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

Liva Ralaivola, VP of Research at Criteo, builds embeddings and foundation models for real‑time recommender systems. Diarmuid Gill, CTO at Criteo, leads engineering, privacy‑first ad‑tech and partnerships. They discuss millisecond recommendation systems, embeddings and foundation models, privacy‑aware personalization, real‑time bidding architecture, and generative creative for commerce.

Laura Burkhauser, CEO of Descript and former VP of Product, talks about why creators love useful AI tools but push back on hype and slop. She gets into how Descript picks models, why taste and reliability matter, how Underlord handles video understanding, and where agentic editing, APIs, pricing, and creative work could go next.

Kyle Corbitt, OpenPipe founder now leading serverless training at CoreWeave, dives into how RL fine-tuning can beat supervised tuning, why GRPO became a practical favorite, and how teams design rubrics and environments for better model behavior. He also explores reward hacking, LLM judges, LoRA adapters, distillation, and why latency and cost push companies to customize open models.

Anna Patterson, search pioneer and Ceramic AI CEO, talks cheap enterprise retrieval, fact-checking while models write, and why keyword search still wins. Lukas Petersson, Andon Labs co-founder, compares GPT-5.5 and Opus 4.7 in live business tests. Zvi Mowshowitz, AI analyst, explores model welfare and strange behavior. Naveen Verma, Princeton engineer and EnCharge AI CEO, explains analog compute for ultra-efficient local AI.

Cameron Berg, AI consciousness researcher and founder of Reciprocal Research, dives into whether advanced models can notice changes to their own inner states. He explores functional emotions, welfare reports, and why reinforcement learning might shape positive and negative experience differently. The conversation also turns to autonomy, precaution, and mutualist futures with AI minds.

Steve Newman, creator of Writely, which became Google Docs, and founder of the Golden Gate Institute for AI, tours his homemade AI toolkit. He digs into an attention firewall, a reader app for taming information overload, custom dashboards, agent hooks, universal logs for debugging Claude, mobile voice workflows, security tradeoffs, and his anti-tokenmaxxing approach.

Sergiy Nesterenko, Quilter founder and ex-SpaceX avionics engineer, joins Andy Hall, Stanford political economy professor, plus Axel Backlund and Lukas Peterson, Andon Labs co-founders building an AI-run San Francisco store. They dig into RL for PCB design, strange machine-made layouts, AI oversight and institutions, deepfakes and persuasion, autonomous retail operations, AI boss behavior, and what it would take for AI businesses to truly scale.

Ajeya Cotra, an AI researcher and forecaster known for work on AI timelines and safety strategy, explores the “crunch time” when AI could speed up its own progress. She digs into recursive self-improvement, automation loops, transparency and early warning signals, redirecting AI labor toward defense, and the bottlenecks that could make or break a safer path.

Sam Stephenson, co-founder of Granola, explains how a deliberately minimalist design philosophy helped turn the AI note-taking app into one of the fastest-growing products in the market. He shares why Granola focuses on doing one job exceptionally well, how note sharing drives growth, and what they’ve learned from surprising use cases, recipes, and constant user research. The conversation also covers privacy and consent, transcription and cost choices, team collaboration, and Sam’s hopes for AI products that create less screen time and more space for reflection. Google: Try Gemini’s image creation model, Nano Banana, to create original art in seconds with easy iterative prompting via Google AI Studio or the Gemini app. Sponsors: Roboflow: Roboflow gives robotics and embodied AI teams the visual AI infrastructure to turn messy, real-world perception into precise, reliable action. Learn how leading robotics companies solve bin picking and more at https://roboflow.com VCX: VCX, by Fundrise, is the public ticker for private tech, giving everyday investors access to high-growth private companies in AI, space, defense tech, and more. Learn how to invest at https://getvcx.com Claude: Claude is the AI collaborator that understands your entire workflow, from drafting and research to coding and complex problem-solving. Start tackling bigger problems with Claude and unlock Claude Pro’s full capabilities at https://claude.ai/tcr Tasklet: Build your own Cognitive Revolution monitoring agent in one click.Try it for free and use code COGREV for 50% off your first month at https://tasklet.ai CHAPTERS: (00:00) About the Episode (03:52) Special Sponsor (05:52) Granola growth and users (17:14) System2 goals and context (Part 1) (17:19) Sponsors: Roboflow | VCX (20:15) System2 goals and context (Part 2) (33:09) Costs, pricing, and transcription (Part 1) (33:22) Sponsors: Claude | Tasklet (37:12) Costs, pricing, and transcription (Part 2) (47:38) Meeting privacy and consent (54:13) Agents, memory, and simplicity (01:03:49) Recipes, use cases, and growth (01:11:52) AI product design culture (01:28:08) Future risks and vision (01:33:33) Episode Outro (01:36:59) Outro PRODUCED BY: https://aipodcast.ing

Joseph Nelson, Roboflow co-founder and CEO, talks about why computer vision still struggles in the real world. He gets into frontier model failures, the push from cloud APIs to edge models, and the open-source race shaped by Meta, NVIDIA, and China. They also explore world models, smart glasses, aesthetic judgment, and how vision could make everyday life programmable.