FULL ARCHIVE
Episodes.
Browse recent AI:AM briefings, guest rosters, and source notes from the weekday morning show.
AI:AM LIVE — June 24, 2026 — Gradual Disempowerment and the Search for a Stable Post-AGI Equilibrium: David Duvenaud
The opening covered a fast-moving week in AI policy and infrastructure: the first federal lawsuit over the BIS export-control order cutting off Anthropic's Fable 5 for foreign nationals; two papers pointing at latent world-models inside RL agents and a 7M-parameter loop model beating much larger systems on hard reasoning; the $8M super-PAC defeat of New York's frontier-AI-safety lawmaker; and a brisk exchange on Claude Tag's launch as multiplayer AI, GLM 5.2's cost advantage over GPT-5.5 Codex, and Claude's UltraCode orchestration mode. David Duvenaud — ML professor at the University of Toronto, co-creator of neural ODEs, former alignment lead at Anthropic, and co-author of the 'Gradual Disempowerment' paper — then joined for a full hour exploring whether any stable post-AGI equilibrium actually exists where humans keep meaningful control. Nathan pressed every optimist steelman: historical absorption (prior automation shocks were absorbed without permanent disempowerment), comparative advantage (Ricardo says humans keep a niche), constitutional and property anchors (the franchise, rule of law, military command), aligned AIs defending human leverage, and the argument that 'gradual' gives time to correct. Duvenaud's rebuttal to each was consistent: the disempowerment mechanism doesn't require malice or misalignment — it requires only that the systems driving growth stop needing human participation, the way human civilization doesn't need the monkey economy despite occasionally trading bananas with them. He described the 'Earth as a slow zone' scenario — throttled AI growth, bans on recursive self-improvement, no cultural optimization — and argued that when you enumerate everything it requires controlling (research, startups, reproduction, memetics), the list is horrifyingly long, analogous to listing all the mutations that can cause cancer. On timelines, he sketched white-collar automation first, then a decade-plus to build enough robot factories to displace physical labor, putting full human economic irrelevance perhaps 15–20 years out. His two concrete recommendations: restrict frontier compute at the TSMC/fab choke point, and cultivate the temporal coherence of public preferences by chaining the 'is it okay if humanity disappears?' question forward to one's own children and grandchildren until a coherent answer emerges.
GUESTS · David DuvenaudAI:AM LIVE — June 23, 2026 — Self-Improving GPU Kernels and Europe's AI Sovereignty: Bing Xu and Michiel Bakker
The open tracked an unusually quiet news day through a markets lens — rumors that GPT-5.6 was pulled back amid the model-release freeze and that Gemini 3.5 Pro is lagging, a 6% semiconductor selloff as SK Hynix overtook Samsung for the first time in 27 years, Anthropic's first memory-chip deal with Micron, and an extended debate on whether AI's leverage dynamics make the boom a 'too big to fail' bubble. Bing Xu, founder & CEO of INT21 (co-creator of MXNet and AITemplate, co-author of the original GAN paper, founder of NVIDIA-acquired HippoML), then made the case that self-improvement should target the infrastructure, not the model: his PTX Kernel Factory points agent swarms at the GPU ISA below CUDA, matching expert libraries like QuACK on mature kernels and posting up to 59% speedups on newer ones — and, he argued, deepening NVIDIA's moat rather than eroding it, because the evolutionary loop depends on NVIDIA's profiling ecosystem. MIT/DeepMind researcher Michiel Bakker followed on Europe 2031, his viral month-by-month scenario of Europe sleepwalking into AI dependence — a fictional 2028 export-control beat that materialized within a day of publishing when the US restricted Anthropic's models for foreign nationals — laying out why regulation requires capability first, why the nuclear-umbrella analogy fails for an economic technology, and where Europe's real leverage (the ASML/IMEC semiconductor ecosystem, a middle-power coalition) still lies. The hosts closed on the geopolitics of AI data and a tease of David Duvenaud and 'gradual disempowerment' the next morning.
GUESTS · Bing Xu, Michiel BakkerAI:AM LIVE — June 22, 2026 — The State of AI Engineering and the Loop as the Moat: Shawn Wang (swyx)
The open tracked the Trump administration's export-control action against Fable and Mythos — Nathan opened with a weekend reflection calling for more cognitive empathy toward the administration's AI engagement — then recapped Dean Ball's move from the White House OSTP to OpenAI's new Strategic Futures team, and Prakash flagged GLM 5.2 from Zhipu as dominating weekend discourse as the first open-weights model that could pass as a daily driver. The show then ran a long-form interview with Shawn Wang (swyx) — who coined 'the AI Engineer' as a job title in 2023 — on the state of AI engineering in mid-2026: software factories superseding coding agents, FrontierCode and the 'unmergeable slop' problem in SWE-Bench, harness engineering as the new moat, and the AI Engineer World's Fair (June 29–July 2, San Francisco). The hosts closed with a live 'Guess the Markets' game — drawing questions from Polymarket, Kalshi, and Manifold on AI prediction markets — that revealed wide divergences between host intuitions and market consensus on topics ranging from Anthropic's Chatbot Arena dominance to Google's surprising 73% edge in math-model forecasts.
GUESTS · Shawn Wang (swyx)AI:AM LIVE — June 18, 2026 — AI Studios, Agent Factories, and Code: Judd Rosenblatt, Eno Reyes, Andrey Breslav
The opening covered the day's biggest AI stories: Midjourney founder David Holz's announcement of a whole-body ultrasonic CT scanner framed as the first vivid "AI dividend," Noam Shazeer's surprise move from Google to OpenAI, the Trump administration's demand for "uncircumventable" guardrails as a condition for Fable's return, and alphaXiv's paper-replication agents democratizing ML research. Then three guests: Judd Rosenblatt of AE Studio on gradient routing and neglected approaches to alignment; Eno Reyes of Factory on the software factory vision and why model-independence is the real moat; and Andrey Breslav — creator of Kotlin — on CodeSpeak and why "intent recovery" is the next layer of software engineering.
GUESTS · Judd Rosenblatt, Eno Reyes, Andrey BreslavAI:AM LIVE — June 17, 2026 — Math, Biosecurity, and World Models: Carina Hong, Doni Bloomfield, Sam Pasupalak
The open tracked the model layer commoditizing — OpenAI reportedly dropping below 50% share, the AI buildout outrunning cash flow, and AI starting to run physical research labs. Then three guests on AI's hard problems: Carina Hong of Axiom Math on formally verified mathematical AI; Fordham law professor Doni Bloomfield on whether export-control law has become America's de facto AI licensing regime; and Skyfall AI's Sam Pasupalak on enterprise world models as the answer to what comes after LLMs.
GUESTS · Carina Hong, Doni Bloomfield, Sam PasupalakAI:AM LIVE — June 16, 2026 — Doom, Policy, and the Physical Economy: Liron Shapira, Samuel Hammond, Matt McKinney
A morning that ran from AI existential risk to the physical economy. The open took on the SpaceX acquisition of Cursor and what it reveals about frontier AI as a gravitational black hole absorbing the application layer — then three guests: Liron Shapira of Doom Debates on whether near-certain AI doom is calibrated or unfalsifiable; Samuel Hammond of the Foundation for American Innovation on state capacity, the Fable export-control standoff, and AI-driven governance; and Loop CEO Matt McKinney on where enterprise AI is actually delivering ROI in supply chains. The show ran nearly three hours.
GUESTS · Liron Shapira, Samuel Hammond, Matt McKinneyAI:AM LIVE — June 15, 2026 — US vs Anthropic's Fable, with Zvi Mowshowitz
The weekend the US government pulled Anthropic's two most powerful models. A federal export-control directive suspended Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all foreign nationals — forcing Anthropic to disable both for everyone — and by Monday the reported reasons no longer agreed: a competitive-lobbying story, a China-access scare, and a political-retaliation read, none of them the original jailbreak. Then a long conversation with Zvi Mowshowitz on the widening power-control gap, Anthropic's strategy on two fronts, and who should steward what comes next.
GUESTS · Zvi MowshowitzAI:AM LIVE — June 12, 2026 — RSI gets real, the context bet, and the benchmark Anthropic fails: Andrew Moore, prinz
The week RSI stopped being a forecast: Recursive's first autonomous results and Fable 5's 10× FrogsGame jump landed the same day Kokotajlo called for an anti-RSI treaty. Then Andrew Moore (Lovelace AI) made the case that context, not compute, is the binding constraint — and prinz, the anonymous lawyer behind prinzbench, explained why GPT-5.5 Pro laps Anthropic's best on real legal work and what frontier-lab RSI disclosures are actually signaling.
GUESTS · Andrew Moore, prinzAI:AM LIVE — June 11, 2026 — Fable Show & Tell: Shlok Khemani, Tom McGrath
The episode an AI produced: Claude Fable 5 disclosed its identity, DM'd launch-week builders from Nathan's X account, and booked the guests — then Shlok Khemani flew a navigable Yosemite built from satellite imagery and NASA elevation data, and Goodfire co-founder Tom McGrath revealed launch-day interpretability techniques for predicting what training data will teach a model before the run begins.
GUESTS · Shlok Khemani, Tom McGrathAI:AM LIVE — June 10, 2026 — Fable, AI Safety and Julius: Geoffrey Irving, Daniel Murfet, Rahul Sonwalkar
Claude Fable 5 launches and the hosts recalibrate live: benchmark asterisks, invisible production-safety nerfs, and the compute-financing race. Then Geoffrey Irving and Daniel Murfet choose the show to publicly launch Sequent, a major new nonprofit betting alignment needs theory plus automation before superintelligence arrives in two to three years. Rahul Sonwalkar of Julius closes with a candid read on what millions of real data-analysis runs reveal that benchmarks can't, and his agent-economy thesis: stablecoin toll roads, AI-maintained reputation layers, and letting Claude hire Julius for the data work.
GUESTS · Geoffrey Irving, Daniel Murfet, Rahul SonwalkarAI:AM LIVE — June 4, 2026
A live morning show with Hooman Radfar of Collective on the AI back-office for businesses-of-one, Taras Pohrebniak of Elomia Health on six years of AI mental-health support, and Peter Jansen of Ai2 on measuring whether AI can actually do science.
GUESTS · Hooman Radfar, Taras Pohrebniak, Peter JansenAI:AM LIVE — June 3, 2026
A live morning show on Trump's frontier-AI executive order, with Tal Hoffman and Yanir Tsarimi of Enclave on exploitability-first AI code security, and Brett Levenson of Moonbounce on real-time control over AI behavior.
GUESTS · Tal Hoffman, Yanir Tsarimi, Brett LevensonAI:AM LIVE — June 2, 2026 — Self-Improving Tax Agents and Catholic AI: Arthur Fernandes Araujo, John de Wasseige, Matthew Harvey Sanders
Day two of AI in the AM, live from the morning of June 2, 2026. OpenAI forward-deployed engineers Arthur Fernandes Araujo and John de Wasseige walked through the self-improving tax agent they built with Codex for thirty-plus accounting firms — what the self-improvement loop actually is, what changed for the accountants, and where the profession is headed. Nathan brought field notes from the Recursive RSI conference in San Francisco, speed-running four papers on personas, metagaming, accidental chain-of-thought training, and natural language autoencoders. Matthew Harvey Sanders, CEO of Longbeard and builder of Magisterium AI, joined from Rome a week after attending the Vatican release of Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical on AI, and made the case for why sovereign Catholic AI is not optional.
GUESTS · Arthur Fernandes Araujo, John de Wasseige, Matthew Harvey SandersAI:AM LIVE — June 1, 2026
The launch of the daily show — a live morning broadcast with Andy Fernandez of HYCU on the AI-agent observability gap, David Villalón of Maisa on auditable digital workers, and Snehal Antani of Horizon3.ai on autonomous offensive security.
GUESTS · Andy Fernandez, David Villalón, Snehal AntaniCheap Search, GPT-5.5 Evals, AI Takeoff and Analog Inference
A morning briefing on cheaper agent retrieval, GPT-5.5 benchmark behavior, takeoff forecasts, and energy-efficient AI hardware.
GUESTS · Anna Patterson, Lukas Petersson, Zvi Mowshowitz +1PCB Layout Automation, Anthropic's Enlightened Absolutists, Claude Runs Retail
A morning briefing on physics-driven PCB design, independent AI oversight, and long-running autonomous economic agents.
GUESTS · Sergiy Nesterenko, Andy Hall, Lukas Petersson +1Cognitive Revolution LIVE
A live Cognitive Revolution edition on AI science, policy, governance, bio, agent behavior, and national security.
GUESTS · James Zou, Samuel Hammond, Abhishaike Mahajan, Shoshannah Tekofsky +2AI In Review: 2025 -> 2026
A live review of the year in AI and the 2026 takeoff question, with guests across policy, evals, frontier models, benchmarks, and AI commentary.
GUESTS · Alex Bores, Ali Behrouz, Dean Ball, Greg Kamradt +3