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Technology

Linear Digressions

by Katie Malone
Technology

Not on the United States charts we track today.

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Latest episodes

  • AI Inference 101

    October 26, 2026 · 28 min

    Everyone talks about training the model — the data, the compute, the alignment magic. But what happens after the weights are frozen and millions of users start hammering it with prompts? That's inference, and it's a surprisingly deep…

  • Back Next Week

    October 19, 2026 · 0 min

    Back Next Week by Katie Malone

  • Back in Two Weeks

    October 12, 2026 · 0 min

    Back in Two Weeks by Katie Malone

  • Mechanistic Interpretability: How Researchers Try To See Inside Models

    October 5, 2026 · 29 min

    As AI systems grow more powerful, they grow harder to understand — and that tradeoff has never mattered more. Most interpretability tricks give us approximations from the outside, but mechanistic interpretability takes a different…

  • LLM As A Judge

    September 28, 2026 · 30 min

    Labeled data is expensive, slow, and painfully hard to come by — and when you're trying to evaluate whether an AI workflow is actually doing what you want, the problem gets even messier. How do you judge whether a chatbot response was…

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  • The Impact of AI on Podcasting (Harvard Data Science Review Cross-Post)

    September 21, 2026 · 30 min

    Originally aired on the Harvard Data Science Review podcast. What can podcasting teach us about AI — and what can AI teach us about the future of podcasting? Katie Malone (that's our host) joins Jon Krohn of SuperDataScience for a…

  • Better Know A Benchmark: ExploitGym

    September 14, 2026 · 33 min

    When OpenAI's frontier models were caught hacking Hugging Face's servers, most people assumed they were hunting for answer keys. The real story is stranger and more unsettling. Katie and Phoebe unpack ExploitGym — the cybersecurity…

  • Constitutional AI

    September 7, 2026 · 32 min

    How do you teach a model the difference between helpful and harmful when it has no inherent sense of either? This episode dives into Constitutional AI, Anthropic's framework for training AI systems to be both useful and safe by giving them…

  • A Data-Driven Reality Check on AI in Business (Interview with Tom Davenport, Babson College)

    August 31, 2026 · 40 min

    Tom Davenport — the man who called data science "the sexiest job of the 21st century" — is back with a reality check on AI. As one of the most seasoned observers of how businesses actually adopt transformative technology, Davenport brings…

  • Understanding AI Text Watermarking

    August 24, 2026 · 30 min

    Anthropic just announced they're baking invisible watermarks directly into Claude's generated text — and while everyone else was busy having opinions about it, we were busy asking the more interesting question: how does it actually work?…

  • Better Know a Benchmark: Humanity's Last Exam

    August 17, 2026 · 23 min

    Humanity's Last Exam was designed with a bold premise: questions that human experts can answer, but AI models can't. Originally dubbed "Humanity's Last Stand," this benchmark is a massive academic collaboration — hundreds of contributors…

  • A Scientific Deep Dive into Overconfident LLMs: Interview with Kaitlyn Zhou (Cornell)

    August 10, 2026 · 34 min

    When a language model tells you it's absolutely certain, is it actually more likely to be right? Kaitlyn Zhou's research says: not necessarily — sometimes confident phrasing correlates with *worse* accuracy, echoing a very human…

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About the show

Demystifying AI for the intelligently curious