The TWIML AI Podcast (formerly This Week in Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence)

In this episode, Zoe Weil, co-founder and CEO of Sequen, joins us to discuss how ranking systems can use live behavioral signals to optimize for purchases rather than clicks or search relevance alone. Zoe explains why approaches developed at data-rich social platforms don’t necessarily translate to retailers and how Sequen uses scroll speed, hover duration, and other in-session interactions to infer shopper intent without relying on user identity. We explore the company’s large event models and its architecture of specialized models that transform streaming events into features for downstream rankers. Zoe describes the infrastructure required to serve dynamic rankings within milliseconds, why the team chose Rust for its backend, and how evaluation harnesses connect model improvements to business outcomes. We also discuss the tradeoffs between advertising and organic revenue, continuous model improvement, and the boundary between useful personalization and surveillance. 🗒️ Full show notes: ⁠⁠https://twimlai.com/go/780.

AI systems have gone from struggling with grade-school math to helping solve research problems that have resisted mathematicians for decades, including Navier-Stokes. In this episode, Greg Burnham, who leads AI capabilities research at Epoch AI, joins us to examine what that progress says about where AI is going. We look at how these systems are solving hard math problems, how much they rely on persistence and prior human work, and whether they are starting to produce genuinely new ideas. We also discuss how to measure progress as traditional benchmarks become less useful, why capability gains appear surprisingly steady across model generations, and where models still struggle with open-ended work, learning from experience, and identifying promising new research directions. 🗒️  Full show notes: https://twimlai.com/go/778.

As reasoning models consume more tokens and AI systems become more expensive to run, understanding what those tokens actually buy is becoming increasingly important. In this episode, Stanford professor and Big Spin co-founder Chris Potts joins us to discuss AI tokenomics and his research into “tokenflation”—the possibility that token usage is growing faster than the measurable value those tokens produce. We explore how to measure the return on AI spending, why benchmarks alone provide an incomplete picture of model progress, and what inference-time scaling means for the economics of increasingly capable models. Chris also explains why expert AI users tend to get better results by challenging and iterating with models, how AI fluency affects outcomes, and why more efficient architectures could change the underlying economics. We also discuss DSPy, interpretability, the limits of today’s transformer architectures, and where Chris sees opportunities for more fundamental innovation in AI. 🗒️ Full show notes: ⁠⁠https://twimlai.com/go/776.