Interconnects
by Nathan Lambert
Latest episode
Was I wrong about open models & cyber risks?
Was I wrong about open models & cyber risks?
About this podcast
Audio essays about the latest developments in AI and interviews with leading scientists in the field. Breaking the hype, understanding what's under the hood, and telling stories.
www.interconnects.ai
Episodes
The newest 20 of 169 episodes
- Was I wrong about open models & cyber risks? · 10 minLast week coined the term “Black October“ after an onslaught of critical vulnerability disclosures, including PHP2Shell and a long-standing GitLab bug, signified the moment when…
- Artificial Analysis v5 and the benchmarker's dilemma · 11 minHill-climbing is easy, knowing what to hill-climb is hard. Making scores go up is expensive, but we have a much clearer playbook for it than we do for creating meaningful…
- Podcast: Kimi K3.1 Pro, the new cyber reality, and Muse musings · 47 minWe — Nathan and Florian — wanted to discuss all the messy trade-offs of a busy week in AI and ask all the pressing questions like: * Why did Kimi K3.1 Pro have a mixed reaction…
- Meta shakes up the frontiers, open and closed · 12 minThis has been a week where the balance of American open-weight models took a step change back toward the frontier. Meta took the lead of this charge with Muse Spark Open, which…
- The Cyber Risk Discourse is Broken · 9 minI’ve had one too many discussions on the cyber risks of open models — where someone assumes that either banning open models happens in a silo (and bad actors will somehow…
- Debating RSI, the US-China Gap, and Jaggedness with JS Denain of Epoch AI · 1 h 5 minThis episode is with Jean-Stanislas “JS” Denain of Epoch AI, who leads their Insights Team and is one of the people I find myself debating the state and trajectory of AI with…
- The current balance of power in open models · 18 minI was recently invited to brief a group of Congressional members and staff on the state of open-weight models in the lens of U.S.-China competition. I’m sharing my prepared…
- Why I still haven’t bought into true RSI · 10 minWe’re in an era where a few organizations are using thousands of concurrent agents to improve their processes and output. These organizations happen to be just the frontier AI…
- One resignation turned the embers of AI fear into a wildfire · 11 minAs AI became more powerful, it was inevitable that a different, growing group would start to take AI safety more seriously – what we did not know ahead of time, is which set of…
- When will average people feel AI’s impact? · 9 minHousekeeping: Paid subscribers to Interconnects now get a permanent 40% discount on my book when purchasing at Manning.com. Access the code at the Interconnects perks page. Many…
- I wrote an AI textbook — how long until AI can do it better? · 13 minThere are a lot of criticisms of AI writing, but most of them are focused on more creative, high-voice writing like this blog. Those — including my own piece — often argue that…
- Open models recap: more on Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8, Xi's WAIC speech, distillation, the open-closed gap, and what's next · 49 minExciting news! My book trying to share post-training knowledge with the world is done and shipping soon. Order on Manning or Amazon. Thanks for the support. It’s currently the #1…
- Kimi K3: The open-weights escalation · 20 minOn Thursday July 16th, Moonshot AI released their latest flagship model Kimi K3. K3 is a 2.8T parameter MoE model which will have its weights released on July 27th. Much of this…
- GLM-5.2 is the step change for open agents · 9 minHousekeeping: Following my “State of the blog” post last week, noting a slight increase in paid features, it’s a good time to remind folks that I offer group subscriptions with…
- Banning Open Source AI Would Be A Mistake · 7 minThis post was originally an op-ed co-authored with Kevin Xu of Interconnected for a general, non-technical audience. The gatekeepers — the many media outlets we pitched it to —…
- State of the blog, mid-2026 · 6 minAs I navigate my career change after Ai2, I wanted to share my views of how this blog relates to my missions and broader work. In my farewell post, I summarized my three goals…
- Frontier post-training recipe review with Finbarr Timbers · 57 minAs I’ve been recapping fundamentals of post-training to wrap up my RLHF / Post-training book I knew I needed to get Finbarr Timbers back on the podcast to talk about the state of…
- Claude Fable 5 and new AI safety fables · 12 minEdit Jun. 11: Anthropic changed their silent model manipulation of AI research queries to also use a classifier like the other safety domains. This addresses a key concern I had…
- Farewell Ai2 · 16 minI’m departing the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2), where I got the great privilege to work on the Olmo models, to grow, to learn, and to have broad lasting impacts. This post is an…
- Open and closed models are on different exponentials · 7 minThe largest debate that’ll define the future balance of power between the open and closed AI model ecosystems is primarily economic — it’s if users of AI will continue to pay…
