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.

Latest Episodes:

Math, Encryption, and the AI Bubble: What AI Could Break Oct 15, 2026

Show notes

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.

Would You Give AI Your Passwords? Oct 08, 2026

Show notes

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.

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

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

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

"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”

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

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