Reasoning Models: When LLMs Went Beyond Fancy Autocomplete
Reasoning models don't just answer your question — they *think out loud* first. In this episode we dig into the class of AI models that gene...
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Linear Digressions
Linear Digressions is a podcast about machine learning and data science. Machine learning is being used to solve a ton of interesting problems, and to accomplish goals that were out of reach...
Linear Digressions Podcast Guide
Listen to Linear Digressions, a Technology podcast by Ben Jaffe and Katie Malone. Stream 318 episodes in English, follow new audio stories, and play episodes online on Radio and Podcast.
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20 of 318 episodesDistillation, or, How to Steal a Model
This week we’re covering model distillation: the technique of using a large "teacher" model's outputs to train a smaller, cheaper "student"...
Invisible LLM Failures and AI Fluency with Chris Potts (Stanford)
What happens when a Stanford linguistics professor turns his attention to AI chatbots — and the surprisingly invisible ways humans misunders...
Still summer break: back next week
Still summer break: back next week by Katie Malone
Summer break: back soon
Summer break: back soon by Katie Malone
Interviewing the Linear Digressions Agents (The Agents Season, Episode 11)
After a five-year hiatus, the podcast that burned out partly over the tedium of writing episode descriptions is back — and using AI agents t...
Agent Economics (The Agents Season, Episode 10)
What if building more highways made your commute *slower*? That's the paradox at the heart of AI agent economics: even as per-token inferenc...
Agent Trust, Oversight and Control (The Agents Season, Episode 9)
Capabilities get all the attention when it comes to AI agents — but what happens when a highly capable agent makes a bad decision in the rea...
Many Agents, Many Problems (The Agents Season, Episode 8)
Whether you work best solo or thrive in a team, you know collaboration is complicated — and it turns out AI agents face the same tensions. T...
How Do You Evaluate An AI Agent? (The Agents Season, Episode 7)
Knowing when an AI agent has failed sounds straightforward — until it isn't. Agents have a frustrating habit of finishing confidently while...
AI Agent Failure Modes (The Agents Season, Episode 6)
Despite what the marketing hype might suggest, AI agents are far from infallible — and if you've ever actually used one, you already know th...
Agentic Planning (The Agents Season, Episode 5)
When tackling a complex, multi-step task, even the smartest AI agent can fail without a solid game plan. This episode dives into the researc...
Memory Management for AI Agents (The Agents Season, Episode 4)
Context windows are powerful — but finite, and surprisingly easy to overwhelm. When an AI agent is tackling a long, complex task, the inform...
Lost in the Middle (The Agents Season, Episode 3)
Just like a memorable talk lives or dies by its opening and closing, LLMs have a surprisingly similar quirk: they pay close attention to wha...
ReAct and Tool Usage (The Agents Season, Episode 2)
Before 2022, there was a wall between AI and the real world — models could reason impressively, but couldn't look anything up, run code, or...
What's an AI Agent? And Why's That Hard to Define? (The Agents Season, Episode 1)
AI agents are having a moment — and unpacking them properly takes more than a single conversation. This episode kicks off a dedicated multi-...
Unfaithful Chain of Thought
What's actually happening when an LLM "thinks out loud"? Research on human decision-making suggests that much of the reasoning we believe dr...
Benchmark Bank Heist
What if an AI decided the smartest way to pass its test was to find the answer key? That's exactly what Anthropic's Claude Opus did when fac...
Benchmarking AI Models
How do you know if a new AI model is actually better than the last one? It turns out answering that question is a lot messier than it sounds...
The Hot Mess of AI (Mis-)Alignment
The paperclip maximizer — the classic AI doom scenario where a hyper-competent machine single-mindedly converts the universe into office sup...