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The Cognitive Revolution / episode intelligence

AI in the AM: 99% off search, GPT-5.5 is "clean", model welfare analysis, & efficient analog compute

26 Apr 2026 24 published claims 1 attributable person
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Speakers in the public record

Nathan Labenz

Claim mix

evaluation 9belief 5uncertainty 4prediction 2observation 2commitment 1recommendation 1

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Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.

Claim ledger

The useful parts, with receipts.

24 published records

01 / prediction

And everyone thinks inference is going to be huge. And so I think the investors and enterprises are just now realizing how much they need search and what a big part it has to play in the world to come.

“And everyone thinks inference is going to be huge. And so I think the investors and enterprises are just now realizing how much they need search and what a big part it has to play in the world to come.”
Speaker
Not verified from transcript
Publisher
The Cognitive Revolution

02 / evaluation

So Grok 41 fast is great at coming up with a set of queries. And of course the frontier models like, you know, Anthropic, you can see the how it calls, but you you can't really use a a frontier model for that like thinking model and and firing off other threads because it'll just slow down the overall experience.

“So Grok 41 fast is great at coming up with a set of queries. And of course the frontier models like, you know, Anthropic, you can see the how it calls, but you you can't really use a a frontier model for that like thinking model and and firing off other threads because it'll just slow down the overall experience.”
Speaker
Not verified from transcript
Publisher
The Cognitive Revolution

03 / evaluation

One, they are slower and then you know, the the last item is because they do a soft match, then sometimes relevancy can be a challenge. So that number of enterprise orgs that have used a vector database for RAG, now all of a sudden they have to turn into relevancy experts because they're like, why did this come back?

“One, they are slower and then you know, the the last item is because they do a soft match, then sometimes relevancy can be a challenge. So that number of enterprise orgs that have used a vector database for RAG, now all of a sudden they have to turn into relevancy experts because they're like, why did this come back?”
Speaker
Not verified from transcript
Publisher
The Cognitive Revolution

04 / belief

I think one of the interesting questions is I think the Uber CTO came out and said that they busted through their clawed budget, you know, for the year in the first four months.

“I think one of the interesting questions is I think the Uber CTO came out and said that they busted through their clawed budget, you know, for the year in the first four months.”
Speaker
Nathan Labenz
Publisher
The Cognitive Revolution

05 / belief

Like I think there's a, there's a, there's a piece of us which gets threatened by, you know, having it, being able to talk and also having, you know, assigning it subjective experience.

“Like I think there's a, there's a, there's a piece of us which gets threatened by, you know, having it, being able to talk and also having, you know, assigning it subjective experience.”
Speaker
Nathan Labenz
Publisher
The Cognitive Revolution

06 / 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

07 / uncertainty

Yeah, In fact, there's other things done by Alan AI that showed if you, if you remove all duplicates before you do training, it actually gives rise to worse models. And you can kind of understand why because you have 1 lone, I don't know, crazy on the web saying something.

“Yeah, In fact, there's other things done by Alan AI that showed if you, if you remove all duplicates before you do training, it actually gives rise to worse models. And you can kind of understand why because you have 1 lone, I don't know, crazy on the web saying something.”
Speaker
Not verified from transcript
Publisher
The Cognitive Revolution

08 / belief

The, the Exa paradigm is like you can write a whole paragraph and it's all very sort of semantically oriented, very embedding based. And but, but I've heard, I think I even spoke to will about the idea that, you know, nobody's going to type in a paragraph long query, but the, your AI can, you know, it has time to do that.

“The, the Exa paradigm is like you can write a whole paragraph and it's all very sort of semantically oriented, very embedding based. And but, but I've heard, I think I even spoke to will about the idea that, you know, nobody's going to type in a paragraph long query, but the, your AI can, you know, it has time to do that.”
Speaker
Nathan Labenz
Publisher
The Cognitive Revolution

09 / evaluation

I have AI, have my own test. And it's been, you know, every time we try it, it fails and I'm like, OK, another, another one doesn't work right.

“I have AI, have my own test. And it's been, you know, every time we try it, it fails and I'm like, OK, another, another one doesn't work right.”
Speaker
Nathan Labenz
Publisher
The Cognitive Revolution

10 / belief

Given all of that, it's like, really hard to imagine how it's not having some experience. And the big reason, I doubt it for the AI side is that all that stuff that, you know, in some unknown, mysterious way is giving rise to consciousness is like that same stuff isn't there, broadly speaking.

“Given all of that, it's like, really hard to imagine how it's not having some experience. And the big reason, I doubt it for the AI side is that all that stuff that, you know, in some unknown, mysterious way is giving rise to consciousness is like that same stuff isn't there, broadly speaking.”
Speaker
Nathan Labenz
Publisher
The Cognitive Revolution

11 / uncertainty

Sometimes you know, they're like 8 words and stuff. And I don't know if you can remember the last time you typed in eight words into a keyword search box, but definitely you'll notice in a large language model, it's almost like a full sentence or sometimes 2 sentences is good because you want to actually describe almost the essay that you want given back to you.

“Sometimes you know, they're like 8 words and stuff. And I don't know if you can remember the last time you typed in eight words into a keyword search box, but definitely you'll notice in a large language model, it's almost like a full sentence or sometimes 2 sentences is good because you want to actually describe almost the essay that you want given back to you.”
Speaker
Not verified from transcript
Publisher
The Cognitive Revolution

12 / commitment

The third question you asked is, you know, we have a link that I'm happy to give you on supervised generation. It's an inference endpoint and we are going to release the, you know, kind of the overall structure and it really answers that question algorithmically.

“The third question you asked is, you know, we have a link that I'm happy to give you on supervised generation. It's an inference endpoint and we are going to release the, you know, kind of the overall structure and it really answers that question algorithmically.”
Speaker
Not verified from transcript
Publisher
The Cognitive Revolution

13 / 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

14 / belief

I'm not a bidder, but I didn't have the model way back then. Because I think that, you know, does help us drive really the the fundamental architectural approaches for for programmability and scalability, which will serve us into the future.

“I'm not a bidder, but I didn't have the model way back then. Because I think that, you know, does help us drive really the the fundamental architectural approaches for for programmability and scalability, which will serve us into the future.”
Speaker
Nathan Labenz
Publisher
The Cognitive Revolution

15 / evaluation

Try doing bunch of these things that like you wouldn't want someone participating in like the water economy to do because and I think quite a lot of these things it's like illegal, like price collusion and stuff like this.

“Try doing bunch of these things that like you wouldn't want someone participating in like the water economy to do because and I think quite a lot of these things it's like illegal, like price collusion and stuff like this.”
Speaker
Nathan Labenz
Publisher
The Cognitive Revolution

16 / prediction

You know, I don't know, maybe I, I wouldn't give it that low of a percentage that they have subjective experience, but I, I think I feel comfortable saying my best guess is like well below half chance that they do so.

“You know, I don't know, maybe I, I wouldn't give it that low of a percentage that they have subjective experience, but I, I think I feel comfortable saying my best guess is like well below half chance that they do so.”
Speaker
Nathan Labenz
Publisher
The Cognitive Revolution

17 / evaluation

Because I, I often feel like you almost, you're almost kind of trying to prompt inject the LLM which is running the search and you're trying to get in there and hack it so that your, you know, your page goes up.

“Because I, I often feel like you almost, you're almost kind of trying to prompt inject the LLM which is running the search and you're trying to get in there and hack it so that your, you know, your page goes up.”
Speaker
Nathan Labenz
Publisher
The Cognitive Revolution

18 / observation

I don't know if you are doing this, but obviously there's a big cottage industry that has sprung up to develop and sell reinforcement learning environments to the Frontier labs and you're sort of simulated ending benches like essentially ARL environment, right?

“I don't know if you are doing this, but obviously there's a big cottage industry that has sprung up to develop and sell reinforcement learning environments to the Frontier labs and you're sort of simulated ending benches like essentially ARL environment, right?”
Speaker
Nathan Labenz
Publisher
The Cognitive Revolution

19 / evaluation

It, it strikes me that we haven't really seen the true unleashing of the Internet's adversarial potential. And so, you know, that's one thing that they, I, I would say one of their biggest weaknesses, even Frontier models biggest weaknesses these days is how gullible they remain.

“It, it strikes me that we haven't really seen the true unleashing of the Internet's adversarial potential. And so, you know, that's one thing that they, I, I would say one of their biggest weaknesses, even Frontier models biggest weaknesses these days is how gullible they remain.”
Speaker
Nathan Labenz
Publisher
The Cognitive Revolution

20 / observation

I, I, I feel especially because I think Noam Brown and some of the other people from open AI Rune, etcetera said that they are actually using these models in research.

“I, I, I feel especially because I think Noam Brown and some of the other people from open AI Rune, etcetera said that they are actually using these models in research.”
Speaker
Nathan Labenz
Publisher
The Cognitive Revolution

21 / evaluation

Now, the problem is today we don't know how to build abstractions in a robust and scalable way that, you know, sort of represent the noise of that underlying substrate.

“Now, the problem is today we don't know how to build abstractions in a robust and scalable way that, you know, sort of represent the noise of that underlying substrate.”
Speaker
Nathan Labenz
Publisher
The Cognitive Revolution

22 / evaluation

It turns out for the kinds of capacitors we use, you see variations that are on the order of, you know, sort of 10 parts per million, right. So giving you levels of precision that are in the neighborhood of 20 bits of precision, which it turns out is well beyond what we need for the quantization kinds of, you know, levels that we care about, which are typically at the level of eight bits and you know, higher than that in some cases.

“It turns out for the kinds of capacitors we use, you see variations that are on the order of, you know, sort of 10 parts per million, right. So giving you levels of precision that are in the neighborhood of 20 bits of precision, which it turns out is well beyond what we need for the quantization kinds of, you know, levels that we care about, which are typically at the level of eight bits and you know, higher than that in some cases.”
Speaker
Nathan Labenz
Publisher
The Cognitive Revolution

23 / evaluation

Turns out we don't need anywhere near that precision for the capacitors that we use. But, but it's really because of this alignment with this geometric control that this particular approach has that allows it to be brutally accurate in the ways that you need it to be through all of these layers of abstraction to be able to scale up.

“Turns out we don't need anywhere near that precision for the capacitors that we use. But, but it's really because of this alignment with this geometric control that this particular approach has that allows it to be brutally accurate in the ways that you need it to be through all of these layers of abstraction to be able to scale up.”
Speaker
Nathan Labenz
Publisher
The Cognitive Revolution
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