Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST)

This episode is sponsored by Notion. Learn more about Notion's Developer Platform today at can deep networks discover abstractions that shallow models miss? Statistical physicist Matthieu Wyart joins Tim Scarfe to argue...

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-Seeking via Contrastive Belief Updates, their new...

This episode is sponsored by Notion. Learn more about Notion's Developer Platform today at Britain's most capable coding model can't be exported, and that ban is the whole reason Cosine set out to build one from...

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 — to work out what their leaderboard-topping system...

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 and verification to tape-out. To get there, his...

This episode is sponsored by Notion. Learn more about Notion's Developer Platform today at folding stalled biology for fifty years. A sequence of amino acids dictates a three-dimensional shape, but reading that shape...

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 Responsible Innovation, the AI-policy advocacy...

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 he explains why that distinction matters...

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**Prolific - Quality data. From real people. For...

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 program search. The core claim: systems like...

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 this episode, we unpack why AI might be turning...

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 technically detailed public walkthrough of the ideas in his...

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 takes us on a journey through the philosophical...

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 neuroscience actually tell us about how the mind works?*...

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 of scientific simplification, from a young Karl...

Dr. Jeff Beck, mathematician turned computational neuroscientist, joins us for a fascinating deep dive into why the future of AI might look less like ChatGPT and more like your own brain. **SPONSOR MESSAGES START**...

Tim sits down with Max Bennett to explore how our brains evolved over 600 million years—and what that means for understanding both human intelligence and AI. Max isn't a neuroscientist by training. He's a tech...

César Hidalgo has spent years trying to answer a deceptively simple question: What is knowledge, and why is it so hard to move around? We all have this intuition that knowledge is just... information. Write it down in a...

This is a lively, no-holds-barred debate about whether AI can truly be intelligent, conscious, or understand anything at all — and what happens when (or if) machines become smarter than us. Dr. Mike Israetel is a sports...

We often think of Large Language Models (LLMs) as all-knowing, but as the team reveals, they still struggle with the logic of a second-grader. Why can’t ChatGPT reliably add large numbers? Why does it "hallucinate" the...

Is a car that wins a Formula 1 race the best choice for your morning commute? Probably not. In this sponsored deep dive with Prolific, we explore why the same logic applies to Artificial Intelligence. While models are...

What if everything we think we know about AI understanding is wrong? Is compression the key to intelligence? Or is there something more—a leap from memorization to true abstraction? In this fascinating conversation, we...

Pedro Domingos, author of the bestselling book "The Master Algorithm," introduces his latest work: Tensor Logic - a new programming language he believes could become the fundamental language for artificial intelligence...

The Transformer architecture (which powers ChatGPT and nearly all modern AI) might be trapping the industry in a localized rut, preventing us from finding true intelligent reasoning, according to the person who...

Ever wonder where AI models actually get their "intelligence"? We reveal the dirty secret of Silicon Valley: behind every impressive AI system are thousands of real humans providing crucial data, feedback, and...