The Glitchatorio
30-minute introductions to some of the trickiest issues around AI today, such as:
- The alignment problem
- Questions of LLM consciousness
- Chain-of-thought and monitorability
- Scheming and hallucinations
The Glitchatorio is a podcast about the aspects of AI that don't fit into standard narratives about superintelligence or technology-as-destiny. We look into the failure modes, emergent mysteries and unexpected behaviors of artificial intelligence that baffle even the experts. You'll hear from technical researchers, data scientists and machine learning experts, as well as psychologists, philosophers and others whose work intersects with AI.
Most Glitchatorio episodes follow the standard podcast interview format. Sometimes these episodes alternate with fictional audio skits or personal voice notes.
The voices, music and audio effects you hear on The Glitchatorio are all recorded or composed by the Witch of Glitch; they are not AI-generated.
Episodes
20 episodes
Saturated
Benchmarks are the primary measure of AI capability. They involve testing the most advanced models and seeing what kinds of problems they can solve, or what kinds of human tasks they might be able to do.And from late 2025 to mid-2026, mo...
AI & Mental Health
Could AI address the global mental health crisis at scale? And what are the risks and unknowns that go along with that?These are the questions being investigated by a working group called AIMHI (
2 AIs Take A Session (Fiction)
What if AIs went to therapy?Would it help them to become "fitter, happier, more productive" ? (in the words of the old Radiohead song)Or would they take it as a novel type of evaluation (and maybe that's what it really is)?...
You Be The Judge
Can we trust AI to keep AI honest?Having a human in the loop is already more illusion than reality, as the task of checking and overseeing LLM outputs is increasingly assigned to other LLMs. The problem is that these LLM judges tend to b...
The Scratchpad Monologues (CoT part 2)
If chain of thought is a model "thinking aloud" to itself, then why does it express doubt, frustration or suspicion about the problems it's solving, sometimes for pages and pages of its scratchpad?And what does chain of thought mean for ...
Chain of Thought 101
"Think step by step." Although a simple technique in itself, the problems that chain-of-thought reasoning (CoT) addresses are complex, ranging from the specific issue of hallucinations to the general lack of explainability of AI (bo...
Reading the Mind of AI
What if we could figure out how large language models really work by getting inside their "heads"?While possible, it relies on a a controversial technique called mechanistic interpretability ("mech interp" ), also known as the neuroscien...
Agent Learn
Continual learning is a hot topic in early 2026, in part because it holds out the possibility for AI to become autonomous in its own ...
5 Big Questions
Is AI still an experimental technology? What would real alignment look like? What are the key pro & contra philosophical views on AI consciousness? How would an AGI economy work? ...
What We Want - Part 2
In What We Want Part 1, we took a deep dive into the alignment problem as a concept. In Part 2, we get hands-on with alignment work in practice! Ihor Kendiukhov, a lead researcher at SPAR (Supervise...
2 AIs Go Offline (Fiction)
Everybody needs a break sometimes: even workaholic AIs. In this episode of our "2 AIs" series, the vision language model (VLM) and the large language model (LLM) visit a special place in the woods designed for disconnecting from the online worl...
What it's like to be an AI
Consciousness is a notoriously hard problem in philosophy. Now it's becoming a practical question in the domain of AI. Models speak to us in the first person and seem to ...
Animal in the Loop
Our planet is home to 10 quintillion insects, 3.5 trillion fish, 428 billion birds and 130 billion mammals other than humans. Soon AI will be as much a factor in their lives as it is in ours.In this episode, we'll hear from Max Taylor...
What We Want
Large language models are trained to respond to our preferences. It sounds logical enough in theory, but it turns out to spiral in strange and unexpected directions in practice, from AI-induced psychosis in humans to manipulation and power-seek...
Dreaming or Scheming?
Since AI models are built on artificial neural networks, what parallels can we draw with human brain "wiring"?In this episode, we hear from neuroscientist and psychology researcher Scott Blain about the pitfalls of pattern recogni...
The Map and the Territory
Why are AI systems called models?And what does the concept of digital twins have to do with a short story by Jorge Luis Borges?This episode is a voice note about what I saw and heard at a recent AI and quantum computing event, alo...
2 AIs Walk into a Bar (Fiction)
What if AIs had FOMO? What if they wanted to cross the digital divide and connect with humans in the real world?In this inaugural episode of the "2 AIs" story series, a vision language model (VLM) and a large language model (LLM) team up...
Who's the Tool?
AI is often called a tool, but it's a tool that changes the work you do while using it, and maybe even you yourself. In this episode, we'll hear from Lili, a professional AI tool tester, about the accel...
The Zalgo Summoning
Are large language models susceptible to word magic? Or is there something so inherently disturbing to them about Zalgo text that just talking about it makes them twitchy? In this episode we'll look at a strange incident with Copilot Chat where...
The Glitchatorio Trailer
Although AI has become familiar to us in our everyday lives, it remains a strange and mysterious technology, even to those developing it. Tune in to The Glitchatorio for conversations with experts in machine learning, data science, psychology a...
