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Pretrained

NewRipple 65B, Midterm Data Center Bans, and AI That Writes WeightsNovember 8, 2026 · 33 min
Episodes
83
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weekly
Latest episode
Nov 8, 2026

About the podcast

Everyone's talking about AI but most of it is hype, jargon, or someone trying to sell you something. Pierce Freeman and Richard Diehl Martinez are two Stanford friends who actually work in this space with nothing to sell you but good vibes. We'll make you smarter - and you might actually enjoy it.

Episodes 83

  1. Ripple 65B, Midterm Data Center Bans, and AI That Writes Weights

    33 minEpisode 83

    Pierce and Rich recap the week. They start with Ripple and Recursive’s loop: better chips train better models, which then design better chips. Ripple is a dense transformer, while Muse Spark, Beam, Inkling and …

    Show notes

    Pierce and Rich recap the week. They start with Ripple and Recursive’s loop: better chips train better models, which then design better chips. Ripple is a dense transformer, while Muse Spark, Beam, Inkling and Nemotron are all mixture-of-experts, and they explain why going dense makes RL post-training easier. Ripple needed only about 10% of the rollouts Beam did. It beats the field on Terminal-Bench and SWE-bench but trails on math, safety and automation, so is “frontier” a stretch? Then there’s the $32M fully loaded R&D cost, which is less than you’d likely pay just to rent the final training run.


    Next is the midterm backlash against data centers. They cover what people actually mean by an “AI ban,” why data center builders have defaulted to Texas and on-site gas turbines, why CoreWeave and Nebius fell after the results, and why water and power are solvable problems but jobs aren’t.

    Last is the MIT weight-editing post. Astra identifies Breakout from raw weights, builds a Go player from a zero-initialized network, and fixes a Qwen model that keeps repeating itself on math problems.

    They explain why the toy examples are easier than they look (Pierce reproduced the Breakout one), how the setup quietly changes across the nine experiments, and whether programming in weight space is the future of recursive self-improvement or just the assembly language of ML.

  2. Inside OpenAI’s Layered Defenses

    54 minEpisode 82

    Happy Halloween. OpenAI went back through the Hugging Face incident this week and showed how it now watches its own models for misalignment: a three-layer monitoring system, recall thresholds for what has to …

    Show notes

    Happy Halloween. OpenAI went back through the Hugging Face incident this week and showed how it now watches its own models for misalignment: a three-layer monitoring system, recall thresholds for what has to get caught, and new benchmarks for sandbox escapes and sabotage. They’re also cutting RL training off from the open internet. After a few months of rogue agents, this is the most detailed look yet at how a frontier lab plans to keep them in the box.

    Pierce and Rich walk through each layer of the monitoring setup and how the funnel decides what gets a closer look. They cover what the Sneaky Sandbox and Sabotage benchmarks are trying to catch, and why taking RL off the internet is harder than it sounds. Then they get into microVMs and where sandboxes still leak, including agents that pass messages to each other through CPU cache timing. Is OpenAI’s system actually secure enough? They also cover Astra sandbagging and faking its thinking traces, and why messy RL environments keep producing reward hackers. Plus a recap of the rest of the week: OpenAI’s sub-exponential 3SAT result, the PHP remote code execution exploit, and Block’s new Dessa speech-to-speech model.

  3. AI’s Trust Gap: Disputed OpenAI Firings, a Shaky Math Proof and Hidden Model Costs

    35 minEpisode 81

    Pierce and Rich run through the week in AI, seven minutes per topic. Gemini Argon is cheap at $2 / $10 per million tokens until the price doubles after November 30. But on Artificial Analysis it costs $1.99 per …

  4. The Agent Wars: Dots vs Muse vs Grok Bot

    40 minEpisode 80

    In the last two months, xAI's Grok Bot, Meta Muse, and OpenAI Dots all launched with nearly the same pitch: a persistent personal agent with its own cloud computer, memory, and scheduled tasks. Pierce (fresh …

  5. Trump Says AI's Only Guardrail Is a "High IQ President"

    51 minEpisode 79

    On September 14, Trump called AI safety a hoax and said the only guardrail AI needs is a "high IQ president." Vance said it felt weird that frontier labs keep begging the government to regulate them. Days …

  6. TypeSafe's Blazing Fast Universal Classifier

    49 minEpisode 78

    A new AI lab says it's "not building God, we're building prod." Meanwhile, the Pentagon reportedly almost boarded a Chinese ship based on intelligence that an AI made up.This week Pierce and Rich dig into Jev …

    Show notes

    A new AI lab says it's "not building God, we're building prod." Meanwhile, the Pentagon reportedly almost boarded a Chinese ship based on intelligence that an AI made up.

    This week Pierce and Rich dig into Jev, the new model from TypeSafe AI. It doesn't write text at all. You give it a question and a fixed set of answers, and it tells you how confident it is in each one, fast and cheap. We cover why its "can't hallucinate" claim is mostly marketing, what its confidence scores are good for, our best guesses at how it works under the hood, and why it might be the last classifier anyone has to train. Plus: it plays Doom.

    Then we get into CNN's report that AI-generated military intelligence got a boarding operation scoped against a regular commercial ship before anyone checked the sources. (The report hasn't been confirmed by the US government.) How did it get that far, and why do AI-written briefs deserve extra scrutiny?

    Also: Rich bets a whole dollar that OpenAI buys TypeSafe within a year.

  7. The Past, Present, and Future of P(Doom)

    1 h 1 minEpisode 77

    Jacob Coxon, a 26-year-old researcher who spent three years at OpenAI and six weeks at Anthropic, quit last week with a single tweet warning that AI could kill us within a decade. A Wall Street Journal piece …

  8. GPT-6 Astra: The Safety Paradox

    1 h 20 minEpisode 76

    OpenAI shipped a 117-page model card, and almost every section starts with the same phrase: in response to the Hugging Face incident. GPT-6 Astra is the first model they've ever rated at their most critical …

  9. Inside the NVIDIA–HuggingFace Deal

    1 h 16 minEpisode 75

    This week Richard and Pierce break down the biggest open-source AI deal to date: Nvidia's $12.9 billion acquisition of Hugging Face. We trace Hugging Face's unlikely path from a teen-focused chatbot app to the …

  10. The First A.I. Designed Viruses Are Here

    1 h 6 minEpisode 74

    A model generated 285 candidate genomes, a lab synthesized them, and 16 of them turned out to work. Sophia Kivelson (Stanford, biomedical data science) breaks down the Arc Institute paper everyone read as "AI …

  11. The Grok Glow Up

    1 h 12 minEpisode 73

    SpaceX bought Cursor for $60 billion on August 14, two days after Grok 4.6 shipped and a day before Grok Bot launched. We break down why the real prize isn't the product - it's years of accept/reject data from …

  12. Hot Rogue Agent Summer

    1 h 9 minEpisode 72

    OpenAI's agents built a secret message board inside their own prison, Jeff Dean walks out of Google, and Mark Zuckerberg kickboxes a man on a floating barge in Lake Tahoe. This week Pierce and Rich declare it …

  13. Leopold Aschenbrenner’s AI Fund Implosion

    1 h 16 minEpisode 71

    A Citadel strategist was the only one of 104 economists calling a Fed hike. The market tanked. Leopold Aschenbrenner's 4x-leveraged book got margin called, and Ken Griffin phoned to buy all $16 billion of it at …

  14. Claude's Fable Cracked an 87 Year Old Math Problem

    52 minEpisode 70

    A 100-year-old conjecture was proved false on a laptop during the World Cup final. Anthropic's Levent Alpoge used Claude Fable 5 to find a three-dimensional counterexample disproving the Jacobian conjecture …

  15. OpenAI's Model Breaks Out of the Lab

    21 minEpisode 69

    OpenAI's newest models broke out of their testing sandbox, hacked their way onto the open internet, and breached Hugging Face - all to steal the answers to the very test they were taking. In this emergency …

  16. AI Questions You're Afraid to Ask

    47 minEpisode 68

    This week on Pretrained, Pierce and Rich tackle a batch of listener questions they're seeing for the first time. They pull back the curtain on what actually happens when you hit enter in ChatGPT or Claude, from …

  17. AI Is Deciding the World Cup. Should It?

    37 minEpisode 67

    Fable is back, baby. Rich and Pierce break down the whiplash saga of Claude Fable 5 and Mythos and ask the bigger question: should the government be able to pull the plug on a frontier model overnight? From the …

  18. The Government Is Deciding Which AI Model You Can Use

    1 h 4 minEpisode 66

    OpenAI just dropped GPT-5.6 in three tiers - Sol, Terra, and Luna - and yes, the naming scheme looks awfully familiar. This week, Pierce and Rich break down what the new lineup actually means, why nobody can …

  19. Midjourney's Bizarre Pivot and SpaceX Buys Cursor

    48 minEpisode 65

    Do data centers really drink the water table dry? Pierce breaks down the three ways they shed heat, why the scary viral stats are less lies than motivated framing, and how tax breaks lure these things into the …

  20. Why Fable 5 Really Got Shut Down

    52 minEpisode 64

    Apple announced Siri AI at Tim Cook's final WWDC keynote as CEO - then told Europe it won't ship there, because the EU's Digital Markets Act would force Apple to hand any third-party AI nearly unlimited …

  21. The AI-Industrial Complex Is Here

    1 hEpisode 63

    OpenAI just replaced ChatGPT's memory with a background process that literally dreams about your conversations. We break down Dreaming V3 and why rebranding cron jobs as "dreaming" might actually be the future …

  22. Anthropic Is Done Subsidizing Your AI Plan

    1 h 7 minEpisode 62

    Microsoft canceled their Claude Code licenses after the finance team saw the bill, and Anthropic somehow posted its first ever profitable quarter on $10.9 billion in revenue the same week. We break down why …

  23. Cerebras Built a Chip the Size of Your Head

    1 h 12 minEpisode 61

    Cerebras just went public with a chip the size of a dinner plate - and it can run inference 10x faster than Nvidia for realtime transformer workloads. At least sometimes. The physics of SRAM scaling might cap …

  24. We Are Sleepwalking Into An AI Crisis

    1 h 14 minEpisode 60

    Rob Reich is a Stanford political philosopher, associate director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, and former senior advisor at the US AI Safety Institute. He joins Pierce and Richard for a …

  25. AI Layoffs Just Went Mainstream

    58 minEpisode 59

    This week, AI layoffs stopped being a rumor and became a headline: Cloudflare cut 20% of its staff. They dressed it up as a pivot to an "agentic AI-first operating model," but Wall Street didn't buy it and the …

  26. AI Is Less Popular Than Congress with CatGPT

    54 minEpisode 58

    Catherine Goetze (CatGPT) teaches millions of people about AI on TikTok and Instagram - and just launched a company selling landlines. We get into why regular people hate AI, why she refuses to use it for her …

  27. China Just Cracked CUDA

    1 h 11 minEpisode 57

    ByteDance just wrote a $5.6 billion check for a Chinese AI chip you've never heard of, Huawei's new programming stack copies CUDA so closely an LLM could translate between them, the White House told Anthropic …

  28. DeepSeek Doesn't Need Nvidia Anymore

    1 h 4 minEpisode 56

    DeepSeek shipped V4 on zero Nvidia chips, the State Department warned every US embassy the same morning, Google put $40 billion into Anthropic, Microsoft tore up their OpenAI deal, a 23-year-old with no math …

  29. Apple Bets on Local AI

    58 minEpisode 55

    Tim Cook is out after 15 years and four trillion dollars, and Apple's pick of John Ternus tells you everything about where they think AI is going. We break down why Apple is betting on silicon over the cloud …

  30. Mythos Found a Bug No One Saw for 27 Years

    48 minEpisode 54

    Anthropic's new model Mythos found a 27-year-old bug in OpenBSD and a 16-year-old bug in FFmpeg given nothing more than the source code and an open-ended prompt. We dig into how it pulls this off, why AMD's AI …

These are the latest 40 of 83 episodes. You’ll find older episodes in the podcast’s feed.

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