After a short break for recovery, we’re back with part two of the Dan Simmons novel The Rise of Endymion from 1997. After far too many weeks, Danielle is back, and so is our far more optimistic guest co-host Filip from the Mind Duck Books podcast. The first thing our intrepid hosts attempt to recall is how the story started in the previous episode.…

Spook Retorts is back! And this year Danielle is starting us off with the venerable Halloween franchise with the third installment from 1982: Season of the Witch. If you love Michael Myers and the deep lore of the Halloween movies, then you’re going to have very ambivalent feelings about Halloween III, which is the first (and last) of John Carpente…

Tom and Nate catch up on the happenings in AI. Of course, we're focused on the biggest awards available to us as esteemed scientists (or something close enough) -- the Nobel Prizes! What does it mean in the trajectory of AI for Hinton and Hassabis to carry added scientific weight. Honestly, feels like a sinking ship. Some links: * Schmidhuber tweet…

This week, Danielle brings the 1999 Sarah Michelle Gellar film Simply Irresistible. Amanda is a chef in New York City who owns a failing restaurant because she’s a terrible cook. While at a street framer’s market, Amanda is bullied into buying a basket of crabs and then has a chance encounter with Tom, the manager of the big department store who’s …

Sam finally begins the final part of the the Hyperion Cantos with the 1997 book The Rise of Endymion by Dan Simmons. It’s finally here! The last book in the absolutely bonkers Hyperion series, and in desperate need of help our intrepid hosts have called in Filip from the Mind Duck Books podcast for much needed moral support. We kick off with Daniel…

Tom and Nate catch up on recent events (before the OpenAI o1 release) and opportunities in transparency/policy. We recap the legendary scam of Matt from IT department, why disclosing the outcomes of process is not enough, and more. This is a great episode on understanding why the process technology was birthed from is just as important as the outco…

On the final short of our summer break, Sam has a new game for Danielle, that’s a lot like some of our other games (look, there’s only so many ideas we can have). In this game, Sam finds weird entries in popular franchises and has Danielle guess which of the three descriptions is the real deal. This is another game where we might not be very good a…

Tom and Nate catch up on core themes of AI after a somewhat unintended summer break. We discuss the moral groundings and philosophy of what we're building, our travels, The Anxious Generation, AGI obsessions, an update on AI Ethics vs. AI Safety, and plenty more in between. As always, contact us at mail@retortai.com Some links we mention in the epi…

As our summer break continues, we’re back for another round of Sequel Shenanigans! In this game Danielle and Sam present three possible sequel titles for media franchises they covered and the other person has to guess which is the real sequel title. They’re not very good at the game but they do come up with some great ideas for sequels, so we think…

We’re still on our summer break, but we brought back a classic game to see you through this drought! This time, our intrepid hosts need to identify the real one of three possible plot summaries for a book based only on the title and author. Danielle spins some amazing faux summaries while Sam takes a decidedly subtler approach to crafting his decep…

While Danielle and Sam are on their summer break, they have some very special shorts so as not to leave you destitute. This time we’re back with the Panic! at the Recall game where our beleaguered hosts try their best to summarize the past media they’ve shared in under a minute. How bad are they at this? Not great! It’s a lot of fun, and definitely…

Tom and Nate catch up on the rapidly evolving (and political) space of AI regulation. We cover CA SB 1047, recent policing of data scraping, presidential appointees, antitrust intention vs. implementation, FLOP thresholds, and everything else touching the future of large ML models. Nate's internet cut out, so this episode ends a little abruptly. Re…

This week the crabs are back as Danielle shares the 1978 Guy N. Smith novel Killer Crabs. We open in Australia where local fisherman Klin is super upset, and maybe a bit racist, about the Japanese poachers stealing his fish. After refusing the siren call of a woman to instead indulge his hatred of the poachers, his concerns are quickly replaced as …

Tom and Nate revisit one of their old ideas -- AI through the lens of public health infrastructure, and especially alignment. Sorry about Tom's glitchy audio, I figured it out after the fact that he was talking into the microphone at the wrong angle. Regardless, here are some links for this week. Links: - Data foundry for AI https://scale.com/blog/…

This week it’s Sam’s turn to share a Disney Channel original movie with the 1999 movie Smart House. Ben Cooper is your average 13-year-old kid completely distraught at the loss of his mother and so desperate to keep his family from changing further that he sabotages his dad’s attempts at dating. You know, healthy stuff. Ben isn’t only a severely tr…

Tom and Nate caught up last week (sorry for the editing delay) on the big two views of the AI future: Apple Intelligence and Situational Awareness (Nationalistic AI doom prevention). One of our best episodes, here are the links: * The Kekulé Problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kekul%C3%A9_Problem * Truth and Method https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…

It’s finally time for the finale of the Thai drama Ready, Set, Love (เกมชนคนโสด)! When we last left off, our group of contestants had decided it was time to create a revolution by exposing the TV show as rigged. Why the populace would suddenly rise up against the government because a realty show wasn’t entirely real is not explained. Anyway, their …

Tom and Nate catch up on many AI policy happenings recently. California's "anti open source" 1047 bill, the senate AI roadmap, Google's search snaifu, OpenAI's normal nonsense, and reader feedback! A bit of a mailbag. Enjoy. 00:00 Murky waters in AI policy 00:33 The Senate AI Roadmap 05:14 The Executive Branch Takes the Lead 08:33 California's Sena…

This week Sam brings Danielle the 2003 direct to VHS film Inspector Gadget 2. If you fondly recall the original 1999 film starring Matthew Broderick, or even the Inspector Gadget cartoon, then you’re leagues ahead of Sam and Danielle who only have the vaguest notion of what happened in that first film. Will that stop them from speculating wildly us…

Tom and Nate discuss two major OpenAI happenings in the last week. The popular one, the chat assistant, and what it reveals about OpenAI's worldview. We pair this with discussion of OpenAI's new Model Spec, which details their RLHF goals: https://cdn.openai.com/spec/model-spec-2024-05-08.html This is a monumental week for AI. The product transition…

Danielle takes us back to the dystopia this week in part two of the Thai drama Ready, Set, Love (เกมชนคนโสด). We rejoin Day and the rest as the games continue on the set of Ready, Set, Love. Well, there’s one game for the show which is far too few for Sam’s liking. However, Day finally realizes she knows Sun from when he was a runaway child and the…

Tom and Nate discuss the shifting power landscape in AI. They try to discern what is special about Silicon Valley's grasp on the ecosystem and what other types of power (e.g. those in New York and Washington DC) will do to mobilize their influence. Here's the one Tweet we referenced on the FAccT community: https://twitter.com/KLdivergence/status/16…

This week Sam shares with Danielle the 2023 fantasy movie The Secret Kingdom. Peter is your average mopey teen with crippling anxiety and a bubbly younger sister. His family has recently arrived at a new house. We say “arrived” because the real mystery of this movie starts right away as Sam and Danielle try to figure out if the family is moving the…

Tom and Nate cover the state of the industry after Llama 3. Is Zuck the best storyteller in AI? Is he the best CEO? Are CEOs doing anything other than buying compute? We cover what it means to be successful at the highest level this week. Links: Dwarkesh interview with Zuck https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/mark-zuckerberg Capuchin monkey https://en.…

This week Danielle returns to the Thai dramas with the 2024 series Ready, Set, Love (เกมชนคนโสด). In an alternate world where a mysterious disease has not only wiped out most men but also made the male birthrate plummet, the only way the to figure out who the precious few men will procreate with is a reality dating show competition. If this makes a…

Tom and Nate catch up after a few weeks off the pod. We discuss what it means for the pace and size of open models to get bigger and bigger. In some ways, this disillusionment is a great way to zoom our into the big picture. These models are coming. These models are getting cheaper. We need to think about risks and infrastructure more than open vs.…

It’s finally here, the finale of the 1996 Dan Simmons novel Endymion! Where we last left off, Father Captain de Soya had been called back to Pacem to receive new orders and a new crew member. It turns out the pope has been having visions from “God” that have told him the location of Aenea on Sol Draconi Septem. The pope is also declaring a crusade …

Tom and Nate catch up on the ridiculous of Nvidia GTC, the lack of trust in AI, and some important taxonomies and politics around governing AI. Safety institutes, reward model benchmarks, Nathan's bad joke delivery, and all the normal good stuff in this episode! Yes, we're also sick of the Taylor Swift jokes, but they get the clicks. The Taylor mom…

This week Danielle brings book four of the Hardy Boys Case Files series by Franklin W. Dixon from 1987: The Lazarus Plot. The Hardy Brothers are back! Joe is still sad about the expoldification of his girlfriend Iola, so he and Frank have taken a camping/fishing trip to unwind. However, it’s there in the woods that Joe sees someone who must be Iola…

Tom and Nate sit down to discuss Claude 3 and some updates on what it means to be open. Not surprisingly, we get into debating some different views. We cover Dune 2's impact on AI and have a brief giveaway at the end. Cheers! More at retortai.com. Contact us at mail at domain. Some topics: - The pace of progress in AI and whether it feels meaningfu…

This week Sam brings the penultimate episode of his deep dive into the 1996 Dan Simmons novel Endymion. When we last left off, it was implied the our hero Raul was dead, thought this was obviously not the case. This part open with us learning how Raul escaped death, both at the hands of the human Pax soldiers, and the jaws of the rainbow sharks. Al…

This week Tom and Nate cover all the big topics from the big picture lens. Sora, Gemini 1.5's context length, Gemini's bias backlash, Gemma open models, it was a busy week in AI. We come to the conclusion that we can no longer trust a lot of these big companies to do much. We are the gladiators playing the crowd of AI. This was a great one, I'm pro…