AI Summer

Feb 27 2025 11 ep. 63 mins 55
AI Summer Podcast artwork

Tim Lee and Dean Ball interview leading experts about the future of AI technology and policy.

www.aisummer.org

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Andrew Lee on running an AI email startup

Feb 27 2025 61 mins  
Andrew Lee is the co-founder of Shortwave, an AI-powered email app. He’s also Tim’s brother.Andrew shares how Shortwave evolved from a conventional email app into a multi-LLM system that automates inbox organization, drafts messages, and performs advanced search via agentic reasoning. He explains how recent improvements in model performance have dramatically changed what is pos

Dean and Tim on Deep Research and the Paris Summit

Feb 21 2025 63 mins  
In this episode, Dean and Tim discuss Dean’s trip to Paris for the AI Action Summit, including Vice President Vance’s speech on AI. They talk through the European outlook on AI regulation, European resentment toward America, and the stark shift in policymaker attitudes toward AI safety. Then they turn to OpenAI’s new Deep Research agent, chatting about their experience with t

Kashmir Hill on falling love with ChatGPT

Feb 12 2025 52 mins  
Kashmir Hill is a reporter at the New York Times who focuses on the social impacts of new technology. In this episode, she describes how users are customizing chatbots like ChatGPT to fulfill emotional and even erotic needs, often bypassing built-in safeguards. These fantasy conversations are usually harmless, but there are potential pitfalls—especially where children are involve

Sophia Tung on riding a self-driving taxi in China

Feb 05 2025 63 mins  
Tim and Dean chat with Sophia Tung, an entrepreneur, engineer, and now YouTuber, about her recent experience in a Chinese self-driving taxi from Apollo Go, a subsidiary of Baidu. Apollo Go is a bit like China’s Waymo, but Sophia found the experience of riding in an Apollo Go taxi to be far worse than riding in a Waymo. We talk about her experience in China as well as the broader

Dean and Tim on DeepSeek and AI progress

Jan 29 2025 57 mins  
Dean and Tim discuss DeepSeek’s r1 release and what it means. We talk export controls, whether the model is a true technical breakthrough, and what “reasoning” models like r1 and o1 mean for the pace of AI progress going forward. This is our first episode with just Dean and Tim chatting, but we hope to do more such episodes in the future. This is a public episode. If you wou

Nathan Labenz on the future of AI scaling

Jan 27 2025 78 mins  
Nathan Labenz is the host of our favorite AI podcast, the Cognitive Revolution. A self-described “AI scout,” Nathan uses his podcast to explore a wide range of AI advancements, from the latest language models to breakthroughs in medicine and robotics. In this episode, Labenz helps us understand the slowdown in AI scaling that has been reported by some media outlets. Labenz says

Lennart Heim on the AI diffusion rule

Jan 23 2025 66 mins  
Lennart Heim is an information scientist and researcher in AI governance at the RAND Corporation and a leading scholar on AI export controls. We asked him about the Biden administration’s “diffusion framework,” which aims to regulate the global diffusion of advanced AI chips and models. We get into all the specifics as well as the broader geopolitical implications of the fram

Sam Hammond on getting government ready for AI

Jan 20 2025 58 mins  
Sam Hammond is senior economist at the Foundation for American Innovation, a right-leaning tech policy think tank based in Washington DC. Hammond is a Trump supporter who expects AI to improve rapidly in the next few years, and he believes that will have profound implications for the public policy. In this interview, Hammond explains how he’d like to see the Trump administration

Ajeya Cotra on AI safety and the future of humanity

Jan 16 2025 73 mins  
Ajeya Cotra works at Open Philanthropy, a leading funder of efforts to combat existential risks from AI. She has led the foundation’s grantmaking on technical research to understand and reduce catastrophic risks from advanced AI. She is co-author of Planned Obsolescence, a newsletter about AI futurism and AI alignment.Although a committed doomer herself, Cotra has worked hard to

Nathan Lambert on the rise of "thinking" language models

Jan 14 2025 60 mins  
Nathan Lambert is the author of the popular AI newsletter Interconnects. He is also a research scientist who leads post-training at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a research organization funded by the estate of Paul Allen. This means that the organization can afford to train its own models—and it’s one of the only such organizations committed to doing so in an