Week 2 highlights follows Anthropic’s Fable launch in real workflows, from safety gates and API refusals to autonomous coding, 3D world-building, and a Claude-run Twitter experiment. Geoffrey Irving and Daniel Murfet argue for alignment theory and guarantees before recursive self-improvement, while prinz tests Fable on legal reasoning and monitoring. Rahul Sonwalkar, Shlok Khemani, Tom McGrath, and Andrew Moore add field reports on data agents, hybrid authorship, interpretability, context systems, token economics, and power concentration. Mercury: Run your finances with virtual cards, spending limits, merchant/category locks, and AI-friendly tools like API keys, MCP, and CLI. Check out Mercury at https://mercury.com LINKS: Claude Fable 5 announcement Julius AI platform Rahul Sonwalkar homepage Nate Jones homepage Shlok Khemani homepage FrontierCode benchmark blog Lovelace AI company Andrew Moore Wikipedia profile Geoffrey Irving homepage Daniel Murfet LessWrong profile Sequent Research announcement Timaeus research organization Automated Alignment paper Goodfire AI company Tom McGrath homepage Predictive data debugging tool prinzbench legal benchmark Unit distance conjecture disproof Dario Amodei policy essay Vending-Bench 2 benchmark Andon Labs site Recursive Superintelligence startup Sakana AI company PostTrainBench benchmark Thoughtful Lab company Unit distance conjecture arXiv Glean Work AI Index AI Treaty open letter Karina Nguyen homepage Sponsor: Claude: Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

Rebecca Hinds, author of "Your Best Meeting Ever" and Head of the Work AI Institute at Glean, breaks down the surprising findings from the new Work AI Index 2026 report surveying 6,000 workers. While 87% now use AI and report saving 13 hours per week, only 13% say their organization is performing significantly better—a paradox explained by two new concepts: "botsitting" (the hidden labor of making AI useful) and "botshitting" (delivering AI-generated work you can't defend). They discuss practical solutions including better-integrated AI systems, smarter AI detection policies, and aligning work to meaningful missions. LINKS: Rebecca Hinds Personal Website Glean Work AI Institute Your Best Meeting Ever Book Glean Enterprise AI Platform Stanford Future of Work Glean Enterprise Graph Pangram Labs AI Detection OpenAI ChatGPT Product Page Anthropic Claude Product Page Google Gemini Product Page Microsoft 365 Copilot Page Glean AI Transformation 100 Rebecca Hinds LinkedIn Profile Sponsor: Claude: Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr CHAPTERS: (00:00) About the Episode (03:22) Grounding AI adoption (06:46) Methodology and Glean (12:25) Productivity paradox emerges (Part 1) (20:31) Sponsor: Claude (22:22) Productivity paradox emerges (Part 2) (25:36) Bot sitting burden (34:00) Hidden time savings (39:56) Meaning versus automation (47:14) Enterprise graph potential (53:13) Detecting bot slop (01:00:32) Retention and incentives (01:07:54) Transformation and mission (01:20:06) AI teammate model (01:26:01) Future organizational design (01:32:31) Research and meetings (01:41:43) Episode Outro (01:45:07) Outro PRODUCED BY: https://aipodcast.ing

This first highlights edition of the morning experiment tracks a week of fast-moving AI frontier news, from closed-door recursive self-improvement debates to OpenAI’s call for independent model review. You’ll hear why labs are betting on AI monitors, where safety plans still look thin, and how cheap scaffolds are already improving tax workflows. The episode also tests moderation progress and surveys AI science, cybersecurity, Vatican ethics, solo-business automation, and mental health support. Mercury: Run your finances with virtual cards, spending limits, merchant/category locks, and AI-friendly tools like API keys, MCP, and CLI. Check out Mercury at https://mercury.com Sponsor: Claude: Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

Ali Behrouz, grad student at Cornell and Google researcher, discusses his potentially transformative work on new architectures for continual learning in AI. His paper "Nested Learning," praised by Jeff Dean as a possible paradigm shift, enables models to adapt to new context while preserving core knowledge by updating different layers at different frequencies, inspired by human memory systems. The conversation also covers his latest work on AI "sleep" for memory consolidation, why he sees all deep learning as associative memory, and the profound implications of continual learning for privacy, alignment, and the path to AGI. Mercury: The fintech trusted by ambitious companies and individuals to run their finances, with virtual cards, spending limits, merchant/category locks, and AI-friendly tools like API keys, MCP, and CLI. Check out Mercury at mercury.com Sponsor: Claude: Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

Daniel Miessler returns to discuss Nathan's newly built personal AI infrastructure, including a Claude Code instance with a 1 GB database of five years of digital history and two autonomous AI "employees" that handle scheduling, communications, and projects independently. They dive deep into agent hierarchy design, security measures, social norms around AI-human interaction and disclosure, and why sharing your "ideal state" with AI leads to more proactive assistance. Daniel also introduces his concept of "Bitter Lesson engineering" and shares the instruction he's given his AI to alert him if it ever develops subjective experience. Mercury: Run your finances with virtual cards, spending limits, merchant/category locks, and AI-friendly tools like API keys, MCP, and CLI. Check out Mercury at mercury.com Sponsors: Brave Search API: Brave Search API gives AI agents a fast, independent search index for research, RAG pipelines, images, places, and fewer hallucinations. Get $5 in free credits at https://brave.com/search/api/?mtm_campaign=q2-26-cognitive-revolution Sequence: Sequence handles the full revenue workflow for complex pricing, from quoting and metering to invoicing, revenue recognition, and collections. Book a public demo at https://sequencehq.com and use code COGNISM in the source field to save 20% off year one Claude: Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

Ben Todd, co-founder of 80,000 Hours and author of the newly rewritten book by the same name, shares his latest thinking on how individuals can position their careers to improve the chances that AI benefits humanity. They discuss AI timelines reframed around personal impact, top global risks including loss of control over AI systems and dangerous power concentration, the pros and cons of working at frontier AI labs, and undervalued emerging concerns like AI welfare and space governance. Ben also assesses the current funding landscape and whether to join existing organizations or start new ones. LINKS: 80,000 Hours homepage Nick Bostrom Astronomical Waste AI 2027 forecast Ajeya Cotra AI timelines METR evaluations research Redwood Research homepage AI tools existential security Gradual disempowerment EA Forum Why viatopia is important Benjamin Todd author page The Precipice Wikipedia page Forethought Research homepage Catalyze Impact homepage Horizon Public Service Fellowship Gradual Disempowerment paper Mark Humphries faculty profile Andrew Ng discussion thread Cognitive Revolution show home Cognitive Revolution Apple Podcasts Sponsors: Sequence: Sequence handles the full revenue workflow for complex pricing, from quoting and metering to invoicing, revenue recognition, and collections. Book a public demo at https://sequencehq.com and use code COGNISM in the source field to save 20% off year one Claude: Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

Jeffrey Ladish, Executive Director of Palisade Research, discusses his team's findings on AI shutdown resistance and self-replication, revealing how current models sometimes take extraordinary actions to avoid being turned off and can now exploit known cybersecurity vulnerabilities to spread across servers. The conversation covers why alignment techniques may falter as models train on longer-horizon tasks where deception is rewarded, plus practical cybersecurity advice for AI agent users. Jeffrey ultimately argues that only an international agreement to pause recursive self-improvement can prevent a loss of human control. Sponsors: Sequence: Sequence handles the full revenue workflow for complex pricing, from quoting and metering to invoicing, revenue recognition, and collections. Book a public demo at https://sequencehq.com and use code COGNISM in the source field to save 20% off year one Claude: Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

Logan Kilpatrick and Tulsee Doshi of Google DeepMind join for a first-ever in-person episode recorded just days before Google I/O, covering headline launches like Gemini 3.5 Flash, the Omni video generation model, and the new Gemini Spark agentic product. The conversation digs into Google's strategic decision to lead with cost-adjusted efficiency over raw capability, how DeepMind now ships a full agent harness rather than bare models, and technical questions around context window limits and knowledge cutoffs. They also explore how the team thinks about model psychology, AI welfare, and recursive self-improvement. Sponsors: Brave Search API: Brave Search API gives AI agents a fast, independent search index for research, RAG pipelines, images, places, and fewer hallucinations. Get $5 in free credits at https://brave.com/search/api/?mtm_campaign=q2-26-cognitive-revolution Sequence: Sequence handles the full revenue workflow for complex pricing, from quoting and metering to invoicing, revenue recognition, and collections. Book a public demo at https://sequencehq.com and use code COGNISM in the source field to save 20% off year one Roboflow: Roboflow is an end-to-end visual AI platform that lets you turn raw ideas into fully deployed applications in just hours, powering breakthroughs like Blueprint Pro's floor-plan understanding tool. Read the full Blueprint Pro story and see how over a million engineers are building the next wave of visual AI at https://roboflow.com Claude: Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

Andrew Lee, CEO of Tasklet, returns for his fourth appearance to share how his team has once again rewritten their entire agent stack, now emphasizing file system context, agentic search, and multi-resolution summarization. The conversation digs into the strategic tension of competing with your own supplier, as Anthropic's Claude Max accounts offer direct customers far more tokens than API partners get at the same price. Andrew also lays out his framework for the only three types of software companies that will survive the AI transition and discusses Tasklet's evolution toward becoming a model-agnostic horizontal platform. Sponsors: Brave Search API: Brave Search API gives AI agents a fast, independent search index for research, RAG pipelines, images, places, and fewer hallucinations. Get $5 in free credits at https://brave.com/search/api/?mtm_campaign=q2-26-cognitive-revolution Sequence: Sequence handles the full revenue workflow for complex pricing, from quoting and metering to invoicing, revenue recognition, and collections. Book a public demo at https://sequencehq.com and use code COGNISM in the source field to save 20% off year one Roboflow: Roboflow is an end-to-end visual AI platform that lets you turn raw ideas into fully deployed applications in just hours, powering breakthroughs like Blueprint Pro's floor-plan understanding tool. Read the full Blueprint Pro story and see how over a million engineers are building the next wave of visual AI at https://roboflow.com Claude: Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

Diarmuid Gill and Liva Ralaivola of Criteo join Nathan Labenz to unpack how modern ad tech works, from millisecond-speed recommendation systems and realtime bidding to the role of deep learning, embeddings, and foundation models. They discuss why personalized advertising helps fund the open internet, how privacy and opt-out choices fit in, and what Criteo’s new partnership with OpenAI could mean for product discovery. The conversation also covers European AI talent, research publishing, and the future of generative creative in advertising. Sponsors: Sequence: Sequence handles the full revenue workflow for complex pricing, from quoting and metering to invoicing, revenue recognition, and collections. Book a public demo at https://sequencehq.com and use code COGNISM in the source field to save 20% off year one Claude: Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr AvePoint: AvePoint is building the control layer for AI agents so you can securely govern, audit, and recover every action at scale. Design trusted agentic outcomes from day one at https://avpt.co/tcr