PERSON DIRECTORY
Nathan Labenz
Host of The Cognitive Revolution. Nathan Labenz appears in 163 indexed conversations across The Cognitive Revolution, The a16z Show. This directory brings every appearance, source, TL;DR, digest, and transcript into one searchable feed.
Zero to One in AI Safety: Halcyon's Mike McCormick on Launching 30 New Orgs & the Founder Bottleneck
Halcyon’s signal is that founders—not ideas or money—are AI safety’s binding constraint; its nonprofit-plus-VC model has launched roughly 30 organizations raising roughly half a billion dollars.Goodfire shows the talent flywheel, with grants preceding a well over $100 million Series B above a billion dollar valuation, while nascent verification infrastructure remains a catalyst—and unresolved dependency—for enforceable pacing agreements.
The RL Fine-Tuning Playbook: CoreWeave's Kyle Corbitt on GRPO, Rubrics, Environments, Reward Hacking
Erik TorenbergNathan LabenzKyle Corbitt
RL can push capable open-weight models higher by reinforcing rare outcome-changing decisions while preserving pretrained “grooves,” unlike SFT’s broader risk of catastrophic forgetting.For enterprise agents, the clearest wedge is latency: RL can bring small models to roughly 30% of frontier latency and improve cost per token by at least an order of magnitude, though slower iteration and reward hacking remain risks.