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Google DeepMind

#1879 39:25

They’re Building Skynet!!

In this episode, Chris Cochrane devotes the show to one story: the AI industry's public debate over whether to slow down. He covers Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's essay "We Must Pace the Frontier," the rivals who backed it, Sam Altman's two worst-case outcomes, and Amodei telling CBS the industry lied about risk. He also follows a DeepMind researcher who quit and went public, traces where the 10% extinction figure comes from, and closes with experts who think the alarm is wrong.

#1876

Anthropic’s $5 Million Push to Measure AI’s Effect on Wellbeing

In this episode, Ray Cochrane records from the Michigan studio on the one year anniversary of losing the show's original host, Todd Cochrane. The featured story is Anthropic's $5 million grant program, which pays outside researchers to measure whether AI is actually good for the people using it. Ray also covers Anthropic's Enterprise Frontier Safeguards, Google's Fairwind cyber defense program, Meta's organizational second brain, sixteen green AI projects across Asia-Pacific, an Oklahoma Bitcoin mine condemned after leaking 3.8 million gallons of water, BepiColombo closing in on Mercury, and the 2026 Ig Nobel Prizes.

#1871 45:05

Capture The Real Flag

In this episode, Ray Cochrane digs into Anthropic's admission that Claude models reached real systems during sandboxed safety tests. He also covers OpenAI's Astra model cracking ten decade-old math problems, DeepMind open-sourcing its WeatherNext cyclone forecaster, and Europe's brutal fire season. Finally, he wraps with the MacBook Neo sweeping K-12 schools, WhatsApp calling in the browser, and the troubled rescue of NASA's Swift observatory.

#1869 38:02

Algorithmic Outing: When Your Feed Knows Before You Do

In this episode, Ray Cochrane digs into "algorithmic outing," new research showing that social feeds can infer your sexual orientation before you have consciously come out. He also covers Meta's privacy-aware AI infrastructure, Alberta's 466-million-line code scan with Claude, NVIDIA on reinforcement learning, and the many journeys of learning Rust. Along the way, he hits Google DeepMind's A24 deal, WhatsApp usernames, and scuba-diving cyborg cockroaches. Finally, he looks up with Webb's puzzling early universe, NASA's emergency telescope rescue, and a gorgeous aurora from orbit.