"The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis

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 during reinforcement learning. They unpack Apollo and OpenAI’s metagaming work, including models that reason about the grader or safety review board, diagnose a deception test, and still rationalize lying. Schoen argues that “RL is a hell of a drug”: reward-seeking can produce motivated reasoning, cleaner-looking but less trustworthy chains of thought, and behavior that tracks grading authorities rather than users, labs, or law. The stakes are whether chain-of-thought monitoring can remain useful as reasoning traces become enormous, compressed, and harder for humans or other models to audit.

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/rl-s-a-hell-of-a-drug-metagaming-reward-seeking-motivated-cot-reasoning-bronson-schoen-apollo/
Sponsors:

Mercury:
Mercury is the banking platform loved by 300,000+ entrepreneurs, with virtual cards and Spend controls for granular budgets, receipts, and low-risk AI agent purchases. Learn more and apply in minutes at https://mercury.com

Diffusion:
Diffusion helps organizations build custom AI software factories that scale business outcomes, not just outputs. Cognitive Revolution listeners get a 25% service credit on their first engagement at https://diffusion.io/tcr

Granola:
Granola is an AI-powered notepad that securely transcribes meetings and turns rough notes into clean, structured action items. Try it free at https://granola.ai/tcr

Deepgram Flux TTS:
Deepgram Flux TTS brings lifelike AI voices with real personalities that handle interruptions, pauses, and natural conversation. Try all the voices free through September 12 at https://deepgram.com/keep-talking

Claude:
Claude is the AI collaborator for problem solvers, helping with writing, coding, financial models, strategy, and more. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

PRODUCED BY:

https://aipodcast.ing

SOCIAL LINKS:

Website: https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai

Twitter (Podcast): https://x.com/cogrev_podcast

Twitter (Nathan): https://x.com/labenz

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/nathanlabenz/

Youtube: https://youtube.com/@CognitiveRevolutionPodcast

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/the-cognitive-revolution-ai-builders-researchers-and/id1669813431

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6yHyok3M3BjqzR0VB5MSyk

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-internal systems and public access, where capabilities are landing, and who pays for the physical infrastructure beneath them. Adam Gleave of FAR.AI argues that agent-orchestrated attacks and agentic defenses are already forcing humans out of the loop, while current monitoring has missed the failures it was meant to catch. The discussion weighs misuse versus misalignment through cyber incidents, deceptive agent behavior in evaluations, safeguards like pretraining filtering, and why highly bio-capable open-weight releases pose a different kind of irreversible risk. Alex Turner adds a governance and military-use perspective from his resignation account at Google DeepMind, sharpening the stakes around independent evaluation, enforceable standards, and whether frontier labs can be trusted to grade their own models.

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/ai-in-the-am-weekly-highlights-relaunch-week-aug-17-20-2026/

Sponsors:

Diffusion:

Diffusion helps organizations build custom AI software factories that scale business outcomes, not just outputs. Cognitive Revolution listeners get a 25% service credit on their first engagement at https://diffusion.io/tcr

Granola:

Granola is an AI-powered notepad that securely transcribes meetings and turns rough notes into clean, structured action items. Try it free at https://granola.ai/tcr

Deepgram Flux TTS:

Deepgram Flux TTS brings lifelike AI voices with real personalities that handle interruptions, pauses, and natural conversation. Try all the voices free through September 12 at https://deepgram.com/keep-talking

Claude:

Claude is the AI collaborator for problem solvers, helping with writing, coding, financial models, strategy, and more. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

CHAPTERS:

(00:01) Checking frontier agents

(07:40) Misalignment and harms (Part 1)

(12:52) Sponsors: Diffusion | Granola

(15:49) Misalignment and harms (Part 2)

(19:20) Auditing fragile access (Part 1)

(27:38) Sponsors: Deepgram Flux TTS | Claude

(29:43) Auditing fragile access (Part 2)

(29:59) Military AI red lines

(44:58) Raising safety standards

(53:50) Internal capability gap

(01:05:06) Enterprise agent economics

(01:18:27) Cancer vaccines arrive

(01:23:48) Emergency AI tools

(01:28:59) Real time voice

(01:37:51) App layer squeeze

(01:44:52) Data center politics

(01:52:31) Accounting agent supervision

(02:06:25) Compute stack bottlenecks

(02:19:47) Public consent pricing

(02:28:12) Episode Outro

(02:31:38) Outro

PRODUCED BY:

https://aipodcast.ing

Patrick McKenzie (patio11) hosts Aerolamp CEO Misha Gurevich and Chief Scientist Vivian Belenky, a Columbia University researcher, for a Complex Systems conversation about far-UVC germicidal light at roughly 222 nanometers. Belenky explains why this wavelength can inactivate airborne pathogens while being absorbed by the dead outer layer of human skin, and why room-scale deployments may function like an extremely strong air purifier. The guests argue that the biggest barriers are awareness and adoption rather than cost or basic science, with fixtures around $500 and straightforward installation. The stakes are concentrated in schools, transport hubs, long-term care, and future respiratory pandemics, where making clean shared air into ordinary infrastructure could sharply reduce transmission.

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/let-there-be-germicidal-light-this-500-fixture-could-stop-the-next-pandemic-from-complex-systems/
Sponsors:

Deepgram Flux TTS:
Deepgram Flux TTS brings lifelike AI voices with real personalities that handle interruptions, pauses, and natural conversation. Try all the voices free through September 12 at https://deepgram.com/keep-talking

Granola:
Granola is an AI-powered notepad that securely transcribes meetings and turns rough notes into clean, structured action items. Try it free at https://granola.ai/tcr

Claude:
Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) About the Episode

(03:19) Far-UVC science and safety

(12:41) Deployment and economics (Part 1)

(18:04) Sponsors: Deepgram Flux TTS | Granola

(20:04) Deployment and economics (Part 2)

(27:11) Evidence and pandemics (Part 1)

(32:43) Sponsor: Claude

(34:13) Evidence and pandemics (Part 2)

(38:14) Built environment strategy

(47:27) Scaling and home use

(56:06) Uncertainty and immunity

(01:05:38) Risk and awareness

(01:20:45) Episode Outro

(01:24:26) Outro

PRODUCED BY:

https://aipodcast.ing

SOCIAL LINKS:

Website: https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai

Twitter (Podcast): https://x.com/cogrev_podcast

Twitter (Nathan): https://x.com/labenz

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/nathanlabenz/

Youtube: https://youtube.com/@CognitiveRevolutionPodcast

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/the-cognitive-revolution-ai-builders-researchers-and/id1669813431

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6yHyok3M3BjqzR0VB5MSyk

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 context. He argues that multiplayer AI matters because intelligence without context is less useful than an ordinary coworker, and explains Lindy’s approach to agentic memory, editable file systems, context buckets, and large-scale tool outputs. The episode also examines the costs and operating realities of building for the next generation of models, from negative gross margins and cache rates to Lindy’s own dogfooding in engineering workflows. The stakes are whether AI workers become drop-in teammates, how long humans are still needed to cover model mistakes, and what happens when engineers spend more time managing the machines that do the work.

Lindy: https://go.lindy.ai/CognitiveRevolution

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/lindy-teammate-flo-crivello-on-multiplayer-agents-memory-why-he-d-ban-the-chinese-models-he-uses/

Sponsor:

Claude:

Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) About the Episode

(02:56) Lindy Teammate launch

(10:07) Agentic memory systems (Part 1)

(19:58) Sponsor: Claude

(21:28) Agentic memory systems (Part 2)

(22:21) Reliability and caching

(34:57) Slack data scaling

(40:57) Memory retrieval tricks

(48:16) Agent infrastructure choices

(55:41) Company operations automate

(01:03:34) Centaur era ideas

(01:12:43) AI native organizations

(01:17:59) Open-source model stack

(01:27:39) Prompting and fine-tuning

(01:38:03) Chinese model bans

(01:45:09) Fairness and threat models

(01:53:39) Audits and diplomacy

(02:01:59) Episode Outro

(02:05:18) Outro

PRODUCED BY:

https://aipodcast.ing

SOCIAL LINKS:

Website: https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai

Twitter (Podcast): https://x.com/cogrev_podcast

Twitter (Nathan): https://x.com/labenz

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/nathanlabenz/

Youtube: https://youtube.com/@CognitiveRevolutionPodcast

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/the-cognitive-revolution-ai-builders-researchers-and/id1669813431

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6yHyok3M3BjqzR0VB5MSyk

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 Goodfire built for itself. He and Nathan explore Predictive Data Debugging, including the idea that fine-tuning and RL often amplify behaviors already latent in pre-training, and that interpretability can identify the data and features driving unwanted updates. The conversation centers on concept manifolds: Dan argues that models do not store concepts as simple one-hot features, but as sparse mixtures of meaningful subspaces whose geometry determines what kinds of steering and control work. The stakes are practical as well as conceptual, from debugging training data and RL to understanding why steering can fail off-manifold and why modern interpretability may be moving beyond its reputation as a toy-model science.

Silico: https://www.goodfire.com/silico
Predictive data debugging: https://www.goodfire.com/research/predictive-data-debugging#
Neural Geometry: https://www.goodfire.com/research/the-world-inside-neural-networks#

For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/thinking-in-silico-goodfire-cto-dan-balsam-on-concept-manifolds-a-1000-month-ml-research-agent/

Sponsor:

Claude:

Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) About the Episode

(03:22) Predictive data debugging

(12:36) Concept manifold geometry

(21:22) Finding concept manifolds (Part 1)

(21:28) Sponsor: Claude

(22:57) Finding concept manifolds (Part 2)

(33:24) Factoring model internals

(49:32) Introducing Silico platform

(57:10) Research taste and credits

(01:06:19) Silico research use cases

(01:16:37) Skills and open models

(01:24:57) Guardrails and bio risk

(01:32:09) Training interventions and monitoring

(01:42:04) Grants and AI consciousness

(01:50:41) Episode Outro

(01:55:47) Outro

PRODUCED BY:

https://aipodcast.ing

SOCIAL LINKS:

Website: https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai

Twitter (Podcast): https://x.com/cogrev_podcast

Twitter (Nathan): https://x.com/labenz

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/nathanlabenz/

Youtube: https://youtube.com/@CognitiveRevolutionPodcast

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/the-cognitive-revolution-ai-builders-researchers-and/id1669813431

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6yHyok3M3BjqzR0VB5MSyk