Unsupervised Learning with Jacob Effron
We probe the sharpest minds in AI in search for the truth about what’s real today, what will be real in the future and what it all means for businesses and the world.
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 5
- Latest publication
- Sep 3, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 9, 2026
Latest episodes
Ep 93: CEO of Redwood Research Buck Shlegeris on OpenAI/HuggingFace Revelations, Fixing AI Safety & Takeover Odds (opens the original)
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Jacob sits down with Buck Shlegeris, CEO of Redwood Research, one of the organizations that led the independent investigation into OpenAI/Hugging Face's incident. They dig into the incident itself, Buck's reactions to it, and what he believes it reveals about the state of where we are today.
AI Vibe Check: Chinese Open Models, Distillation & The Hugging Face Breach (opens the original)
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In this installment of their recurring roundtable, Jacob, Ari, and Rob dig into the accelerating Chinese open-source model race, debating whether Kimi K3 has actually closed the gap with the US frontier or just looks like it has, and whether distillation fully explains China's progress. That opens into the messier fight over open-weight models generally, with the group dissecting the backlash against Anthropic's stance and asking whether powerful open models are inherently dangerous or actually
Ep 92: xAI Co-Founder Unpacks the Future of Model Development (opens the original)
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Igor Babuschkin, co-founder of River AI and formerly a co-founder of xAI, joins to unpack a career that spans nearly every major AI lab: he led the StarCraft and AlphaCode work at DeepMind, joined OpenAI's reasoning team years before o1 shipped, and co-founded xAI, where he helped stand up the Colossus data center in roughly 120 days and reflects candidly on what it's actually like working with Elon Musk day to day, plus what the Cursor acquisition actually unlocked for Grok's coding models. He
Ep 91: Top AI Analyst Unpacks Today's AI Hype Cycle (opens the original)
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Benedict Evans, one of tech's most widely-read analysts, joins Jacob Effron. The conversation centers on Benedict's core thesis that comparing AI's scale to past platform shifts (the internet, mobile, PCs) is analytically useless, and that the more productive move is studying how those previous technologies actually evolved economically to reason about where AI's value will accrue. He argues the one genuine difference this time is that we don't know AI's physical or scientific limits, unlike pas
Ep 90: AI Pioneer Jürgen Schmidhuber on the State of AI Today (opens the original)
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Dr. Jürgen Schmidhuber, a renowned scientist and AI researcher widely regarded as one of the pioneers in the field, originated key ideas behind today's transformers, LSTMs, and recursive self-improvement through his lab's work. He argues that true AGI remains bottlenecked by physical hardware, that today's AI data center investments are headed for a correction as open-source keeps pace with closed labs, and that the path to general intelligence runs through artificial curiosity and self-generate
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