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

We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal team on other projects he's incubating. He's hiring a Chief of Staff, EA, Head of Special Projects, Investment Associate, and more. For a list of JDs, check out: eriktorenberg.com.

SPONSORS: Shopify | NetSuite | Omneky

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

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 10% off.

X:

@labenz (Nathan)

@AravSrinivas (Aravind)

@eriktorenberg (Erik)

@cogrev_podcast 

LINKS:

- Perplexity AI: https://www.perplexity.ai/

- Part 1 with Aravind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSYQZZu4MEM

TIMESTAMPS:

(00:00:00) - Episode Preview

(00:01:12) - Introducing Aravind Srinivas and Perplexity AI

(00:05:05) - Perplexity's growth to millions of queries per day

(00:06:21) - Perplexity's retention and market share vs. ChatGPT

(00:08:32) - Improving reliability, speed, accuracy, and new features

(00:10:33) - Getting to daily usage from weekly usage

(00:13:21) - Aravind's favorite Perplexity use cases

(00:18:34) - Issues with lack of sufficient web coverage for hard queries

(00:18:38) - Sponsors: Netsuite | Omneky

(00:23:13) - Building their own search index and models for self-sufficiency

(00:26:29) - Using their own index vs real-time web queries

(00:28:43) - Integrating default search and Copilot companion experiences

(00:31:49) - Training their own models as the only viable long-term option

(00:36:56) - The web becoming more like an API accessed via AI assistants

(00:41:23) - Not trying to copy Google's business model

(00:44:36) - Spending more on compute than people to get scale efficiencies

(00:49:35) - Replacing all parts of the stack with their own proprietary versions

(00:53:59) - Shipping fast out of necessity in a competitive war zone

(00:58:00) - AI assistants becoming a significant part of human digital activity

The Cognitive Revolution is brought to you by the Turpentine Media network. 

Producer: Vivian Meng

Executive Producers: Amelia Salyers, and Erik Torenberg

Editor: Graham Bessellieu

For inquiries about guests or sponsoring the podcast, please email [email protected]

Zvi Mowshowitz, the writer behind Don't Worry About the Vase, returns to catch up with Nathan on everything OpenAI, Amazon-Anthropic collab, and Google Deepmind. They also discuss Perplexity, deepfakes, and software bundling vs the Roman Empire. If you're looking for an ERP platform, check out our sponsor, NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive

Definitely also take a moment to subscribe to Zvi's blog Don't Worry About the Vase 

(https://thezvi.wordpress.com/) - Zvi is an information hyperprocessor who synthesizes vast amounts of new and ever-evolving information into extremely clear summaries that help educated people keep up with the latest news. 

We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal team on other projects he's incubating. He's hiring a Chief of Staff, EA, Head of Special Projects, Investment Associate, and more. For a list of JDs, check out: eriktorenberg.com.

SPONSORS: Shopify | NetSuite | Omneky

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

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 10% off.

TIMESTAMPS:

00:00:00 - Episode Preview

(00:02:42) - Nathan's experience using Code Interpreter for a React app

00:06:09 - Zvi's perspective on Code Interpreter and other new Anthropic products

(00:10:47) - Nathan's approach of "coding by analogy" using Code Interpreter

(00:15:42) - Sponsors: Netsuite | Omneky

(00:17:00 )- Performance degradation issues with large context windows

(00:22:50) - The disconnect between Anthropic's value and what users are willing to pay

(00:31:56) - Predicting Gemini's capabilities relative to GPT-4

00:30:13 - Rating Code Interpreter's capabilities

(00:37:53) - Using Perplexity vs. Anthropic products for search

(00:44:11) - Potential for a bundled subscription for multiple AI services

(00:47:39) - Challenges of getting competitors to agree to bundling

(00:54:05) - Concerns over information pollution from synthetic content

(00:56:36) - Filtering adversarial vs. unintentional bogus information

(01:02:20) - Dangers of info pollution visible in Archive dataset

(01:11:15) - Kevin Fisher’s AI Souls demo with emotional voices

(01:12:15) - Difficulty of detecting AI voices/images for a general audience

(01:14:32) - Being optimistic about defending against deepfakes

(01:21:12) - The reversal curse in language models

(01:46:12) - Implications of Amazon investing in Anthropic

(01:49:20) - Non-standard terms likely affected the Anthropic valuation

(01:51:13) - Survey of the AI Safety landscape

Nathan and Erik chat OpenAI GPT-3.5 fine tuning updates, using GPT 4 outputs to fine-tune 3.5, when to accelerate, and AI bundles. If you're looking for an ERP platform, check out our sponsor, NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive

We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal team on other projects he's incubating. He's hiring a Chief of Staff, EA, Head of Special Projects, Investment Associate, and more. For a list of JDs, check out: eriktorenberg.com.

SPONSORS: Shopify | NetSuite | Omneky

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

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 10% off.

TIMESTAMPS:

(00:00) - Intro and GPT-3.5 fine tuning update

(05:50) - Using GPT-4 to generate training data for GPT-3.5 

(09:54) - Potential for training models on synthetic/cleaned data 

(10:24) - Using chain of thought prompts to improve model performance 

(15:02) - Sponsors: Netsuite | Omneky

(19:39) - Accelerating applications vs new AI models 

(20:40) - What to accelerate vs what to slow down

(26:07) - AI as a co-pilot vs fully automating tasks 

(30:12) - When to delegate to AI

(36:40)- Displacement of human roles by AI systems

(40:39) - Does training on synthetic data solve a problem?

(45:10) - The idea of an AI bundle/subscription 

(50:28) - Bundling in other industries like cable and SaaS

(54:27) - Churn and retention challenges for AI apps 

(01:02:54) - Low retention for easy-to-use AI apps

(01:03:57) - Incentives for AI companies to join a bundle

(01:04:39) - Potential for collaboration between AI companies 

(01:12:01) - Leading AI firms creating separate bundles

(01:16:43) - Outro

In this episode, Nathan sits down with three researchers at Carnegie Mellon studying adversarial attacks and mimetic initialization: Zico Kolter, Andy Zou, and Asher Trockman. They discuss: the motivation behind researching universal adversarial attacks on language models, how the attacks work, and the short term harms and long term risks of these jailbreaks. If you're looking for an ERP platform, check out our sponsor, NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive

We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal team on other projects he's incubating. He's hiring a Chief of Staff, EA, Head of Special Projects, Investment Associate, and more. For a list of JDs, check out: eriktorenberg.com.

TIMESTAMPS:

[00:00:00] - Introducing the podcast and guests Zico Kolter, Andy Zou, and Asher Trockman

[00:06:32] - Discussing the motivation and high-level strategy for the universal adversarial attack on language models

[00:09:33] - Explaining how the attacks work by adding nonsense tokens to maximize target sequence probability

[00:11:06] - Comparing to prior adversarial attacks in vision models

[00:13:47] - Details on the attack optimization process and discrete token search

[00:17:09] - The empirical notion of "mode switching" in the language models

[00:21:18] - Technical details on gradient computation across multiple models and prompts

[00:23:46] - Operating in one-hot vector space rather than continuous embeddings

[00:25:50] - Evaluating candidate substitutions across all positions to find the best update

[00:28:05] - Running the attack optimization for hundreds of steps across multiple GPUs

[00:39:14] - The difficulty of understanding the loss landscape and internal model workings

[00:43:55] - The flexibility afforded by separating the loss and optimization approach

[00:48:16] - The challenges of creating inherently robust models via adversarial training

[00:52:34] - Potential approaches to defense through filtering or inherent model robustness

[00:55:51] - Transferability results to commercial models like GPT-4 and Claude

[00:59:25] - Hypotheses on why the attacks transfer across different model architectures

[01:04:36] - The mix of human-interpretable and nonsense features in effective attacks

[01:08:29] - The appearance of intuitive manual jailbreak triggers in some attacks

[01:15:33] - Short-term harms of attacks vs long-term risks

[01:18:37] - Influencing those with incomplete understanding of LLMs to appreciate differences from human reasoning

[01:24:16] - Mitigating risks by training on filtered datasets vs broad web data

[01:2916] - Curriculum learning as a strategy for both capability and safety

[01:30:35] - Influencing developers building autonomous systems with LLMs

[01:33:19] - Alienness of LLM failure modes compared to human reasoning

[01:35:45] - Getting inspiration from biological visual system structure

[01:40:35] - Initialization as an alternative to pretraining for small datasets

[01:51:41] - Encoding useful structures like grammars in initialization without training

[02:12:10] - Most ideas don't progress to research projects

[02:13:02] - Pursuing ideas based on interest and feasibility

[02:15:14] - Fun of exploring uncharted territory in ML research

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 10% off.

Music Credit: Stableaudio.com

In this episode, Nathan sits down with Adam Wenchel, CEO of Arthur.ai. Adam founded the AI security company back in 2019, before GPT-2 existed. In this episode, Adam shares his unique perspective on the AI security landscape, drawing from years building commercial AI systems. They discuss the attacks Adam set out to defend against, the changing priorities of executives in the rush to adopt LLMs, and the LLM-specific techniques Adam has developed. If you're looking for an ERP platform, check out our sponsor, NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive

We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal team on other projects he's incubating. He's hiring a Chief of Staff, EA, Head of Special Projects, Investment Associate, and more. For a list of JDs, check out: eriktorenberg.com.

TIMESTAMPS:

(00:00:00) Episode Preview

(00:03:45) Adam's background in AI and starting Arthur AI in 2019

(00:05:52) The release of ChatGPT as a watershed moment for generative AI

(00:07:09) Differences between traditional cybersecurity and AI security

(00:09:51) Early examples of AI security issues like boundary detection attacks in fraud systems

(00:12:39) - Mitigating risks of AI systems through observability and robust training

(00:14:40) - Financial services governance of AI models and its challenges today

(00:15:12) Sponsors: Netsuite | Omneky

(00:21:18) - Motivations for governance like staying compliant with regulations

(00:21:40) - The mix of incentives shaping earlier AI governance, like explainability

(00:28:14) - Using LMs to evaluate the security of other LMs

(00:30:03) - Dynamics between training and evaluating future LMs

(00:38:10) - The state of reasoning capabilities in large LMs

(00:44:35) - Corporate urgency around adopting generative AI technologies

(00:46:51) - Common enterprise use cases for generative AI and security concerns

(00:50:45) - Techniques for reducing hallucinations in retrieval augmented LMs

(00:53:15) - Benchmarking LMs on specific organizational tasks versus generic benchmarks

(00:56:30) - Metrics beyond accuracy like concision and hedging

(01:01:20) - Automatically detecting anomalies and hallucinations

(01:09:20) - Relationships between Arthur AI and foundation model providers

(01:11:52) - Where Cohere shines: multilingualism and not hedging

(01:13:43) - Anticipating future watershed moments and steady progress

(01:19:03) - Whether we can ever fully solve AI alignment and safety

LINKS:

Arthur.ai: https://www.arthur.ai/

X/Social:

@apwenchel (Adam)

@itsArthurAI (Arthur.ai)

@labenz (Nathan)

@eriktorenberg

@CogRev_Podcast

SPONSORS: Shopify | NetSuite | Omneky

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

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 10% off.

Music Credit: Stableaudio.com

In this episode, Nathan sits down with Stephen Parker and Josh Rubin of Waymark, and creators of The Frost, an AI-powered 12 minute short film. In this episode, we get a behind the scenes look at their creative process, the prompting and creative techniques they used to generate and animate the DALL-E results, and an overview of the current state of AI art. If you're looking for an ERP platform, check out our sponsor, NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive

We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal team on other projects he's incubating. He's hiring a Chief of Staff, EA, Head of Special Projects, Investment Associate, and more. For a list of JDs, check out: eriktorenberg.com.

TIMESTAMPS

(00:00) Episode Preview

(00:01:00) Nathan’s introduction for Stephen Parker and Josh Rubin

(00:05:01) - The Frost is a 12-minute short film created using DALL-E 2 images.

(00:07:06) - The Frost started as an experiment to see if a narrative film could be created completely from AI imagery.

(00:10:38) - Parker started generating images with DALL-E 2 when he got access to the early preview.

(00:12:26) - Prompt technique to get consistent images by providing context about a hypothetical film.

(00:15:57) Sponsors: Netsuite | Omneky

(00:19:37) - Compositional continuity, like shot-reverse shot, was hard to achieve through prompting.

(00:22:13)- Rubin would request specific shots and the team would prompt DALL-E 2 to create them

(00:32:25) - Getting consistent facial features for characters was very difficult.

(00:39:03) - The storytelling helped cover inconsistencies that viewers might not notice.

(00:40:15) - Working with the images DALL-E provides

(00:44:53) Inpainting and compositing to refine DALL-E Images

(00:50:43) - The AI art is limited by what exists in the training data.

(01:02:05)- Animating the human characters was challenging because of missing or incorrect appendages.

(01:07:36) - The team had to find creative ways to convey emotion through the limited animation.

01:02:24 - Animating subtle human movement and emotion is still very difficult.

(01:06:35) - A romantic comedy would be much harder to produce with current AI capabilities.

(01:12:17) - For Frost 2 they are using text-to-video models like RunwayML.

(01:15:43) - AI voicing advancements applied to filmmaking

(01:19:27) - The future of AI in Hollywood and filmmaking: quality narratives still require human vision

SPONSORS: Shopify | NetSuite | Omneky

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

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 10% off.

Music Credit: GoogleLM

In this episode, Trey Kollmer, WGA Writer and Co-Executive of the show Ghosts, returns to the show to discuss updates to the Hollywood Strikes, including news on SAG-AFTRA and WGA. Trey and Nathan chat why actors are joining the strikes, how AI will change acting as a profession, Trey’s views on reasoning and how he’s experimenting with GPT-4, and much, much more.

We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal team on other projects he's incubating. He's hiring a Chief of Staff, EA, Head of Special Projects, Investment Associate, and more. For a list of JDs, check out: eriktorenberg.com.

TIMESTAMPS:

(00:04:01) Hollywood and AI: updates on SAG-AFTRA and the WGA

(00:15:20) Sponsors: NetSuite | Omneky

(00:18:56) Studio approach to copyright and compensation with generative AI

(00:22:17) Hollywood receptiveness to using AI and protections guild members are asking for

(00:24:56) Models implementing gradient descent in the weights

(00:29:14) How Nathan uses models to write for the podcast

(00:34:15) Generating and mining jokes in the writer’s room

(00:40:18) Untraining models

(00:44:20) AI writing tools and writer perception of them

(00:46:34) Context length and pooling layers

(00:51:11) Microsoft China

(01:00:02) Actors’ strike

(01:05:45) Using 1 million DALL-E images to create an AI short film

(01:09:11) Deepfakes

(01:12:51) The future where anyone can be a reasonable synthetic actor

(01:17:33) Trey’s take on reasoning and why Hollywood should be more open to AI

(01:25:49) A monk’s experience with Chat-GPT

(01:28:56) Outdatedness of stochastic parrot notion; reasoning and synthesis

(01:36:14) Model vs human susceptibility to adversarial attacks because of human robustness

(01:47:30) Performance jumping with abstraction

(01:49:22) Language model self-delegation

(01:51:04) NVIDIA’s margins compared to TSMC and ASML

(02:07:35) Adding an AI layer and competing with incumbents

(02:13:10) Rewind AI

(02:19:27) Big tech vs old school studios

(02:14:52) Dramatic ironies from the picketing lines

(02:21:38) AI development moments that feel like a movie

(02:26:34) CEO of Inflection’s views on misuse being a greater threat than the AI itself

SPONSORS: Shopify | NetSuite | Omneky

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

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 10% off.

Music Credit: GoogleLM

In this episode, Nathan sits down with three members of the a16z x Convex AI Town project: Yoko Li (Partner, a16z), Martin Casado (GP, a16z), and James Cowling (CTO, Convex). AI Town is a virtual town where AI agents live, interact, and socialize. They discuss how AI Town originated from Yoko’s companion app project, unpredictability as a feature in LLMs and interacting with models like they are lifeforms, and why they chose Javascript and Convex to build AI Town. If you're looking for an ERP platform, check out our sponsor, NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive

We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal team on other projects he's incubating. He's hiring a Chief of Staff, EA, Head of Special Projects, Investment Associate, and more. For a list of JDs, check out: eriktorenberg.com.

📣 CALL FOR FEEDBACK:

To borrow from a meme… we're in the podcast arena trying stuff. Some will work. Some won't. But we're always learning.

http://bit.ly/TCRFeedback

Fill out the above form to let us know how we can continue delivering great content to you or sending the feedback on your mind to [email protected]. 

TIMESTAMPS:

(00:00:00) - Episode Preview: Intro to AI Town and the idea of AI as companions

(00:05:29) - Overview of AI Town and the simulation framework based on the Stanford Generative Agents paper

(00:08:24) - Yoko explains how the idea for AI Town originated from the companion app project

(00:12:31) - The simplicity and elegance of the AI Town codebase

(00:15:47) - Sponsors: Netsuite | Omneky

(00:18:25) - How Convex built a server-side game engine for AI Town 

(00:23:39 )- James emphasizes the power of functional programming paradigms like Convex for building AI apps

(00:25:02) - Using simple JavaScript so anyone could understand and extend AI Town

(00:30:23) - How AI coding assistants were used in building AI Town 

(00:31:22) - No open source code for the Stanford paper when they started

(00:33:25) - The interplay between programmer and AI model

(00:38:01)- Martin draws a distinction between using formal languages vs. natural language

(00:43:21) The balance between formal language and unpredictable behaviours in LLMs

(00:48:27) Are we living in a simulation?

(00:50:38) Advice for other developers in AI

(00:54:29) AI Town is a community project to be extended on

SPONSORS: Shopify | NetSuite | Omneky

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

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 10% off.

Music Credit: GoogleLM

In this episode, Nathan sits down with Daniel Kang, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois. Kang has done pioneering work bringing zero knowledge cryptographic proofs to AI. In this episode, they chat about the cryptographic theory behind Daniel's work, how cryptography allows us to balance the tradeoff between privacy and authenticity, and how cryptography usage is needed in a world where LLMs are increasingly embedded into our daily lives. If you're looking for an ERP platform, check out our sponsor, NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive

We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal team on other projects he's incubating. He's hiring a Chief of Staff, EA, Head of Special Projects, Investment Associate, and more. For a list of JDs, check out: eriktorenberg.com.

CALL FOR FEEDBACK:

To borrow from a meme… we're in the podcast arena trying stuff. Some will work. Some won't. But we're always learning.

http://bit.ly/TCRFeedback

Fill out the above form to let us know how we can continue delivering great content to you or sending the feedback on your mind to [email protected]. 

TIMESTAMPS:

(00:00) Episode Preview

(00:01:04) Nathan's Introduction

(00:07:06) Motivation for bringing zero-knowledge proofs to AI

(00:10:27) Verifying model execution without revealing model details

(00:12:42) Verifying medical AI services haven't been tampered with

(00:15:09) Sponsors: Netsuite | Omneky

(00:18:54) Cryptographic hashes for commitments

(00:22:42) Assumptions underlying cryptographic hashes 

(00:25:20) Adding entropy through salting 

(00:26:24) Z case snarks and the proving process 

(00:31:00) Using lookup tables for nonlinearities

(00:33:35) Floating point vs fixed point calculations 

(00:34:08) Quantizing models for efficiency

(00:35:55) Using polynomials to represent arbitrary computations

(00:37:26) What are finite fields? 

(00:41:23) Toxic waste for cryptographic secrecy

(00:45:51) Computational costs

(00:47:39) The experience of using a cryptography application to verify model output  

(00:49:05) Verification key doesn't reveal model weights

(00:56:36) What using crypto infrastructure in AI enables and challenges to its implementation 

(01:01:26) Potential for 10-100x cost reductions

(01:04:51) Authenticating images with attested cameras

(01:11:56) How cryptography in AI could impact daily life

(01:14:25) On-device credential verification

(01:15:50) Potential for regulation of hardware authentication

(01:18:52) Upcoming work to reduce proof costs

LINKS:

Daniel's website

SPONSORS: Shopify | NetSuite | Omneky

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

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 10% off.

Music Credit: GoogleLM

In this episode, Nathan and Erik sit down to analyze Hugging Face in light of its recent $235M Series D round. They analyze Hugging Face’s community and defensibility through the lens of other community businesses like ProductHunt and Yelp, assess its ability to fulfill its $4.5 billion valuation, and assess competitors and other notable companies in the space like Replit, Character, and Runway. If you're looking for an ERP platform, check out our sponsor, NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive

We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal team on other projects he's incubating. He's hiring a Chief of Staff, EA, Head of Special Projects, Investment Associate, and more. For a list of JDs, check out: eriktorenberg.com.

TIMESTAMPS:

(00:00:57) Episode Preview

(00:01:52) Nathan’s Introduction

(00:04:57) Overview of Hugging Face and recent fundraising announcement

(00:08:13) Hugging Face’s product line

(00:16:47) Sponsors: Netsuite | Omneky

(00:18:36) Community driven businesses and HuggingFace’s moat

(00:23:23) Discovery and inference

(00:28:04) Hugging Face’s ideological nature

(00:31:31) Curation is key

(00:33:46) Keeping content fresh when AI moves so fast

(00:35:44) If Hugging Face is a $50 billion company one day, what would it look like?

(00:48:08) Hugging Face vs Replit

(00:57:19) Contrasting Hugging Face with other companies like Character and Runway

LINKS MENTIONED:

Hugging Face's LLM leaderboard

X/TWITTER:

@labenz (Nathan)

@eriktorenberg

@CogRev_Podcast

SPONSORS: Shopify | NetSuite | Omneky

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

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 10% off.

Music Credit: GoogleLM