Agents Of Tech

Turing Award winner John Hennessy argues that even a few percent more productivity a year adds up in an economy the size of America's, and explains why the return could take time to show up. John Hennessy shared the 2017 Turing Award, often called the Nobel Prize of computing, for work that shaped the modern microprocessor. He served as president of Stanford University for 16 years and is chai...

Boris Gamazaychikov measured AI's footprint inside Salesforce and co-created a star rating for AI models. Now he sorts the real climate numbers from the fake ones. Sam Altman calls AI's water numbers "totally fake." Critics say one chat uses a whole bottle. The truth depends on which AI, and where it runs. He now works at Sustainable AI Group, which estimates the energy, carbon a...

In this Agents of Tech episode, Autria Godfrey, Laila Rizvi and Stephen Horn revisit four of the sharpest voices in AI, and their answers could not be further apart:🔹 Gary Marcus, cognitive scientist and AI author, argues we're probably in a financial bubble and that LLMs are "just not as smart as they look."🔹 Emily Bender, professor and author of The AI Con, says the hype is drive...

AI agents can already connect and communicate. But can they understand one another, coordinate around a shared goal and genuinely think together? Vijoy Pandey, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Outshift by Cisco, joins Autria Godfrey to introduce the Internet of Cognition: a vision for enabling AI agents and humans to share knowledge, coordinate decisions and combine their intelligence....

Will AI take your job? An MIT labor economist says that is the wrong worry. The real shift has already been in play: firms facing AI uncertainty stop hiring employees and start hiring disposable workers. Paul Osterman is Professor Emeritus at MIT Sloan and author of Disposable Workers: The Transformation of Employment. His survey of more than 6,000 US workers found that 35 percent are marginal emp...

AI has the potential to change everything, from work, education, healthcare, and even democracy itself. But with that promise comes pressure on those in positions of power to get it right. So if you were advising the next president or prime minister, what part of the AI strategy playbook would you tear up first? Are governments even remotely ready for the age of AI? Are we prioritizing prosperity...

Trillions of dollars are being poured into the AI promise of a global economic transformation. We're being sold a productivity revolution, faster output, greater growth, and unprecedented prosperity. But when? Real, tangible gains are barely showing up in the data. So is the return on investment actually going to be smaller and slower than promised? And could these billion-dollar bets bankrupt...

If public money helped build the foundations of AI, but now private companies control much of its future, who should be reaping the benefits? Is there a role for the government? Who should be in charge of shaping what comes next? In this episode of Agents of Tech, our hosts Autria Godfrey, Stephen Horn, and Laila Rizvi are talking AI, publicly funded science, and the future of innovation with form...

AI was supposed to make us better: faster searches, more productivity, wider knowledge, but it hasn't, and public sentiment is starting to shift. People are inundated with fake images and voices, AI-generated slop, unreliable answers, phony influencers, and a growing wave of content that looks real, but it may not be. At the same time, young people just entering the job market are asking wheth...

Hundreds of billions of dollars are flowing into AI investment, yet our guest, Hala Hanna, Executive Director of MIT Solve, points out that less than 1% of AI venture funding is going to social impact. If AI is so powerful, why is so little of that power being directed toward the people and the problems that need it the most? Can AI really be used for the public good, or is the promise of AI for g...

The current AI boom is really built on the huge scaling of LLMs, but are they're getting it wrong? Alex LeBrun, Co-founder and CEO of Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI Labs), argues that if AI is going to understand the world, model cause and effect, and reason across time, it may need something different: world models. His new company has raised more than $1 billion to try to prove it. He is...

AI at work has been sold as a productivity revolution. But Microsoft's latest Work Trend Index points to a more complicated story. Workers are using AI, companies are buying the tools, and agents are beginning to take on more of the execution – but many organizations are not yet built to capture the value. The question is no longer just whether AI can help people work faster. It's whether...

Disclaimer: The conversation in this video is for information purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Always consult a licensed healthcare professional before making any health decisions. Dr. Eric Topol believes AI can predict disease decades before symptoms appear, and he's argued that AI without doctors may outperform doctors with AI. But someone has to set the rules. And right...

CuspAI was co-founded by Max Welling, a pioneer of modern AI. But instead of building chatbots, he's creating and harnessing AI to discover new materials for everything from carbon capture to water purification, plastic alternatives, and more efficient batteries. If this works, it could change everything. But can it? And if so, when? This week, we’re talking science, scale, and when CuspAI wil...

If you survive the next five years, says immunologist Derya Unutmaz, MD, you will live for the next 50 thanks to what AI can accomplish in medical research. But is AI really a silver bullet that solves humanity's most difficult problems? Or does that kind of thinking get us into trouble? Professor Unutmaz is an NIH funded immunologist, with 35 years of published research and more than 100 papers,...

As AI gets more capable, will it make public information more trustworthy, or less? Does news media have to be biased to be financially successful? Is AI a threat to Wikipedia or will we always be reliant to the human component when it comes to seeking trustworthy information? These are timely questions about AI, information, technology and trust that affect us all – which is why Stephen Horn, Aut...

NOTE: This episode was recorded before the recent conflict involving Iran began. The US and China control over 90 percent of the world's AI computing power. In practice, that means most countries rely on American or Chinese firms, chips, and rules to access the most advanced systems ever built. Some call it partnership. Others call it dependency. Our guest today, Ryan Wain, the Senior Director...

Will AI destroy humanity? Most people think that's science fiction. The people actually building it aren't so sure. Geoffrey Hinton - the Godfather of AI - says there's a 10 to 20 percent chance AI wipes us out. OpenAI’s Sam Altman told Congress his own technology could 'cause significant harm to the world.' Our guest, Malo Bourgon, CEO of the Machine Intelligence Research Inst...

ChatGPT has 800 million users. OpenAI is valued at $500 billion. But our guest today says the whole thing is a scam. Professor Emily Bender, author of “The AI Con” and Director of the Computational Linguistics Laboratory at University of Washington, argues Artificial Intelligence is just a broad marketing term and “AI" is just a label for unrelated tech - creating a false sense of an inevitab...

Diplomacy used to be about treaties and territory – now it seems it's more about data, algorithms, and the companies that control them. At Donald Trump’s inauguration, Silicon Valley’s most powerful figures stood steps away, a sign that Big Tech now sits at the centre of global power. Tech companies pervade everyday life and wield power once reserved for nation states. Are the people in charge...

Quantum computing may finally be ready for the real world - and it could power the next wave of AI. In this episode of Agents of Tech we sit down with Oxford Quantum Circuits (OQC) CEO Gerald Mullally to explore how OQC is integrating quantum computers into data-centres in London, Tokyo and New York.

Larry Ellison built Oracle into a cornerstone of the modern tech economy. Now he is making a $2.5 billion bet on Oxford, backing the Ellison Institute of Technology at Oxford to fuse AI, medicine and sustainability in one global hub. In this episode of Agents of Tech, Autria Godfrey, Stephen Horn and Laila Rizvi sit down in Oxford with Professor Santa Ono, Global President of the Ellison Institute...

Is the U.S. LOSING the AI race to China? China and the U.S. are neck and neck in the AI race for global dominance. Former OpenAI board member Helen Toner (now at Georgetown’s CSET) joins us in Washington, D.C. to break down China vs U.S. strategies—open-source diffusion vs big tech global dominance— and what “winning” actually means. Helen has recently spent time in China and works at the center o...

Is the U.S. LOSING the AI race to China? China and the U.S. are neck and neck in the AI race for global dominance. Former OpenAI board member Helen Toner (now at Georgetown’s CSET) joins us in Washington, D.C. to break down China vs U.S. strategies—open-source diffusion vs big tech global dominance— and what “winning” actually means. Helen has recently spent time in China and works at the center o...

Has OpenAI made the WRONG bet? Gary Marcus argues that OpenAI is taking the wrong approach - and the AI bubble is real. We walk through why GPT-5 underwhelmed, where the scaling paradigm breaks, and what might really get us to AGI. Gary explains: – Why the economics don’t add up for current AI – Why GPT-5 isn’t as good as expected – The core LLM limitations and why the scaling paradigm fails – Why...