Aug 12, 2026

Chelsea Finn: This is the State of the Art in Robotics

Chelsea Finn, co-founder of Physical Intelligence, discusses the path to building general-purpose robots that operate reliably in the real world. She details how advanced reinforcement learning with human intervention, coupled with multi-scale memory systems, significantly boosts robot autonomy and throughput. Finn argues that robotics is entering its "GPT era," moving from specialized models to powerful, out-of-the-box foundation models like their PIO7, which demonstrates strong compositional generalization across tasks, objects, and robot platforms, matching or exceeding specialist performance without fine-tuning. The talk also covers the unique challenges and opportunities in robotics data, model deployment, and career paths.

Aug 12, 2026

RL Environments Explained: How AI Agents Learn Real-World Work | Brendan Foody, Mercor

Mercor CEO Brendan Foody elucidates the concept of RL environments, essential for training advanced AI agents. He breaks down their three core components—worlds, apps, and tasks—and details Mercor's evolution from crowdsourced data to expert-driven, "agentic" data. Foody underscores the indispensable role of human experts in defining frontier tasks and creating robust verifiers, exemplified by a real legal RL environment. He shares post-training results demonstrating significant performance gains with modest compute, discusses data pricing and quality, demystifies synthetic data, and explores future directions like ultra-long-horizon tasks and virtual co-workers. The talk emphasizes that data sets are becoming a critical moat for application-layer companies, enabling them to own their intelligence.

Aug 12, 2026

The OWASP LLM Top 10 has a few surprises for you

This podcast episode breaks down the 2026 OWASP LLM Top 10, highlighting a significant rise in concern for 'Excessive Agency' over traditional prompt injection. It explores the discrepancies between practitioner fears and incident data, particularly regarding misinformation, and advocates for viewing security frameworks as tools for operationalization and cyber resilience, not just compliance. The discussion also covers CISA's new SBOM guidance, emphasizing the need to operationalize supply chain data for effective risk reduction, and shares Black Hat 2026 insights on AI agents as a new attack surface, introducing the concept of 'intent collusion' and underscoring the critical need for foundational security principles like least privilege.

Aug 11, 2026

Circleback CEO Ali Haghani: Recording Company Meetings Will Become The Norm

Ali Haghani, co-founder of CircleBack, shares his unique hardware setup and delves into how his AI notetaker streamlines business operations, from interview tracking to customer support. He discusses the shift from manual coding to AI-orchestrated development, the nuances of prompt engineering, and his vision for why recording meetings with AI is becoming essential for leveraging LLMs and agents effectively in enterprises, ultimately reshaping the future of software engineering.

Aug 11, 2026

How Harvey Built a Research Lab on a Budget | Gabe Pereyra

Gabe Pereyra of Harvey details a playbook for application companies to compete with frontier AI labs by leveraging the ecosystem. Key strategies include building specialized benchmarks like Legal Agent Bench, using domain experts for synthetic data generation to overcome sensitive client data issues, partnering with multiple 'neo labs' for post-training, and developing robust model serving and evaluation infrastructure. He emphasizes open-sourcing data for validation and the 'Moneyball' philosophy for success, addressing challenges like talent acquisition and long-context management in the Q&A.

Aug 11, 2026

The Past, Present & Future of Programming Languages • Kevlin Henney • YOW! 2025

Kevlin Henney explores the slow but profound evolution of programming languages, revealing how many 'new' features are decades-old concepts. He analyzes language popularity rankings, highlighting the dominance of 20th-century languages and the impact of the "von Neumann bottleneck." The talk delves into historical innovations from Fortran to Algol, coroutines to functional programming, and concludes by examining how Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming clients of existing languages, further entrenching the mainstream rather than causing radical change, often due to their training data favoring established codebases.