muckrAIkers

muckrAIkers

Join us as we dig a tiny bit deeper into the hype surrounding "AI" press releases, research papers, and more. Each episode, we'll highlight ongoing research and investigations, providing some much needed contextualization, constructive critique, and even a smidge of occasional good will teasing to the conversation, trying to find the meaning under all of this muck.

Episodes

June 23, 2025 53 mins

In this episode, we break down Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill" and its dystopian AI provisions: automated fraud detection systems, centralized citizen databases, military AI integration, and a 10-year moratorium blocking all state AI regulation. We explore the historical parallels with authoritarian data consolidation and why this represents a fundamental shift away from limited government principles once held by US conse...

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    Jacob and Igor tackle the wild claims about AI's economic impact by examining three main clusters of arguments: automating expensive tasks like programming, removing "cost centers" like call centers and corporate art, and claims of explosive growth. They dig into the actual data, debunk the hype, and explain why most productivity claims don't hold up in practice. Plus: MIT denounces a paper with fabricated data, and Grok r...

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    April 9, 2025 91 mins

    DeepSeek has been out for over 2 months now, and things have begun to settle down. We take this opportunity to contextualize the developments that have occurred in its wake, both within the AI industry and the world economy. As systems get more "agentic" and users are willing to spend increasing amounts of time waiting for their outputs, the value of supposed "reasoning" models continues to be peddled by AI system develope...

  • Mark as Played
    February 10, 2025 15 mins

    DeepSeek R1 has taken the world by storm, causing a stock market crash and prompting further calls for export controls within the US. Since this story is still very much in development, with follow-up investigations and calls for governance being released almost daily, we thought it best to hold of for a little while longer to be able to tell the whole story. Nonetheless, it's a big story, so we provide a brief overview of...

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    Chris Canal, co-founder of EquiStamp, joins muckrAIkers as our first ever podcast guest! In this ~3.5 hour interview, we discuss intelligence vs. competencies, the importance of test-time compute, moving goalposts, the orthogonality thesis, and much more.

    A seasoned software developer, Chris started EquiStamp as a way to improve our current understanding of model failure modes and capabilities in late 2023. Now a key contra...

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    December 30, 2024 86 mins

    What happens when you bring over 15,000 machine learning nerds to one city? If your guess didn't include racism, sabotage and scandal, belated epiphanies, a spicy SoLaR panel, and many fantastic research papers, you wouldn't have captured my experience. In this episode we discuss the drama and takeaways from NeurIPS 2024.

    Posters available at time of episode preparation can be found on the episode webpage.

    EPISODE RECORDED 2...

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    The idea of model cards, which was introduced as a measure to increase transparency and understanding of LLMs, has been perverted into the marketing gimmick characterized by OpenAI's o1 system card. To demonstrate the adversarial stance we believe is necessary to draw meaning from these press-releases-in-disguise, we conduct a close read of the system card. Be warned, there's a lot of muck in this one.

    Note: All figures/tab...

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    December 2, 2024 58 mins

    While on the campaign trail, Trump made claims about repealing Biden's Executive Order on AI, but what will actually be changed when he gets into office? We take this opportunity to examine policies being discussed or implemented by leading governments around the world.


    • (00:00) - Intro
    • (00:29) - Hot off the press
    • (02:59) - Repealing the AI executive order?
    • (11:16) - "Manhattan" for AI
    • (24:33) - EU
    • (30:47) - UK
    • ...
    Mark as Played
    November 19, 2024 67 mins

    Multiple news outlets, including The Information, Bloomberg, and Reuters [see sources] are reporting an "end of scaling" for the current AI paradigm. In this episode we look into these articles, as well as a wide variety of economic forecasting, empirical analysis, and technical papers to understand the validity, and impact of these reports. We also use this as an opportunity to contextualize the realized versus promised f...

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    October 2024 saw a National Security Memorandum and US framework for using AI in national security contexts. We go through the content so you don't have to, pull out the important bits, and summarize our main takeaways.

    • (00:48) - The memorandum
    • (06:28) - What the press is saying
    • (10:39) - What's in the text
    • (13:48) - Potential harms
    • (17:32) - Miscellaneous notable stuff
    • (31:11) - What's the US governments take on A...
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    October 30, 2024 60 mins

    Frontier developers continue their war on sane versioning schema to bring us Claude 3.5 Sonnet (New), along with "computer use" capabilities. We discuss not only the new model, but also why Anthropic may have released this model and tool combination now.


    • (00:00) - Intro
    • (00:22) - Hot off the press
    • (05:03) - Claude 3.5 Sonnet (New) Two 'o' 3000
    • (09:23) - Breaking down "computer use"
    • (13:16) - Our understanding
    • (...
    Mark as Played
    October 22, 2024 82 mins

    Brace yourselves, winter is coming for OpenAI - atleast, that's what we think. In this episode we look at OpenAI's recent massive funding round and ask "why would anyone want to fund a company that is set to lose net 5 billion USD for 2024?" We scrape through a whole lot of muck to find the meaningful signals in all this news, and there is a lot of it, so get ready!


    • (00:00) - Intro
    • (00:28) - Hot off the press
    • (02:...
    Mark as Played
    October 16, 2024 61 mins

    The Open Source AI Definition is out after years of drafting, will it reestablish brand meaning for the “Open Source” term? Also, the 2024 Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry are heavily tied to AI; we scrutinize not only this year's prizes, but also Nobel Prizes as a concept.

     

    • (00:00) - Intro
    • (00:30) - Hot off the press
    • (03:45) - Open Source AI background
    • (10:30) - Definitions and changes in RC1
    • (18:36) - “Busine...
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    September 30, 2024 79 mins

    Why is Mark Ruffalo talking about SB1047, and what is it anyway? Tune in for our thoughts on the now vetoed California legislation that had Big Tech scared.

    • (00:00) - Intro
    • (00:31) - Updates from a relatively slow week
    • (03:32) - Disclaimer: SB1047 vetoed during recording (still worth a listen)
    • (05:24) - What is SB1047
    • (12:30) - Definitions
    • (17:18) - Understanding the bill
    • (28:42) - What are the players saying abou...
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    September 23, 2024 50 mins

    OpenAI's new model is out, and we are going to have to rake through a lot of muck to get the value out of this one!

    ⚠ Opt out of LinkedIn's GenAI scraping ➡️ https://lnkd.in/epziUeTi

    • (00:00) - Intro
    • (00:25) - Other recent news
    • (02:57) - Hot off the press
    • (03:58) - Why might someone care?
    • (04:52) - What is it?
    • (06:49) - How is it being sold?
    • (10:45) - How do they explain it, technically?
    • (27:09) - Reflection AI Dr...
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