Intelligence on the Edge: Liquid AI's Ramin Hasani on the Search for Device-Native Foundation Models

About this episode

Ramin Hasani discusses the future of AI and the importance of device-native foundation models.

Liquid AI co-founder and CEO Ramin Hasani joins Nathan to make a technically grounded case against the idea that scale alone defines the future of AI. Drawing on Liquid’s path from MIT CSAIL work on liquid time-constant networks to Automated Foundation Model Design, he explains why efficient, hardware-aware architectures can look very different from frontier-scale attention models. The conversation centers on device-native foundation models for phones, laptops, cars, and wearables, including Liquid’s open-weight LFM family and production deployments at Shopify and Mercedes-Benz. The stakes are whether useful intelligence can move beyond the data center into local, privacy-sensitive, low-latency applications—and which model and chip companies will own that on-device intelligence layer. For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/intelligence-on-the-edge-liquid-ai-s-ramin-hasani-on-the-search-for-device-native-foundation-models/ Mercury: Command is Mercury’s new conversational interface, giving you natural-language access to your finances and helping you take actions within your existing permissions and approval policies…

People in this episode

Host: Nathan Labenz

Guest: Ramin Hasani

Topics covered

• device-native foundation models
• AI architecture
• local intelligence
• privacy-sensitive applications
• hardware-aware models

Keywords

• Liquid AI
• foundation models
• AI efficiency
• local applications
• hardware architecture

Sponsors

Claude

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Liquid AI, MIT CSAIL, Shopify, Mercedes-Benz, Anthropic

Products: Claude Pro

More episodes of "The Cognitive Revolution"

• AI:AM Highlights: Welcome to the AGI Era · September 5, 2026 · 2h 21m
• Write, Change, Recall, Forget: MongoDB's Pete Johnson on How Retrieval Drives Agent Performance · September 1, 2026 · 1h 37m
• AI:AM Highlights: Recursive Self-Improvement, Rushed and Vibe-Coded? · August 28, 2026 · 2h 12m
• RL's a Hell of a Drug: Metagaming, Reward Seeking & Motivated CoT Reasoning – Bronson Schoen, Apollo · August 26, 2026 · 2h 14m
• AI in the AM — Weekly Highlights: Relaunch Week (Aug 17–20, 2026) · August 22, 2026 · 2h 34m
• Let There Be Germicidal Light: This $500 Fixture Could Stop the Next Pandemic, from Complex Systems · August 16, 2026 · 1h 25m