The TWIML AI Podcast (formerly This Week in Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence)

Hosted by Sam Charrington

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793

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Sep 2026

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About the show

Machine learning and artificial intelligence are dramatically changing the way businesses operate and people live. The TWIML AI Podcast brings the top minds and ideas from the world of ML and AI to a broad and influential community of ML/AI researchers, data scientists, engineers and tech-savvy business and IT leaders. Hosted by Sam Charrington, a sought after industry analyst, speaker, commentator and thought leader. Technologies covered include machine learning, artificial intelligence, deep learning, natural language processing, neural networks, analytics, computer science, data science and more.

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60 recent

September 9, 202659 min

Do AI Tokenomics Matter More Than Model Benchmarks? with Chris Potts - #776

As reasoning models consume more tokens and AI systems become more expensive to run, understanding what those tokens actually buy is becoming increasingly important. In this episode, Stanford professor and Big Spin co-founder Chris Potts joins us to discuss AI tokenomics and his research into “tokenflation”—the possibility that token usage is growing faster than the measurable value those tokens produce. We explore how to measure the return on AI spending, why benchmarks alone provide an incomplete picture of model progress, and what inference-time scaling means for the economics of increasingly capable models. Chris also explains why expert AI users tend to get better results by challenging and iterating with models, how AI fluency affects outcomes, and why more efficient architectures could change the underlying economics. We also discuss DSPy, interpretability, the limits of today’s transformer architectures, and where Chris sees opportunities for more fundamental innovation in AI. 🗒️ Full show notes: ⁠⁠https://twimlai.com/go/776.

September 1, 20261 hr 6 min

World Models and the Future of Spatial AI with Justin Johnson - #775

In this episode, Justin Johnson, co-founder of World Labs, joins us to discuss world models and the emerging field of spatial AI. We explore why many researchers see capabilities beyond language as an important frontier for AI, and what it means to build models that can understand, generate, and simulate the environments around them. Justin explains the different approaches to world modeling, including explicit 3D representations and generative models, and why there is still no established recipe for building these systems. We also discuss World Labs’ Marble system, which can generate navigable 3D worlds from images and other inputs, the challenges of evaluating world models, and the role of simulation, planning, and action. Finally, Justin shares his vision for models that bring these capabilities together, supporting everything from interactive virtual environments to agents and robots that can operate in the physical world. 🗒️ Full show notes: ⁠https://twimlai.com/go/775.

August 26, 202658 min

Why the Next AI Breakthrough May Come from Physics with Max Welling - #774

The conventional wisdom in AI is that the next breakthrough will come from more compute, more data, and larger models. But what if the next leap comes from somewhere else? In this episode, Max Welling—co-founder and CTO of CuspAI and professor at the University of Amsterdam—argues that physics may provide some of the ideas behind the next generation of AI systems. We begin with CuspAI’s work using generative AI to design entirely new materials for semiconductors, batteries, carbon capture, and clean energy. Max explains how foundation models for chemistry, agentic workflows, simulation, and automated experimentation are dramatically accelerating the search for new materials and reshaping scientific discovery. The conversation then broadens into a deeper question. Beyond giving AI new scientific problems to solve, can physics also teach us how to build better AI? Max explores surprising connections between machine learning and thermodynamics, why waves may become a new computational primitive for neural networks, and how concepts like symmetry breaking and statistical physics could inspire AI architectures beyond today’s scaling paradigm. 🗒️ Full show notes: https://twimlai.com/go/774.

August 12, 202656 min

Why Image Generation Needs More Than Bigger Models with Fatih Porikli - #773

Text-to-image models have become remarkably good at producing realistic images. But realism isn’t the same as correctness. Ask for several distinct people, a specific composition, or a high-resolution image generated locally, and today’s models still struggle in surprising ways. In this episode, Fatih Porikli, Vice President of Technology at Qualcomm, joins me to discuss what remains unsolved in image generation and several approaches his team presented at CVPR to address those challenges. We explore why better training objectives can improve controllability, how separating scene planning from rendering may lead to more reliable image generation, techniques for generating 16-megapixel images efficiently on edge devices, and new methods for eliminating the visible artifacts that often appear in AI-powered image editing. Along the way, we discuss reinforcement learning for image generation, agentic image generation pipelines, on-device AI, and what the next phase of progress in generative vision systems is likely to look like. 🗒️  Full show notes: https://twimlai.com/go/773

July 27, 202647 min

Why Models Are AI’s Next Training Dataset with Damian Borth - #772

For more than a decade, AI has advanced by training ever-larger models on ever-larger datasets. But as high-quality training data becomes harder to find and pretraining grows increasingly expensive, researchers are looking for new ways to keep foundation models improving. In this episode, Damian Borth, professor of AI and machine learning at the University of St. Gallen, argues we’ve been overlooking an important source of knowledge: the models we’ve already trained. His group’s work on weight space learning treats trained neural networks themselves as data, learning from the distilled results of millions of GPU hours of optimization rather than starting from raw data each time. We explore what it means to build foundation models of neural networks, how knowledge can be transferred across architectures and domains, why this approach could dramatically reduce the cost of developing specialized models, and whether future AI systems may be trained on collections of existing models instead of ever-growing datasets. 🗒️  Full show notes: https://twimlai.com/go/772.

July 8, 202659 min

How AI Learns to Smell with Alex Wiltschko - #771

In this episode, Alex Wiltschko, founder and CEO of Osmo, joins the show to discuss his goal of giving computers a sense of smell and what it takes to build olfactory intelligence. We explore the science behind smell, from the hundreds of olfactory receptors in the human nose to the challenge of mapping the relationship between molecular structure and odor, ensuring safety regulations are met, and building foundation models for smell. Alex explains how graph neural networks and advanced embedding spaces allow AI to capture the multi-dimensional structure of scents, grouping them into perceptual neighborhoods, and creating a machine learning representation that predicts how molecules smell. We also cover how Osmo built the largest proprietary olfactory dataset from scratch to train a fleet of predictive models, and how olfactory intelligence could eventually power applications far beyond fragrance, including disease detection, emotion sensing, and consumer devices. 🗒️  Full show notes: https://twimlai.com/go/771.

June 16, 202656 min

Why AI Agents Break the GenAI Security Model with Devvret Rishi - #770

In this episode, Sam talks with Dev Rishi, GM of AI at Rubrik, about what happens when agents move beyond answering questions and start taking action across tools, systems, and business processes. We explore why the enterprise playbook of static guardrails plus human approval starts to break down in the agent era. Agents are useful because they can plan, call tools, update systems, write code, send messages, and operate across workflows at machine speed, but those same capabilities make them difficult to govern with rules written in advance or approval prompts reviewed one at a time. Dev explains why tool access increases blast radius, why agents can route around controls in surprising ways, and why human-in-the-loop review can become security theater when agents operate at scale. We also discuss what enterprises need instead: better visibility, runtime enforcement, policy-aware governance, agent observability, and recovery mechanisms for when something goes wrong. Along the way, we dig into MCP and tool sprawl, small language models for policy enforcement, defense in depth, agent rewind, and why AI may be needed to help secure AI. 🗒️ Full show notes: https://twimlai.com/go/770.

June 9, 202651 min

Is RAG Dead? Lessons from Building AI for Tax Law with Alex Bowcut - #769

As context windows grow into the millions of tokens, many AI practitioners are questioning whether retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is still necessary. If modern models can ingest entire libraries of documents, why bother with retrieval at all? In this episode, Alex Bowcut, Head of Engineering at Sphere, explains why the answer depends on the application. Sphere uses AI to automate global tax compliance—an environment where getting the answer right isn’t enough. Every conclusion must be backed by the correct legal citation, and every decision must withstand expert review. We explore how Sphere built TRAM (Tax Review and Assessment Model), a production AI system that combines retrieval, reasoning models, legal review workflows, reinforcement learning, and deterministic systems to help tax experts move nearly two orders of magnitude faster while maintaining accuracy. Along the way, we discuss why RAG remains critical in high-stakes domains, how Sphere processes legal and regulatory documents from jurisdictions around the world, retrieval architectures, semantic chunking, dense versus sparse retrieval, expert feedback loops, and the challenges of building AI systems that people can actually trust. 🗒️ Full show notes: https://twimlai.com/go/769.

May 21, 20261 hr 6 min

Relational Foundation Models for Enterprise Data with Jure Leskovec - #768

In this episode, Jure Leskovec, co-founder and chief scientist at Kumo and professor of computer science at Stanford, joins us to explore two fronts of his work: AI for science and relational deep learning. We begin with AI Virtual Cell, a multiscale effort to learn data-driven representations from proteins to cells to patients using single-cell RNA-seq data, protein language models like ESM, and structure models like AlphaFold—without hand-encoding biology. Jure then dives into relational deep learning, reframing enterprise databases as graphs and training neural networks directly on raw multi-table data. He explains Kumo’s Relational Foundation Model (RFM2), which performs in-context learning over subgraphs to make accurate predictions on new databases and tasks with no training, and how this approach benchmarks against RelBench and other multi-table datasets. We also discuss real-world deployments at companies like Reddit, DoorDash, and Coinbase, explainability via attention over tables and columns, integration with agentic systems, deployment options, and practical limitations. The complete show notes for this episode can be found at https://twimlai.com/go/768.

May 7, 202653 min

How to Find the Agent Failures Your Evals Miss with Scott Clark - #767

In this episode, Scott Clark, co-founder and CEO of Distributional, joins us to explore how teams can reliably operate and improve complex LLM systems and agents in production. Scott introduces a Maslow’s hierarchy of observability: telemetry for logging, monitoring for known signals, and post-production or online analytics to surface unknown unknowns. We dig into examples of real-world failures Scott’s team has seen in production systems, such as “lazy” tool-use hallucinations that standard evals miss, and how mapping traces into vector fingerprints enables clustering and topic discovery to uncover emergent behaviors. Scott explains how analytics can feed the data flywheel by generating evals, guardrails, and training data, and why online, adaptive approaches are essential for non-stationary models. We also touch on practical how-to’s such as instrumentation with OpenTelemetry, the GenAI semantic conventions, and the role of dedicated analytics tools. The complete show notes for this episode can be found at https://twimlai.com/go/767.