Core Memory

For the past decade, the scientist Suzanne Gildert has been working to imbue robots and AIs with new skills. She co-founded a pair of start-ups - Kindred and Sanctuary AI - that strove to add intelligence to robotic arms and bodies. The results were robotic arms that could do factory work at Kindred and then an upscaled, much weirder version of the technology at Sanctuary. In the background, Gilde...

Don’t meet your heroes unless your hero is John Markoff. For he is as good as billed. No one has broken more stories about the technology industry or documented more of Silicon Valley’s most crucial moments than Markoff, the longtime scribe for The New York Times. He was the journalist I most wanted to model my career after, and I will remain forever jealous of all the things he witnessed first ha...

Several years ago, KFC did something ridiculous. It hired a giant, stratospheric balloon maker called World View to put its Zinger Chicken sandwich into space. Or at least near space. This was an expensive, showy endeavor and no less than Rob Lowe came on as a new Colonel Sanders-cum-Mission Control Lead for the stunt. Ultimately, the sandwich did not go quite as high as KFC wanted, but, still, I...

Dina Radenkovic has set out to reshape women’s health. Gameto, her start-up based in Austin, has spent the last four years working on stem cell engineering technology that it expects to aim at things ranging from fertility treatments to menopause. On the fertility front, Gameto already has a product called Fertilo that reduces the time women must go through painful, hormonal injections from two we...

In this episode, we’re joined by the test pilot Elliot Seguin to learn what it’s like to put your life on the line on a regular basis. Unlike most of the people in his profession, Seguin did not do the whole Top Gun-style military training. He earned his status as a test pilot the hard way by putting in the hours flying all kinds of aircraft and convincing people to give him a go in their birds. H...

Fresh off closing a $200 million funding round, Ben Lamm from Colossal Biosciences - now valued at more than $10 billion - joins Core Memory - now valued at less than $10 billion - to talk about bringing extinct animals back to our fair planet. The company has set to work on woolly mammoths, the dodo bird, and the thylacine (aka Tasmanian Tiger) in its effort to restore animals and ecosystems. To...

A few weeks ago, I went out to Zipline’s test facility in Half Moon Bay, California for a dinner and to see their delivery drones in action. I was not expecting much. It feels like we’ve been promised delivery drones for years and years. And, in fact, we have . These visions of the future don’t always arrive on schedule, but the delivery drones were feeling extra tardy. I also wasn’t even sure if...

Sam Altman has placed a few very large bets. There’s OpenAI, of course, and Helion Energy for fusion; World (fka Worldcoin) for finance and identity; and then Retro Bio for longevity. In late 2023, I did a deep dive on Retro’s technology and Altman’s $180 million investment in the company. [Update: Would like to make it clear that MIT Technology Review reporter Antonio Regalado broke the story on...