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

Voice AI has gotten remarkably good, but natural conversation remains a high bar. Small delays, awkward interruptions, or the wrong tone can quickly break the illusion—and adding vision and visual presence only raises the stakes.

In this episode, Alex Smola, co-founder and CEO of Boson AI, explores the path from today’s voice agents to audiovisual agents and AI avatars. We discuss the technical tradeoffs behind real-time voice, including audio tokenization, latency, model size, and inference cost, as well as what changes when these systems can both see and be seen.

We also explore the role of emotional intelligence in AI, how agents can learn from human interactions, and what it will take to move beyond impressive demos toward interactions that actually feel natural.

🗒️ Full show notes: https://twimlai.com/go/777.

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.

In this episode, Justin Johnson, co-founder of World Labs, joins us to discuss world models and the emerging field of spatial AI. We explore why many researchers see capabilities beyond language as an important frontier for AI, and what it means to build models that can understand, generate, and simulate the environments around them.

Justin explains the different approaches to world modeling, including explicit 3D representations and generative models, and why there is still no established recipe for building these systems. We also discuss World Labs’ Marble system, which can generate navigable 3D worlds from images and other inputs, the challenges of evaluating world models, and the role of simulation, planning, and action. Finally, Justin shares his vision for models that bring these capabilities together, supporting everything from interactive virtual environments to agents and robots that can operate in the physical world.

🗒️ Full show notes: ⁠https://twimlai.com/go/775.

The conventional wisdom in AI is that the next breakthrough will come from more compute, more data, and larger models. But what if the next leap comes from somewhere else?

In this episode, Max Welling—co-founder and CTO of CuspAI and professor at the University of Amsterdam—argues that physics may provide some of the ideas behind the next generation of AI systems.

We begin with CuspAI’s work using generative AI to design entirely new materials for semiconductors, batteries, carbon capture, and clean energy. Max explains how foundation models for chemistry, agentic workflows, simulation, and automated experimentation are dramatically accelerating the search for new materials and reshaping scientific discovery.

The conversation then broadens into a deeper question. Beyond giving AI new scientific problems to solve, can physics also teach us how to build better AI? Max explores surprising connections between machine learning and thermodynamics, why waves may become a new computational primitive for neural networks, and how concepts like symmetry breaking and statistical physics could inspire AI architectures beyond today’s scaling paradigm.

🗒️ Full show notes: https://twimlai.com/go/774.

Text-to-image models have become remarkably good at producing realistic images. But realism isn’t the same as correctness. Ask for several distinct people, a specific composition, or a high-resolution image generated locally, and today’s models still struggle in surprising ways.

In this episode, Fatih Porikli, Vice President of Technology at Qualcomm, joins me to discuss what remains unsolved in image generation and several approaches his team presented at CVPR to address those challenges. We explore why better training objectives can improve controllability, how separating scene planning from rendering may lead to more reliable image generation, techniques for generating 16-megapixel images efficiently on edge devices, and new methods for eliminating the visible artifacts that often appear in AI-powered image editing.

Along the way, we discuss reinforcement learning for image generation, agentic image generation pipelines, on-device AI, and what the next phase of progress in generative vision systems is likely to look like.

🗒️ Full show notes: https://twimlai.com/go/773