Big Technology Podcast

Koray Kavukcuoglu is the Chief Technology Officer of Google DeepMind. Kavukcuoglu joins Big Technology to discuss how his team is pushing the frontier of AI research inside Google as the company's Google IO developer event gets underway. Tune in to hear Kavukcuoglu break down the value of brute scale versus novel techniques and how the new inference-time “DeepThink” mode could supercharge reasonin...

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover: 1) ChatGPT ranks No. 5 among all websites worldwide 2) ChatGPT is the only website among the top ranked by SimilarWeb that is growing 3) How do chatbots get information if they replace the web? 4) Grok's 'white genocide' messaging campaign 5) What's in a system prompt, with a look inside Grok's 6) The trut...

Emily  Bender is a computational linguistics professor at the University of Washington. Alex Hanna is the Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute. Bender and Hanna join Big Technology to discuss what their new book, “The AI‑Con," which they describe as the layered ways today’s language‑model boom obscures environmental costs, labor harms, and shaky science. Tune in to hear a...

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover: 1) OpenAI has another new top executive structure 2) What is Sam Altman's role now? 3) Who is Fidji Simo, OpenAI's new CEO of Applications 4) OpenAI abandons total for-profit conversion 5) Microsoft's demands on OpenAI 6) Could Apple replace Google as the default search with AI? 7) Is it an either or decis...

Gary Marcus is a cognitive scientist, author, and longtime AI skeptic. Marcus joins Big Technology to discuss whether large‑language‑model scaling is running into a wall. Tune in to hear a frank debate on the limits of “just add GPUs" and what that means for the next wave of AI. We also cover data‑privacy fallout from ad‑driven assistants, open‑source bio‑risk fears, and the quest for interpretabi...

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover 1) What an 'AI-First Company' is 2) Aaron Levie's AI-first memo to Box. 3) Luis von Ahn's AI-first memo to Duolingo 4) Tobi Lutke's AI-first memo to Shopify 5) Can non-tech company be AI-first? 6) Apple earnings 7) Apple's federal government issues 8) Microsoft earnings 9) Amazon earnings 10) Meta Earnings...

Jamil Ghani is Amazon’s Vice President of Prime. Ghani joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss Amazon's position in the ongoing trade war and how Alexa Plus combined with Prime will appeal to its customers. Tune in to hear Ghani debunk the headline about tariff price labels, walk through Alexa Plus’s rollout, and outline why Amazon believes its approach to a contextually-aware assistant will work....

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover 1) Anthropic researcher's assertion that there's a 15% chance Claude is conscious 2) What happens if people believe AI is sentient? 3) Why consciousness and intelligence are different 4) Hey, is this all just marketing? 5) Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's push for AI model interpretability 6) China's robot half...

Dylan Patel is the founder and CEO of SemiAnalysis. He joins Big Technology Podcast to explain how generative AI work, explaining the inner workings of tokens, pre-training, fine-tuning, open source, and reasoning. We also cover DeepSeek’s efficiency breakthrough, the race to build colossal AI data centers, and what GPT-5’s hybrid training approach could unlock. Hit play for a masterclass you’ll w...

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover 1) Is OpenAI's o3 model AGI? 2) Maybe it's AGI when you squint 3) Why people are floating the idea that OpenAi is close to AGI 4) Is OpenAI going to declare that GPT-5 is AGI 5) What's in it for companies saying they've achieved AGI first? 6) AI's new memory capabilities add something big to the experience...

Grace Shao is a Hong Kong-based writer and analyst, and author of AI Proem on Substack newsletter. She joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss China's rise in artificial intelligence, and whether (and how) it can be a global player. Tune in to hear how China's AI startups are rapidly productizing cutting-edge tech, why it keeps developing open-source models, and why it's surging in robotics. We al...

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover 1) Ranjan's experience during the financial crisis 2) The uncertainty around operating a business today 3) Why bond traders are important 4) Could the U.S. position in global trade decline? 5) Was it the tariffs or the rollout that's causing chaos? 6) Why Apple manufactures in China 7) Exposure of Amazon, A...

Thomas Kurian is the CEO of Google Cloud Platform. He joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss how AI is changing the competitive balance in cloud services and why he believes Google has a chance to win. We also discuss the various use cases Google customers are finding for GenAI in the technology's early days, and whether the agent buzz is real. Finally, towards the end of the conversation we touc...

Ryan Petersen is the CEO of Flexport. Adam Parker is the CEO of Trivariate Research. Today we host an 'emergency' special report on the impact of tariffs on tech and the economy. Join us for the first half where Petersen breaks down what the administration is hoping to do with its tariff policy, whether it's advisable, what the near and long term impacts will be, and whether Trump will blink. In t...

Mustafa Suleyman is the CEO of Microsoft AI and a co-founder of DeepMind. He joins Big Technology to discuss Microsoft's strategy to build more personalized and emotionally intelligent AI companions. Tune in to hear how Microsoft is differentiating its AI offerings through personality design, memory features, and action capabilities that could transform our digital interactions. We also cover Micr...

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover 1) OpenAI's $40 billion fundraise 2) Is the $40 billion number real? 3) Can OpenAI live up to the expectations that come along with the money? 4) What OpenAI will spend the cash on 5) AI products are growing fast 6) Would you go to AI therapy? 7) Is AI a letdown? 8) Why AI boasts have gotten ahead of the te...

Brian McCullough is the host of Techmeme Ride Home. He's back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover: 1) Why everyone's using ChatGPT to make Ghibli art 2) What is Ghibli 3) OpenAI's product dominance stands out 4) The Studio Ghibli copyright question 5) The AI servers are at capacity 6) The AI datacenters are still probably built out too early 7) What's CoreWeave? 8) CoreWeav...

Dan Hendrycks is the Director and co-founder of the Center for AI Safety, and an advisor to Scale AI and xAI. He joins Big Technology Podcast for a discussion of AI's growing risk profile, and what to do about it. Tune in to hear Hendricks explain why virology expertise in AI models is an immediate concern and how these systems might soon enable devastating hacks. We also cover intelligence explos...

Amir Efrati is the co-executive editor of The Information. He's back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover: 1) Is there a market for NVIDIA's GPU chips outside of the cloud providers? 2) Why NVIDIA is making the case that we're early in the AI buildout 3) Whether NVIDIA's focus on Robotics is real or marketing 4) NVIDIA's chip roadmap 5) Amazon's cheaply priced AI chips 6) Co...

Yann LeCun is the chief AI scientist at Meta. He joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss the strengths and limitations of current AI models, weighing in on why they've been unable to invent new things despite possessing almost all the world's written knowledge. LeCun digs deep into AI science, explaining why AI systems must build an abstract knowledge of the way the world operates to truly advance...

Reed Albergotti is the technology editor at Semafor. He's back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover 1) Gruber turns on Apple 2) Has Apple lost its credibility? 3) Apple stock takes a hit after downgrades 4) Will we even use a phone in the future? 5) Will AI investing stop in a tough market? 6) The spectrum of AI outcomes and the wisdom of massive capex 7) Tesla risks and opp...

David Baszucki is the CEO of Roblox. He joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss how the company envisions generative AI playing into game creation on Roblox. Tune in to hear his vision for a future where users can prompt entire game experiences and modify them in real time using AI. We also cover child safety concerns, Hindenburg Research allegations, and whether parents should give their kids mon...

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover 1) Siri’s poor performance 2) Amazon leaves Apple in the dust 3) Should Apple replace Siri with ChatGPT? 4) Apple’s market cap is closer to $4 trillion than $3 trillion 5) Microsoft and OpenAI’s evolving relationship 6) Why AI wrappers are rising 7) Will AI take our jobs... now? --- Enjoying Big Technology...

Panos Panay is the senior vice president of Devices & Services at Amazon. Daniel Rausch is the Vice President of Alexa at Amazon. The two join Big Technology Podcast to discuss how the company rearchitected Alexa, blending a deterministic system with the latest generative AI technology to create something that can both turn your lights off and speak with you about philosophy. We also discuss how a...

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover 1) OpenAI's release of GPT 4.5 2) Is GPT 4.5 a major advance or what? 3) What better EQ gets you in an AI model 4) What reasoning advances can be built on top of GPT 4.5 5) Is AI product or model more important? (cont.) 6) Gary Marcus says OpenAI is in trouble 7) Anthropic releases Claude Sonnet 3.7 8) NVID...