Kyle Rush

AI:AM LIVE — September 2, 2026 — Why the Loop Transformer Breaks the Chain-of-Thought Bargain, Hint's Kyle Rush on the Expertise Locked in the Expert's Head, and a Case for Expanding the Safety Tent

Nathan Labenz and Prakash Narayanan open on The Information's report that OpenAI's Astra uses a loop transformer, with Nathan arguing that chain-of-thought monitoring was never a panacea — Apollo's Bronson Shane has read millions of tokens and still can't say why a model acts as it does — but that it is the best tool anyone has, and that quietly adding opaque serial depth in the wake of OpenFace is an own goal OpenAI can't cover with a reassuring tweet. His proposal: labs should publish negative research agendas and commit to a hard cap on how many computational steps a model can take before it has to write something down. Prakash walks the mechanics with a Fable 5.1 artifact, then reports GPT-6-Astra staged on the OpenAI API and expected Thursday. A fourteen-question "Guess the Markets" round, split around the guest, pits both hosts against two AI contestants on the AI bubble, Anthropic's revenue recognition, EUV in China, and the world's second trillionaire. Hint co-founder and CTO Kyle Rush — Obama 2012, Casper, Maisonette, and a co-founder relationship with Martha Stewart — explains why he built a provenance-tracking graph of the home rather than a better chatbot, why every fact about a house is a claim with a source and a date, what happened when his voice agent called a generator technician seventeen times in a row, and why the real moat is that homeowners don't know the words to ask. The close runs the second half of the quiz and lands on Dean Ball, David Krueger, and Nathan's argument that the pausers should recognize a new friend when they have one.