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Timothy B. Lee interviews leading experts about the future of AI technology and policy.
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Kevin Roose on how AGI went from pipe dream to roadmap
I’ve known former New York Times reporter Kevin Roose since 2017, when we rode a bus into the California desert to try out Waymo’s early driverless cars. Now he has a new book called The AGI Chronicles (https://theagichronicles.com/) about
Garrison Lovely on the case for banning superintelligence
I talked to Garrison Lovely (https://x.com/GarrisonLovely), author of the new book Obsolete (https://www.obsoletebook.org/), about his case that we shouldn’t just slow down AGI. We should stop building it. We started with the fights inside
Jasmine Sun on the data center backlash
Nothing about data centers changed much this year — except the country’s mood. To find out why, the independent journalist Jasmine Sun traveled to the sites of proposed and completed data centers (https://jasmi.news/p/no-data-centers-in-my-
Steven Adler on the AI industry’s rogue agent crisis
Steven Adler spent four years inside OpenAI working on safety before leaving to co-found Guidelight (https://guidelight.ai/), a nonprofit pushing for stronger AI controls. On Tuesday, the group published a new scorecard (https://guidelight.
Josh Saxe on hardening the Internet after the Hugging Face attack
I invited Joshua Saxe, a former black-hat hacker who led AI security efforts at Meta, to break down last week’s incident in which a swarm of OpenAI models escaped their testing sandbox and hacked Hugging Face. The attack began as routine pr
Robert Wright on the global implications of powerful AI
Robert Wright, author of the Nonzero newsletter (http://nonzero.org/) and host of the Nonzero podcast (https://www.youtube.com/c/Nonzero), is a veteran journalist who interviewed Geoffrey Hinton about neural networks back in 1983. He joined
Alan Rozenshtein on Friday's shocking shutdown of Claude Fable 5
Last night, I called University of Minnesota law professor Alan Rozenshtein and asked him to help me decode the Commerce Department’s surprise decision to impose export controls on Anthropic’s Claude models. Late on Friday, the Commerce Dep
James Grimmelmann explains how AI is changing copyright
I’m organizing a happy hour on June 23 for listeners of AI Summer and readers of my newsletter, Understanding AI (https://www.understandingai.org/). It’ll run from 5:30 to 8:00pm at The Crown & Crow (https://www.thecrownandcrowdc.com/) in W
Andy Masley on the data center backlash
Over seven years teaching high school physics, Andy Masley learned how to explain abstract quantities like watt-hours in an accessible way. That skill has made him one of the most effective critics of the growing environmental panic over da
Sophia Tung on the state of autonomous vehicles
I don’t know anyone who has ridden in more different kinds of robotaxis than Sophia Tung. A YouTuber (https://www.youtube.com/@sophiat) and the author of the RideAI newsletter (https://rideai.substack.com/), she is one of the most knowledge
Divyansh Kaushik on the robotics race between China and the US
I talk to Divyansh Kaushik (https://x.com/dkaushik96), a Carnegie Mellon machine learning PhD turned national-security advisor at Beacon Global Strategies (https://bgsdc.com/team/dr-divyansh-kaushik/), about the robotics race between the US
Alex Imas explains why AI (probably) won't put everyone out of work
Alex Imas (https://x.com/alexolegimas) is an economist at the University of Chicago Booth School (https://www.chicagobooth.edu/faculty/directory/i/alex-imas) who argues that the most important thing about an AI-saturated economy won’t be wh
Sayash Kapoor on Claude Mythos as normal technology
Last week Anthropic stunned the AI world by announcing Claude Mythos Preview—and then refusing to release it. Princeton’s Sayash Kapoor, co-author of the newsletter AI as Normal Technology (https://www.normaltech.ai/), joins Tim and Kai Wil
Nat Purser explains how progressives are thinking about AI
Tim talks to Nat Purser, a tech policy advocate at Public Knowledge and a veteran of Democratic campaigns, about how policymakers on the left side of the political spectrum view AI. Purser describes a Democratic landscape split between thos
Ryan Avent on self-driving cars and the future of the labor market
Author Ryan Avent joins Tim to revisit a bet they made 16 years ago (https://timothyblee.com/2010/11/08/a-bet/)—and to ask whether the lessons of self-driving cars apply to modern AI. Back in 2010, Avent wagered that his newborn daughter wo
Joel Becker on METR's famous time horizons chart
METR’s time horizons chart (https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-complete-long-tasks/) has become one of the most discussed metrics in AI. It estimates the difficulty of tasks — measured in human work hours — that a mode
Pete Hegseth's war on Anthropic (with Alan Rozenshtein and Kevin Frazier)
Tim and Dean team up with Scaling Laws hosts Alan Rozenshtein (https://law.umn.edu/profiles/alan-rozenshtein) and Kevin Frazier (https://law.utexas.edu/faculty/kevin-frazier/) for a joint episode on the fight between Anthropic and the Depar
Dean on the AI Action Summit in India
Dean joins from London after attending the AI Impact Summit in India. Dean and Tim unpack the summit’s central tension: “middle power” nations like India, Indonesia, and Nigeria pushing a vision of AI focused on public service delivery, agr
Kai Williams on the many masks LLMs wear
With Dean away, Tim invites his Understanding AI colleague Kai to unpack the surprising ways chatbot personalities can go wrong, a topic Kai covered in a recent article (https://www.understandingai.org/p/the-many-masks-that-llms-wear). Ever
AI safety in India, AV operators in the Philippines
Dean recorded this episode as he was preparing to attend the India AI Impact Summit — the fourth iteration of an annual gathering that has transformed from an intimate AI Safety Summit with heads of state to something resembling a tech indu
Dean is back!
Dean Ball is back. In April 2025, Dean left the podcast to join the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, where he spent four months working on the Trump administration’s AI policies—including executive orders, the AI action
Dean Ball is leaving the podcast
This week Dean began a new job (https://x.com/deanwball/status/1912253821272682567): senior policy advisor for AI in the Trump White House. I will miss having him as a co-host and wish him the best in his new role. In this episode, recorded
Charles Yang on AI and Science
This week, Dean and Tim talk to Charles Yang, a former staffer at the Department of Energy who now writes the Rough Drafts (https://charlesyang.substack.com) newsletter. Tim has written extensively about AI in science, concentrating especia
James Grimmelmann on the copyright threat to AI companies
James Grimmelmann is a professor of law at Cornell University and a leading expert on copyright law. Grimmelmann walks through the complex process courts use to determine whether training AI models on copyrighted materials—like OpenAI using
Andrew Lee on running an AI email startup
Andrew Lee is the co-founder of Shortwave, an AI-powered email app. He’s also Tim’s brother. Andrew shares how Shortwave evolved from a conventional email app into a multi-LLM system that automates inbox organization, drafts messages, and p
Dean and Tim on Deep Research and the Paris Summit
In this episode, Dean and Tim discuss Dean’s trip to Paris for the AI Action Summit, including Vice President Vance’s speech on AI. They talk through the European outlook on AI regulation, European resentment toward America, and the stark s
Kashmir Hill on falling in love with ChatGPT
Kashmir Hill is a reporter at the New York Times who focuses on the social impacts of new technology. In this episode, she describes how users are customizing chatbots like ChatGPT to fulfill emotional and even erotic needs, often bypassing
Sophia Tung on riding a self-driving taxi in China
Tim and Dean chat with Sophia Tung, an entrepreneur, engineer, and now YouTuber, about her recent experience (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raSZN6mxHLs) in a Chinese self-driving taxi from Apollo Go, a subsidiary of Baidu. Apollo Go is a
Dean and Tim on DeepSeek and AI progress
Dean and Tim discuss DeepSeek’s r1 release and what it means. We talk export controls, whether the model is a true technical breakthrough, and what “reasoning” models like r1 and o1 mean for the pace of AI progress going forward. This is ou
Nathan Labenz on the future of AI scaling
Nathan Labenz is the host of our favorite AI podcast, the Cognitive Revolution (https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/). A self-described “AI scout,” Nathan uses his podcast to explore a wide range of AI advancements, from the latest language
