Agents Of Tech

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...

AI agents can’t easily talk to each other. To solve this, Cisco has joined forces with Google, Dell, Oracle, and Red Hat to launch AGNTCY, the open-source Internet of Agents. It’s designed so agents from different organizations can discover, trust, and work together - and it’s now donated to the Linux Foundation for neutral governance. Vijoy Pandey, Senior VP and GM of Outshift by Cisco, explains...

AI is changing the way we do biology. But can it crack one of the toughest challenges in science — drug discovery? In this episode of Agents of Tech, we speak with Professor Charlotte Deane, MBE, University of Oxford, one of the UK’s leading computational biologists. As a co-lead of OpenBind, Charlotte is helping build the global data infrastructure needed to accelerate drug discovery with AI. Fro...

Can artificial intelligence replace scientists? At Stanford University, Professor James Zou is leading research on AI scientists, virtual labs, and digital researchers that are already transforming biology and medicine. In this episode of Agents of Tech, recorded live at ISMB/ECCB in Liverpool, James explains how his lab is building virtual research teams powered by AI. These “digital scientists”...

In this exclusive Agents of Tech interview from ISMB/ECCB in Liverpool, we sit down with Dr. John Jumper, Nobel Laureate and leader of the groundbreaking AlphaFold project at Google DeepMind. Discover how AlphaFold reshaped molecular biology by accurately predicting protein structures, and hear Jumper's vision for using AI to not just predict biology, but design it. Join us as we explore the f...

In this episode of Agents of Tech, we dive into agentic AI, a new kind of artificial intelligence designed to enhance human agency rather than automate people out of the loop. We’re joined by Dr. Niloufar Salehi, Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley and Chief Product Officer at Across AI. Her work spans healthcare, education, criminal justice, and the creative industries. She explains why most AI sy...

Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing scientific research—but can it really replace human scientists? In this episode of Agents of Tech, we speak with Professor José Penadés and Dr. Tiago Costa from Imperial College London about their groundbreaking collaboration with Google's Gemini 2.0 AI co-scientist. Within just two days, AI unraveled a scientific mystery they'd spent years explor...

Is generative AI replacing workers—or helping them thrive? In this episode of Agents of Tech, we explore how AI is transforming the global workforce. Economist Lindsey Raymond (Microsoft Research), co-author of a groundbreaking study with Erik Brynjolfsson and Danielle Li, joins us to unpack how AI tools are boosting productivity, equalizing skills, and reshaping the modern job. We cover: AI’s imp...

Can AI help us survive extreme weather and climate change—or is it part of the problem? In this episode of Agents of Tech, we speak to Professor Auroop Ganguly, Director of AI for Climate and Sustainability at Northeastern University, about how artificial intelligence is being used to predict disasters, improve infrastructure resilience, and shape sustainable climate policy. 🌀 We discuss: • How A...

We’re entering an era where AI systems don’t just follow prompts—they act independently. But what happens when we hand over too much control? In this episode of Agents of Tech, our hosts Stephen Horn, Autria Godfrey and Laila Rizvi sit down with Margaret Mitchell, Chief Ethics Scientist at Hugging Face and one of the world’s leading voices on AI ethics. Together, they explore what autonomy really...