Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST)
by Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST)
Latest episode
Mathematics Just Changed Forever — Kevin Hartnett
Mathematics Just Changed Forever — Kevin Hartnett
About this podcast
Welcome! We engage in fascinating discussions with pre-eminent figures in the AI field. Our flagship show covers current affairs in AI, cognitive science, neuroscience and philosophy of mind with in-depth analysis. Our approach is unrivalled in terms of scope and rigour – we believe in intellectual diversity in AI, and we touch on all of the main ideas in the field with the hype surgically removed. MLST is run by Tim Scarfe, Ph.D (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ecsquizor/) and features regular appearances from MIT Doctor of Philosophy Keith Duggar (https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-keith-duggar/).
Episodes
The newest 20 of 272 episodes
- Mathematics Just Changed Forever — Kevin Hartnett · 1 h 33 minKevin Hartnett is the author of *The Proof in the Code*.SPONSOR:---Cyber Fund built the Monastery to help founders ship products that were impossible a year ago. Applications for…
- What Most People Get Wrong About Evolution | Akarsh Kumar · 48 minA lot of people in AI treat evolution as a dumb fallback, basically random search for when you can't take a gradient. Akarsh Kumar thinks that is wrong. Selection hangs on to…
- How a Voice Agent Learns the Rhythm of Conversation — Shawn Wen · 1 h 10 minTsung-Hsien (Shawn) Wen, CTO of PolyAI, tells Tim Scarfe why voice agents are harder than text agents. Voice adds time, and a good conversation depends on adapting to the person…
- Who Checks a Proof No Human Can Read? — Leo de Moura · 1 h 14 minLeonardo de Moura created Lean and co-created Z3. ---This episode is sponsored by Parallel.Parallel, where agents find answers: web search, extraction and deep research APIs…
- When AI Research Starts Moving Faster Than Human Research - Zhengyao Jiang · 44 minWeco let an AI coding agent rewrite the harness around another agent for eight days: its code, prompts and tools, while the underlying language model stayed fixed. Tim Scarfe…
- How Deep Learning Finally Cracked Messy Tables - Frank Hutter · 1 h 53 minFrank Hutter, co-founder of Prior Labs, talks about TabPFN, a tabular foundation model that makes predictions in a single forward pass, and the research behind it. TabPFN is…
- Why Scaling Prediction Cannot Create Intelligence - Alexander Mattick · 2 h 14 minAlexander Mattick is a researcher at Fraunhofer IIS and a PhD researcher at the University of Technology Nuremberg (UTN), and a regular on Yannic Kilcher's Discord. He first came…
- How Physical AI Learns Across Language, Video and Action — Ming-Yu Liu · 26 minThe car making a left turn at the start of this episode was never filmed. Cosmos 3 generated it. Ming-Yu Liu, who leads the Cosmos research at NVIDIA, explains how one model can…
- Speech Recognition Is Not a Solved Problem — Pavan Kumar Reddy · 1 h 42 minPavan Kumar Reddy leads audio research at Mistral AI. He joins Tim Scarfe for a deep technical tour of Voxtral — and explains why the frontier of deployed voice is still a…
- How Replication Could Teach Machines What Good Science Looks Like — Edward Hughes · 2 h 1 minCan a machine learn the judgement that separates a plausible-looking result from a faithful experiment? Edward Hughes, Chief Scientist and co-founder of Inherent, joins Tim…
- AI 2040: Plan A report - Daniel Kokotajlo & Thomas Larsen · 1 h 29 minCould slowing AI development make superintelligence safer? Daniel Kokotajlo and Thomas Larsen of the AI Futures Project join Tim Scarfe to examine AI 2040: Plan A, a proposal to…
- Designing How AI Grows — Tom McGrath · 1 h 40 minTom McGrath is co-founder and Chief Scientist at Goodfire, and a former Google DeepMind researcher. He joins Tim Scarfe to ask what neural networks actually learn, whether their…
- Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs — Ilia Shumailov & Alexander Panfilov · 49 minTim Scarfe speaks with Ilia Shumailov and Alexander Panfilov about their paper, Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs.The core bug sounds deceptively simple…
- Every Exponential Ends — Silicon Valley Forgot — Adam Becker · 1 h 18 minAstrophysicist Adam Becker, author of "What Is Real?", joins Tim Scarfe to take apart the futures Silicon Valley keeps selling: the 2045 singularity, mind uploading, Mars…
- AI Is Learning at the Wrong Level of Abstraction — Matthieu Wyart · 1 h 18 minThis episode is sponsored by Notion. Learn more about Notion's Developer Platform today at https://notion.com/mlstWhy can deep networks discover abstractions that shallow models…
- How Researchers Test AI for Hidden Goals — Apollo Research · 1 h 18 minCan 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…
- Why a Nation Can't Outsource Its Frontier AI - Alistair Pullen (Cosine AI) · 56 minThis episode is sponsored by Notion. Learn more about Notion's Developer Platform today at https://notion.com/mlst Britain's most capable coding model can't be exported, and…
- The Benchmark With No Instructions — ARC-AGI-3 (winning team!) · 1 h 24 minTim 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…
- The Thermodynamic AI Computing Chip - Thomas Ahle · 1 h 2 minThomas 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…
- He won a Nobel here for AlphaFold. Then he left. - John Jumper · 53 minThis episode is sponsored by Notion. Learn more about Notion's Developer Platform today at https://notion.com/mlstProtein folding stalled biology for fifty years. A sequence of…
