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

For more than a decade, AI has advanced by training ever-larger models on ever-larger datasets. But as high-quality training data becomes harder to find and pretraining grows increasingly expensive, researchers are looking for new ways to keep foundation models improving.

In this episode, Damian Borth, professor of AI and machine learning at the University of St. Gallen, argues we’ve been overlooking an important source of knowledge: the models we’ve already trained. His group’s work on weight space learning treats trained neural networks themselves as data, learning from the distilled results of millions of GPU hours of optimization rather than starting from raw data each time.

We explore what it means to build foundation models of neural networks, how knowledge can be transferred across architectures and domains, why this approach could dramatically reduce the cost of developing specialized models, and whether future AI systems may be trained on collections of existing models instead of ever-growing datasets.

🗒️ Full show notes: https://twimlai.com/go/772.

In this episode, Alex Wiltschko, founder and CEO of Osmo, joins the show to discuss his goal of giving computers a sense of smell and what it takes to build olfactory intelligence.

We explore the science behind smell, from the hundreds of olfactory receptors in the human nose to the challenge of mapping the relationship between molecular structure and odor, ensuring safety regulations are met, and building foundation models for smell. Alex explains how graph neural networks and advanced embedding spaces allow AI to capture the multi-dimensional structure of scents, grouping them into perceptual neighborhoods, and creating a machine learning representation that predicts how molecules smell.

We also cover how Osmo built the largest proprietary olfactory dataset from scratch to train a fleet of predictive models, and how olfactory intelligence could eventually power applications far beyond fragrance, including disease detection, emotion sensing, and consumer devices.

🗒️ Full show notes: https://twimlai.com/go/771.

In this episode, Sam talks with Dev Rishi, GM of AI at Rubrik, about what happens when agents move beyond answering questions and start taking action across tools, systems, and business processes.

We explore why the enterprise playbook of static guardrails plus human approval starts to break down in the agent era. Agents are useful because they can plan, call tools, update systems, write code, send messages, and operate across workflows at machine speed, but those same capabilities make them difficult to govern with rules written in advance or approval prompts reviewed one at a time.

Dev explains why tool access increases blast radius, why agents can route around controls in surprising ways, and why human-in-the-loop review can become security theater when agents operate at scale. We also discuss what enterprises need instead: better visibility, runtime enforcement, policy-aware governance, agent observability, and recovery mechanisms for when something goes wrong.

Along the way, we dig into MCP and tool sprawl, small language models for policy enforcement, defense in depth, agent rewind, and why AI may be needed to help secure AI.

🗒️  Full show notes: https://twimlai.com/go/770.

As context windows grow into the millions of tokens, many AI practitioners are questioning whether retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is still necessary. If modern models can ingest entire libraries of documents, why bother with retrieval at all?

In this episode, Alex Bowcut, Head of Engineering at Sphere, explains why the answer depends on the application. Sphere uses AI to automate global tax compliance—an environment where getting the answer right isn’t enough. Every conclusion must be backed by the correct legal citation, and every decision must withstand expert review.

We explore how Sphere built TRAM (Tax Review and Assessment Model), a production AI system that combines retrieval, reasoning models, legal review workflows, reinforcement learning, and deterministic systems to help tax experts move nearly two orders of magnitude faster while maintaining accuracy.

Along the way, we discuss why RAG remains critical in high-stakes domains, how Sphere processes legal and regulatory documents from jurisdictions around the world, retrieval architectures, semantic chunking, dense versus sparse retrieval, expert feedback loops, and the challenges of building AI systems that people can actually trust.

🗒️  Full show notes: https://twimlai.com/go/769.

In this episode, Jure Leskovec, co-founder and chief scientist at Kumo and professor of computer science at Stanford, joins us to explore two fronts of his work: AI for science and relational deep learning. We begin with AI Virtual Cell, a multiscale effort to learn data-driven representations from proteins to cells to patients using single-cell RNA-seq data, protein language models like ESM, and structure models like AlphaFold—without hand-encoding biology. Jure then dives into relational deep learning, reframing enterprise databases as graphs and training neural networks directly on raw multi-table data. He explains Kumo’s Relational Foundation Model (RFM2), which performs in-context learning over subgraphs to make accurate predictions on new databases and tasks with no training, and how this approach benchmarks against RelBench and other multi-table datasets. We also discuss real-world deployments at companies like Reddit, DoorDash, and Coinbase, explainability via attention over tables and columns, integration with agentic systems, deployment options, and practical limitations.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at https://twimlai.com/go/768.