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On Prakash's Grok 3 vs. DeepResearch comparison · Feb 2025
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Side by side comparison OpenAI DeepResearch vs Grok 3 DeepSearch TLDR: Grok 3 hands down victory Query: Find me Settlers of Catan Cities and Knights, not 5-6 players and not Legend of Conquerors, price and delivery time, Northern California Speed: 🏆 Grok 3 - 84 seconds 160
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It won’t happen. People say all kinds of things in surveys. Watch what they do instead. And what they do is… use AI.
"People hate AI. AI is less popular than ICE, less popular than politicians" SemiAnalysis founder Dylan Patel @dylan522p predicts a real backlash wave: as AI spreads and gets blamed for broader social problems, large-scale protests could hit within months. "I think we'll see
Forget public conversations. People unload their inner lives - hopes, wishes, desires, anxieties and worries into their AI assistants. That data is way more sensitive & valuable than anything the govt could record publicly. We built our own panopticon and pay monthly for it.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on AI and the Constitution: "It is not illegal to put cameras around everywhere in public space and record every conversation. It's a public space." "But today, the government couldn't record that all and make sense of it." With AI: you can map the
Isomorphic Labs just doubled AlphaFold's performance on drug design benchmarks. @owl_posting :"The field is already awash with many really good preclinical assets. The bottleneck is how well these work in patients." "That story has been told for ten years. It is not obviously Show more
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AI:AM is hosted by Prakash Narayanan and Nathan Labenz, whose personal accounts are followed by Jeff Bezos (Amazon founder), Marc Andreessen (a16z founder), Garry Tan (Y Combinator President and CEO), Jack Clark (Anthropic co-founder), Jerry Tworek (OpenAI VP), and many of the founders, researchers, and investors setting the AI agenda.
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There's a yawning gulf between the people inside the AI bubble and everyone else, and it's getting wider every week. The people with the most accurate picture of what's coming are structurally unable to describe it. Lab leaders can't speak candidly. Research stops getting published. Leaks go pseudonymous.
AI:AM is a live morning show built to close that gap — with the people who are actually building, funding, and shipping AI, on the record, in real time.
The hosts
Co-host
Prakash leans toward deployment — the economic upside, the operators shipping AI into the real economy. A finance operator turned AI builder: Stanford EE, investment banking, distressed debt and special situations across emerging Asia, ML credit scoring before the LLM era. 55,000 followers and 300M+ impressions on X.
@8teapi on X →
Co-host
Nathan leans toward AI research, safety, and the risks of rapid capability gains. Founded Waymark — featured in an OpenAI case study in 2023 — and participated in the GPT-4 Red Team. Now host of The Cognitive Revolution, one of the most technically substantive AI interview shows.
@labenz on X →Get the AI:AM briefing — top guests, top stories, and the day's most important AI moves. Delivered after every show. Free.
A three-act Wednesday show. Nathan and Prakash opened with the machinery around the models: all three GPT-5.6 models (Sol, Terra, Luna) were cleared to launch publicly the next day, July 9, after Commerce's CAISI review — making GPT-5.6 the first frontier model to graduate the June EO's pre-release gate rather than be stopped by it (as of air time it remained a ~20-partner API preview, not GA) — the same 48 hours OpenAI's exhibition model beat the human field at the AtCoder World Tour Finals, with AtCoder's own president conceding 'total defeat to AI.' The hosts then took on Anthropic's 'global workspace' paper (Jul 6, 2026) — a privileged, small slice of Claude's activity that supports multi-step reasoning and experiential language, and the consciousness-framing fight it ignited from OpenAI's Boris Power to Neel Nanda and Eleos AI — plus Replit's claim to have 'closed the loop' on a self-improving agent read through Lilian Weng's harness-engineering lens, and a same-week regulatory split-screen: Beijing weighing export curbs on China's top models (open weights included, per Reuters Jul 7) while Illinois signed SB 315, first-in-nation annual safety audits for frontier developers, with Coefficient Giving's reported $160M grant to Geoffrey Irving's Resolution rounding out the block. Then Zeev Farbman — co-founder and CEO of LTX, the Facetune founder who split Lightricks in two on June 1, 2026 to go all-in on open world models — joined for a 48-minute conversation built around the open-weights bet in AI video: why he took ~250 people and the models while Facetune kept the cash cow, the Red Hat-style licensing math of giving away weights free under $10M ARR, LTX-2.3's #1 open-weights ranking on Video Arena (Jun 30, 2026) versus the closed frontier's compute advantage, video models as world models with implicit physics, robotics teams fine-tuning owned weights inside their own environments, and what responsible deployment means for open video. Finally, the longest segment of the day: 'Predictions & FutureSearch,' the hosts-versus-the-AI-superforecasters rematch teased on Monday's Dan Schwarz episode — a 'Guess the Market' round with Nathan and Prakash calibrating against live prediction-market odds on AI questions and comparing their guesses to FutureSearch's AI forecasting agent.
A hosts-only experiment in public sensemaking: with Anthropic's massive new J-Space interpretability release just out — a ~150-page paper plus ~50 pages of commentary, summaries, and interactive demos — Nathan and Prakash spent nearly two hours working through it live with no expert guests, pausing to ask Claude for help and pulling up the paper's visualizations on screen. The headline: applying a 'Jacobian lens' to a transformer's activations reveals an emergent global-workspace-like region — the J-Space — at intermediate depths where the model's higher-order reasoning becomes legible: watch a model silently solve multi-step arithmetic in a single forward pass while copying an unrelated sentence, or 'concentrate on citrus fruits' on command without emitting a token. Nathan's optimistic read: because ablating the J-Space destroys exactly the capabilities takeover scenarios require — strategic multi-step reasoning and theory of mind — cheap J-Space monitoring adds 'another 9' to defense-in-depth ('a tough day for the stochastic parrot crowd'), and interpretability keeps surprising to the upside only three years after toy models of superposition. The hosts worked through the counterfactual-reflection-training result (training the model to give an account of its principles mid-task loads those concepts into the J-Space and improves behavior even when unobserved), the sleeper-agent result (concepts like 'secretly' and 'fraud' visible on the first token of a hidden-goal model's response), Anthropic's three outside review tracks (neuroscientists, Eleos AI on welfare and moral patienthood, and Neel Nanda calling it a starting point for a research program), the consciousness question both hosts noted everyone is carefully not answering, and Daniel Kokotajlo's 'a few dozen more advances like this' — which Nathan pushed back on as too pessimistic. Then a follow-up the hosts had promised: Nathan ran roughly 400 of his Cognitive Revolution intro essays through Pangram Labs' AI-text detector and walked through the receipts on screen — two flagged essays were admitted AI reads, one 0%-human score was 'fair enough,' but one essay Pangram scored 0% human came with a 50-minute Google Docs edit history showing him rewriting nearly every section: 'trust it as a consumer, be more cautious as a judge.' Prakash countered with the Chamath episode — a 100%-AI post Elon replied to before anyone checked — and argued the window in which anyone cares about AI-written text may close within the year. The FutureSearch prediction-market quiz planned for the day was deferred on-air to the next morning's show — with FutureSearch itself competing against the hosts.
The labs talk to each other. The funds talk to each other. We talk to both — live, on the record, before the news cycle has its take. The room is small. The work it produces is not.
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Episode notes and source links turn the live discussion into a useful briefing for people who do not have an hour.
