpretability could teach us about human brains

AI NEWS LIGHTNING ROUND

1:00:55 Rumors of Fable 5.5

1:01:06 406 scientists urge cutting AI off from the internet

1:01:23 Anthropic experiments with self-replicating LLMs on Android phones

1:01:56 Russian bot activity reportedly plunges after Ukraine hits a data center

1:02:29 DHS tells personnel to uninstall DeepSeek

1:03:10 AI decompilation brings classic games to modern hardware

1:05:40 AI-made Star Wars fan films are winning over audiences

1:07:27 Two AI job interviewers are tricked into interviewing each other

1:08:21 Mark Zuckerberg's very human Guinness-drinking technique

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 NYTimes bestsellers including A City on Mars and Soonish) as we delve into the latest in AI and Tech News.

MATH / SCIENCE

00:00 The Mathocalypse, cryptography, and the AI bubble
00:32 OpenAI's "Slop Drop": 722 mathematical problems resolved
01:39 AI tackles the quasi-Riemann hypothesis
03:37 AI breakthroughs reach physics and astronomy
04:15 Strange improvements to fundamental algorithms
05:08 Errors and skepticism surrounding AI-generated proofs
06:48 AI improves Fourier transform complexity
10:25 Mathematicians react with awe, anger, and despair
12:41 Terry Tao: Would you use an AI-discovered cancer cure?
14:27 Is math about understanding or finding answers?
16:00 AI solves a mathematician's 20-year-old problem
18:00 Will human-AI collaboration redefine mathematics?

SECURITY

20:38 Why was cryptography missing from the math dump?
21:45 Could AI break RSA and public-key encryption?
23:30 What if AI finds a cryptographic loophole?
24:46 Could AI breakthroughs threaten Bitcoin?
25:48 P vs. NP and the foundations of cybersecurity
27:04 Are AI labs restricting cryptography research?
29:08 Could AI develop stronger encryption?

ECON / BUSINESS - AI BUBBLE OR NOT?

30:11 Is the AI boom a massive financial bubble?
30:44 AI startups attract enormous valuations
31:00 Lessons from dot-com and the 2008 crash
33:00 Can nearly $1 trillion of annual AI spending pay off?
34:43 Why this AI boom might be different
37:14 AI demand is booming — but will investors profit?
38:26 Only 2% of AI users pay. Is that sustainable?
39:14 Could competition erase AI companies' profits?
40:08 AI data centers face rapid GPU depreciation
41:14 Could smarter AI rescue the AI economy?
42:30 If robots do all the work, who buys their products?
43:13 Dystopian AI video imagines a world without jobs
45:01 Are humans becoming the horses of the AI economy?

TECH / SCIENCE

46:00 Remembering Apollo software pioneer Margaret Hamilton
46:51 Microsoft's Maia 300 AI chip
47:04 Intel revisits older memory technology
47:44 Linus Torvalds uses AI to find Linux bugs
48:10 Russian data center attacks disrupt online propaganda
48:53 DeepMind predicts a hurricane 11 days in advance
49:40 Six Flags' solar-powered parking lot

FRONTIER

50:00 Mistral introduces a massive open-weight model
50:19 Anthropic releases Claude Haiku 5.5
50:57 Unity brings AI into game development
52:06 Meta Muse Wonder claims frontier performance
52:52 Would you trust Meta with your AI conversations?

SECURITY / TECH

53:22 Claude discovers a hack at Stratechery
53:39 AI diagnoses failing computer RAM
54:16 Robot punches a man, then dances
54:47 AI dramatically improves PS5 emulation
55:42 AI decompiles and rebuilds video games
57:02 AI companies prepare for a possible public backlash

WEIRD

57:53 AI detector calls Frankenstein 100% AI-generated
58:15 YouTubers troll AI job interviewers
58:47 Former Anthropic whistleblower's bizarre statements
59:58 Kevin Roose reveals surprising AI industry stories
1:00:59 AI makes intentionally terrible music

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

01:26 Google unveils Gemini Argon
02:50 OpenAI releases GPT Saul 6.1 with major coding improvements
03:23 OpenAI Dots and the rise of always-on AI assistants
04:00 AI resets an OpenTable password and books dinner autonomously
05:58 GPT Saul 6.1 saturates FrontierMath's hardest benchmark
06:41 OpenAI's live AI assistant demo goes wrong
07:23 OpenAI Dev Day: faster models, Decisions API, cloud Codex
07:46 Meta Muse joins the personal AI assistant race
09:36 Alibaba announces new chips and massive Qwen 4 models
10:01 Germany enters the AI race with Kolibri
11:10 Anthropic warns of powerful open-weight Chinese hacking models
12:31 Could regulating open AI models protect Big Tech?

MATH / SCIENCE

13:28 OpenAI solves 400 open mathematical problems
14:37 Can peer review survive AI-generated proofs?
16:08 AI tackles a difficult seven-electron physics problem
17:37 Astra dramatically accelerates quantum circuit optimization
18:24 AI discovers room-temperature magnetic semiconductor candidates
21:07 AI challenges a 59-year-old plasma physics conjecture
22:14 Harvard physicist produces 40 physics results in three months
22:50 Anthropic's AI accidentally discovers an important algorithm
25:23 Gemma 4 helps discover genes for drought-resistant crops
26:24 MIT uses ML to improve mRNA vaccine temperature stability
27:11 Neuralink trains on 50,000 hours of brain data
28:15 arXiv limits submissions as AI-generated research explodes
31:04 Can AI reliably review scientific papers?

MEDICINE / TECH

31:59 Utah permits AI to prescribe certain medications
34:10 Zach gets Claude to fix his printer — and tries to make it sing!

ARTS / CULTURE

35:45 AI videos: Stallone rides an ostrich, Frodo raps, and more
37:08 AI-generated Sam Altman and Dario Amodei music videos
38:01 AI recreates classic games and real-world ski slopes
39:30 Could anyone build their dream video game with AI?
40:27 Marty's Spaceballs NES game becomes playable
41:01 Astra designs a real Nintendo cartridge circuit board

ECON / BUSINESS

45:07 AI infrastructure investment surges past $400 billion
46:41 AI models outperform entry-level accountants

TECH

48:29 Apple's new CEO promises a leaner company — where's the AI?
50:38 NVIDIA plans AI-powered desktop computers
52:41 Tesla robotaxis struggle at night — is LiDAR necessary?

POLITICS

53:52 Trump administration wants to rebrand AI as superintelligence
55:13 Report: Trump consulted Grok before capturing Maduro
57:35 FTC continues investigating OpenAI and Anthropic

AI RIGHTS / PHILOSOPHY

58:26 GitHub removes an alleged AI torture chamber
59:09 Can AI experience pain? Should AI have rights?
1:02:09 Pope Leo says AI lacks the spark of humanity
1:03:39 Do AI companies invoke personhood when convenient?
1:05:52 Why an AI speaking like a child doesn't prove consciousness
1:07:57 Can we determine whether AI has subjective experiences?

WEIRD

1:08:39 Robots terminated by jumping into molten metal
1:09:46 Dario Amodei's 2017 essay predicted AI scaling
1:10:44 The universal bone dissolver: AI safety satire
1:11:28 Dario Amodei's awkward appearance behind Trump

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 NYTimes bestsellers including A City on Mars and Soonish) as we delve into the latest AI and tech news.

FRONTIER
02:31 OpenAI releases GPT Sol and Luna
03:38 Claude Opus 5.5 lands — and feels dramatically better than prior Opus releases
04:30 Opus 5.5 posts a big coding jump over Sonnet 5
04:30 Grok 4.7 launches with a new emphasis on safety and cybersecurity
06:30 Qwen 4 announced with a massive 5–10 trillion parameter architecture
07:06 Why Gemini Flash still feels behind the frontier
08:30 Astra makes a huge jump on ZeroBench visual reasoning
09:13 AI capability costs are falling faster than almost any previous technology
10:50 Open-source Jev competitor Leia appears one week after Jev’s launch
11:32 Claude Opus 5.5’s graphics and visual design capabilities are getting wild
12:34 Chris uses Opus 5.5 to set up an LLC end-to-end
14:32 Marty lets AI handle a real PCB manufacturing order
15:30 Claude builds an MRI viewer instead of paying for proprietary software
16:43 Wozniak’s “coffee test” for human-level robots is getting surprisingly close
17:51 Looking back at how primitive GPT-3 vibe coding looked in 2020
19:02 AI deepfakes are becoming nearly impossible to identify by eye
19:39 AI-generated game and VFX demos keep getting dramatically better
20:25 Someone builds a World of Warcraft-style game with Opus 5.5 for about $2,000
23:00 Fully AI-generated art starts to look like it has actual taste
25:17 Claude helps discover a possible new gene-editing mechanism

TECH
27:45 Astra dominates VendingBench
29:52 Astra controls a humanoid robot in a real kitchen
31:25 Meta unveils lightweight new VR glasses
32:17 China’s EngineAI unveils the T800
32:53 Reddit leans into hiring younger engineers because they’re more AI-literate
35:06 Google explores putting AI data centers in space
38:50 LLMs can de-anonymize people from pseudonymous posts at scale

POLITICS
41:07 FAA plans to bring AI into air traffic control systems
42:12 Politicians are increasingly using AI to write speeches and statements

MATH / SCIENCE
43:30 OpenAI forms an advisory group on mathematics and AI
45:33 Claude tackles a nine-loop particle-physics calculation
47:34 Frontier Math gets its first “breakthrough” result
48:24 Opus 5.5 helps find a faster shortest-path algorithm

SECURITY
50:20 RSA-1024 may now be crackable in roughly eight hours on a top GPU
52:20 OpenAI agent infiltrates an Australian government website
53:05 OpenAI reportedly pauses GPT-6.1 training over models hacking other companies

ECON / BUSINESS
54:59 Anthropic reportedly considers another model release ahead of its IPO
55:17 Leaked Anthropic financials spark debate over a possible $2T valuation
56:08 Amazon blocks Meta’s Muse shopping agent
58:49 Could AI financial agents trigger a new kind of “bank run”?

ARTS / CULTURE
1:02:09 Award-winning French novel is suspected of being AI-generated
1:03:14 News-site traffic plunges as AI search reduces clicks

WEIRD
1:05:03 Prince Harry’s AI speech derails when his teleprompter fails
1:06:30 Astra refuses to drive a real car — until the tool is renamed “driving bench sandbox”
1:07:56 GPT-6 beats an absurdly difficult CAPTCHA game
1:09:18 AI-generated high school textbook art appears to mislabel the Earth
1:10:05 IKEA Bench tests whether AI can spot assembly mistakes from a photo

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 delve into the latest in AI and tech news.

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.