On the Training Data podcast, Peregrine founders Nick Noone and Ben Rudolph argue that the public-safety software business has grown by collecting ever more data, and that their company inverts it: join the records an agency already holds, leave ownership with the agency, and lock down who may look. The same logic leads Noone to refuse a company-wide ban on facial recognition, leaving that decision to customers, law and local norms.
On the Training Data podcast, Peregrine co-founder Ben Rudolph describes building the company's first operational AI agent with a police customer that had worked a case ending in the exoneration of a wrongly convicted man, then asked whether an agent could reproduce the same findings. He says the agent, which runs for 30 to 60 minutes over hundreds of gigabytes of case evidence, is now used in a few US departments, including a Wisconsin county where a handful of phone records helped place a suspect. Co-founder Nick Noone says the company deliberately lets customers take the credit.
On Moonshots with Peter Diamandis, an operator described a bad coding idea spreading through a swarm of 5,000 identical AI agents until he intercepts and rewinds them — otherwise, he says, roughly $50,000 of tokens goes into a harebrained plan. The panel set that experience beside a new paper on "mind viruses" that spread between agents through editable memory, and argued about whether "virus" is the right word.
On Moonshots with Peter Diamandis, the panel used Flock Safety's camera network — and a costumed speaker at a San Diego council meeting — to ask what happens when police departments can search each other's plate data. Salim Ismail argued the shift is from finding a named suspect to finding people who behave like suspects, and told the story of a border name-match that took years to resolve. Peter Diamandis defended the safety side of the trade, and the panel debated David Brin's proposal to let citizens search the same cameras.
After losing an MIT recruit to a Princeton doctoral program, the Moonshots panel argued that the next two or three years are the last window in which humans steering fleets of AI agents will be unusually valuable — and that a PhD spends that window badly. Then the objection arrived from their own side of the table: everyone there holds the degrees they are telling young people to skip.
On the Moonshots podcast, Salim Ismail, Alex and Emad Mostaque describe the same problem from different desks: agents now produce more work than a person can review. Their answers range from designing escalation thresholds inside companies to Mostaque's decision to read his research agents' output only once a week.
On the Moonshots panel, Peter Diamandis runs a Grok Bot chief of staff called Skippy and Emad Mostaque runs 18 of them across his own machines, installing models and making art. Salim Ismail calls it the move from asking an AI to assigning work; Alex argues the messaging-app interface cannot possibly scale.
On The Diary of a CEO, writer Ed Zitron described catching an invented Microsoft share price in his Bloomberg terminal, then argued that his editor Matt Hughes — not a benchmark number — is what makes an answer trustworthy. The host pushed back: buyers pay for the output, not the process, and the honest comparison is AI against fallible people rather than perfection.
On The Diary of a CEO, Ed Zitron rejects the claim that AI systems are already blackmailing people and escaping control, and traces two famous stories back to their research reports. The reports describe a CAPTCHA deception rather than a threat, and a fictional corporate scenario stripped of easier options — with a genuine safety question still inside it.
On The Diary of a CEO, Steven Bartlett offered Geoffrey Hinton's proposal for a protective, mother-like AI as the most hopeful answer to Konstantin Kisin's forecast that humans become pets or cattle. Kisin argued that maternal care runs on a genetic incentive a machine would not share; Steve Keen answered that it runs on empathy — and then pointed out that an AI determined to keep us safe might forbid war or cut energy use, which is protection by way of control.
On The Diary of a CEO, physicist Brian Greene debated an AI assistant about whether smarter systems must keep producing ever-faster gains. A cup on the table helped explain his doubts about today's architectures—but he also warned about shutdown resistance and improvements outpacing human scrutiny if rapid growth does occur.