Radical Talks

Yvonne Likomanova, Senior Director of Talent at Radical Ventures, digs into what's really driving the AI talent flows. Drawing on a career that spans Stripe, Cruise, Applied Intuition, Yvonne shares where the world's best researchers and engineers are setting their sights. The conversation covers why elite talent is leaving frontier labs for a new class of research-first institutions, what...

Michael Rubenstein, Co-Founder & Co-CEO of Firsthand, joins Radical's Molly Welch to dig into what's broken in digital advertising — a trillion-dollar-plus industry that AI isn't just improving, it's replacing entirely. Drawing on a career that spans DoubleClick, AppNexus, and now Firsthand, Michael makes the case for why the future belongs to brand agents, not ads. The convers...

Varun Sivaram, Founder & CEO of Emerald AI, joins Radical Partners Molly Welch and Rob Toews to explore what's actually holding back AI infrastructure. While the conversation around AI bottlenecks tends to focus on chips and models, Varun explains why the binding constraint is power, from grid capacity limits and interconnection backlogs to the widening gap between compute demand and energ...

When Ori Eldarov started Offdeal, he wasn't thinking about AI as a productivity hack. He was thinking about what it would take for a small team to compete with firms that had been doing this for decades. Thirteen people. Nearly $10 million in their first full year. This founder-first take was recorded during our October AI Founders Masterclass, before agentic workflows entered the mainstream c...

Arsham Ghahramani, CEO and Co-Founder of Ribbon, joins Radical Partner Sanjana Basu to unpack fundraising from the founder’s side of the table. With a PhD in AI focused on cancer research and early experience scaling recommendation systems at Amazon, Arsham brings both technical depth and operating perspective to the conversation. Now he leads Ribbon, an AI hiring platform that has conducted over...

Jim Fan, Director and Distinguished Research Scientist at NVIDIA, joins Radical Partner Molly Welch to explore what's holding back embodied AI and robotics. While large language models have advanced rapidly, Jim explains why progress in the physical world depends less on ever-larger models and more on solving fundamental problems: exploration-driven learning, scalable data pipelines, and synth...

John Maslin, CEO and Co-Founder of Vulcan Elements, joins Radical Partner Molly Welch to unpack the overlooked physical infrastructure behind AI. While chips dominate most conversations, John explains why rare earth magnets are a foundational dependency across data centers, semiconductor manufacturing, robotics, EVs, and defense systems, and why today’s globally concentrated supply chain poses rea...

Databricks Chief AI Scientist Jonathan Frankle joins Radical Partner Vin Sachidananda for a special conversation from Radical Ventures’ AI Masterclass Series. Together, they explore what it takes to move AI from academic insight to real-world, enterprise-scale deployment. Drawing on Jonathan’s experience co-founding Mosaic ML and now leading research at Databricks, the discussion covers why early...

The story of modern AI cannot be told without Geoffrey Hinton and Jeff Dean. In this special episode of Radical Talks, recorded live at NeurIPS, the longtime collaborators and friends join Radical Ventures Co-Founder Jordan Jacobs to explore how bold ideas finally met the infrastructure required to scale them. From early breakthroughs at Google to the choices shaping today’s systems, they reflect...

Joelle Pineau is one of the architects behind modern AI — and as Chief AI Officer at Cohere, she’s focused on turning breakthrough research into real-world impact. In this special episode of Radical Talks, recorded live at Radical Ventures’ AI Founders Masterclass, Joelle joins Radical Partner Sanjana Basu to explore how frontier AI actually makes its way from the lab into the enterprise. Drawing...

Fei-Fei Li, renowned AI researcher and CEO and Co-founder of World Labs, is pushing the field toward its next frontier: spatial intelligence. Fresh off the commercial launch of Marble — World Labs’ generative world model that turns simple prompts into fully editable 3D environments — she joins host Molly Welch to explore why modeling and reasoning about the physical world remains the missing dimen...

May Habib co-founded WRITER in 2020 after previously co-founding a localization startup, bringing her longtime passion for language technology to enterprise AI. Under her leadership as CEO, WRITER has developed into a full-stack AI platform serving global companies like Salesforce, Uber, and Vanguard while continuously adapting to the unprecedented pace of change in the generative AI landscape.

The following post is based on the latest Radical Talks episode with host Molly Welch, Partner at Radical Ventures, and featuring Ted Mabrey, Head of Palantir Commercial. Listen to the podcast on Spotify , Apple Podcasts , or YouTube.

Radical Partners Molly Welch and Aaron Rosenberg are joined by General Reasoning Co-founder and CEO Ross Taylor to discuss the AI approach powering today's reasoning revolution: reinforcement learning.

The AI revolution is changing nearly every industry, from software to content creation, yet one crucial area remains largely untouched: the design of physical things. While AI is great at manipulating digital bits, the physical world — from skyscrapers to spacecraft — still relies on traditional engineering approaches that haven’t fundamentally changed in decades. This gap represents a huge, untap...

While consumer voice AI has long frustrated users with clunky interactions, enterprise voice AI has reached a turning point. The architectural improvements over the past 12-18 months have enabled natural, contextual conversations that are revolutionizing industries from recruiting to healthcare.  Sanjana and Arsham join host Molly Welch to discuss why voice represents the most natural human interf...

In this week's Radical Talks podcast, Radical Partner Rob Toews joins host Molly Welch to discuss AI’s curse of catastrophic forgetting and the challenge of building systems capable of continual learning. Rob digs into why this limitation exists and the early work being done to solve it, exploring the emerging AI paradigm that could bridge the gap between static models and truly adaptive intel...

Coming soon, Radical Talks cuts through AI hype to showcase what's truly driving innovation. Hosted by Radical Ventures partner Molly Welch, each episode features intimate conversations with researchers, founders, and investors at AI's cutting edge. Discover contrarian perspectives and insider insights you won't find anywhere else, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

In honour of Geoffrey Hinton winning the Nobel Prize in Physics, we bring you an exclusive Radical AI Founders Masterclass talk between, Geoffrey Hinton and Fei-Fei Li, hosted and moderated by Jordan Jacobs, Managing Partner and Co-Founder of Radical Ventures. The conversation marked the first time Geoff Hinton and Fei-Fei Li have shared a stage, and featured a dramatic recounting of the 2012  Ima...

In the same paper where Alan Turing outlined his famous criteria for determining when a computer is capable of thinking like a human being, he also shared advice on building a device that might one day pass the ‘Turing Test.’ “Instead of trying to produce a programme to simulate the adult mind,” the pioneer of computer science writes,“why not rather try to produce one which simulates the child's?”...

A feature conversation with AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li. As WIRED magazine put it:  “She’s one of a tiny group of scientists—a group perhaps small enough to fit around a kitchen table—who are responsible for AI’s recent remarkable advances.” The Stanford Computer Science Professor and Co-Director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, joins Radical Ventures Managing Partner, Jordan Jacobs...

A feature interview with Pieter Abbeel,  an innovator at the cutting edge of where AI meets robotics. In this episode of Radical Talks, Radical Ventures Managing Partner Jordan Jacobs chats with Pieter about the impact of COVID19 on automation, how AI has revolutionized the field of robotics and they also share a few thoughts on how professional sports should be thinking about robot refs. Pie...

Dr. Eric Topol joins Radical Ventures Managing Partner Jordan Jacobs for a discussion about the latest challenges in combatting COVID-19, and how Artificial Intelligence is the future of healthcare — the key to better health and more compassionate care. Dr. Topol is the founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, professor of molecular medicine, and executive vice pr...

Welcome to the premier episode of Radical Talks.  Created by Radical Ventures, an early stage venture fund investing in technology and Artificial Intelligence, Radical Talks explores the intersection of technology, the economy, politics and culture with global thought leaders. In our first episode we're joined by Eric Schmidt. Eric was the CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011, and the Executive Ch...