The BasePodcastThe Cognitive Revolution86 min1,446 views
AI:AM: Is THIS the AI We Want? Alarming Acceleration, AI Election Bets, GPU Trading & AI-Native VC
In a weekly highlights show, hosts Nathan Labenz and Prakash Narayanan discuss METR's report on AI speeding up AI research at Anthropic and Anthropic's amended S-1, then interview guests on AI election forecasting, GPU trading rules and AI-native venture capital.
Why it matters
The same thing, for different readers.
What it means for you
Podcast hosts and guests describe AI agents already doing most of the hands-on work in AI research, and AI models forecasting elections about as well as top human forecasters.
For lawmakers
A GPU seller describes checks for Chinese ownership and Nvidia site visits; the hosts argue gaps remain and that government action should target frontier labs' practices.
For researchers
Thoughtful's Ballot Bench found nine frontier agents well calibrated on 2026 midterm forecasts, while the trading agents lost money by reacting slowly and sometimes inventing information.
The question it raises
Labenz asks whether the field should be cheering AI systems that get better at deception and collusion in games, or asking if that is what people want.
In their own words
Every quotation was found, word for word, in the text we saved from the source. That shows the words are there; it does not make them true, or prove the speaker meant them as quoted.
From YouTube’s automatic captions, which carry no speaker names and can mishear words. Where the speaker is known only from context, the quotation says so.
“the general trend we're kind of seeing is that I mean today and this has already been true for many months um researchers have essentially agents that can do the vast majority the actual implementation work which is what we would kind of consider as like research engineering.”
“if a model assigns an 80% chance of a candidate winning across all of the elections where assigns a similar 80% chance, it is right around 80% of the time”
“Nvidia also typically is going to check every six months and make sure those GPUs are where they're supposed to be, right? They'll physically come on site and actually make sure that they haven't left.”
“nobody's putting a gun to anybody's head saying you must do recursive self-improvement here.”
“the acceleration that they are reporting on here is not just a raw material uh input story. It is an algorithm story and it is a data quality story”
The record
- Questions
- What happens when AI helps build more capable AI? · How fast is AI advancing, and where is it heading? · How is AI used in attacks, defence and war?
- People
- Nathan Labenz (Speaks) · Prakash Narayanan (Speaks) · Brian Zhou (Speaks, researcher, Thoughtful) · Mike San Miguel (Speaks, Luxor Technology) · Bryan Bischof (Speaks, head of AI, Theory Ventures)
- Also covered by
- The Cognitive Revolution
- What we read
- We read the whole source.
- Found by
- The Radar, run of November 8, 2026, via
yt-the-cognitive-revolution-youtube(tier 1: the source’s own channel or an official record) - Cite this
- The Cognitive Revolution, “AI:AM: Is THIS the AI We Want? Alarming Acceleration, AI Election Bets, GPU Trading & AI-Native VC”, November 7, 2026. Entry in the Ctrl AI Base, https://ctrlai.com/base/cognitive-revolution-2026-11-07-ai-am-acceleration-election-bets