Unsupervised Learning with Jacob Effron

Ep 97: Jev Creator on Decision Models, Benchmark Fatigue & Why the Labs Missed It

Jev creator and TypeSafe AI co-founder, Diogo Almeida, joins Jacob Effron to talk about why AI still isn't automating the easy work it's been smart enough to do for years

Ep 96: Nebius CTO on Racing the Hyperscalers Before AWS Wakes Up

Nebius CTO Danila Shtan joins Jacob Effron to talk about what it takes to run an AI cloud at the frontier, and why he thinks the hyperscalers haven’t won this market yet.

Ep 95: Modal CEO on the Future of Inference, the Chaos of the GPU Market & Origins of the Sandbox Bet

Jacob Effron and Pat Chase sit down with Erik Bernhardsson, co-founder and CEO of Modal, for his second appearance on Unsupervised Learning, now with the company past a $

Ep 94: Applied Compute CEO on the Limits of RL, the New AI Hyperscaler & Why Post-Training Wins Inference

Yash Patil, a former OpenAI researcher who worked on Codex and now runs Applied Compute, argues that post-training is the most overlooked part of the AI stack and the key

Ep 93: CEO of Redwood Research Buck Shlegeris on OpenAI/HuggingFace Revelations, Fixing AI Safety & Takeover Odds

Jacob sits down with Buck Shlegeris, CEO of Redwood Research, one of the organizations that led the independent investigation into OpenAI/Hugging Face's incident. They di

AI Vibe Check: Chinese Open Models, Distillation & The Hugging Face Breach

In this installment of their recurring roundtable, Jacob, Ari, and Rob dig into the accelerating Chinese open-source model race, debating whether Kimi K3 has actually clo

Ep 92: xAI Co-Founder Unpacks the Future of Model Development

Igor Babuschkin, co-founder of River AI and formerly a co-founder of xAI, joins to unpack a career that spans nearly every major AI lab: he led the StarCraft and AlphaCod

Ep 91: Top AI Analyst Unpacks Today's AI Hype Cycle

Benedict Evans, one of tech's most widely-read analysts, joins Jacob Effron. The conversation centers on Benedict's core thesis that comparing AI's scale to past platform

Ep 90: AI Pioneer Jürgen Schmidhuber on the State of AI Today

Dr. Jürgen Schmidhuber, a renowned scientist and AI researcher widely regarded as one of the pioneers in the field, originated key ideas behind today's transformers, LSTM

AI Vibe Check: Lab Wars, Why APIs Might Vanish & Future Predictions

Six months after their last roundup, Jacob sits down with Ari Morcos (Datology AI CEO, former Meta AI researcher) and Rob Toews (Radical Ventures partner, Forbes AI colum

Ep 89: AI Research Legend’s Honest Assessment of Where We Are

This episode with Lukasz Kaiser, co-author of the seminal "Attention Is All You Need" transformer paper and former researcher at both Google Brain and OpenAI, is a wide-r

Ep 88: Unpacking DeepMind's Quest for SuperIntelligence with Demis Hassabis' Biographer

Sebastian Mallaby spent three years and 30+ hours interviewing Demis Hassabis in the back of a British pub to write The Infinity Machine, and the conversation uses that r

Ep 87: Gemini Co-Lead on World Models, RL's Next Domains & Continual Learning

Oriol Vinyals, VP of Research at Google DeepMind and co-lead of the Gemini program, joins Jacob the day after Google I/O to unpack the research underpinning Google's late

Ep 86: Yann LeCun on Leaving Meta, Breaking The LLM Paradigm, & Why Hinton is Wrong

Yann LeCun, Turing Award winner and former Chief AI Scientist at Meta, joins Jacob Effron. The conversation centers on Yann's contrarian thesis that LLMs are a dead-end o

Ep 85: Has AI Infra Stabilized, FM Vibe Shift, & What's Next for Coding Agents

This episode is a wide-ranging conversation between Jacob and Swyx (Shawn Wang), an AI engineer, podcaster, and now operator at Cognition, who sits at a uniquely informed

Ep 84: OpenAI’s Chief Scientist on Continual Learning Hype, RL Beyond Code, & Future Alignment Directions

Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI's Chief Scientist, sits down with Jacob to cover the full arc of where AI research stands today and where it's headed. The conversation spans the e

Ep 83: Owning the System of Record, AI-Native Org Charts, & Why ITSM is The Most Vulnerable Legacy Category

Serval is one of the fastest-growing AI-native enterprise software companies right now, and this episode is a rare inside look at the deliberate architectural, go-to-mark

Ep 82: Behind Legora's $550M Raise, Model Competition, Doubling Revenue Every Quarter, & US Expansion

Max Junestrand, CEO of Legora, joins Jacob Effron and Logan Bartlett to discuss the company's $550M Series D and share a candid account of what building an AI-native comp

Ep 81: Ex-OpenAI Researcher On Why He Left, His Honest AGI Timeline, & The Limits of Scaling RL

This episode features Jerry Tworek, a key architect behind OpenAI's breakthrough reasoning models (o1, o3) and Codex, discussing the current state and future of AI. Jerry

AI Vibe Check: The Actual Bottleneck In Research, SSI’s Mystique, & Spicy 2026 Predictions

Ari Morcos and Rob Toews return for their spiciest conversation yet. Fresh from NeurIPS, they debate whether models are truly plateauing or if we're just myopically focus