Thinking Machines: AI & Philosophy
“Thinking Machines,” hosted by Daniel Reid Cahn, bridges the worlds of artificial intelligence and philosophy - aimed at technical audiences. Episodes explore how AI challenges our understanding of topics like consciousness, free will, and morality, featuring interviews with leading thinkers, AI leaders, founders, machine learning engineers, and philosophers. Daniel guides listeners through the complex landscape of artificial intelligence, questioning its impact on human knowledge, ethics, and the future.
We talk through the big questions that are bubbling through the AI community, covering topics like "Can AI be Creative?" and "Is the Turing Test outdated?", introduce new concepts to our vocabulary like "human washing," and only occasionally agree with each other.
Daniel is a machine learning engineer who misses his time as a philosopher at King's College London. Daniel is the cofounder and CEO of Slingshot AI, building the foundation model for psychology.
- Update frequency
- every 13 days
- Average duration
- 38 minutes
- Episodes
- 26
- Years Active
- 2023 - 2025
AI Therapy with Slingshot's Derrick Hull
“Everyone should go to therapy.” It’s a common statement, but much harder to achieve than it looks. There’s only one therapist for every 10K would-be clients, and the gap is only growing every year.
T…
What if we could cure loneliness? Philosophy, dopamine, and more with Mark Ungless
Artificial neural networks were designed to emulate the human brain - and their insane performance on a wide range of tasks is pretty good evidence to support the comparison.
Well, it's a bit more com…
Does Philosophy Make Progress? Chatting with Every's Dan Shipper
Is the AI revolution we're experiencing going to push us into a future we can't imagine? Or will the pace of progress enable us to adjust along the way?
Dan Shipper spends his time thinking and writin…
OpenAI o1: Another GPT-3 moment?
GPT-3 didn't have much of a splash outside of the AI community, but it foreshadowed the AI explosion to come. Is o1 OpenAI's second GPT-3 moment?
Machine Learning Researchers Guilherme Freire and Luka…
The Future is Fine Tuned (with Dev Rishi, Predibase)
Dev Rishi is the founder and CEO of Predibase, the company behind Ludwig and LoRAX. Predibase just released LoRA Land, a technical report showing 310 models that can outcompete GPT-4 on specific task…
Pre-training LLMs: One Model To Rule Them All? with Talfan Evans, DeepMind
Talfan Evans is a research engineer at DeepMind, where he focuses on data curation and foundational research for pre-training LLMs and multimodal models like Gemini. I ask Talfan:
- Will one model rule…
On Adversarial Training & Robustness with Bhavna Gopal
"Understanding what's going on in a model is important to fine-tune it for specific tasks and to build trust."
Bhavna Gopal is a PhD candidate at Duke, research intern at Slingshot with experience at …
On Emotionally Intelligent AI (with Chris Gagne, Hume AI)
Chris Gagne manages AI research at Hume, which just released an expressive text-to-speech model in a super impressive demo. Chris and Daniel discuss AI and emotional understanding:
- How does “prosody” …
Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned (with Joel Lehman)
Former OpenAI Research Scientist Joel Lehman joins to discuss the non-linear nature of technological progress and the present day implications of his book, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned.
Joel co-aut…
Where are the good AI products? (with Varun Shenoy)
“Where are the good AI products?” asks Varun Shenoy, ML engineer in his latest blog post. Varun and I talk through:
- What are the cool applications that exist? Why aren't there more of them?
- What do (th…
The End of RAG (with Donato Riccio)
ML Engineer and tech writer Donato Riccio wrote an article entitled "The End of RAG?" discussing what might replace Retrieval Augmented Generation in the near future. The article was received as high…
GPUs and how the cloud is changing (with Cedana Founder, Neel Master)
What’s going on with GPUs? We talk through the GPU bottleneck/supply gut, Meta’s apparent 600,000 H100-equivalents and the future of the GPU cloud.
Neel Master is the CEO and founder of Cedana, enabli…
Live Video Translation with AI
Founders of Lingopal, Deven Orie and Casey Schneider, join to talk about their startup story, developing real-time translation software for enterprises.
Topics include:
- Why is translation so hard?
- How a…
Is open-source AI safe? (with SafeLlama founder, Enoch Kan)
Founder of the SafeLlama community, Enoch Kan joins us today, to talk about safety in open source and medical AI. Enoch previously worked in AI for radiology, focused on mammography at Kheiron Medica…
What is the future of AI-assisted or AI-driven software?
Join Daniel Cahn on another SlingTalk episode with Kristian Freed (ex-CTO at Pariti and Elder), discussing the past, present and future of AI-assisted or AI-driven software.
They talked about:
- The Evol…
Is the Turing Test Outdated?
In 1950, Alan Turing asked, “Can machines think?” He suggested the Imitation Game as a test to evaluate whether a machine can think, more commonly called the “Turing Test.” Today we ask, is the Turin…
Prompt Engineering
Join Daniel Cahn on SlingTalks as he welcomes Jonathan Pedoeem (Founder of PromptLayer) to talk through Prompt Engineering. This episode offers an in-depth look into the past, present, and future of …
AI for Investment Diligence
Adam Kirsh (Head of Product & Engineering, Stealth Startup) joins Slingshot to talk about how AI is transforming investment due diligence.
Beyond AI in diligence, we discuss:
- “Horizontal” and “vertical…
The Myth of Human-in-the-Loop
Ex-Datadog Founding PM, Ayush Kapur, joins Daniel Cahn on SlingTalks to talk through the overloaded term, "Human in the Loop". They hone in on the impact of both, emotional and philosophical aspects …
AI-Generated Content and the Boring Apocalypse
AI is increasingly doing the heavy lifting in our communications and content generation. On this episode, Guilherme Freire, Founding ML Engineer at Slingshot, joins the podcast to discuss the impact …