Fresh Air

Kazuo Ishiguro on ‘Klara and the Sun’

The story is narrated by a human-like robot, who serves as one child's "artificial friend."

The a16z Show

Why AI Could Turn Small Law Firms Into Billion-Dollar Businesses

AI won't just cut costs for law firms. It could expand access to legal representation by making an entirely new class of cases economically viable.

Lex Fridman Podcast

#503 – AI Crisis in Math: Navier-Stokes, Riemann Hypothesis & Complexity Theory

AI solved some of its hardest problems: Navier-Stokes, the quasi-Riemann hypothesis, the unique games conjecture and hundreds of other problems.

Decoder with Nilay Patel

Inside Anthropic’s trillion-dollar AI gamble

To get to $1 trillion, we do have to move to some of that white collar work, where it goes from AI augmentation to labor saving or replacement in some areas.

The a16z Show

Mark Cuban on Why AI Could Turn Solo Founders Into Trillionaires

Mark believes founders should use AI to learn, not as an excuse to stop thinking.

The a16z Show

Mark Cuban’s Plan to Make Healthcare Affordable

His starting point for employers: run every benefits contract through AI and ask where you're getting ripped off.

The a16z Show

Reinventing School for the AI Era | Joe Liemandt, Gagan Biyani & Erik Torenberg

the most important question for students may not be which field is safest from AI, but what they care enough about to build

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Christina Cacioppo - Building an Enduring Software Company in the Age of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.496]

I do think that, in the long run, there's something like: the companies that are doing the most important work, on the most important problems, with the best people, tend to win. And I think AI is actually making that more true, not less true, because AI is a great equalizer on the execution side — it's getting cheaper and easier to build software. What's not getting cheaper and easier is knowing what to build.

Mixed Signals

Google’s Josh Spanier On The Unrealized CMO Armageddon, And Why AI Is At 'The End Of The Beginning'

We've never lacked for ideas in marketing we've been constrained by resources you only have so much budget so much time so many people with AI as sort of an accelerant every idea fear that you have suddenly becomes possible.

Freakonomics Radio

692. What Will A.I. Do to (and for) Human Creativity?

Writers, designers, actors, coders, musicians, thinkers — they're all worried about being replaced by machines. But what if the A.I.s are actually here to help?

Fresh Air

Betty Gilpin is seeking anti-algorithm, weird roles – and it's working

I think the goal is to find things that feel anti-algorithm — stories and characters that couldn't have been generated by a machine trying to please everyone. And weirdly, I think that's what connects with people the most, because audiences can feel the difference between something that was made to be consumed and something that was made because someone was burning to make it.

TBPN

The Internet Is Finished, Nobody Expects The Number 4, Early iPhone Duo Reviews, SpaceXSITesla

When security patches are released, it marks the starting shot in a race between defenders and hackers. Defenders have to test and install the software patches while hackers study the patches as a guide to find new vulnerabilities, looking to see what has changed and then devising ways of attacking those areas. But today's AI tools can do this work much quicker than any human, potentially making the process more risky, security experts say.

The a16z Show

What Happens When Everyone Has a Health Expert in Their Pocket? | OpenAI’s Karan Singhal

the longer-term goal is AI that can help people navigate their health proactively, while making trustworthy medical intelligence dramatically more accessible

The Prof G Pod

China’s AI Dumping Plan Could Trigger a U.S. Recession

If I'm she, I'm going to flood the market with cheap AI and watch Open AI and Enthropic announce a slowdown in growth, which will absolutely freak out the market and probably thrust the US, if not the entire West, into a recession.

Diet TBPN

Inflation Heats Up, Anthropic Investor Day, Tesla Roadster Mania| Diet TBPN

Being on the frontier just means you're getting distilled. If you're not getting distilled, that's the definition in your mind. Like unless other people will spend a lot of money to try to emulate your model and recreate it, then you are not — that's a good like reality check.

The a16z Show

What Happens When Al Agents Can Spend Your Money?

the next generation of software may need to adapt to each user rather than the other way around

Diet TBPN

Inflation Heats Up, Anthropic Investor Day, Tesla Roadster Mania| Diet TBPN

If you're not getting distilled, that's the definition in your mind. It's like unless you're not frontier. Yeah. I think that's like the the most honest definition. Like unless other people will spend a lot of money to try to emulate your model and recreate it, then you are not

TED

AI and the End of Loneliness | Paul Bloom | TED

Imagine a teenage boy who never learned to cut short his monologues because his AI companion never got bored. Imagine an adult who never learned to apologize because her AI companion never needed an apology. Imagine a world where the answer to the question, "Am I the asshole?" is always a firm and resounding no.

The a16z Show

Why AI Could Finally Fix Healthcare Access | Zocdoc CEO Oliver Kharraz

why patients shouldn't be locked into a single healthcare platform, and how surfacing last-minute availability can reduce appointment wait times from weeks to days

The a16z Show

AI Can Write the Code. Can It Run the System? | Grepr CEO Jad Naous

AI has transformed engineering inside his 10-person team, cutting some projects from six months to just 10 days.

The Prof G Pod – Scott Galloway

The $400k Skill AI Can’t Replace | Deep Dive

AI takes everything to the average and people aren't interested in reading average or average doesn't grab your heart. It's something that's an outlier that you haven't seen before that resonates with you. The value is judgment, perspective, taste.

Diet TBPN

OpenAI Bugging Incident, Are Your Devices Listening? Xbox Launches Remix Lab | Diet TBPN

There's no meeting between like Sam Altman and Greg Brockman where they're just like let's read off the weights to GPT7 ... you're going to get like strategy like corporate strategy which is maybe valuable if you're like trading the stock market but it's not like you're going to listen in on a conversation and be like, 'Okay, I can just reverse engineer the next model.'

TBPN

Muse Wonder, Anjney Sizes Up, Neal Stephenson Joins, Social Reckoning Review, Eli Manning Live

The whole thing feels very out of date in the scaling era. Uh the race towards super intelligence so dominant in the minds of tech people right now. Uh I'm not surprised that this movie is an underperforming because it doesn't answer the questions that people are asking about tech companies right now.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

David Vélez - Building Nubank and the Future of Global Banking - [Invest Like the Best, EP.495]

David believes the industry is still in its Blockbuster era, with most of the world's banking still running through branches and incumbent banks, and that AI will make digital banks dramatically more efficient than the incumbents they compete with.

The Prof G Pod

"It Does the Work and Doesn't Cry" — Ethan Mollick on AI Replacing Interns

Middle managers were increasingly turning to using AI instead of interns, cuz it it does the work and doesn't cry, right? And so, as a result, you saw this loop where nobody was learning the sort of entry skills before.

The Prof G Pod

"Nobody Knows What's Going On" — Ethan Mollick on Why CEOs Are Getting AI Wrong

About 50% of American workers use AI. They report, by the way, three times productivity gains on the tasks they use AI for. They're just not giving that to companies, right? Because why would you? Like you're worried you'll get fired if AI shows you that you're more efficient.

The a16z Show

David George & Jack Altman on AI, Autonomy, and the Next $25 Trillion

With AI adoption still concentrated among a relatively small group of heavy users, he argues there could be room for multiple layers of the stack to grow at once.

Diet TBPN

Nvidia’s Cloud Strategy Evolves, Factory-Cognition Drama, Instinct Pushes Into Shopping | Diet TBPN

Instead of layering their customers and trying to control aggregate demand, which would be really powerful if it happened, uh the product evolved into this unified AI platform, which is their their words, but basically it's it's between an actual like Expedia for GPUs and just a set of standards.

The Prof G Pod – Scott Galloway

Meta’s Muse AI Agent Cost $0. What’s the Catch?

Something that Meta has that OpenAI and Anthropic don't have is Meta is a massive advertising business. In the last quarter alone, Meta did $59 billion in advertising revenue. The entire rest of the business did $1.5 billion. Meta is an advertising company.

The a16z Show

AI Can Write Code. Why Isn’t Software Better?

coding agents may help us write software faster, but the software they produce still largely works the way software always has

TED

Is AI Turning Us All into the Same Person? | Sandra Matz | TED

AI turns this infinite diversity of human opinions, beliefs and preferences into statistically safe sameness.

Diet TBPN

Microsoft to Take On Muse, Trump & Xi Dinner, The Mansion Section | Diet TBPN

The models have advanced to a point where there is a new use case like they're useful in a new way. Not just knowledge retrieval, not just go and write a bunch of code, they are useful, but that requires a new type of harness. Just like when the models got good at code, the harness became very important.

TED

The Energy Mess AI Is Creating — and How to Fix It | Ari Matusiak | TED

The thing to remember about these AI tech companies is that they are in a global race, that they intend to win, and they will pay almost whatever it costs for the power that they need to win that race.

The New York Times

Why the Coast Guard Is Using Surveillance Drones in the Great Lakes

We see private companies increasingly at the center of law enforcement operations that have profit incentives, carrying out surveillance of what ordinary people going about their ordinary lives are doing. And I think people inherently understand that we need law enforcement in this country, but there are natural, inborn limits to how much they watch us, how much they hover over us, how much they see us, and robots and A.I. have the potential to eviscerate those limits.

Mixed Signals

The Internet Is Flooded With Slop. Pangram Wants To Fight Back. | Mixed Signals

AI really wants every sentence to be the most important sentence. It's like there's no like thinking ahead to to the um to like to the end of the essay or something. It's just trying to make every sentence sound impressive, which makes it very tiring to read.

Semafor

Youth Wellbeing Forum: Building Resilient Generations | Semafor Events

There's a concept called co cognitive shrinking that's being noticed now in children using AI.

The a16z Show

The AI-Native CRM

his team followed customers from AI presentations into sales workflows and eventually found a harder problem: making sense of the fragmented and often conflicting data spread across a company's emails, calls, CRM, and other systems.

Decoder with Nilay Patel

Why the current tech backlash feels different

Software engineering is verifiable, you can run it through the compiler and see if it works. AI has obviously gotten really good at making software. If you believe the world is just software, that means AI has gotten good, it's done. You can see the labs are talking about how they've achieved AGI or they will very soon and it is very much connected to the ability of AI to write software. I'm just not discounting that that's important. I'm just saying once you get outside of software, verifiability gets way harder.

The a16z Show

World Models, Robotics, and the Future of 3D AI

just as language models became general-purpose engines for working with text, world models could become a horizontal layer for visual and physical intelligence across industries from entertainment and gaming to construction and robotics.

TBPN

GG Navier Stokes, Math Wars, Greg Brockman Joins, Scott Wu Joins, The Seufenator Joins

These uh these math models have discovered the the hardest problem of advanced mathematics which is authorship uh contribution. Who actually did the work? Who gets lead left on the paper?

Diet TBPN

OpenAI Cracks Navier-Stokes, Tech Trailers, AI Jobs Apocalypse on Hold | Diet TBPN

Same month that AI solved this incredibly difficult math problem, I saw someone use Chachi PT to book a haircut. So equivalent, no, I mean in terms of the actual economy, the actual impact of these things, uh like practically using these tools for something that people enjoy, that's not just spinning their wheels, that's not just optimizing endless things, that's actually uh generative and moving things forward.

TBPN

Greg Brockman on Astra and the Future of OpenAI

I think that talking about curing diseases and new medicines we're going to be able to develop, all of that starts to become much more real when you have models that are at this level of assistance and capability. And I do think that there are going to be real changes to to think about in terms of we can have so much more ambition with the kinds of of challenges that we can hope to tackle now.

Throughline

Is it time for a Luddite Renaissance? | Throughline

Something about this moment feels more existential. Like the very core of who we are as human beings is under threat, challenging the way we think, communicate, connect.

The a16z Show

OpenAI Researchers on the Future of Mathematical Reasoning

the reasoning traces look remarkably similar to the work of an expert mathematician, including choosing promising approaches, backtracking when they fail, and combining ideas from across the literature.

The a16z Show

Can Open Source Keep AI Power From Concentrating?

today's concentration may be a feature of the current technological paradigm rather than a permanent feature of AI. Transformers reward enormous amounts of data and compute, but future breakthroughs could make smaller, more specialized models far more capable.

The a16z Show

Your AI Doctor Is Coming | Julie Yoo

Because healthcare never built the same layers of legacy software as other industries, it may now be able to leapfrog directly into agentic AI.

Diet TBPN

Astra Reactions, Jobs Print, Cybercab Launch | Diet TBPN

Those are never really feel the AGI moments for me, but this, uh, but I I've actually spent hundreds, if not thousands of hours in 3D modeling software, uh, mostly in Cinema 4D and Houdini, and it was really fun. I really enjoy making uh, uh, 3D renders and motion graphics. Uh, and it was also useful when I was making YouTube videos. Uh, but every step in building a scene uh requires you got to watch a YouTube tutorial. Then you got to look up how all the different functions work. And then ultimately you're tweaking settings in literally four dimensions because it's a 3D scene.

TED

How AI Is Breaking the Internet (and What to Do About It) | Matthew Prince | TED

The answer engines are giving the answers and people aren't following the footnotes. You're actually trusting that AI systems are giving you the right answer, and that's destroying media. Across the board, we're seeing reported numbers of between a 90 and 30 percent decline in the traffic to their sites.

TED

How AI Is Breaking the Internet (and What to Do About It) | Matthew Prince | TED

The answer engines are giving the answers and people aren't following the footnotes. And this was 18 months ago. What's happened since, has it gotten better or worse? Do you trust AI more today than you did 18 months ago? The answer is most people do, and as a result, it's actually gotten twice as hard to get traffic to content that's there. You're not following the footnotes anymore. You're actually trusting that AI systems are giving you the right answer, and that's destroying media.