"The Cognitive Revolution"

The Balance of AI Power: Anton Leicht on Politics, Pacing Deals, and Muddling Through Well

Anton Leicht, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of Threading the Needle, joins Nathan Labenz to explore how political and institutiona

AI:AM Highlights: Astra as AGI, OpenAI's Pause, Mythos @ Mozilla & Human Agency vs Technocapitalism

Nathan Labenz and Prakash Narayanan examine the capabilities of GPT-6 Astra and the economic forces accelerating frontier artificial intelligence. Across a series of feat

Nathan Goes to China #3: US-China Relations, the Art of the AI Deal & the Road to Pax Robotica

In this solo finale to his three-part series following two weeks in China, Nathan delivers a net assessment of Chinese AI capabilities and constraints ahead of dedicated

AI:AM Highlights: Welcome to the AGI Era

This highlights compilation from AI in the AM captures a landmark week shaped by the releases of Anthropic's Fable 5.1 and OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra alongside new revelations

Write, Change, Recall, Forget: MongoDB's Pete Johnson on How Retrieval Drives Agent Performance

Nathan's guest this episode is Pete Johnson, Field CTO of AI at MongoDB, and the conversation is really two conversations woven together: a history of database architectu

AI:AM Highlights: Recursive Self-Improvement, Rushed and Vibe-Coded?

In this AI:AM Highlights episode, Nathan Labenz and Prakash revisit three live mornings with Louis Kirsch and Damon Falck of Inherent Laboratories, Vercel CTO Malte Ubl,

RL's a Hell of a Drug: Metagaming, Reward Seeking & Motivated CoT Reasoning – Bronson Schoen, Apollo

Nathan talks with Apollo Research Member of Technical Staff Bronson Schoen, who studies raw frontier-model chain-of-thought, about what those reasoning traces reveal duri

AI in the AM — Weekly Highlights: Relaunch Week (Aug 17–20, 2026)

Relaunch week of AI in the AM brings together highlights from four live mornings and nine guests, centered on who checks frontier AI, how wide the gap is between lab-inte

Let There Be Germicidal Light: This $500 Fixture Could Stop the Next Pandemic, from Complex Systems

Patrick McKenzie (patio11) hosts Aerolamp CEO Misha Gurevich and Chief Scientist Vivian Belenky, a Columbia University researcher, for a Complex Systems conversation abou

Lindy Teammate: Flo Crivello on Multiplayer Agents, Memory & Why He'd Ban the Chinese Models He Uses

Flo Crivello returns to The Cognitive Revolution to launch Lindy Teammate, an AI employee that lives in Slack, connects to company tools, and accumulates a team’s shared

Thinking in Silico: Goodfire CTO Dan Balsam on Concept Manifolds & a $1000/Month ML Research Agent

Goodfire co-founder and CTO Dan Balsam returns to discuss where interpretability research now stands and to introduce Silico, the $1,000-per-month research platform Goodf

Pick Your Poison: Zvi Mowshowitz on the Unipolar/Multipolar AGI Dilemma, OpenFace & Pacing the ...

Zvi Mowshowitz returns for his eleventh appearance to discuss what current AI tools are actually good for, where they distort judgment, and why writing still matters as a

Nathan Goes to China – Part 2: AI Safety with Chinese Characteristics

Nathan reports from two weeks in China, including WAIC in Shanghai and an AI safety hub launch at Tsinghua, to examine the American policy argument that any safety obliga

Is Offense or Defense Dominant? FAR.AI's Adam Gleave on the AI Security Leaderboard

FAR.AI co-founder and CEO Adam Gleave joins Nathan to discuss FAR.AI’s AI Security Leaderboard, the first systematic head-to-head evaluation of the misuse safeguards fron

Nathan Goes to China – Part 1: Tech & Agent Setup, Chinese AI UX, WAIC, and Attitudes on AI

Nathan returns from two weeks in Beijing and Shanghai for the first of three Chatham House–rules episodes on what China feels like at ground level: getting online, naviga

Alignment with Awakening: Davidad on Moral Realism, AI Wisdom, & why His p(Doom) is Down to 5%

David “davidad” Dalrymple joins the show to explain why he has moved from the ARIA Safeguarded AI and formal-verification agenda toward “Alignment with Awakening,” while

AI:AM Highlights: Exploring the J-Space, AI Superforecasters, SambaNova's Chips, & LTX Video Gen

Nathan Labenz and Prakash Narayanan lead this AI:AM highlights episode with a live, hosts-only exploration of Anthropic’s “global workspace” paper, including the J-space

Intelligence on the Edge: Liquid AI's Ramin Hasani on the Search for Device-Native Foundation Models

Liquid AI co-founder and CEO Ramin Hasani joins Nathan to make a technically grounded case against the idea that scale alone defines the future of AI. Drawing on Liquid’s

1000 Designs a Day: Neural Concept's Thomas von Tschammer on AI-Native Engineering

Thomas von Tschammer, co-founder and Managing Director US of Neural Concept, argues that physics-aware AI is driving a third revolution in engineering physical products.

AI:AM #4: Cameron on Model Consciousness, Duvenaud's Gradual Disempowerment, swyx's AI-Eng Alpha

This AI:AM highlights cut brings together Cameron Berg, David Duvenaud, Michiel Bakker, Shawn “swyx” Wang, and Bing Xu to examine what we understand about frontier AI sys