Computer Science podcasts

Nick Kuhn joins Daniel Whitenack and Chris Benson to discuss deploying AI agents alongside conventional enterprise applications. Topics include agent build packs, MCP gateways, shared memory, identity, sandboxing and lessons from platform engineering.

Hosted by Daniel Whitenack, Chris Benson

Demetrios Brinkmann and Chris Benson discuss agents that operate computers and interact with software. They examine MCP, agent harnesses, interactions between agents, emerging commerce workflows and the practical challenges of using these tools in enterprise environments.

Hosted by Chris Benson

Chris Smith presents a research-news episode covering a treatment for prematurely fused infant skull bones, discussion of advanced AI risks, animal-assisted observations in Greenland’s fjords, and a European commercial rocket launch. The surgery segment explains how biomedical modelling and engineered springs supported treatment planning.

Hosted by Chris Smith

Chris Smith investigates autonomous transport through a ride on a self-driving bus in Cambridge. In collaboration with the Royal Institute of Navigation, the programme discusses the engineering, operation and navigation of driverless vehicles. Contributors include Nick Bailey, Daniel Clarke, Jamie Wilson, Jim Hutchinson, Ramsey Faragher and Edward Cameron, representing the test service, local transport partnership, vehicle manufacturer, automation supplier and navigation community.

Hosted by Chris Smith

Chetan Gupta joins Daniel Whitenack and Chris Benson to discuss the importance of system architecture when moving AI into enterprise use. The conversation connects industrial and physical AI with deployment, governance and sovereignty, considering how organizations can make practical design choices.

Hosted by Daniel Whitenack, Chris Benson

Recorded live at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Philadelphia, this episode brings hosts Janna Levin and Steven Strogatz together with Akshay Venkatesh, Ravi Vakil and Alex Kontorovich. They examine what recent AI-generated proofs demonstrate, how machine assistance may change mathematical research, and what proof, creativity, understanding and storytelling contribute to the discipline. The recording took place on 26 July 2026; Quanta published the episode on 3 September 2026.

Hosted by Janna Levin, Steven Strogatz

Charles Frye of Modal examines the infrastructure constraints behind large-scale AI research. With Ravid Shwartz Ziv and Allen Roush, he discusses underused hardware, saturated resources, sharing GPU capacity and deciding when to train a model. The conversation also covers inference and speculative decoding, hardware economics, virtualization and the security boundaries around agents and open models. Hosted by Ravid Shwartz Ziv and Allen Roush. Watch the full conversation on the publisher’s YouTube channel.

Hosted by Ravid Shwartz Ziv, Allen Roush

Angie Jones discusses the shared infrastructure needed for practical AI agents, including interoperability and open standards. The conversation covers MCP, agent-to-agent communication and Goose, asking how common foundations can make tools easier to connect and reduce fragmentation as organizations adopt agent systems.

Hosted by Chris Benson

Computer scientist and cognitive scientist Melanie Mitchell discusses why artificial intelligence does not think or reason like humans, how developmental and comparative psychology can improve machine-cognition experiments, and six principles for testing AI competence, robustness, and failure modes.

Chris Benson and Daniel Whitenack separate the roles of models, agents and the software harnesses that run them. They discuss architectural choices for multi-agent systems, practical deployment considerations, and how openness and dependency on particular vendors influence the systems developers can build.

Hosted by Chris Benson, Daniel Whitenack

Chris Benson and Daniel Whitenack examine a reported security incident involving OpenAI agents and Hugging Face. They reconstruct the episode's account of what happened and discuss what it suggests about sandboxing, network access and the controls needed when AI systems can execute actions.

Hosted by Chris Benson, Daniel Whitenack

PufferAI researcher Joseph Suarez argues that implementation and simulation bottlenecks have constrained reinforcement learning as much as algorithm choice. He discusses the design of useful simulators, CPU and GPU trade-offs, faster training pipelines and open-source research tools. The conversation ranges from game environments to potential applications in scientific simulation and biological modelling. Hosted by Ravid Shwartz Ziv and Allen Roush. Watch the full conversation on the publisher’s YouTube channel.

Hosted by Ravid Shwartz Ziv, Allen Roush

Jacinta Bowler examines the boundary between progress and hype in quantum computing, including commercial incentives, public communication and the effect of AI competition. Guests Tara Roberson, Stela Todorovic of PsiQuantum Australia, Gideon Lichfield and Warwick Bowen of the University of Queensland discuss how to assess breakthrough claims.

Hosted by Jacinta Bowler

Florian Brand of Prime Intellect discusses how to evaluate agents when their tools and execution environments affect the result. The episode examines benchmark gaming, preventing shortcuts around scoring rules and the statistical limits of expensive evaluation runs. It also asks whether subjective impressions of reliability can be translated into useful measurements of model behavior. Hosted by Ravid Shwartz Ziv and Allen Roush. Watch the full conversation on the publisher’s YouTube channel.

Hosted by Ravid Shwartz Ziv, Allen Roush

Jacinta Bowler explores Australia’s role in quantum computing, from CSIRAC and early digital computing to present efforts toward large quantum machines. Peter Thorne, Michelle Simmons and Robert Clark of UNSW, and Geoff Pryde of PsiQuantum Australia discuss the country’s research history and prospects.

Hosted by Jacinta Bowler

Berkeley professor Ion Stoica discusses how research software becomes useful infrastructure and, sometimes, a company. The conversation draws on systems projects and companies associated with his laboratory to examine adoption, maintenance and the role of students. It also covers the complexity of the AI software stack, GPU utilization, coding agents in distributed systems, reward design and regulating outcomes. Hosted by Ravid Shwartz Ziv and Allen Roush. Watch the full conversation on the publisher’s YouTube channel.

Hosted by Ravid Shwartz Ziv, Allen Roush

Fireworks AI co-founder Benny Chen explains the infrastructure required to serve machine-learning models at scale, from GPU procurement and kernels to runtimes and request routing. He discusses power constraints, hardware utilization, mixture-of-experts models, quantization, reinforcement-learning efficiency and speculative decoding. The conversation also covers distributed training across data centres, sparse autoencoders, the constraints on open-source interpretability research, and the relationship between open models and compute availability. Hosted by Ravid Shwartz Ziv and Allen Roush; the full conversation is available on YouTube.

Hosted by Ravid Shwartz Ziv, Allen Roush

Cristopher Moore connects computational complexity to questions about cognition and artificial intelligence. The discussion considers what makes a problem difficult, how rugged landscapes shape computation, and what complexity theory can contribute to understanding learning and generalization in brains and machines.

Hosted by Paul Middlebrooks

Devvret Rishi discusses how agents with access to tools and external systems change the security requirements of generative AI applications. He examines the limitations of static controls and the need for runtime policies, observability and recovery mechanisms as agent workflows become more capable.

Hosted by Sam Charrington

Michael Riegler discusses current uses of AI and language models, possible future developments and the concerns accompanying their spread. Conversation in Norwegian.