Unsupervised Learning with Jacob Effron

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 Jungestål, 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 compa

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

Ep 80: CEO of Surge AI Edwin Chen on Why Frontier Labs Are Diverging, RL Environments & Developing Model Taste

Edwin Chen is the founder and CEO of Surge AI, the data infrastructure company behind nearly every major frontier model. Surge works with OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Goo

Ep 79: OpenAI's Head of Product on How the Best Teams Build, Ship and Scale AI Products

This episode features Olivier Godement, Head of Product for Business Products at OpenAI, discussing the current state and future of AI adoption in enterprises, with a par

Ep 78: Jordan Schneider, Host of China Talk, on AI Race, Key Policy Decisions & Unpacking Geopolitical Chip Tension

This week on Unsupervised Learning, Jacob Effron is joined by Jordan Schneider, host of China Talk, who challenges widespread assumptions about US-China AI competition. C

Ep 77: Anthropic’s Dianne Na Penn on Opus 4.5, Rethinking Model Scaffolding & Safety as a Competitive Advantage

This episode features Dianne Na Penn, a senior product leader at Anthropic, discussing the launch of Claude Opus 4.5 and the evolution of frontier AI models. The conversa