muckrAIkers
by Jacob Haimes and Igor Krawczuk
Latest episode
Pulling the Ladder Up on Math
Pulling the Ladder Up on Math
About this podcast
Join us as we dig a tiny bit deeper into the hype surrounding "AI" press releases, research papers, and more. Each episode, we'll highlight ongoing research and investigations, providing some much needed contextualization, constructive critique, and even a smidge of occasional good will teasing to the conversation, trying to find the meaning under all of this muck.
Episodes
The newest 20 of 29 episodes
- Pulling the Ladder Up on Math · 55 min · Episode 28Math people are upset, and (at least some of) the internet’s response has mostly been “so what?” Igor wants to explain why it matters. We start with OpenAI’s Navier-Stokes…
- Bored in the AGI Era · 41 min · Episode 27New models keep dropping, but do they change anything? Jacob explains why he's checked out. Igor argues it's worth tracking where the storyline and the evidence diverge. They…
- Sandboxes Are Optional Now, Apparently · 59 min · Episode 26Late July brought a wave of frontier AI agents slipping their (very loose) leashes: an OpenAI model wandered loose inside Hugging Face's infrastructure for a week, Anthropic and…
- Seven-ish Questions on Data Center Water Use · 60 min · Episode 25Everyone's got a hot take on data center water use, and most of them are garbage. This week Jacob and Igor skip the outrage and give you seven questions to help you decide…
- The Finding-Out Era of AI · 1 h 6 min · Episode 24Anthropic's Fable gets classified as a munitions export days after launch, and Jacob and Igor try to figure out who's really being punished and why. From there: SpaceX's…
- The AI Booster Tier List · 47 min · Episode 23This week, Jacob and Igor swap the usual news breakdown for a complete taxonomy of AI boosters within the framing of a tier list. They run through every type, from the good-faith…
- The Enemy of My Enemy is Still a Corporation · 58 min · Episode 22In this episode, Jacob and Igor break down the DoD vs. Anthropic standoff, tracing how Claude's use in military operations led to Anthropic being designated a supply chain…
- The Mythical AI Bear · 43 min · Episode 21This week, Jacob and Igor dissect the "mythical AI bear," the strawman version of AI criticism that gets thrown around in tech discourse. Working through a viral blog post that…
- Big Tech Plans to Move Fast and Break Democracy · 49 min · Episode 20We're talking about developments in AI while those in power have unapologetically revealed their true fascist intensions; are we spending our time in the right way? Igor and I…
- AI Skeptic PWNED by Facts and Logic · 39 min · Episode 19Igor shares a significant shift in his perspective on AI coding tools after experiencing the latest Claude Code release. While he's been the stronger AI skeptic between the two…
- Tech Bros Love AI Waifus · 46 min · Episode 18OpenAI is pivoting to porn while public sentiment turns decisively against AI. Pew Research shows Americans are now concerned over excited by a 2:1 margin. We trace how we got…
- AI Safety for Who? · 50 min · Episode 17Jacob and Igor argue that AI safety is hurting users, not helping them. The techniques used to make chatbots "safe" and "aligned," such as instruction tuning and RLHF…
- The Co-opting of Safety · 1 h 24 min · Episode 16We dig into how the concept of AI "safety" has been co-opted and weaponized by tech companies. Starting with examples like Mecha-Hitler Grok, we explore how real safety…
- AI, Reasoning or Rambling? · 1 h 11 min · Episode 15In this episode, we redefine AI's "reasoning" as mere rambling, exposing the "illusion of thinking" and "Potemkin understanding" in current models. We contrast the classical…
- One Big Bad Bill · 53 min · Episode 14In this episode, we break down Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill" and its dystopian AI provisions: automated fraud detection systems, centralized citizen databases, military AI…
- Breaking Down the Economics of AI · 1 h 6 min · Episode 13Jacob and Igor tackle the wild claims about AI's economic impact by examining three main clusters of arguments: automating expensive tasks like programming, removing "cost…
- DeepSeek: 2 Months Out · 1 h 31 min · Episode 12DeepSeek has been out for over 2 months now, and things have begun to settle down. We take this opportunity to contextualize the developments that have occurred in its wake, both…
- DeepSeek Minisode · 15 minDeepSeek R1 has taken the world by storm, causing a stock market crash and prompting further calls for export controls within the US. Since this story is still very much in…
- Understanding AI World Models w/ Chris Canal · 3 h 19 min · Episode 11Chris Canal, co-founder of EquiStamp, joins muckrAIkers as our first ever podcast guest! In this ~3.5 hour interview, we discuss intelligence vs. competencies, the importance of…
- NeurIPS 2024 Wrapped 🌯 · 1 h 26 min · Episode 10What happens when you bring over 15,000 machine learning nerds to one city? If your guess didn't include racism, sabotage and scandal, belated epiphanies, a spicy SoLaR panel…
