Welcome to The Information Bottleneck!

Episodes

Dec. 15, 2025

EP20: Yann LeCun

Yann LeCun – Why LLMs Will Never Get Us to AGI "The path to superintelligence - just train up the LLMs, train on more synthetic data, hire thousands of people to school your system in post-training, invent new tweaks on RL-I ...

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Dec. 10, 2025

EP19: Al in Finance and Symbolic Al with Atlas Wang

Atlas Wang (UT Austin faculty, XTX Research Director) joins us to explore two fascinating frontiers: the foundations of symbolic AI and the practical challenges of building AI systems for quantitative finance. On the symbolic...

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Dec. 1, 2025

EP18: AI Robotics

In this episode, we hosted Judah Goldfeder, a PhD candidate at Columbia University and student researcher at Google, to discuss robotics, reproducibility in ML, and smart buildings. Key topics covered: Robotics challenges: We...

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Nov. 24, 2025

EP17: RL with Will Brown

In this episode, we talk with Will Brown, a research lead at Prime Intellect , about his journey into reinforcement learning (RL) and multi-agent systems, exploring their theoretical foundations and practical applications. We...

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Nov. 17, 2025

EP16: AI News and Papers

In this episode, we discuss various topics in AI, including the challenges of the conference review process, the capabilities of Kimi K2 thinking, the advancements in TPU technology, the significance of real-world data in rob...

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Nov. 13, 2025

EP15: The Information Bottleneck and Scaling Laws with Alex Alemi

In this episode, we sit down with Alex Alemi, an AI researcher at Anthropic (previously at Google Brain and Disney), to explore the powerful framework of the information bottleneck and its profound implications for modern mac...

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Nov. 10, 2025

EP14: AI News and Papers

In this episode, we talked about AI news and recent papers. We explored the complexities of using AI models in healthcare (the Nature Medicine paper on GPT-5's fragile intelligence in medical contexts). We discussed the delic...

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Nov. 7, 2025

EP13: Recurrent-Depth Models and Latent Reasoning with Jonas Geiping

In this episode, we host Jonas Geiping from ELLIS Institute & Max-Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Tübingen AI Center, Germany. We talked about his broad research on Recurrent-Depth Models and late reasoning in large...

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Nov. 2, 2025

EP12: Adversarial attacks and compression with Jack Morris

In this episode of the Information Bottleneck Podcast, we host Jack Morris, a PhD student at Cornell, to discuss adversarial examples (Jack created TextAttack , the first software package for LLM jailbreaking), the Platonic r...

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Oct. 27, 2025

EP11: JEPA with Randall Balestriero

In this episode we talk with Randall Balestriero, an assistant professor at Brown University. We discuss the potential and challenges of Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPA). We explore the concept of JEPA, which a...

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Oct. 20, 2025

EP10: Geometric Deep Learning with Michael Bronstein

In this episode, we talked with Michael Bronstein, a professor of AI at the University of Oxford and a scientific director at AITHYRA, about the fascinating world of geometric deep learning. We explored how understanding the ...

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Oct. 12, 2025

EP9: AI in Natural Sciences with Tal Kachman

In this episode we host Tal Kachman, an assistant professor at Radboud University, to explore the fascinating intersection of artificial intelligence and natural sciences. Prof. Kachman's research focuses on multiagent intera...

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Oct. 6, 2025

EP8: RL with Ahmad Beirami

In this episode, we talked with Ahmad Beirami, an ex-researcher at Google, to discuss various topics. We explored the complexities of reinforcement learning, its applications in LLMs, and the evaluation challenges in AI resea...

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Sept. 29, 2025

EP7: AI and Neuroscience with Aran Nayebi

In this episode of the "Information Bottleneck" podcast, we hosted Aran Nayeb, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University, to discuss the intersection of computational neuroscience and machine learning. We talked ab...

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Sept. 20, 2025

EP6: Urban Design Meets AI: With Ariel Noyman

We talked with Ariel Noyman, an urban scientist, working in the intersection of cities and technology. Ariel is a research scientist at the MIT Media Lab, exploring novel methods of urban modeling and simulation using AI. We ...

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Sept. 16, 2025

EP5: Speculative Decoding with Nadav Timor

We discussed the inference optimization technique known as Speculative Decoding with a world class researcher, expert, and ex-coworker of the podcast hosts: Nadav Timor. Papers and links: Accelerating LLM Inference with Lossl...

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Sept. 7, 2025

EP4: AI Coding

In this episode, Ravid and Allen discuss the evolving landscape of AI coding. They explore the rise of AI-assisted development tools, the challenges faced in software engineering, and the potential future of AI in creative fi...

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Sept. 2, 2025

EP3: GPU Cloud

Allen and Ravid discuss the dynamics associated with the extreme need for GPUs that AI researchers utilize. They also discuss the latest advancements in AI, including Google's Nano Banana and DeepSeek V3.1, exploring the impl...

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Aug. 26, 2025

EP2: PeFT

Allen and Ravid sit down and talk about Parameter Efficient Fine Tuning (PeFT) along with the latest updated in AI/ML news.

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Aug. 20, 2025

EP1: Sampling

In this episode of the Information Bottleneck Podcast, Ravid Shwartz-Ziv and Alan Rausch discuss the latest developments in AI, focusing on the controversial release of GPT-5 and its implications for users. They explore the f...

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