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Nathan Labenz

Host · The Cognitive Revolution

Claims
258
Episodes
33
Shows
1
Named items
9

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person / recommends

Kevin Roose

“On The New York Times, I, I share your disappointment. I, I recommend Kevin Roose and, and Hard Fork out of The New York Times family of-”

The Cognitive Revolution · 23 Jun 2026

Evidence receipt · Source ↗

tool / uses

Claude Max

“And certainly if you were to triple it from there, you'd be getting into something on the order of magnitude of parity with human headcount. What are you doing with it all too? Because I use my $200 Claude Max and my Codex Pro and I honestly don't even hit my limits that often.”

The Cognitive Revolution · 17 Jun 2026

Evidence receipt · Source ↗

tool / uses

Codex Pro

“And certainly if you were to triple it from there, you'd be getting into something on the order of magnitude of parity with human headcount. What are you doing with it all too? Because I use my $200 Claude Max and my Codex Pro and I honestly don't even hit my limits that often.”

The Cognitive Revolution · 17 Jun 2026

Evidence receipt · Source ↗

app / uses

Claude Max

“What are you doing with it all too? Because I use my $200 Claude Max and my Codex Pro and I honestly don't even hit my limits that often.”

The Cognitive Revolution · 17 Jun 2026

Evidence receipt · Source ↗

app / uses

Codex Pro

“What are you doing with it all too? Because I use my $200 Claude Max and my Codex Pro and I honestly don't even hit my limits that often.”

The Cognitive Revolution · 17 Jun 2026

Evidence receipt · Source ↗

tool / uses

Gemini 3 flash

“I think I used Gemini 3 flash at the time.”

The Cognitive Revolution · 1 Jun 2026

Evidence receipt · Source ↗

app / uses

Claude

“That's probably the biggest reason that I use Claude is that I perceive it to be most robust to that kind of stuff.”

The Cognitive Revolution · 26 Apr 2026

Evidence receipt · Source ↗

app / uses

Beeper Desktop

“I use Beeper Desktop to try to like aggregate a half dozen or so of them. That's also kind of painful. I feel like Beeper Desktop is, Good idea crashes a lot for me.”

The Cognitive Revolution · 19 Apr 2026

Evidence receipt · Source ↗

other / likes

AE Studio

“Is there stuff that we can do or is it, you know, is there is it a different organization's job to figure out how to fill that gap. Because I do feel like I want some more, and I love some of the AE Studio stuff, including self-other overlap.”

The Cognitive Revolution · 4 Jan 2026

Evidence receipt · Source ↗

Claim ledger

What Nathan said.

28 transcript-backed records

01 / uncertainty

I don't know if you wanna share it, but do you have a ratio of not I don't mean all inference spend, like, including your customers' use cases, but, like, your own internal inference versus your payroll.

“I don't know if you wanna share it, but do you have a ratio of not I don't mean all inference spend, like, including your customers' use cases, but, like, your own internal inference versus your payroll.”
Speaker
Nathan Labenz
Publisher
The Cognitive Revolution

02 / uncertainty

One let's do one more beat on the stuff that's relatively mundane, then we can zoom out to some some real big picture considerations. But you did have, as you alluded to earlier, this highly viral post, I don't know, two months ago maybe, moving a significant part of the workload to open source models for cost saving reasons and for you don't need God to schedule your meetings reasons.

“One let's do one more beat on the stuff that's relatively mundane, then we can zoom out to some some real big picture considerations. But you did have, as you alluded to earlier, this highly viral post, I don't know, two months ago maybe, moving a significant part of the workload to open source models for cost saving reasons and for you don't need God to schedule your meetings reasons.”
Speaker
Nathan Labenz
Publisher
The Cognitive Revolution

03 / uncertainty

Is are we still in that regime? And if so, is there are there things that you're, like, wanting Opus five one to be able I I don't know if you're even able to use Fable interestingly enough.

“Is are we still in that regime? And if so, is there are there things that you're, like, wanting Opus five one to be able I I don't know if you're even able to use Fable interestingly enough.”
Speaker
Nathan Labenz
Publisher
The Cognitive Revolution

04 / uncertainty

Are there any other I don't know if you share this premise, but one feeling that I have over and over again is I just kinda hate the fact that we are doing such an intense first search in AI space in terms of architecture, in terms of training techniques, in terms of just we're now, like, designing chips to be very highly coupled with the architectures, which is deepening this issue.

“Are there any other I don't know if you share this premise, but one feeling that I have over and over again is I just kinda hate the fact that we are doing such an intense first search in AI space in terms of architecture, in terms of training techniques, in terms of just we're now, like, designing chips to be very highly coupled with the architectures, which is deepening this issue.”
Speaker
Nathan Labenz
Publisher
The Cognitive Revolution

06 / uncertainty

Is it convergent evolution or is it a reflection of, of how we think somehow encoded in the data that it's then reverse engineering our structure from the shadow of that structure as it's encoded in text? It's a, it's a very interesting question and I don't know that the paper really has anything to say about that yet, but there's certainly going to be a lot of future work, I think, downstream of this one.

“Is it convergent evolution or is it a reflection of, of how we think somehow encoded in the data that it's then reverse engineering our structure from the shadow of that structure as it's encoded in text? It's a, it's a very interesting question and I don't know that the paper really has anything to say about that yet, but there's certainly going to be a lot of future work, I think, downstream of this one.”
Speaker
Nathan Labenz
Publisher
The Cognitive Revolution

07 / uncertainty

We don't know why I don't think at this point it's shaping up this way, but it is the case that if you oblate this J space, then you do lose these advanced reasoning capabilities.

“We don't know why I don't think at this point it's shaping up this way, but it is the case that if you oblate this J space, then you do lose these advanced reasoning capabilities.”
Speaker
Nathan Labenz
Publisher
The Cognitive Revolution

08 / uncertainty

Are all those different domains that you laid out now powered by a domain specialist model that has learned, for example, the intuitive physics of heat dissipation through a ventilation system? And how, if we just take that one example, if the old version was like actually having a simulation down to the level of I don't know if it was all this detailed, but going all the way down to molecules of air blowing through a space and how they bounce off of each other and what ultimately happens.

“Are all those different domains that you laid out now powered by a domain specialist model that has learned, for example, the intuitive physics of heat dissipation through a ventilation system? And how, if we just take that one example, if the old version was like actually having a simulation down to the level of I don't know if it was all this detailed, but going all the way down to molecules of air blowing through a space and how they bounce off of each other and what ultimately happens.”
Speaker
Nathan Labenz
Publisher
The Cognitive Revolution

10 / uncertainty

I guess turning to the ensuing fiasco, I don't know if you would even agree with the characterization of Friday night's ban, export control, functional ban on Fable as a fiasco, but it's certainly a bit of a left-field curveball mess.

“I guess turning to the ensuing fiasco, I don't know if you would even agree with the characterization of Friday night's ban, export control, functional ban on Fable as a fiasco, but it's certainly a bit of a left-field curveball mess.”
Speaker
Nathan Labenz
Publisher
The Cognitive Revolution

12 / uncertainty

Because I might think, jeez, you know, all the stuff I've done with this model in this One Direction, like probably isn't going to help me over here.

“Because I might think, jeez, you know, all the stuff I've done with this model in this One Direction, like probably isn't going to help me over here.”
Speaker
Nathan Labenz
Publisher
The Cognitive Revolution

13 / uncertainty

Anyway, the one thing that I had where it actually like did a data delete that it was actually kind of painful was predicated on the fact that Slack's rate limits, if you're just kind of a indie hacker, are insanely low Gmail, you know, you fly through and it took me a, you know, I don't know, a couple hours for the script to run.

“Anyway, the one thing that I had where it actually like did a data delete that it was actually kind of painful was predicated on the fact that Slack's rate limits, if you're just kind of a indie hacker, are insanely low Gmail, you know, you fly through and it took me a, you know, I don't know, a couple hours for the script to run.”
Speaker
Nathan Labenz
Publisher
The Cognitive Revolution

14 / uncertainty

I mean, one thing people sort of seem to find surprise and delight in at least, you know, as reported on Twitter often is when, you know, agents do something cool that wasn't expected or they're sort of, you know, some emergent property. I don't know, I guess I don't, I'm not too worried about it.

“I mean, one thing people sort of seem to find surprise and delight in at least, you know, as reported on Twitter often is when, you know, agents do something cool that wasn't expected or they're sort of, you know, some emergent property. I don't know, I guess I don't, I'm not too worried about it.”
Speaker
Nathan Labenz
Publisher
The Cognitive Revolution

17 / uncertainty

One thing that I recall, I don't know if it was 2 IOs ago or whatever, right, but there was going to be 3 sizes of Gemini model at one point in time.

“One thing that I recall, I don't know if it was 2 IOs ago or whatever, right, but there was going to be 3 sizes of Gemini model at one point in time.”
Speaker
Nathan Labenz
Publisher
The Cognitive Revolution

18 / uncertainty

Is it going to be available via the API and is it going to be I've noticed with, I mean, Gemini's been the only API that's accepted video for a while now, but I don't know exactly how it works under the hood, obviously, but I do feel that it's sort of kind of down-sampled, or maybe there's like frames taken out of it historically.

“Is it going to be available via the API and is it going to be I've noticed with, I mean, Gemini's been the only API that's accepted video for a while now, but I don't know exactly how it works under the hood, obviously, but I do feel that it's sort of kind of down-sampled, or maybe there's like frames taken out of it historically.”
Speaker
Nathan Labenz
Publisher
The Cognitive Revolution

19 / uncertainty

I don't know, you probably know what the ratio is of API cost to effective token cost when you buy a Claude Max subscription and max it out.

“I don't know, you probably know what the ratio is of API cost to effective token cost when you buy a Claude Max subscription and max it out.”
Speaker
Nathan Labenz
Publisher
The Cognitive Revolution

20 / uncertainty

Therefore, my product decision-making is less about who was willing to bid on my time and more about how much time was I willing to have my AI invest on my behalf to go out and figure out what to do. I don't know, that's more of a prompt, I guess, than a question.

“Therefore, my product decision-making is less about who was willing to bid on my time and more about how much time was I willing to have my AI invest on my behalf to go out and figure out what to do. I don't know, that's more of a prompt, I guess, than a question.”
Speaker
Nathan Labenz
Publisher
The Cognitive Revolution

21 / uncertainty

I don't know if it was in the same e-mail or another one, but you described adding generative AI models to the descript product as a polarizing topic, and I guess a polarizing product move.

“I don't know if it was in the same e-mail or another one, but you described adding generative AI models to the descript product as a polarizing topic, and I guess a polarizing product move.”
Speaker
Nathan Labenz
Publisher
The Cognitive Revolution

22 / uncertainty

There's never any like really like step change for like now you're in a new environment or anything like that. It's just like a continuous loop, but whenever it hits some kind of token threshold, which will change every day, maybe it's 100K today, I don't know.

“There's never any like really like step change for like now you're in a new environment or anything like that. It's just like a continuous loop, but whenever it hits some kind of token threshold, which will change every day, maybe it's 100K today, I don't know.”
Speaker
Nathan Labenz
Publisher
The Cognitive Revolution

23 / uncertainty

Do you think that you can get there with pure search or is there still something to be said for kind of continued pre training or mid training, whatever you want to call it that would try to bake in a sort of corporate world model that presumably would complement a search, but I I don't know if it's necessary.

“Do you think that you can get there with pure search or is there still something to be said for kind of continued pre training or mid training, whatever you want to call it that would try to bake in a sort of corporate world model that presumably would complement a search, but I I don't know if it's necessary.”
Speaker
Nathan Labenz
Publisher
The Cognitive Revolution

24 / uncertainty

Obviously, you're betting on this Pi framework as opposed to like these sort of products that kind of exist in like a constellation where they're out there off orbiting around this center thing. I don't know.

“Obviously, you're betting on this Pi framework as opposed to like these sort of products that kind of exist in like a constellation where they're out there off orbiting around this center thing. I don't know.”
Speaker
Nathan Labenz
Publisher
The Cognitive Revolution

25 / uncertainty

I mean, you mentioned Les Wrong and Eliezer, and there's this sort of, I don't know all the lore of Matt's, but I do understand that a lot of people who have participated in it over time come out of the Eliezer discourse and had a certain set of assumptions that were like, we're not going to be able to teach this thing our values, it's going to be extremely unwieldy from the beginning.

“I mean, you mentioned Les Wrong and Eliezer, and there's this sort of, I don't know all the lore of Matt's, but I do understand that a lot of people who have participated in it over time come out of the Eliezer discourse and had a certain set of assumptions that were like, we're not going to be able to teach this thing our values, it's going to be extremely unwieldy from the beginning.”
Speaker
Nathan Labenz
Publisher
The Cognitive Revolution

26 / uncertainty

I both watched a talk of yours and read a blog post from about 18 months ago where you kind of sketch out the different archetypes of AI researcher that you have seen, and then also kind of map that onto the demands of organizations. And I don't know how much it's changed.

“I both watched a talk of yours and read a blog post from about 18 months ago where you kind of sketch out the different archetypes of AI researcher that you have seen, and then also kind of map that onto the demands of organizations. And I don't know how much it's changed.”
Speaker
Nathan Labenz
Publisher
The Cognitive Revolution

27 / uncertainty

What does the kind of funnel look like in terms of, I don't know if there's intermediate steps that, you know, would make sense to talk about selected. And then I think the good news, though, is if you do get into the program, your success rate on the other end of like getting into the field in a professional W-2 employee status sort of way is really high.

“What does the kind of funnel look like in terms of, I don't know if there's intermediate steps that, you know, would make sense to talk about selected. And then I think the good news, though, is if you do get into the program, your success rate on the other end of like getting into the field in a professional W-2 employee status sort of way is really high.”
Speaker
Nathan Labenz
Publisher
The Cognitive Revolution
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