Today’s episode is a deep dive into the collision of AI and the future of entertainment, against the backdrop of the still-raging Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike. Nathan Labenz sits down with Trey Kollmer, Sophia Lear, and Garrett Schabb – all seasoned television writers and Guild members – to discuss the labor dispute. While the strike encompasses many dynamics, the timely intersection with a rapidly changing AI landscape has the writers entwined in the wild possibilities and existential threats of paradigm-shifting technology. Other entertainment guilds and labor unions are watching closely. Note: Nathan kicks off this episode with a longer-than-usual introduction and analysis as the subject matter of this episode requires some added context. If you would prefer to dive straight into the interviews, follow the timecodes below to skip ahead (and maybe give the intro a listen when you finish!) More about our guests Trey Kollmer, Sophia Lear, and Garrett Schabb and their work: Trey Kollmer, currently co-executive producer for the TV show Ghosts, was described to me as perhaps the single most knowledgeable guild member on the topic of AI. Follow him at @treyko on Twitter. Sophia Lear has been a writer for TV shows including Ghosts, The Unicorn, and New Girl, and was also previously an assistant literary editor for the New Republic. Garrett Schabb has written for shows including Tosh.0 and Suits (of Meghan Markle fame), and has also written for Crooked Media.  Follow him at @garrettschabb PODCAST RECOMMENDATION: The AI Breakdown: https://pod.link/1680633614 As anyone in AI knows, the pace of progress of new releases is relentless. The AI Breakdown is a daily podcast (10-20min long) that helps us ensure we don't miss anything important by curating news and analysis. TIMESTAMPS: (00:00) Preview (01:54) Introduction and analysis for this episode  (09:02) Trey Kollmer breaks down the dynamics of compensation, ownership and crediting for WGA writers, issues at the heart of the strike (14:52) Sponsor: Omneky (15:09) Recommendation: The AI Breakdown (17:16) What are the attitudes and implementation of AI in the writer’s room? (22:42) Usefulness of AI for script writing (and will better training out of jailbreaks make it less useful?)  (30:59) The main two AI-related demands of the labor dispute (34:44) Is there any way to police or standardize use? (42:48) Writers’ diverse reactions to AI, from hostility to experimentation (50:00) Picturing a long term Utopian future (57:46) Sophia Lear breaks down sentiments around GPT-4, AI-generated scripts and the previous eras of crappy sitcoms and bad streaming series (written by humans) (1:08:19) Dissecting quality  (1:11:27) Whose jobs are safe? (1:17:03) Garrett Schabb breaks down dystopian/realistic view of studio’s incentives (1:20:33) How Garrett uses ChatGPT (1:27:37) Ethical boundaries of using the model to write like your favorite writers (1;32:16) The two types of storytelling in the future, UBI and decoupling writing from a profession TWITTER: @CogRev_Podcast @treyko (Trey) @labenz (Nathan) @eriktorenberg (Erik) Thank you Omneky for sponsoring The Cognitive Revolution. 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: MusicLM More show notes and reading material released in our Substack: https://cognitiverevolution.substack.com

Nathan Labenz sits down with Andrew Feldman, CEO and Co-Founder of Cerebras Systems, a company building a new class of computer system for accelerating AI and changing the future of work. Cerebras Systems is the creator of the world’s largest chip, at 2.6 trillion transistors. In this episode, they discuss the founding story of Cerebras, the experience of creating the world’s largest chip, and the process that goes into chip design and manufacturing for an AI-focused chip.  This episode is the first part of our hardware exploration series focused on the people building at the forefront of hardware applications in AI. LINKS: Cerebras: https://www.cerebras.net/ Book: The Chip War by Chris Miller PODCAST RECOMMENDATION: The AI Breakdown: https://pod.link/1680633614 As anyone in AI knows, the pace of progress of new releases is relentless. The AI Breakdown is a daily podcast (10-20min long) that helps us ensure we don't miss anything important by curating news and analysis. TIMESTAMPS (00:00) Preview (04:27) Andrew’s story of creating the world’s largest chip and Cerebras (07:19) What is a chip? (08:14) The diversity of chips and what they can accomplish (09:47) What is it like to design a 2.5 trillion transistor chip? (12:41) The founding story of Cerebras and building the team (14:20) Sponsor: Omneky (23:00) What was the hardest part about building the company? (26:11) What happens after designing the chip’s blueprint? (27:29) The tradeoffs needed in chipmaking  (34:08) The comparison between chips and neural networks (38:31) The generalization vs specialization of a chip  (40:11) Sparse compute vs dense compute (43:55) Ghost in the machine (46:54) Supply chain challenges of the Cerebras chip (54:59) The future for chips (58:19) Building chip clusters (58:57) The Cerebras business model (01:00:41) Building a chip cluster vs using a Cerebras chip (01:02:57) Giant chips on the edge (01:05:32) What is the edge?  (01:08:04) Andrew’s favorite AI products (01:10:08) Would Andrew get a Neuralink implant? (01:14:16) Consciousness and chips (01:17:50) AI hopes and fears TWITTER: @CogRev_Podcast @andrewdfeldman (Andrew) @labenz (Nathan) @eriktorenberg (Erik) Thank you Omneky for sponsoring The Cognitive Revolution. 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: MusicLM More show notes and reading material released in our Substack: https://cognitiverevolution.substack.com

Nathan Labenz sits down with engineer Shreya Rajpal, the creator of Guardrails AI, a new Python library that allows developers to add a layer of output, validation and correction to their code. Practically guardrails can ensure a reliable interface between language models and more traditional deterministic software systems. At the same time, mind-bending and potentially risky use case frameworks like Guardrails allow developers to ask and answer entirely new kinds of questions. Talking to Shreya really reinforced just how early we are in LLM’s impact on the software industry. We were introduced to Shreya’s work when recording our interview with Matt Welsh, the CEO of Fixie.AI (Ep 19: How AI Agents Will Change How We Work). LINKS: Guardrails AI: https://shreyar.github.io/guardrails/ RECOMMENDED PODCASTS: Upstream: https://link.chtbl.com/Upstream TIMESTAMPS: (00:00) Episode preview (05:00) Why Shreya built Guardrails AI (08:33) Common ways LMs can “go off the rails” and how Guardrails can correct it (13:45) Discussion of validators (15:31) Sponsor: Omneky (18:48) Business and creative use cases of Guardrails AI (25:00) What can be achieved by Guardrails AI that cannot be achieved by traditional code (32:44) How agents work vs how Guardrails works (35:34) AI as shepherd vs delegating to AI and the role of human understanding (39:54) Trust deficit and risks (46:33) Is it realistic to imagine GPT-4 using Guardrails? (52:00) How Shreya thinks about security (57:02) How Shreya thinks about embeddings (1:05:05) How Shreya thinks about problemsolving with LMs (1:07:50) Shreya on OpenAI’s Evals Library, Anthropic’s Constitutional AI (1:12:55) Discussion of determinism (1:15:00) Recommendations for developers to minimize overhead (1:26:00) Predictions about providers in the space of LMs (1:29:30) Shreya’s favorite AI tools (1:30:00) Would Shreya get a neuralink implant (1:31:50) Biggest hopes and fears for AI TWITTER: @CogRev_Podcast @ShreyaR (Shreya) @labenz (Nathan) @eriktorenberg (Erik) Thank you Omneky for sponsoring The Cognitive Revolution. 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: MusicLM More show notes and reading material released in our Substack: https://cognitiverevolution.substack.com

Nathan sits down with Vivek Natarajan, research scientist at Google Health. Vivek leads the Google Brain moonshot behind Med-PaLM, Google’s flagship medical large language model, featured in The Economist, The Scientific American, CNBC, and Forbes. In this episode, they discuss the foundational models that Vivek and team built before Med-PaLM, the techniques used to develop Med-PaLM which will be of interest to anyone developing AI systems for high-stakes use cases, and the capabilities for Med-PaLM to equalize access to medical knowledge and care. This episode is part of a series centered on talking to the people at the cutting edge of building AI-driven solutions in medicine. PODCAST RECOMMENDATION: Upstream: https://link.chtbl.com/Upstream LINKS: https://sites.research.google/med-palm/ FEEDBACK / COLLABORATE WITH NATHAN: Email: [email protected] TIMESTAMPS: (00:00) Episode preview (03:43) The story of how Med-PaLM came to be (09:41) Building Med-PaLM’s infrastructure (13:10) The US medical licensing exam as a measure of AI progress (15:23) Sponsor: Omneky (18:17) Practicality of benchmarking in real-world usage (21:39) Overcoming the shortfalls of Flan-PaLM with Med-PaLM (25:08) Choosing to use soft prompting over few shot prompting (30:36) The process of training Flan-PaLM (37:31) A curriculum approach to soft-prompting (38:43) Layperson vs expert interactions with LLMs (43:54) How did the Google team facilitate user exploration of the model’s capabilities? (46:58) Shift in techniques from Med-PaLM to Med-PaLM2 (50:21) Using different prompting strategies with Med-PaLM2 (57:33) Is Med-PaLM 2 preferred over clinicians? (01:02:28) Will there be a multimodal version of Med-PaLM? (01:04:52) Breakthroughs required for AI to further advance human potential (01:10:23) The Med-PaLM business plan (01:12:08) Is there a vision for a consumer product? (01:15:46) The pros and cons of pre-training a model (01:19:45) Vivek’s favorite AI products (01:21:01) Would Vivek get a Neuralink implant? (01:23:08) AI hopes and fears TWITTER: @CogRev_Podcast @vivnat (Vivek) @labenz (Nathan) @eriktorenberg (Erik) Thank you Omneky for sponsoring The Cognitive Revolution. 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: MusicLM More show notes and reading material released in our Substack: https://cognitiverevolution.substack.com/

[Bonus Episode] Future of Life Institute Podcast host Gus Docker interviews Conjecture CEO Connor Leahy to discuss GPT-4, magic, cognitive emulation, demand for human-like AI, and aligning superintelligence. You can read more about Connor's work at https://conjecture.dev Future of Life Institute is the organization that recently published an open letter calling for a six-month pause on training new AI systems. FLI was founded by Jann Tallinn who we interviewed in Episode 16 of The Cognitive Revolution. We think their podcast is excellent. They frequently interview critical thinkers in AI like Neel Nanda, Ajeya Cotra, and Connor Leahy - an episode we found particularly fascinating and is airing for our audience today. The FLI Podcast also recently interviewed Nathan Labenz for a 2-part episode: https://futureoflife.org/podcast/nathan-labenz-on-how-ai-will-transform-the-economy/ SUBSCRIBE: Future of Life Institute Podcast: Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/future-of-life-institute-podcast/id1170991978 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2Op1WO3gwVwCrYHg4eoGyP TIMESTAMPS: (00:00) Episode introduction (01:55) GPT-4  (18:30) "Magic" in machine learning  (29:43) Cognitive emulations  (40:00) Machine learning VS explainability  (49:50) Human data = human AI?  (1:01:50) Analogies for cognitive emulations  (1:28:10) Demand for human-like AI  (1:33:50) Aligning superintelligence  If you'd like to listen to Part 2 of this interview with Connor Leahy, you can head here:  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/connor-leahy-on-the-state-of-ai-and-alignment-research/id1170991978?i=1000609972001