Forrest Meyen is the co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Lunar Outpost, a company that builds machines that go to places like Mars and, if everything goes according to plan, the moon. The company is betting that the private space boom of the past decade will soon go beyond Earth’s orbit to the moon and beyond. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Brannin McBee is the co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at CoreWeave. A few years ago, he and a few friends started buying hardware to mine cryptocurrency. It turns out, the same hardware -- chips known as GPUs -- is essential for running state-of-the-art AI models. Today, Brannin and his friends have turned their hobby into a company that’s competing against some of the biggest companies in the world to provide the hardware and computing power to run AI. See omnystudio.com/listener for...

Sam Bankman-Fried, the former crypto mogul, is on trial for fraud. On today’s show, we talk to Lidia Jean Kott, who is covering the trial for another Pushkin show, about a dramatic day in court. Caroline Ellison, former co-CEO of Alameda Research and Sam Bankman-Fried’s ex-girlfriend, took the stand. She recently pleaded guilty to fraud, and is cooperating with the prosecution. Hear Against the Rules with Michael Lewis: The Trial of Sam Bankman-Fried wherever you get your podcasts. See...

Christina Smolke is the co-founder and CEO of Antheia. Antheia is a synthetic biology company -- they’re in the business of genetically engineering microorganisms to produce commercial products. Christina’s problem is this: How do you turn yeast cells into tiny factories to create the active ingredients in generic drugs. If Christina and her team solve this problem, they won’t solve the drug shortage problem entirely. But they might help make it better. See omnystudio.com/listener for...

Major breakthroughs in artificial intelligence research often reshape the design and utility of AI in both business and society. In this episode of Smart Talks with IBM, Malcolm Gladwell and Jacob Goldstein explore the conceptual underpinnings of modern AI with Dr. David Cox, VP of AI Models at IBM Research. They talk foundation models, self-supervised machine learning, and the practical applications of AI and data platforms like watsonx in business and technology. Enjoy this episode from...

Stephen Klein is the co-founder and CEO of Hyphen, a company that is developing an automated make line. Stephen's problem is this: How do you make restaurant food from fresh ingredients... cheaper? Chipotle invested in Hyphen, whose automated system could soon be preparing online orders at thousands of Chipotle outlets. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Simon Johnson is an MIT economist and the co-author of a new book called “Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle over Technology and Prosperity”. Simon’s problem is this: How do you create the conditions for technological change to benefit many people, rather than just a powerful few? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Sal Khan is the founder and CEO of Khan Academy. Sal’s problem is this: How do you design an AI that can give students the kind of benefits they’d get from working with a human tutor? Earlier this year, Khan Academy launched Khanmigo, an AI tutor built on top of GPT4.  The idea is to use AI to give more kids access to one-on-one tutoring, and help human teachers with their work as well. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What can we learn from the centuries-long quest to eradicate smallpox, once the scourge of humanity? And how did it set the stage for all vaccines to come? First we meet Edward Jenner, a doctor in 18th century Britain who learned about the folk practice of “variolation” and found a safer way to inoculate people against smallpox. Then, Donald Hopkins of the Carter Center takes us back to the 1960s in Sierra Leone, where he discovered that successfully eradicating smallpox could be a feasible...

Allon Bloch is the co-founder and CEO of K Health. Allon’s problem is this: Can you use AI to make seeing a doctor easier and more helpful? Today, thousands of patients a month are treated through K Health. The company has an AI-based patient interface and it employs about 150 doctors. And K Health has plans to expand beyond primary care -- and they just raised another 50 million dollars to help them get there. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Sonia Kastner is the founder and CEO of Pano. Sonia’s problem is this: How do you use data and machine learning to mitigate the damage caused by climate change? Pano mounts cameras on remote mountaintop towers, then sends images from the cameras to an AI model trained to spot wildfire smoke. The goal is to alert fire crews early, before the fire spreads. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Amit Sharma is the founder and CEO of Narvar. Narvar works with companies such as Sephora, Lululemon and Home Depot to manage the post-purchase phase of online shopping — tracking, alerts and returns. Around 10 percent of online purchases are returned and every return cuts into retailers’ profits. Amit’s problem is this: consumers have learned to love free returns, but can retailers afford them? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Danielle Feinberg is a Visual Effects Supervisor at Pixar Animation Studios. Danielle’s problem is this: How do you optimize technology so that you can spend more time being creative? Danielle Feinberg has worked at Pixar for 26 years. Earlier in her career, she was the director of photography on movies like Coco and Wall-E. She talks about how new software shapes creative work. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Yaron Singer is the founder and CEO of Robust Intelligence. Yaron’s problem is this: How do you reduce AI’s security and reliability risks? Yaron was a computer science professor at Harvard and worked at Google before starting Robust Intelligence. The company’s software tests AI models and datasets for problems with performance and security. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Chris Monroe is the co-founder and chief scientist of IonQ. Chris’s problem is this: How do you build a quantum computer that will actually work? Quantum computing has the potential to transform fields from drug development to clean energy to cybersecurity, but so far no one has been able to build a quantum computer that can reliably outperform existing computers. Monroe is also a physics professor at Duke University, and he talks Jacob through the principles that make quantum computing...

Seven stocks are powering the market: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla. How will they do in the second half of this year? Ethan Wu hosts as Rob ‘Value This’ Armstrong takes on Elaine ‘The Lex Flex’ Moore. In three rounds they pick their winners for the second half of 2023, and tell us why they chose them. If you enjoyed this preview of the new podcast Unhedged, subscribe to the show now: https://apple.co/478A3VS See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Charles Fisher is the co-founder and CEO of Unlearn AI. Charles’ problem is this: How do you build an AI model that can predict human health? Charles and his colleagues have built a predictive model of health that is already being used in clinical trials, and might one day be deployed to predict individuals’ health outcomes. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Laura Modi is the founder and CEO of Bobbie, a company that makes baby formula and sells it directly to parents. Laura’s problem is this: how do you launch a startup in a highly regulated industry that has pretty much been a duopoly for decades? Part of Laura’s answer is marketing, which raises another question: how do you get people to consider formula despite so much messaging that breastfeeding is better? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Xiao Wang is the founder of a company called Boundless. Xiao’s problem is this: How do you make it cheaper and easier for people to navigate the U.S. immigration system? Xiao moved to the U.S. from China when he was three years-old. For many years, he took for granted that immigration was slow, complicated, and expensive to navigate. With Boundless, he’s built a platform to help people who try to figure out that system every year. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Henrik Stiesdal got his start in wind power back in the 70s. The price of oil had gone way up, and he wanted to help his parents figure out a cheaper source of electricity for their farm. He went on to help create the modern wind industry. Five decades later, he’s still pushing the frontier. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

One of the most amazing things about ChatGPT and other, similar AI models: Nobody really understands what they can do. Not even the people who build them. On today’s show, we talk with Sam Bowman about some of the mysteries at the heart of so-called large language models. Sam is on the faculty at NYU, he runs a research group at the AI company Anthropic and he is the author of the illuminating paper Eight Things to Know About Large Language Models. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy...

Dan Friedmann is the CEO of Carbon Engineering. The company is at the frontier of a new industry, direct air capture. They just broke ground on a big plant in Texas that will pull carbon dioxide out of the air. Dan’s problem is this: how do you bring the price of direct air capture way down? And how do you convince companies and governments to pay for scrubbing carbon out of the air? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Does flying have to be bad for the environment? Val Miftakhov, the founder and CEO of ZeroAvia, doesn’t think so. His company built a plane that’s powered by hydrogen fuel, which produces zero carbon emissions. It had a successful test flight earlier this year and Miftakhov hopes it will be ready for commercial use by 2025.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Andrew Mason is the founder and CEO of Descript. Descript's software has made editing audio and video much simpler.  The company recently received a large investment from OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. It's a sign that Descript is moving toward using generative AI to generate words and pictures. What will that mean for the people who currently do that work? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Andrew Ponec is co-founder and CEO of the energy storage company Antora Energy.  Andrew's problem is this: How can you store renewable energy in a way that is cheap enough and reliable enough for industrial use? He thinks the solution may be storing that energy as heat, in big blocks of graphite. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.