AI Summer
Episodes
Joel Becker on METR's famous time horizons chart
14 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
METR’s time horizons chart has become one of the most discussed metrics in AI. It estimates the difficulty of tasks — measured in human work hours...
Pete Hegseth's war on Anthropic (with Alan Rozenshtein and Kevin Frazier)
09 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Tim and Dean team up with Scaling Laws hosts Alan Rozenshtein and Kevin Frazier for a joint episode on the fight between Anthropic and the Department ...
Dean on the AI Action Summit in India
26 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Dean joins from London after attending the AI Impact Summit in India. Dean and Tim unpack the summit’s central tension: “middle power” nations l...
Kai Williams on the many masks LLMs wear
22 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
With Dean away, Tim invites his Understanding AI colleague Kai to unpack the surprising ways chatbot personalities can go wrong, a topic Kai covered i...
AI safety in India, AV operators in the Philippines
16 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Dean recorded this episode as he was preparing to attend the India AI Impact Summit — the fourth iteration of an annual gathering that has transform...
Dean is back!
08 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Dean Ball is back. In April 2025, Dean left the podcast to join the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, where he spent four months wo...
Dean Ball is leaving the podcast
16 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This week Dean began a new job: senior policy advisor for AI in the Trump White House. I will miss having him as a co-host and wish him the best in hi...
Charles Yang on AI and Science
07 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This week, Dean and Tim talk to Charles Yang, a former staffer at the Department of Energy who now writes the Rough Drafts newsletter. Tim has written...
James Grimmelmann on the copyright threat to AI companies
19 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
James Grimmelmann is a professor of law at Cornell University and a leading expert on copyright law. Grimmelmann walks through the complex process cou...
Andrew Lee on running an AI email startup
27 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Andrew Lee is the co-founder of Shortwave, an AI-powered email app. He’s also Tim’s brother.Andrew shares how Shortwave evolved from a conventiona...
Dean and Tim on Deep Research and the Paris Summit
21 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Dean and Tim discuss Dean’s trip to Paris for the AI Action Summit, including Vice President Vance’s speech on AI. They talk thro...
Kashmir Hill on falling love with ChatGPT
12 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Kashmir Hill is a reporter at the New York Times who focuses on the social impacts of new technology. In this episode, she describes how users are cus...
Sophia Tung on riding a self-driving taxi in China
05 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Tim and Dean chat with Sophia Tung, an entrepreneur, engineer, and now YouTuber, about her recent experience in a Chinese self-driving taxi from Apoll...
Dean and Tim on DeepSeek and AI progress
29 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Dean and Tim discuss DeepSeek’s r1 release and what it means. We talk export controls, whether the model is a true technical breakthrough, and what ...
Nathan Labenz on the future of AI scaling
27 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Nathan Labenz is the host of our favorite AI podcast, the Cognitive Revolution. A self-described “AI scout,” Nathan uses his podcast to explore a ...
Lennart Heim on the AI diffusion rule
23 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Lennart Heim is an information scientist and researcher in AI governance at the RAND Corporation and a leading scholar on AI export controls. We asked...
Sam Hammond on getting government ready for AI
20 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Sam Hammond is senior economist at the Foundation for American Innovation, a right-leaning tech policy think tank based in Washington DC. Hammond is a...
Ajeya Cotra on AI safety and the future of humanity
16 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Ajeya Cotra works at Open Philanthropy, a leading funder of efforts to combat existential risks from AI. She has led the foundation’s grantmaking on...
Nathan Lambert on the rise of "thinking" language models
14 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Nathan Lambert is the author of the popular AI newsletter Interconnects. He is also a research scientist who leads post-training at the Allen Institut...
Jon Askonas on AI policy in the Trump era
09 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Jon Askonas, an Assistant Professor of Politics at Catholic University of America, is well connected to conservatives and Republicans in Washington DC...