Hidden Layers: AI and the People Behind It

Hosted by KUNGFU.AI

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May 2026

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About the show

Hidden Layers: AI and the People Behind It, is a series focused on all things artificial intelligence. Hosted by our Co-Founder and CTO, Ron Green, who uses his 20+ years of AI experience to break down complex topics into digestible, engaging conversations. ‍If you’re a tech professional, or just looking to better understand the world of AI, you’re in the right place. Each episode will explore cutting-edge technical advances, discuss the art of the possible, and review some of the incredible work being done in the field.

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53 recent

May 14, 202641 min

AI Is Designing the Next Cancer Fighter | EP.53

What if AI could design proteins to help your immune system find and kill cancer cells? That's not a hypothetical — it's what 28 teams across 40 countries attempted in the Bits-to-Binders Challenge, an open-science competition organized by PhD students at the University of Texas at Austin. In this episode, Ron sits down with three of the organizers — Clay Kosonocky, Daryl Barth, and Aaron Feller — to unpack how they pulled off one of the most ambitious student-led experiments at the intersection of AI and biology. Together, they submitted 12,000 AI-designed protein sequences to bind to a cancer target called CD20, then validated the results in real biological assays. The conversation covers the 100-year history of protein folding, how AlphaFold changed everything, why AI biology can't just rely on benchmarks, what a CAR-T cell actually does, and what a 7% hit rate tells us about where the field really stands. Plus: open source science, the verification gap between digital predictions and wet lab reality, and why a global team of strangers working together might be the most hopeful signal of all. 00:00 Intro & Why AI Protein Design Matters 02:38 Why Protein Folding Is So Important 04:47 What AlphaFold Changed 07:59 From Predicting Proteins to Designing Them 11:10 The Rise of AI Protein Design 13:27 AI Skepticism in Biology 15:34 Why Wet Lab Validation Still Matters 20:36 Inside the Bits-to-Binders Challenge 22:05 Designing CAR-T Cell Proteins 26:57 Why Most Designs Failed 31:12 Open Source Biology & Global Collaboration 33:37 Competition Winners & Best Results 35:39 Final Takeaways on AI + Biology

April 23, 202628 min

Anthropic Code Leak: A Rare Look Inside Frontier AI | EP.52

What can we actually learn from the recent Anthropic code leak? In this episode of Hidden Layers, Ron Green, Michael Wharton, and Dr. ZZ Si unpack what the leak reveals about how a frontier AI company may be building agentic systems in practice. They explore Anthropic’s apparent approach to memory, skills, and context compaction, and why the biggest takeaway is not model weights, but the harness around the model. The conversation also gets into why simple, human-readable systems may be outperforming more complex architectures, and what these design choices could mean for the next generation of domain-specific AI agents. 00:00 Intro and why the leak matters 00:43 What leaked and what it reveals 03:50 Memory systems and context management 07:20 Skills, extensibility, and simple design 11:39 Compaction and the limits of context windows 17:23 Why the harness matters so much 18:36 A blueprint for building agentic systems

March 12, 202631 min

The "AI Bubble" Bubble | EP.51

Is the AI bubble narrative itself a bubble? Billions of dollars are flowing into chips, data centers, and frontier models. From the outside, it can look speculative. But from inside the industry, the signal looks very different. In this episode of Hidden Layers, Ron Green is joined by Michael Wharton and Dr. ZZ Si to discuss what it actually feels like to build with AI today. They explore rapid advances in model capabilities, the growing power of coding agents, and why many organizations are still struggling to absorb the productivity gains AI already enables. They also examine the massive capital investment in AI infrastructure and debate what signals would actually indicate the industry has hit a plateau. 00:00 – Is the AI Bubble Narrative Itself a Bubble? 03:00 – Rapid Advances in AI Model Capabilities 05:35 – Coding Agents and the Changing Development Workflow 09:30 – Benchmarks Showing AI Capability Acceleration 16:20 – Verifying AI Outputs and the Limits of Evaluation 18:20 – CAPEX, Chips, and the Dot-Com Bubble Comparison 21:50 – What Would Actually Signal an AI Bubble 26:30 – Why AI May Become a Utility

February 19, 202629 min

Did AI Kill Programming? | EP. 50

Are AI coding tools actually replacing programmers, or just changing how software gets built? In this episode of Hidden Layers, Ron Green sits down with Dr. ZZ Si and Michael Wharton to unpack what has shifted with modern coding agents, what has not, and where the hype breaks down. They share concrete examples from their own workflows, including how coding tools have moved from autocomplete to handling larger chunks of work, and why the real bottleneck is no longer writing syntax, but defining intent, architecture, and product direction. The conversation also explores how these tools are reshaping team velocity, why senior engineers tend to get more leverage from AI than junior developers, and the risks of weakening the talent pipeline if companies stop investing in early-career engineers. The episode closes with a candid look at what skills will matter most in an AI-assisted world, how abstraction layers are changing the role of programmers, and whether we may already be near peak computer science graduates. 00:00 – The rise of AI coding tools 03:07 – How workflows are changing 06:27 – Team velocity and delivery speed 08:19 – Product thinking vs. engineering execution 09:46 – Is programming actually dying? 11:41 – What “programming” means now 15:23 – Senior vs. junior developer leverage 16:33 – The developer talent pipeline 18:21 – Ego, identity, and automation 19:08 – Before vs. after: building with AI 22:30 – Debugging and fixing issues with AI 24:42 – Spec-writing and product shaping with AI 26:49 – The future of computer science grads 29:20 – Closing reflections

January 22, 202630 min

Your AI Is Too Big, Too Expensive, and Probably Wrong | EP. 49

What if the most powerful AI in your organization isn’t the biggest model you can buy, but the one trained on data only you own? In this episode of Hidden Layers, Ron Green is joined by Dr. ZZ Si and Michael Wharton to break down why domain-specific AI models consistently outperform general-purpose systems in real enterprise environments. They explore how narrowly scoped models deliver higher accuracy, lower costs, better reliability, and stronger governance, especially when built on proprietary data. Through real-world examples spanning finance, industrial systems, healthcare, and document understanding, the conversation tackles when to build custom models, when to rely on APIs, and how to identify AI initiatives that actually make it into production. The takeaway is clear: focus beats scale, and specificity is often the fastest path to durable competitive advantage. Chapters 00:00:00 What Is Domain-Specific AI 00:01:15 General Models vs. Focused Systems 00:02:48 Performance, Cost, and Model Size 00:04:13 Proprietary Data as Advantage 00:07:58 Why AI Fails in Production 00:08:42 Real-World Domain-Specific Examples 00:10:54 How to Decide What to Build 00:14:53 Scale, Accuracy, and Uncertainty 00:18:49 The Spectrum of Domain-Specific AI 00:27:01 What We’d Build Differently Today

December 17, 202540 min

AI Year in Review – Key Moments, Hot Takes, and 2026 Predictions | EP. 48

2025 was another defining year for artificial intelligence. In this special AI Year in Review episode of Hidden Layers, Ron Green is joined by Emma Pirchalski, Michael Wharton, and Dr. ZZ Si to break down what actually mattered in AI this year. The team recaps the biggest developments from 2025, revisits their predictions from 2024 to see what held up (and what didn’t), and shares honest, experience-driven predictions for 2026. Topics include multimodal models, agents, enterprise adoption, governance gaps, workforce impact, ROI pressure, and where AI is truly headed next. This episode cuts past hype to focus on what leaders, builders, and decision-makers should actually be watching as AI moves from experimentation to execution. Chapters 00:00:00 Welcome and Introduction to 2025 AI Year in Review 00:00:56 Emma's Working Models Podcast Announcement 00:01:48 Top AI Developments of 2025 00:16:29 Reviewing 2025 Predictions 00:25:08 2026 Predictions 00:36:49 Closing Thoughts

November 13, 202537 min

Why Agentic AI Isn’t Ready for Prime Time—Yet | EP. 47

Artificial intelligence is shifting from prediction to autonomy—and “agentic AI” is leading the charge. In this episode of Hidden Layers, KUNGFU.AI’s Ron Green, Dr. ZZ Si, and Michael Wharton unpack what it really means for machines to act on their own, what’s hype versus real progress, and how far we are from true artificial general intelligence (AGI). They discuss how coding agents are transforming development workflows, why agentic AI is both overhyped and underutilized, the challenges of scaling reliable autonomy, the connection between AGI, biology, and lifelong learning, and whether new architectures or cognitive inspiration will take us the rest of the way. 00:00 – Intro: From prediction to autonomy 01:30 – What is agentic AI? 05:00 – Coding agents and creative workflows 08:00 – Reliability, risk, and real-world use 12:30 – The agentic hype cycle 16:00 – Why businesses underuse (and overuse) AI 19:00 – Narrow AI and domain-specific intelligence 22:00 – The AGI timeline debate 26:00 – Learning from biology and cognition 33:00 – Lifelong learning and what’s missing today

September 25, 202531 min

Why AI Hallucinates (and Why It Might Never Stop) | EP. 46

In this episode of Hidden Layers, Ron is joined by Michael Wharton and Dr. ZZ Si to explore one of the most pressing and puzzling issues in AI: hallucinations. Large language models can tackle advanced topics like medicine, coding, and physics, yet still generate false information with complete confidence. The discussion unpacks why hallucinations happen, whether they’re truly inevitable, and what cutting-edge research says about detecting and reducing them. From OpenAI’s latest paper on the mathematical inevitability of hallucinations to new techniques for real-time detection, the team explores what this means for AI’s reliability in real-world applications.

September 3, 202525 min

GPT-5 Release Fallout, AGI Timeline, Google's Genie 3 and Meta's DINO V3 | EP. 45

In this episode of Hidden Layers, we dive into the most important AI developments of the month. We cover OpenAI’s highly anticipated and controversial GPT-5 release, debate where we really are on the AGI timeline, explore groundbreaking new world models like Google’s Genie 3 and Tencent’s Huanyuan Gamecraft, and unpack Meta’s DINO V3 image encoder breakthrough.

August 16, 202528 min

Bridging Physics and AI for Smarter Climate Decisions | EP. 44

In this episode of Hidden Layers, host Ron talks with Dr. Hannah Lu, assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin and core faculty at the Odin Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences. Dr. Lu is pioneering the use of AI-powered surrogate models to make complex scientific simulations—like CO₂ absorption in geological formations—faster, more accurate, and more useful for real-world decision-making.They discuss:<ul><li>How surrogate models work and why they’re so powerful</li><li>The challenges of applying AI to physics-based systems</li><li>How digital twins and uncertainty quantification are shaping the future of environmental modeling</li><li>The intersection of generative AI, physics constraints, and climate science</li></ul>