Podcast
Pretrained
Hosted by Pierce Freeman & Richard Diehl Martinez · EN
Everyone's talking about AI but most of it is hype, jargon, or someone trying to sell you something. We're 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.
30episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
AI Questions You're Afraid to Ask
5d ago00:47:07Tap to summarizeThis 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 prompt rewriting and system prompts to GPU queues and the UI tricks that make streaming text feel human. From there, they dig into what really separates GPT, Claude, Gemini, and Llama, why models hallucinate with such confidence, and the real-world failure modes that should make everyone double-check AI output. Plus: is AI actually making us dumber, how do you use it at work without "cheating," which jobs are genuinely at risk, and why the gap between free and paid tiers is quietly creating a two-tiered AI experience most people don't even know exists.
Transcribe →AI Is Deciding the World Cup. Should It?
2w ago00:36:36Tap to summarizeFable 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 rumored Amazon leak that spooked Washington to the case for an "FDA for LLMs" and what the UK's AI Safety Institute gets right, they debate who should really be checking under the hood. Then it's off to the pitch: how AI is reshaping the World Cup, from semi-automated offside calls that strip refs of judgment (and maybe the soul of the game) to the tiny island of Curaçao using AI-powered diaspora scouting to become the smallest nation ever to qualify.
Transcribe →The Government Is Deciding Which AI Model You Can Use
3w ago01:03:43Tap to summarizeOpenAI 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 prove when a model is "done" training, and how AI is getting scary good at chaining real exploits. Then things get spicy: Anthropic accuses DeepSeek, Moonshot, and Minimax of running 24,000 fake accounts and 16 million conversations to distill Claude. But is it hypocritical to cry theft when your own models were trained on the open internet? Plus a four-year tour of US AI policy, from the AI Bill of Rights to pre-release cyber reviews.
Transcribe →Midjourney's Bizarre Pivot and SpaceX Buys Cursor
4w 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
Jun 1700:52:24Tap 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
Jun 1101:00:20Tap 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
Jun 401:06:48Tap 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
May 2901:11:30Tap 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.
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