TechFirst with John Koetsier

AI models are powerful, but they don’t forget. And that's a problem. They hallucinate. They inherit bias. They absorb sensitive data. And once they’re trained, fixing those issues is painfully expensive. Retraining takes weeks and maybe tens of millions of dollars. And any guardrails the AI company puts up are brittle. What if you could perform surgery on the model itself? In this episode of T...

Large language models have dominated the AI conversation — but are small language models (SLMs) actually the future? In this episode of TechFirst, host John Koetsier sits down with Andy Markus, SVP & Chief Data and AI Officer at AT&T, to unpack how small language models are delivering enterprise-grade accuracy at a fraction of the cost and latency of massive LLMs. Andy explains how AT&...

Humanoid robots are coming into our homes, but they probably won’t be doing your laundry anytime soon. In this episode of TechFirst, host John Koetsier sits down with Jan Liphardt, founder & CEO of OpenMind and Stanford bioengineering professor, to unpack what home robots will actually do in the near future ... and why the “labor-free home” vision is mostly a myth (for now). Jan explains why h...

AI is hitting entertainment like a sledgehammer ... from algorithmic gatekeepers and AI-written scripts to digital actors and entire movies generated from a prompt. In this episode of TechFirst, host John Koetsier sits down with Larry Namer, founder of E! Entertainment Television and chairman of the World Film Institute, to unpack what AI really means for Hollywood, creators, and the global media...

Robots aren’t just software. They’re AI in the physical world. And that changes everything. In this episode of TechFirst, host John Koetsier sits down with Ali Farhadi, CEO of Allen Institute for AI, to unpack one of the biggest debates in robotics today: Is data enough, or do robots need structured reasoning to truly understand the world? Ali explains why physical AI demands more than massive dat...

Can we really build a $10,000 humanoid robot on open-source AI? In this episode of TechFirst, John Koetsier talks with Chris Kudla, CEO of Mind Children, about a radically different approach to humanoid robots. Instead of six-figure industrial machines built for factories or war zones, Mind Children is building small, safe, friendly social robots designed for kids, classrooms, and elder care. Meet...

Is AI really the new UI, or is that just another tech buzzphrase? Or ... is AI actually EVERY user interface now? In this episode of TechFirst, host John Koetsier sits down with Mark Vange, CEO & founder of Automate.ly and former CTO at Electronic Arts, to unpack what happens when interfaces stop being fixed and start being generated on the fly. They explore: • Why generative AI makes it cheap...

The web is turning agentic. And that changes everything from shopping to search to SEO. In this episode of TechFirst, John Koetsier sits down with Dave Anderson (VP at ContentSquare + host of the “Tech Seeking Human” podcast) to unpack what happens when browsers and AI assistants don’t just answer … they do stuff. For you. On your behalf. From Atlas and agentic browsing to the growing backlash fro...

AI has mastered language, sort of. But the real world is way messier. In this episode of TechFirst, John Koetsier sits down with Kirin Sinha, founder and CEO of Illumix, to explore what comes after large language models: world models, spatial intelligence, and physical AI. They unpack why LLMs alone won’t get us to human-level intelligence, what it actually takes for machines to understand physica...

Quantum computers usually mean massive machines, cryogenic temperatures, and isolated data centers. But what if quantum computing could run at room temperature, fit inside a server rack — or even a satellite? In this episode of TechFirst, host John Koetsier sits down with Marcus Doherty, Chief Science Officer of Quantum Brilliance, to explore how diamond-based quantum computers work — and why they...

Will AI kill your job? What happens to your job as AI gets smarter and companies keep laying people off even while profits rise? Will you still have a job? Will the job you have change beyond recognition? Scary questions, no? In this episode of TechFirst, host John Koetsier sits down with Nikki Barua, co-founder of Footwork and longtime founder, executive, and resiliency expert, to unpack what wor...

What if someone actually built TARS from Interstellar—and discovered it really could work? In this episode of TechFirst, host John Koetsier sits down with Aditya Sripada, a robotics engineer at Nimble, who turned a late-night hobby into a serious research project: a real, working mini-version of TARS, the iconic robot from Interstellar. Aditya walks through why TARS’s strange, flat form factor isn...

AI is already reshaping the workforce. What about teenagers? Turns out, they might be more impacted than anyone else. After all, they're usually in low-skill entry-level jobs that AI can replace. The problem ... teens are losing their first experience with working, making money, and establishing an identity outside of their homes. In this episode of TechFirst, host John Koetsier speaks with Ka...

Are we about to create real life Terminators? Humanoid robots built for war? In this episode of TechFirst I talk with Sankaet Pathak, founder and CEO of Foundation, a California-based humanoid robot company that is not afraid of the defense market. We dig into why he is building humanoid robots that can work three shifts a day, how they plan to scale from dozens of robots to tens of thousands, and...

Is AI the secret sauce that lets the West deglobalize supply chains and bring factories back home? In this episode of TechFirst, I talk with Federico Martelli, CEO and cofounder of Forgis, a Swiss startup building an industrial intelligence layer for factories. Forgis runs “digital engineers” — AI agents on the edge — that sit on top of legacy machinery, cut downtime by about 30%, and boost produc...

AI agents can already write code, build websites, and manage workflows ... but they still can’t pay for anything on their own. That bottleneck is about to disappear. In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, we sit down with Jim Nguyen, former PayPal exec and cofounder/CEO of InFlow, a new AI-native payments platform launching from stealth. InFlow wants to give AI agents the ability to onbo...

Are we ready for a world where everything is smart? Not just phones and apps, but buildings, robots, and delivery bots rolling down our streets? Windows ... doors ... maybe even towels. And don't forget your shoes. In this episode of TechFirst, I talk with Mat Gilbert, director of AI and data at Synapse, about physical AI: putting intelligence into machines, devices, and environments so they c...

Are humanoid robots going to decide which countries get rich and which fall behind? Probably yes. In this TechFirst, I talk with Dr. Robert Ambrose, former head of one of NASA’s first humanoid robot teams and now chairman of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence at Alliant. We dig into the future of humanoids, how fast they are really advancing, and what it means if China wins the humanoid race bef...

Is AI empathy a life-or-death issue? Almost a million people ask ChatGPT for mental health advice DAILY ... so yes, it kind of is. Rosebud co-founder Sean Dadashi joins TechFirst to reveal new research on whether today’s largest AI models can recognize signs of self-harm ... and which ones fail. We dig into the Adam Raine case, talk about how Dadashi evaluated 22 leading LLMs, and explore the futu...

We’ve digitized sound. We’ve digitized light. But touch, maybe the most human of our senses, has stayed stubbornly analog. That might be about to change, thanks to programmable matter. Or programmable fabric. In this TechFirst episode, I speak with Adam Hopkins, CEO of Sensetics, a new UC Berkeley/Virginia Tech spinout building programmable fabrics that replicate the mechanoreceptors in human fing...

AI is devouring the planet’s electricity ... already using up to 2% of global energy and projected to hit 5% by 2030. But a Spanish-Canadian company, Multiverse Computing, says it can slash that energy footprint by up to 95% without sacrificing performance. They specialize in tiny AI: one model has the processing power of just 2 fruit fly brains. Another tiny model lives on a Raspberry Pi. The opp...

Can AI give every creator their own virtual team? Maybe, thanks to a new platform from RHEI called Made, which offers Milo, an AI agent who becomes your creator director, Zara, an AI agent who is your community manager, and Amie, a third AI agent who takes on the role of relationship manager. And, apparently, more agents are coming soon. The creator economy is bigger than ever, but so is burnout....

What happens when Amazon, NVIDIA, and MassRobotics team up to merge generative AI with robotics? In this episode of TechFirst we chat with Amazon's Taimur Rashid, Head of Generative AI and Innovation Delivery. We talk about "physical AI" ... AI with spatial awareness and the ability to act safely and intelligently in the real world. We also chat about the first cohort of a new accele...

Artificial general intelligence (AGI) could be humanity’s greatest invention ... or our biggest risk. In this episode of TechFirst, I talk with Dr. Ben Goertzel, CEO and founder of SingularityNET, about the future of AGI, the possibility of superintelligence, and what happens when machines think beyond human programming. We cover: • Is AGI inevitable? How soon will it arrive? • Will AGI kill us …...

What changes when robots deliver everything? Starship Technologies has already completed 9 million autonomous deliveries, crossed roads over 200 million times, and operates thousands of sidewalk delivery robots across Europe and the U.S. Now they’re scaling into American cities ... and they say they’re ready to change your world In this episode of TechFirst, I speak with Ahti Heinla, co-founder an...