**Erik Torenberg** (0:00)
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At Turpentine, we're building the first media outlet for tech people by tech people. We have a slate of hit shows across a range of topics and industries, from AI with Cognitive Revolution to Econ 102 with Noah Smith. Our other shows drive the conversation in tech with the most interesting thinkers, founders, and investors, like Moment of Zen and my show Upstream. We're looking for industry leading hosts and shows along with sponsors. If you think that might be you or your company, email me at erik.turpentine.co. That's E-R-I-K at turpentine.co.
**Zvi Mowshowitz** (0:45)
Someone walks into Sam Altman's office, says Google just announced 1.5 Pro.
It has a million-layer context window, potentially going to be 10 million. It's really exciting. People are raving about it. Here's now the time. And Sam's like, yeah, now Sora. You can't have both ways. You can't both say, there's so many chips coming online that we need to build AGI soon. And AGI is coming along so fast, we won't have enough chips, we need to build lots more chips and then go raise the money to make the chips.
It would be surprising to me if AGPT-5 worthy of its name didn't make these agents kind of work.
**Nathan Labenz** (1:22)
Hello and welcome to The Cognitive Revolution, where we interview visionary researchers, entrepreneurs, and builders working on the frontier of artificial intelligence.
Each week we'll explore their revolutionary ideas, and together we'll build a picture of how AI technology will transform work, life, and society in the coming years. I'm Nathan Labenz, joined by my co-host Erik Torenberg. Zvi Mowshowitz, welcome back again to The Cognitive Revolution.
**Zvi Mowshowitz** (1:48)
Always fun here. Let's do it.
**Nathan Labenz** (1:50)
Let's do it.
So, I call you when I feel like my own personal context window is overflowing and I can no longer find all the needles in the haystack that I might need to to make sense of what's going on. It sure seems like things are happening faster and faster all the time.
**Zvi Mowshowitz** (2:07)
Well, that's what Gemini Pro 1.5 is for, right? You've got the big new context window. You should be okay.
**Nathan Labenz** (2:12)
Well, how is your personal context window holding up, first of all, and then we'll get into all the latest news.
**Zvi Mowshowitz** (2:17)
I think that my capabilities are advancing fast enough that I've been able to keep pace, but it has been rough. So the discourse speed has slowed down in the last few months. It feels like we had a lot of really big developments and discussions around various potential government actions and also around the OpenAI situation.
And 2024 has been more of a like, okay, everybody chill, everybody process what's happened, and therefore we can focus on temporarily technologies. And yeah, a lot is happening, but also you start to see the patterns, and you start to say, okay, this is a version of this other thing that's happened, and it's not that it's slowing down in absolute terms, but you gain the power matching ability to process what's happening.
**Nathan Labenz** (3:06)
Is that a natural process for you or are you changing how you work at all or your approach in any way?
**Zvi Mowshowitz** (3:13)
So I think it's a natural process in the sense of, I find myself saying, let's try this again. Let's go over this again.
Or as we previously discussed, right, it's like, you see this in the Maplavene columns where he's like, well, you know, as we have talked about before, and every word is a link to a different, I suppose, it's the same basic idea of a lot of these concepts and questions and reactions are going to repeat, right? Like, different people are realizing different versions of the same thing at different times. You know, the future is not even distributed, it's getting distributed, we pick up on when people notice this, especially when like mainstream media, you know, standard cultural people pick up on things that we knew six months ago, we knew a year ago, where we figured out was coming at that time.
And so a lot of them just, okay, yeah, we're going to go for this again, we have already covered that. Yeah, this is actually from October, and that happened to me yesterday, actually, I was writing stuff up. And I realized, no, this is actually a few months old. I probably already covered this. It's fine.
**Nathan Labenz** (4:14)
I'm trying to figure out what I can do to be more valuable. I think, you know, I've never really considered myself a content creator in, you know, in any sort of normal content creation sense. Starting a podcast was kind of a way to make sure that I was consistently tackling a new topic and, you know, hopefully sharing that with people in what I hope to be a somewhat useful way.
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