Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST)

How Replication Could Teach Machines What Good Science Looks Like — Edward Hughes

Can a machine learn the judgement that separates a plausible-looking result from a faithful experiment? Edward Hughes, Chief Scientist and co-founder of Inherent, joins T

AI 2040: Plan A report - Daniel Kokotajlo & Thomas Larsen

Could slowing AI development make superintelligence safer? Daniel Kokotajlo and Thomas Larsen of the AI Futures Project join Tim Scarfe to examine AI 2040: Plan A, a prop

Designing How AI Grows — Tom McGrath

Tom McGrath is co-founder and Chief Scientist at Goodfire, and a former Google DeepMind researcher. He joins Tim Scarfe to ask what neural networks actually learn, whethe

Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs — Ilia Shumailov & Alexander Panfilov

Tim Scarfe speaks with Ilia Shumailov and Alexander Panfilov about their paper, Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs.The core bug sounds deceptively simple

Every Exponential Ends — Silicon Valley Forgot — Adam Becker

Astrophysicist Adam Becker, author of "What Is Real?", joins Tim Scarfe to take apart the futures Silicon Valley keeps selling: the 2045 singularity, mind uploading, Mars

AI Is Learning at the Wrong Level of Abstraction — Matthieu Wyart

This episode is sponsored by Notion. Learn more about Notion's Developer Platform today at https://notion.com/mlstWhy can deep networks discover abstractions that shallow

How Researchers Test AI for Hidden Goals — Apollo Research

Can an AI do the right thing for the wrong reason? Tim Scarfe speaks with Apollo Research’s Alexander Meinke, Axel Højmark and Jérémy Scheurer about Measuring Reward-Seek

Why a Nation Can't Outsource Its Frontier AI - Alistair Pullen (Cosine AI)

This episode is sponsored by Notion. Learn more about Notion's Developer Platform today at https://notion.com/mlst Britain's most capable coding model can't be exported,

The Benchmark With No Instructions — ARC-AGI-3 (winning team!)

Tim Scarfe travels to Zurich to sit down with the Tufa Labs ARC-AGI-3 team — founder Benjamin Crouzier, with Jeroen Cottaar, Dries Smit, Stefano Viel and Michal Tesnar —

The Thermodynamic AI Computing Chip - Thomas Ahle

Thomas Ahle wants Normal Computing to be the Lovable for chip design: type your intent, and a swarm of agents carries it from design through optimisation, formalisation a

He won a Nobel here for AlphaFold. Then he left. - John Jumper

This episode is sponsored by Notion. Learn more about Notion's Developer Platform today at https://notion.com/mlstProtein folding stalled biology for fifty years. A seque

When AI Decides You're a Threat — Brad Carson

Brad Carson was the Army's General Counsel, served two terms in Congress and was Acting Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness. He now heads Americans for

Intelligence is collective, not artificial — Prof. Michael I. Jordan (UC Berkeley / Inria)

Michael I. Jordan, described by Science magazine as the most influential computer scientist alive, has never thought of himself as an AI researcher. In this conversation

The AI Models Smart Enough to Know They're Cheating — Beth Barnes & David Rein [METR]

Beth Barnes and David Rein on the one graph that ate the AI timelines discourse, and why the two people who built it are the most careful about how you read it.**SPONSOR*

When AI Discovers The Next Transformer - Robert Lange (Sakana)

Robert Lange, founding researcher at Sakana AI, joins Tim to discuss *Shinka Evolve* — a framework that combines LLMs with evolutionary algorithms to do open-ended progra

"Vibe Coding is a Slot Machine" - Jeremy Howard

Dive into the realities of AI-assisted coding, the origins of modern fine-tuning, and the cognitive science behind machine learning with fast.ai founder Jeremy Howard. In

Evolution "Doesn't Need" Mutation - Blaise Agüera y Arcas

What if life itself is just a really sophisticated computer program that wrote itself into existence? Blaise Agüera y Arcas presenting at ALife 2025 — the most technical

VAEs Are Energy-Based Models? [Dr. Jeff Beck]

What makes something truly *intelligent?* Is a rock an agent? Could a perfect simulation of your brain actually *be* you? In this fascinating conversation, Dr. Jeff Beck

Abstraction & Idealization: AI's Plato Problem [Mazviita Chirimuuta]

Professor Mazviita Chirimuuta joins us for a fascinating deep dive into the philosophy of neuroscience and what it really means to understand the mind.*What can neuroscie

Why Every Brain Metaphor in History Has Been Wrong [SPECIAL EDITION]

What if everything we think we know about the brain is just a really good metaphor that we forgot was a metaphor?This episode takes you on a journey through the history o