SHOW DIRECTORY
The Cognitive Revolution
Detailed conversations with AI researchers and builders about frontier models, agents, safety, policy, and the path toward advanced intelligence.
BIDCLUB DESCRIPTION
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.