Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST)

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 appe

100 episodes

Why a Nation Can't Outsource Its Frontier AI - Alistair Pullen (Cosine AI)
13 July 2026 55 min transcript summary
The Benchmark With No Instructions — ARC-AGI-3 (winning team!)
1 July 2026 1h 24m transcript summary
The First Thermodynamic AI Computing Chip - Thomas Ahle
28 June 2026 1h 2m transcript summary
He won a Nobel here for AlphaFold. Then he left. - John Jumper
22 June 2026 53 min transcript summary
When AI Decides You're a Threat — Brad Carson
31 May 2026 1h 20m
Intelligence is collective, not artificial — Prof. Michael I. Jordan (UC Berkeley / Inria)
21 May 2026 1h 17m transcript summary
The AI Models Smart Enough to Know They're Cheating — Beth Barnes & David Rein [METR]
4 May 2026 1h 53m transcript summary
When AI Discovers The Next Transformer - Robert Lange (Sakana)
13 March 2026 1h 18m transcript summary
“Vibe Coding is a Slot Machine” - Jeremy Howard
3 March 2026 1h 26m transcript summary
Evolution “Doesn’t Need” Mutation - Blaise Agüera y Arcas
16 February 2026 55 min transcript summary
VAEs Are Energy-Based Models? [Dr. Jeff Beck]
25 January 2026 46 min transcript summary
Abstraction & Idealization: AI's Plato Problem [Mazviita Chirimuuta]
23 January 2026 53 min
Why Every Brain Metaphor in History Has Been Wrong [SPECIAL EDITION]
23 January 2026 42 min
Bayesian Brain, Scientific Method, and Models [Dr. Jeff Beck]
31 December 2025 1h 16m transcript summary
Your Brain is Running a Simulation Right Now [Max Bennett]
30 December 2025 3h 17m
The 3 Laws of Knowledge [César Hidalgo]
27 December 2025 1h 37m
"I Desperately Want To Live In The Matrix" - Dr. Mike Israetel
24 December 2025 2h 55m
Making deep learning perform real algorithms with Category Theory (Andrew Dudzik, Petar Velichkovich, Taco Cohen, Bruno Gavranović, Paul Lessard)
22 December 2025 43 min transcript summary
Are AI Benchmarks Telling The Full Story? [SPONSORED] (Andrew Gordon and Nora Petrova - Prolific)
20 December 2025 16 min
The Mathematical Foundations of Intelligence [Professor Yi Ma]
13 December 2025 1h 39m transcript summary
Pedro Domingos: Tensor Logic Unifies AI Paradigms
8 December 2025 1h 27m transcript summary
He Co-Invented the Transformer. Now: Continuous Thought Machines - Llion Jones and Luke Darlow [Sakana AI]
23 November 2025 1h 12m
Why Humans Are Still Powering AI [Sponsored]
3 November 2025 24 min
The Universal Hierarchy of Life - Prof. Chris Kempes [SFI]
25 October 2025 40 min
Google Researcher Shows Life "Emerges From Code" - Blaise Agüera y Arcas
21 October 2025 59 min
The Secret Engine of AI - Prolific [Sponsored] (Sara Saab, Enzo Blindow)
18 October 2025 1h 19m
AI Agents Can Code 10,000 Lines of Hacking Tools In Seconds - Dr. Ilia Shumailov (ex-GDM)
4 October 2025 1h 1m
New top score on ARC-AGI-2-pub (29.4%) - Jeremy Berman
27 September 2025 1h 8m
Deep Learning is Not So Mysterious or Different - Prof. Andrew Gordon Wilson (NYU)
19 September 2025 2h 3m transcript summary
Karl Friston - Why Intelligence Can't Get Too Large (Goldilocks principle)
10 September 2025 1h 21m
The Day AI Solves My Puzzles Is The Day I Worry (Prof. Cristopher Moore)
4 September 2025 1h 34m
Michael Timothy Bennett: Defining Intelligence and AGI Approaches
28 August 2025 1h 5m
Superintelligence Strategy (Dan Hendrycks)
14 August 2025 1h 45m
DeepMind Genie 3 [World Exclusive] (Jack Parker Holder, Shlomi Fruchter)
5 August 2025 58 min
Large Language Models and Emergence: A Complex Systems Perspective (Prof. David C. Krakauer)
31 July 2025 49 min
Pushing compute to the limits of physics
21 July 2025 1h 23m
The Fractured Entangled Representation Hypothesis (Kenneth Stanley, Akarsh Kumar)
6 July 2025 2h 16m
The Fractured Entangled Representation Hypothesis (Intro)
5 July 2025 15 min
Three Red Lines We're About to Cross Toward AGI (Daniel Kokotajlo, Gary Marcus, Dan Hendrycks)
24 June 2025 2h 7m
How AI Learned to Talk and What It Means - Prof. Christopher Summerfield
17 June 2025 1h 8m
"Blurring Reality" - Chai's Social AI Platform (SPONSORED)
26 May 2025 50 min
Google AlphaEvolve - Discovering new science (exclusive interview)
14 May 2025 1h 13m
Prof. Randall Balestriero - LLMs without pretraining and SSL
23 April 2025 34 min
How Machines Learn to Ignore the Noise (Kevin Ellis + Zenna Tavares)
8 April 2025 1h 16m
Eiso Kant (CTO poolside) - Superhuman Coding Is Coming!
2 April 2025 1h 36m
The Compendium - Connor Leahy and Gabriel Alfour
30 March 2025 1h 37m
ARC Prize v2 Launch! (Francois Chollet and Mike Knoop)
24 March 2025 54 min
Test-Time Adaptation: the key to reasoning with DL (Mohamed Osman)
22 March 2025 1h 3m
GSMSymbolic paper - Iman Mirzadeh (Apple)
19 March 2025 1h 11m
Reasoning, Robustness, and Human Feedback in AI - Max Bartolo (Cohere)
18 March 2025 1h 23m
Tau Language: The Software Synthesis Future (sponsored)
12 March 2025 1h 41m
John Palazza - Vice President of Global Sales @ CentML ( sponsored)
10 March 2025 54 min
Transformers Need Glasses! - Federico Barbero
8 March 2025 1h 0m
Sakana AI - Chris Lu, Robert Tjarko Lange, Cong Lu
1 March 2025 1h 37m
Clement Bonnet - Can Latent Program Networks Solve Abstract Reasoning?
19 February 2025 51 min
Prof. Jakob Foerster - ImageNet Moment for Reinforcement Learning?
18 February 2025 53 min
Daniel Franzen & Jan Disselhoff - ARC Prize 2024 winners
12 February 2025 1h 9m
Sepp Hochreiter - LSTM: The Comeback Story?
12 February 2025 1h 7m
Want to Understand Neural Networks? Think Elastic Origami! - Prof. Randall Balestriero
8 February 2025 1h 18m
Nicholas Carlini (Google DeepMind)
25 January 2025 1h 21m
Subbarao Kambhampati - Do o1 models search?
23 January 2025 1h 32m
How Do AI Models Actually Think? - Laura Ruis
20 January 2025 1h 18m
Jurgen Schmidhuber on Humans co-existing with AIs
16 January 2025 1h 12m
Yoshua Bengio - Designing out Agency for Safe AI
15 January 2025 1h 41m
Francois Chollet - ARC reflections - NeurIPS 2024
9 January 2025 1h 26m
Jeff Clune - Agent AI Needs Darwin
4 January 2025 2h 0m
Neel Nanda - Mechanistic Interpretability (Sparse Autoencoders)
7 December 2024 3h 42m
Jonas Hübotter (ETH) - Test Time Inference
1 December 2024 1h 45m
How AI Could Be A Mathematician's Co-Pilot by 2026 (Prof. Swarat Chaudhuri)
25 November 2024 1h 44m
Nora Belrose - AI Development, Safety, and Meaning
17 November 2024 2h 29m
Why Your GPUs are underutilised for AI - CentML CEO Explains
13 November 2024 2h 8m
Eliezer Yudkowsky and Stephen Wolfram on AI X-risk
11 November 2024 4h 18m
Pattern Recognition vs True Intelligence - Francois Chollet
6 November 2024 2h 42m
The Elegant Math Behind Machine Learning - Anil Ananthaswamy
4 November 2024 1h 53m
Michael Levin - Why Intelligence Isn't Limited To Brains.
24 October 2024 1h 3m
Speechmatics CTO - Next-Generation Speech Recognition
23 October 2024 1h 46m
Dr. Sanjeev Namjoshi - Active Inference
22 October 2024 2h 45m
Joscha Bach - Why Your Thoughts Aren't Yours.
20 October 2024 1h 52m
Decompiling Dreams: A New Approach to ARC? - Alessandro Palmarini
19 October 2024 51 min
It's Not About Scale, It's About Abstraction - Francois Chollet
12 October 2024 46 min
Bold AI Predictions From Cohere Co-founder
10 October 2024 47 min
Open-Ended AI: The Key to Superhuman Intelligence? - Prof. Tim Rocktäschel
4 October 2024 55 min
Ben Goertzel on "Superintelligence"
1 October 2024 1h 37m
Taming Silicon Valley - Prof. Gary Marcus
24 September 2024 1h 56m
Prof. Mark Solms - The Hidden Spring
18 September 2024 1h 26m
Patrick Lewis (Cohere) - Retrieval Augmented Generation
16 September 2024 1h 13m
Ashley Edwards - Genie Paper (DeepMind/Runway)
13 September 2024 25 min
Cohere's SVP Technology - Saurabh Baji
12 September 2024 1h 30m
David Hanson's Vision for Sentient Robots
10 September 2024 53 min
The Fabric of Knowledge - David Spivak
5 September 2024 46 min
Jürgen Schmidhuber - Neural and Non-Neural AI, Reasoning, Transformers, and LSTMs
28 August 2024 1h 39m
"AI should NOT be regulated at all!" - Prof. Pedro Domingos
25 August 2024 2h 12m
Adversarial Examples and Data Modelling - Andrew Ilyas (MIT)
22 August 2024 1h 28m
Joscha Bach - AGI24 Keynote (Cyberanimism)
21 August 2024 57 min
Gary Marcus' keynote at AGI-24
17 August 2024 1h 12m
Is ChatGPT an N-gram model on steroids?
15 August 2024 32 min
Jay Alammar on LLMs, RAG, and AI Engineering
11 August 2024 57 min
Can AI therapy be more effective than drugs?
8 August 2024 2h 14m
Prof. Subbarao Kambhampati - LLMs don't reason, they memorize (ICML2024 2/13)
29 July 2024 1h 42m
Sayash Kapoor - How seriously should we take AI X-risk? (ICML 1/13)
28 July 2024 49 min

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