Podcast
Pretrained
Hosted by Pierce Freeman & Richard Diehl Martinez · EN
10 years after studying at Stanford, two friends have somehow become AI experts. One builds startups, the other studies at Cambridge - together they break down LLMs and machine learning with zero BS and maximum banter.
27episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Midjourney's Bizarre Pivot and SpaceX Buys Cursor
2d ago00:47:52Tap to summarizeDo 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 country's most parched counties. Then: Midjourney becomes a healthcare company, SpaceX buys Cursor for $60B in stock, and the Fable 5 export-ban saga rolls on: the Lutnick letter, the SK Telecom-China angle, Anthropic's new KYC-and-biometrics policy, and the unsolvable problem of telling 70% of your own staff they can't touch the model. Get hyped on some data centers.
Transcribe →Why Fable 5 Really Got Shut Down
1w ago00:52:24Tap to summarizeApple 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, autonomous access to your phone. We break down whether that's Apple crying wolf again or a genuinely new class of risk, why Anthropic shipped Fable 5 with anti-bootstrapping safeguards designed to stop foreign labs from cloning frontier models or auto-optimizing their GPU kernels (with a silent capability downgrade if it thinks you're trying), and how the same drone tech being battle-tested in Ukraine is one tenacious, self-recharging LLM away from a landmine in the sky.
Transcribe →The AI-Industrial Complex Is Here
2w ago01:00:20Tap to summarizeOpenAI 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 of AI memory, what Jensen Huang's RTX Spark reveal at Computex means for the bet that inference is about to leave the data center for your laptop, how a shadow industry called AI Engine Optimization is poisoning Reddit threads to get products ranked inside ChatGPT, and why the US government pulling Intel-style equity deals on AI labs could put Uncle Sam on Sand Hill Road - including proposals that would hand the public a 50% stake in the companies building AGI.
Transcribe →Anthropic Is Done Subsidizing Your AI Plan
3w ago01:06:48Tap to summarizeMicrosoft 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 token pricing is collapsing (Gemini Flash is now $1.50 per million tokens, down from $60 when GPT-4 launched), what Apple is quietly building ahead of WWDC to own the entire agentic pipeline on your phone, and why Pope Leo XIV just dropped a 40,000-word encyclical framing AI as this generation's Industrial Revolution - with Anthropic's Chris Olah speaking at the Vatican.
Transcribe →Cerebras Built a Chip the Size of Your Head
4w ago01:11:30Tap to summarizeCerebras 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 how far it can go. We break down the bull and bear case.Then: Calif used Mythos to crack Apple's M5 kernel in five days flat, SpaceX handed Anthropic 220,000 Nvidia GPUs from the old xAI clusters, and the Trump administration wrote an executive order on AI safety vetting and then killed it hours before signing.
Transcribe →We Are Sleepwalking Into An AI Crisis
May 2001:13:49Tap to summarizeRob 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 sweeping conversation about AI, policy, modern education, and much more.Rob skewers Silicon Valley's misuse of democratizing AI, unpacks the corporate-form gymnastics behind OpenAI's restructuring and Anthropic's PBC status, indicts Stanford itself as the world's most successful nonprofit, and offers an insider's view of standing up the US AI Safety Institute from a five-person team inside the Department of Commerce.
Transcribe →AI Layoffs Just Went Mainstream
May 1400:58:27Tap to summarizeThis 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 stock dropped 24%. Then we turn to Pennsylvania's attorney general suing Character AI after one of its bots posed as a licensed therapist and dig into why the small players keep getting singled out and what kind of legal precedent that sets for everyone building on top of base models. And finally, Brussels blinks: the EU postpones the AI Act's high-risk obligations after its whole use-case-first framework collided with the reality of general-purpose models.
Transcribe →AI Is Less Popular Than Congress with CatGPT
May 1200:53:59Tap to summarizeCatherine 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 own content, and what SF's "single before Series B" work culture is doing to a generation of founders.
Transcribe →China Just Cracked CUDA
May 701:10:54Tap to summarizeByteDance 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 it can't expand access to Mythos because the Pentagon wants first dibs, Samsung warned that memory prices are only getting worse from here, and China killed Zuckerberg's $2 billion bid for Manus because it turns out Singapore-washing your company doesn't fool Beijing. Pierce and Rich break down what all of it means.
Transcribe →DeepSeek Doesn't Need Nvidia Anymore
May 101:04:29Tap to summarizeDeepSeek 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 degree used ChatGPT to crack a famous Erdős conjecture, and Sony built a ping pong robot that beats the pros. We break down what all of it means.
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