Riverside

Why AI Agents Don't Actually Understand You — Danielle Perszyk, Amazon AGI Lab

Jul 11, 2026 · 48:54

Danielle Perszyk of Amazon's AGI Lab argues that AI agents fail because they don't truly understand users — they model tasks but not the human mind, so reliability must shift from clicking correctly to aligning representations. She explains how Amazon's AGI Lab, seeded by the former Adept team, builds perception agents that perceive digital environments like humans and interact in real time, moving beyond chatbots and coding agents. The lab is exploring new architectures for episodic memory, social world models, and multi-agent systems where agents fluidly negotiate meaning, inspired by human collective intelligence. Perszyk warns that current AI homogenizes thinking, reducing human agency, and advocates for a diverse society of AIs with different biases to augment rather than replace human cognition. She discusses how aligning AI's goals with inferring and matching human representations could unlock generalization and make agents genuinely collaborative, from automating digital drudgery to transforming education with Socratic tutors.

Snipd: The AI Podcast App for Learning — with CEO Kevin Ben-Smith

Mar 14, 2025 · 1:17:46

Snipd CEO Kevin Ben-Smith joins Swyx to explain how the AI-powered podcast app turns passive listening into active learning. Snipd transcribes and diarizes episodes, generates chapters, identifies mentioned books, and summarizes insights on demand — all with a four-person team. Kevin describes moving from self-hosted open-source models (Wave2vec, Pyannote) to a mix of Whisper, OpenAI, Google Gemini, and Perplexity APIs, balancing cost against the need for predictable batch processing vs. real-time user requests. He details technical hurdles like dynamic content resyncing (building a 'Shazam for podcasts') and using LLMs as judges to filter hallucinated book recommendations. The episode also covers Snipd's origin as a hackathon-winning podcast search tool, Swyx's own switch from Overcast, and Kevin's vision for voice-driven post-episode reflection and AI-assisted discovery as the next frontier.