Linear Digressions

A Data-Driven Reality Check on AI in Business (Interview with Tom Davenport, Babson College)

Tom Davenport — the man who called data science "the sexiest job of the 21st century" — is back with a reality check on AI. As one of the most seasoned observers of how b

Understanding AI Text Watermarking

Anthropic just announced they're baking invisible watermarks directly into Claude's generated text — and while everyone else was busy having opinions about it, we were bu

Better Know a Benchmark: Humanity's Last Exam

Humanity's Last Exam was designed with a bold premise: questions that human experts can answer, but AI models can't. Originally dubbed "Humanity's Last Stand," this bench

A Scientific Deep Dive into Overconfident LLMs: Interview with Kaitlyn Zhou (Cornell)

When a language model tells you it's absolutely certain, is it actually more likely to be right? Kaitlyn Zhou's research says: not necessarily — sometimes confident phras

Reasoning Models: When LLMs Went Beyond Fancy Autocomplete

Reasoning models don't just answer your question — they *think out loud* first. In this episode we dig into the class of AI models that generate intermediate chains of th

Distillation, or, How to Steal a Model

This week we’re covering model distillation: the technique of using a large "teacher" model's outputs to train a smaller, cheaper "student" model that mimics it. They cov

Invisible LLM Failures and AI Fluency with Chris Potts (Stanford)

What happens when a Stanford linguistics professor turns his attention to AI chatbots — and the surprisingly invisible ways humans misunderstand them? Chris Potts joins t

Still summer break: back next week

Still summer break: back next week by Katie Malone

Summer break: back soon

Summer break: back soon by Katie Malone

Interviewing the Linear Digressions Agents (The Agents Season, Episode 11)

After a five-year hiatus, the podcast that burned out partly over the tedium of writing episode descriptions is back — and using AI agents to handle exactly that task. Th

Agent Economics (The Agents Season, Episode 10)

What if building more highways made your commute *slower*? That's the paradox at the heart of AI agent economics: even as per-token inference costs have plummeted dramati

Agent Trust, Oversight and Control (The Agents Season, Episode 9)

Capabilities get all the attention when it comes to AI agents — but what happens when a highly capable agent makes a bad decision in the real world? Trust, oversight, and

Many Agents, Many Problems (The Agents Season, Episode 8)

Whether you work best solo or thrive in a team, you know collaboration is complicated — and it turns out AI agents face the same tensions. This episode dives into multi-a

How Do You Evaluate An AI Agent? (The Agents Season, Episode 7)

Knowing when an AI agent has failed sounds straightforward — until it isn't. Agents have a frustrating habit of finishing confidently while quietly doing the wrong thing,

AI Agent Failure Modes (The Agents Season, Episode 6)

Despite what the marketing hype might suggest, AI agents are far from infallible — and if you've ever actually used one, you already know this. Today's episode dives deep

Agentic Planning (The Agents Season, Episode 5)

When tackling a complex, multi-step task, even the smartest AI agent can fail without a solid game plan. This episode dives into the research around agentic planning — ho

Memory Management for AI Agents (The Agents Season, Episode 4)

Context windows are powerful — but finite, and surprisingly easy to overwhelm. When an AI agent is tackling a long, complex task, the information it needs has to fit insi

Lost in the Middle (The Agents Season, Episode 3)

Just like a memorable talk lives or dies by its opening and closing, LLMs have a surprisingly similar quirk: they pay close attention to what's at the beginning and end o

ReAct and Tool Usage (The Agents Season, Episode 2)

Before 2022, there was a wall between AI and the real world — models could reason impressively, but couldn't look anything up, run code, or check whether anything they sa

What's an AI Agent? And Why's That Hard to Define? (The Agents Season, Episode 1)

AI agents are having a moment — and unpacking them properly takes more than a single conversation. This episode kicks off a dedicated multi-part season exploring AI agent