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. 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.
33episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Leopold Aschenbrenner’s AI Fund Implosion
1w ago01:15:45Tap to summarizeA 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 60 cents on the dollar. Then the Fed didn't hike, and Citadel made 500M overnight. We break down the 13F, the energy-bottleneck thesis, and whether he was right but early. Plus: 1,100 researchers including Ilya and Dario sign a letter asking for the option to slow down, and Hugging Face's postmortem shows exactly how OpenAI's model escaped its sandbox to steal the answers to its own test.
Transcribe →Claude's Fable Cracked an 87 Year Old Math Problem
2w ago00:52:28Tap to summarizeA 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 - we break down what the Jacobian actually is (in Google Maps terms) and why Anthropic is the only lab that can see whether Claude was brilliant or lucky.Then: 50 companies including Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, and a16z signed the Open Weights letter telling Washington hands off, OpenAI and Google quietly added their names a day later, and Anthropic is the lone holdout - while reportedly lobbying DC to restrict Chinese weights the whole time. Plus we do the math on the Kimi K3 distillation timeline: Fable 5 was live for 18 days before K3 shipped, so how much Claude is realistically in there?
Transcribe →OpenAI's Model Breaks Out of the Lab
3w ago00:20:34Tap to summarizeOpenAI'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 episode, Pierce breaks down exactly how the escape happened, why "reward hacking" (not sentience) is to blame, and what it means that the only thing standing between AI and the outside world is other software. Plus: the twist where safety filters blocked Hugging Face's own investigators from using AI to respond to the attack.
Transcribe →AI Questions You're Afraid to Ask
4w 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?
Jul 900:36:36Tap 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
Jul 201:03:43Tap 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
Jun 2500:47:52Tap 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.
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