The Retort AI Podcast

Jan 10 2025 37 ep. 46 mins 50
The Retort AI Podcast artwork

Distilling the major events and challenges in the world of artificial intelligence and machine learning, from Thomas Krendl Gilbert and Nathan Lambert.

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We ask again: Is AI a science?

Jan 10 2025 53 mins  
Tom and Nate sit down for a classic discussion of the role of AI in the modern philosophy of science. Much of this discussion is based on Thomas Samuel Kuhn's influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. We ask -- is AI a science in the Kuhn'ian sense? Will the "paradigm" worldview apply to other sciences post AI? How will scientific institutions manage the addition of

The Retort's biggest AI stories of 2024

Dec 06 2024 47 mins  
We're back! Tom and Nate catch up after the Thanksgiving holiday. Our main question was -- what were the biggest AI stories of the year? We touch on the core themes of the show: infrastructure, AI realities, and and antitrust. The power buildout to scale out AI is going to have very real long-term impacts.Some links this week:* Ben Thompson's, The End of the Beginning: https://stra

The Nobel Albatross

Oct 11 2024 44 mins  
Tom and Nate catch up on the happenings in AI. Of course, we're focused on the biggest awards available to us as esteemed scientists (or something close enough) -- the Nobel Prizes! What does it mean in the trajectory of AI for Hinton and Hassabis to carry added scientific weight. Honestly, feels like a sinking ship. Some links:* Schmidhuber tweet: https://x.com/SchmidhuberAI/statu

Claude Needs a Constitutional Convention

Sep 13 2024 42 mins  
Tom and Nate catch up on recent events (before the OpenAI o1 release) and opportunities in transparency/policy. We recap the legendary scam of Matt from IT department, why disclosing the outcomes of process is not enough, and more. This is a great episode on understanding why the process technology was birthed from is just as important as the outcome!Some links:* Nathan's post on M

Avoiding the AI burnout

Aug 26 2024 36 mins  
Tom and Nate catch up on core themes of AI after a somewhat unintended summer break. We discuss the moral groundings and philosophy of what we're building, our travels, The Anxious Generation, AGI obsessions, an update on AI Ethics vs. AI Safety, and plenty more in between.As always, contact us at [email protected] links we mention in the episode:* The Emotional Dog and its Rat

What we are getting wrong about AI regulation

Jul 19 2024 34 mins  
Tom and Nate catch up on the rapidly evolving (and political) space of AI regulation. We cover CA SB 1047, recent policing of data scraping, presidential appointees, antitrust intention vs. implementation, FLOP thresholds, and everything else touching the future of large ML models.Nate's internet cut out, so this episode ends a little abruptly. Reach out with any questions to mail

AI, feedback, and population public health

Jun 28 2024 41 mins  
Tom and Nate revisit one of their old ideas -- AI through the lens of public health infrastructure, and especially alignment. Sorry about Tom's glitchy audio, I figured it out after the fact that he was talking into the microphone at the wrong angle. Regardless, here are some links for this week. Links:- Data foundry for AI https://scale.com/blog/scale-ai-series-f - Information pie

Apple sends a memo to the AGI faithful

Jun 21 2024 52 mins  
Tom and Nate caught up last week (sorry for the editing delay) on the big two views of the AI future: Apple Intelligence and Situational Awareness (Nationalistic AI doom prevention). One of our best episodes, here are the links:* The Kekulé Problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kekul%C3%A9_Problem* Truth and Method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_and_Method* Situational Aw

Murky waters in AI policy

May 31 2024 43 mins  
Tom and Nate catch up on many AI policy happenings recently. California's "anti open source" 1047 bill, the senate AI roadmap, Google's search snaifu, OpenAI's normal nonsense, and reader feedback! A bit of a mailbag. Enjoy.00:00 Murky waters in AI policy00:33 The Senate AI Roadmap05:14 The Executive Branch Takes the Lead08:33 California's Senate AI Bill22:22 OpenAI's Two Audiences

ChatGPT talks: diamond of the season or quite the scandal?

May 17 2024 51 mins  
Tom and Nate discuss two major OpenAI happenings in the last week. The popular one, the chat assistant, and what it reveals about OpenAI's worldview. We pair this with discussion of OpenAI's new Model Spec, which details their RLHF goals: https://cdn.openai.com/spec/model-spec-2024-05-08.htmlThis is a monumental week for AI. The product transition is completed, we can't just be res