Machine Learning podcasts

Maxim Raginsky joins Paul Middlebrooks to examine brains, AI and biological autonomy through control theory. They discuss what behaviour reveals about a system's internal organisation, analog and digital descriptions, the relationship between control and cybernetics, active inference and the limits of computational accounts. The publisher offers a public episode and supporter access to its full archive.

Hosted by Paul Middlebrooks

Diogo Almeida joins Sam Charrington to discuss TypeSafe's Jev model and the use of calibrated decisions as a component of AI software. The conversation examines reinforcement learning from calibrated decisions, differences from classifiers and text-generating models, and the implications for agents, tool use and system architecture.

Hosted by Sam Charrington

Anna Truzzi and Luca Pellegrino discuss experiments on a historical antibacterial preparation and the sources of bias in AI systems. An external segment with Ian Scott and Ilaria Zanardi explores elephant communication, including low-frequency sound, long-distance signalling and the evidence for individually distinctive calls.

Hosted by Anna Truzzi, Luca Pellegrino

Yuandong Tian discusses his research on computer Go, from DarkForest to OpenGo, and the role of action-space design in applying reinforcement learning. The conversation covers gradient-free optimization, neural architecture search, Coconut’s approach to reasoning in latent space, representation learning and grokking. It then examines AI-assisted research, recursive self-improvement, coding-agent limitations, and whether alternative architectures can outperform transformers. The closing discussion considers data efficiency, robotics, restrictions on self-improving systems, and open-source models.

Hosted by Ravid Shwartz Ziv, Allen Roush

Sana Qadar speaks with cognitive neuroscientist Reuben Rideaux and English professor Sophie Gee about how using AI may affect thinking, memory and creative work. They examine cognitive offloading, the potential contributions of AI tools, and which parts of intellectual activity benefit from continued human engagement.

Hosted by Sana Qadar

Ming-Yu Liu, NVIDIA vice president of research and head of the Cosmos Lab, joins Practical AI hosts Daniel Whitenack and Chris Benson to discuss AI systems that interact with the physical world. The conversation examines open models, world models and simulation as foundations for robotics and autonomous vehicles, and how research and deployment can advance physical AI. Published 1 October 2026; publisher runtime 47 minutes 19 seconds.

Hosted by Daniel Whitenack, Chris Benson

Sam Charrington speaks with Greg Burnham, who leads AI capabilities research at Epoch AI, about the progression from elementary mathematical tasks to difficult research problems, including Navier–Stokes. They examine how advanced systems solve mathematical problems, the roles of persistence and existing human work, and the evidence for new ideas. The conversation also considers how to measure progress when traditional benchmarks become less informative, why improvements appear steady across successive model generations, and the remaining weaknesses in open-ended research, learning from experience and choosing productive scientific questions.

Hosted by Sam Charrington

Stanford linguist and computer scientist Chris Manning discusses what linguistics contributed to machine learning and why pragmatics and dialogue remain open problems for language models. The conversation examines early abstraction of verb categories in small transformers, how distributed representations shape learning, and whether language alone can support meaningful representations. It also considers language in world models, diffusion language models, and representation finetuning (ReFT), which steers frozen models through their hidden states. The final discussion asks where knowledge resides and whether concepts occupy linear subspaces.

Hosted by Ravid Shwartz Ziv, Allen Roush

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

Andrew Dai joins The Information Bottleneck to discuss language-model pre-training, next-token prediction, training-data quality and visual reasoning. The conversation examines counting and image understanding, world models and JEPA. Hosted by Ravid Shwartz-Ziv and Allen Roush.

Gaute Einevoll and Mihai Petrovici discuss how neuromorphic hardware can support artificial intelligence and efficient brain simulation. They contrast high-frequency arithmetic on conventional silicon with the rich dynamics and millisecond spikes of biological neurons, and explore brain-inspired systems for emulating neural dynamics and studying computation in spiking networks. Petrovici is a senior researcher at the University of Bern. The conversation was recorded on 18 June 2026 and released on 23 September 2026; the publisher’s audio runs 1 hour, 41 minutes and 46 seconds.

Hosted by Gaute Einevoll

Carnegie Mellon researcher and Abridge co-founder Zachary Lipton discusses where machine learning can help healthcare and why clinical work is harder to automate than software development. The conversation examines medical documentation, decision support, drug discovery, open models and model routing, then turns to academic research, doctoral training and the effects of automation on scientific careers. 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

Rafael Rosengarten and BioPharmaTrend co-founder Andrii Buvailo discuss how to assess progress in AI-assisted drug discovery. They trace the move from individual computational tasks to connected research workflows and question whether counting AI-associated drug candidates captures the technology’s value. Topics include research productivity, trial design, biomarkers, human expertise and the use of patient-derived data, organoids and other representative biological systems to improve translation. The conversation also considers why AI has become polarising and how specialised models may fit into pharmaceutical research.

Alex Smola discusses the development of voice agents, audiovisual systems and AI avatars. Topics include audio tokenization, inference cost, conversational latency, visual context and how artificial systems might learn from interaction while responding appropriately to human emotion.

Hosted by Sam Charrington

Sara Hooker of Adaptation Lab explores AI systems that change with their users, tasks and environments. The discussion connects continual learning, efficient adaptation and automated science with the difficulty of evaluating tasks that lack easily checked answers. It also covers interfaces, distillation, open models, safety and regulation, multilingual tokenization, and possible successors to current Transformer systems. 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

Jonathan Webb and ABC AI reporter Cam Wilson discuss how AI systems are changing mathematical research and the controversy around claims concerning the Navier–Stokes equations and the Millennium Prize. Mathematician Tristan Buckmaster of New York University contributes to the discussion.

Hosted by Jonathan Webb

Microsoft researcher Alexia Jolicoeur-Martineau explains the Tiny Recursive Model and the reasoning behind her work on small networks that repeatedly refine an internal state and proposed answer. The conversation examines truncated gradients, puzzle-solving benchmarks and the differences from autoregressive language generation. It also considers molecular modelling, limits of data scaling and which research directions she would prioritize. 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

Leonardo and Andrea discuss internet censorship and recent work on Navier-Stokes equations involving AI, including the scientific significance and debate surrounding the results. The episode also contains Giuliano Greco's interview with Ivano La Rosa about a cyberpunk audio drama set in a future Genoa.

Hosted by Leonardo, Andrea

The Science Show reviews a new approach to detecting and measuring concussion, a repurposed satellite for mapping the Universe, intervention to conserve a potentially sterile native plant, AI support for people with dyslexia, and how recommendation algorithms influence reading choices.

Hosted by Robyn Williams, Belinda Smith

Mathematicians Sylvia Serfaty and Amaury Hayat discuss AI-assisted mathematical research with Alexandra Delbot. The conversation examines recent claims of difficult problem solving, how researchers assess and understand machine-generated proofs, and the implications for publication, mathematical practice and the responsibilities raised by the Leiden declaration.

Hosted by Alexandra Delbot