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    Technology

    Last Humans in the Loop

    A weekly conversation about AI, technology, startups, and the future from people who’ve actually built the systems everyone uses.

    Chris Slowe CTO’d Reddit through hypergrowth and its IPO. Marty Weiner was a founding engineer at Pinterest and Reddit’s first CTO. Zach Weinersmith is the creator of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal and the NYTimes bestselling author of books exploring the future of science and technology.

    Each week we debate the biggest stories, explain the technology behind them, and occasionally wander into philosophy, history, and whatever weird rabbit hole AI sends us down.

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    Latest Episodes:
    Is This the Best AI Model Right Now? Sep 30, 2026
    Show notes

    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.


    HAVE YOU TRIED JEV YET?? Sep 23, 2026
    Show notes

    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.


    AI POLITICAL FALLOUT UNDERWAY, CALLS TO SLOW AI, ANTHROPIC IPO, AI GEN PHOTOSHOP, MATH FALLOUT Sep 16, 2026
    Show notes

    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.


    ASTRAPALOOZA! Let's explore all the ways people are using ChatGPT6 Sep 09, 2026
    Show notes

    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.


    "How is AI changing math?" with Math Professor Jonathan Wise Sep 02, 2026
    Show notes

    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.


    Are you marketing to AI yet?, Humans talking like AI now, Live AI made TV shows, China exports surge Sep 02, 2026
    Show notes

    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.


    Laptop AI = 6 Month Old Frontier Models, AI Cancer Vaccines, Test Scores Down, Bomber Drones + AI Aug 26, 2026
    Show notes

    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.


    Study: AI Use Makes You Look Lazy, RAM $$$ Up 7x, Open Weight Music AI, Security Flaw in Major LLMs Aug 20, 2026
    Show notes

    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.


    AI doing real science, EU: AI needs watermarks, Jeff Dean leaves Google, Riemann Hypothesis Progress Aug 13, 2026
    Show notes

    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.


    The AI Productivity Paradox, New LLM Architecture, AlphaFold Shutting Down, 10 Math Breakthroughs Aug 05, 2026
    Show notes

    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/


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