Pioneers of AI

This week, Pioneers of AI is bringing back one of our most thought-provoking conversations: How AI is transforming the job market. Hilke Schellmann, journalist and author of “The Algorithm,” has spent years diving into the impact of AI on who gets hired and moves up – or doesn’t. Revisit this episode where we talk about how and why she began reporting on AI and jobs, how AI has changed hiring, and...

For years, news organizations have walked a fine line between embracing new and emerging technologies and safeguarding their IP and content from those same technologies. The New York Times is no exception when it comes to its relationship with AI. Alex Hardiman, Chief Product Officer of The New York Times, is leading the storied news organization’s adoption of AI across the company. She also overs...

It’s back-to-school season and questions about how AI is changing the classroom are top of mind for parents, students, and teachers. Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, an education platform that pioneered online learning, is one of the leading voices in the conversation about how AI is shaping education. He joins Pioneers of AI to discuss how AI can free teachers to connect more deeply with th...

Award-winning visual artist Shantell Martin has made a name for herself through her signature black-line, graphic drawings that have scaled gallery walls and traced paths across Times Square. She's collaborated with iconic brands like Tiffany & Co, as well as leading artists like Kendrick Lamar. For the past ten years, Martin has also been at the forefront of integrating AI into her process. O...

OpenAI has released the latest iteration of its flagship product, GPT-5. It arrives after much anticipation, but does it live up to the hype? Jeremy Khan, AI Editor at Fortune, returns to the show to break down what this new model can do. We’ll explore how it performs compared to past iterations, what OpenAI decided to improve and why, and what GPT-5 means for the AI giant’s future. Learn more abo...

How do we build products and platforms that support a healthy, prosperous future? What will it take to “make the internet fun again?” Should kids be using AI? This week, serial entrepreneur and investor Alexis Ohanian—who co-founded Reddit two decades ago and is currently working to reinvent the social news aggregator Digg—joins Reid and Aria to talk about (re)building online and offline communiti...

As AI becomes a bigger part of the modern workplace, more companies are integrating agents into their workflows, redefining how employees and technology collaborate. At the forefront of this shift is Writer, a company deploying AI agents to take on time consuming tasks, from analyzing customer feedback to drafting business proposals. In this episode of Pioneers of AI, Writer’s co-founder and CEO M...

Google DeepMind is the powerhouse artificial intelligence lab behind Google’s AI assistant, Gemini. It’s also behind the groundbreaking AI tool, AlphaFold, that can predict a protein’s 3D structure. DeepMind’s COO, Lila Ibrahim, who’s the former COO and President of Coursera, has built her career on exploring how technology can benefit humanity. She’s now leading Google DeepMind with a mindset of...

From deepfakes to fabricated news, AI has been shown to generate convincing deceptive images and videos, increasing the spread of misinformation. David Rand, a professor of Information Science and marketing at Cornell University, is using the same technology for a different purpose: debunking those very same conspiracy theories. In a recent and groundbreaking study, Rand and his team asked partici...

In her New York Times bestseller “Empire of AI,” journalist Karen Hao traces the rise of an intriguing and controversial tech giant: OpenAI. In years spent chronicling the company, she came to a theory of how OpenAI’s operating model mimics imperialist empires of the past – and how other major AI players have followed suit. Hao’s history and analysis take up the evolution of Open AI’s original mis...

Artificial general intelligence, or AGI, is the next horizon that could match or surpass human thinking. Companies are investing billions in it, but not necessarily in projects to help humans with our memory, health, or well-being. MIT Media Lab professor Pattie Maes believes a different approach to how we advance AI could center and even re-define the human experience. With more than 30 years of...

How does the rise of AI impact our sense of what’s true? How can humans maintain a degree of individual privacy and unlock the benefits of AI while mitigating potential harms? In this episode, Reid and Aria sit down with data privacy pioneer Latanya Sweeney, Professor of Government and Technology at Harvard; former Chief Technology Officer at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission; and founder of Harva...

Founders and entrepreneurs today are racing to build companies with the leanest teams possible. Elias Torres, founder and CEO of Agency AI, a B2B company that delivers personalized, AI-powered customer service, is doing exactly that. His goal? To reach unicorn status with just 100 employees. Formerly the VP of Engineering at HubSpot and co-founder of Drift , Torres brings a direct and visionary mi...

What would it look like to keep all living creatures in the loop on the development of new technology? Reid sat down for a wide-ranging solo discussion with Jane Goodall on that very subject – and more. They talked about how to maintain hope and focus on local impact in today’s often chaotic world, how technology – and AI in particular – might be helpful for conservation, and Jane’s global youth p...

AI is a powerful tool full of possibilities, but it also carries the potential for significant harm. One disturbing misuse is the creation of synthetic “revenge porn” through deepfakes, targeting anyone without consent. Breeze Liu, a survivor of this form of online image abuse, has dedicated her career to preventing it from happening to others. As an advocate, she played a key role in the passage...

What does it take to create something the world has never seen before? In this final episode of Artful Intelligence, Reid Hoffman and Chris McLeod explore what it takes to spark a creative revolution with filmmaker Paul Trillo. Using OpenAI’s groundbreaking AI video generator, Sora, Paul directed the world’s first fully AI-generated music video.  After gaining early access to Sora, Paul faced...

Over the past several decades, the field of robotics has achieved remarkable milestones. Robots have been sent to Mars and to the deepest parts of the ocean. Cynthia Breazeal, a professor at the MIT Media Lab, believes there’s another frontier that robots should enter: our daily lives. As a pioneer in social robotics, Breazeal has devoted her career to developing socially and emotionally intellige...

How can you shape the future with AI to create the world you want to live in? Reid Hoffman and Chris McLeod explore this question with Elise Swopes, a trailblazing visual artist and educator blending AI with photography. Currently an evangelist for Adobe, Elise has been a creative force since the early days of Instagram, crafting surreal visuals for brands such as Adidas, McDonald’s, Casamigos, an...

You may have heard that AI is a bit of a resource hog. It requires so much electricity that scaling it could have a tremendous impact on the planet through the increase of emissions. So, what is the exact footprint you’ll leave the next time you type a prompt into your AI model of your choice? Dr. Sasha Luccioni, Climate Lead at the global AI firm Hugging Face, joins Pioneers of AI to break down e...

Can AI and spirituality coexist? Deepak Chopra, world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, challenges our perceptions by embracing artificial intelligence as a spiritual tool. In this mind-expanding conversation, Chopra reveals why he believes AI represents "the most powerful technology for expanding awareness in every area" and how it's revolutionizing our path to...

Women’s health has historically been understudied and underfunded. And when it comes to women’s hormonal health, we’re missing some critical data. Marina Pavlovic Rivas is working to close that gap by leveraging AI. Her company, Eli Health, offers an at-home monitor that tracks hormonal levels through saliva, giving women access to health data that is typically difficult to access. In this episode...

The buzz in Silicon Valley around AI agents has many asking: What’s real and what’s hype? Box’s co-founder and CEO, Aaron Levie, joins Rapid Response to help decipher between fact and fiction, taking listeners inside the fast-paced evolution of agents and its impact on the future of enterprise AI. Plus, Levie unpacks how AI is really being adopted in the workplace, what it takes to legitimately bu...

Jeff Bussgang is a general partner at Flybridge Capital Partners and teaches entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School. When he’s not helping his students become future founders, he’s writing books. His latest, The Experimentation Machine , is a guide for founders looking to leverage AI in their startups. In this episode, we surface practical strategies founders can implement today, explore what...

Vinod Khosla is one of the leading investors and technologists of our time, consistently making Forbes’ Midas List (basically the Oscars for venture investors) as head of Khosla Ventures. He was an early innovator in the world of computer chips and an early investor in OpenAI, as well as backing successes like DoorDash, Stripe, and Headspace. We unpack Vinod’s investment thesis, his utopic vision...

Scaling a business means managing redundant tasks that take time and manpower. Through his company, Invisible Technologies, Francis Pedraza is looking to make that process easier by creating a digital assembly line with humans and AI working together. Now, ten years in, Invisible Technologies has worked with major household-name companies to train their AI models and streamline operations. On this...