TechFirst with John Koetsier

Could artificial intelligence make you MORE human? Help you become your best self? And, maybe, 10-15X your output? In this TechFirst we chat with author, flow coach, and entrepreneur David Passiak, who has gone way down the generative AI rabbit hole and made tools like ChatGPT his CMO, CEO, CRO, chief strategy officer, chief content officer, and more. He says it's 10X'd his output, but in...

GPUs are rare and expensive right now. Every company doing AI model training needs more, and NVIDIA can't build enough, especially of the NVIDIA H100 GPU. Run.ai CEO and co-founder Omri Geller says he has a software solution to this hardware problem. The key: GPUs are mostly idle, even in high-demand settings. According to Geller, his software 2X to 4Xs your GPU capacity on existing hardware,...

Dronamics just got a license to operate in Europe. Its Black Swan cargo delivery drone is the size of a 2-seater aircraft and carries 800 pounds for 1500 miles. It's also 50% cheaper with 60% fewer emissions and 80% faster than standard airfreight. In this TechFirst, host John Koetsier chats with Dronamics CEO and co-founder, Svilen Rangelov. Topics include: - The Black Swan cargo drone - Why...

It looks like we will soon be delivering power wirelessly to NASA robots on the moon. Yank Tech just won a NASA contract to to develop wireless charging solutions for autonomous vehicles on the moon. In this TechFirst, we chat with CEO Josh Yank. Topics we cover include: - Wireless power on the moon ... how does it work? - What’s the power source … solar energy? - When will it be ready? - When cou...

"ET phone home" has never been more relevant. We're seeing a wave of phone calls to space, or at least space connectivity from relatively ordinary cell phones. - Apple added SOS - T-Mobile is working with Starlink - AT&T is working with AST SpaceMobile Why? And where is this going? To answer, we chat with a senior director from Ciena. It's a networking giant that supports 85%...

Right now might be the golden age of humanoid general purpose robot development. Tesla, of course, is building the Optimus robot. Figure.ai is working on one as well, plus others like Chinese company Fourier Intelligence with the GR-1 Boston Dynamics, and Agility Robots. So is Sanctuary AI. Sanctuary says they’re on a mission “to create the world’s-first human-like intelligence in general-purpose...

Elon Musk calls him "batshit crazy," but Dan O'Dowd has built software for the F-35 fighter jet, the B2 bomber, and to secure U.S. nuclear forces. He's also built a microprocessor for Mars, worked on the Mac at Steve Jobs' request, and completed a ton of test drives of Tesla full self driving. His conclusion: it's worse than a drunk driver. And: it does not recognize smal...

Optimus, the Tesla bot, has been in development for 2 years and still can’t really do that much. There’s another dream team of engineers and roboticists who are building a humanoid robot that they call the “kinder, gentler” robot. In this TechFirst we chat with 2 investors in Figure.ai: Jesse Coors and Gregg Hill. They think humanoid bipedal robots could be one-to-one with humans in numbers "...

Can we get an open source medical AI that saves millions of lives? Everywhere on the planet, health care is a problem. In the US it's too expensive. In Canada it's too busy. In much of Africa and India it's too rare, and in many other countries including Western Europe, it's overwhelmed and overrun. AI could help, but only if we can get our act together, says HIPPO AI foundation fo...

ChatGPT is not actually generative AI, says Intel senior research scientist Ilke Demir. In this TechFirst we chat with an Intel scientist who has been working on generative AI for years. We talk about the genesis of generative AI, which is as far back as the 1970s, and we talk about ethical uses of generative AI and how we can use neuromorphic computing to help reduce the massive computation cost...

I’ve done a lot of shows on alternative energy ... green energy sources like wind, geothermal, solar ... but should nuclear be in the mix? Nuclear’s having a bit of a resurgence lately as a green option for reliable energy. To talk about why and where it might fit we chat with the founder and president of Nano Nuclear Energy, Jay Yu, and the CEO, James Walker. We discuss Zeus and Odin, their two n...

Would you get a whole-body MRI scan to check for cancer and other problems even if you don’t feel any symptoms? Some have done just that and saved their lives. Others simply find out that they're relatively healthy. I seem to fall somewhere in the middle. I recently did a 60-minute full-body MRI scan. I learned I'm mostly healthy, but there are some potential problems. The CEO and co-found...

Apple's likely releasing its massively expensive VR/AR/mixed reality headset, Reality Pro, next week at WWDC 2023. One key VR competitor says he's much less worried about Apple winning than he is worried that Apple will fail. Why? That would devastate the consumer VR market, setting back the industry years. In this TechFirst I chat with Varjo CEO and co-founder Urho Konttori, Finnish maker...

Generative AI is going to drive a 10X transformation in gaming, says Unity CEO John Riccitiello. It'll create truly believable worlds ... so believable it might even become more real that our "real world." It will transform NPCs -- non-player characters -- into deep, intelligent, and differentiated characters who might be more fun to hang out with than your real friends. And it will...

Huge chunks of our lives are already managed by AI. The songs we listen to, the routes we drive, the search results we see, the climate in our homes? When AGI takes over, will you even notice? In this TechFirst, we chat with Evan Coopersmith, a data scientist and AI researcher who says that when AI fully takes over ... we probably won't. And, he says, his bird can teach us a lot about what our...

Imaging using an entire podcast as a prompt to GPT-5, or GPT-10. What would a massively capable generative AI do with a podcast? Create a movie? Score a soundtrack? Build an immersive world? John Gauntt is the host of The Augmented City podcast. He’s also a journalist, analyst, founder, and story teller who has been building an audio sci-fi ghost story about Seattle 100 years from now for the past...

Facebook isn't what it used to be. It's shedding staff, dismantling efforts to create the metaverse, losing ground to TikTok in short-form video, bleeding ad revenue thanks to Apple's privacy changes, and generally following rather than leading tech industry trends. But it still has a massive number of users and some of the biggest apps on the planet. What can Facebook do to regain its...

Is technology and AI out of control? Is AI already beyond our ability to manage and monitor? In this TechFirst, we chat with David B. Auerbach. He's a software engineer who has worked for Google and Microsoft and recently wrote a book. The title is a bit on the scary side ... MEGANETS: How Digital Forces Beyond Our Control Commandeer Our Daily Lives and Inner Realities. He says technology is a...

Aimi is a generative AI application for music that make songs that are everlasting: collaborations between artists and audiences that start, but never have to end. In this TechFirst I chat with Edward Balassanian, the CEO of Aimi, a generative AI for music that musicians can use to create, generate, and even code music ... while allowing audiences to add, customize, extend, and personalize the sou...

The 500-year ceramic geodesic dome home is now an actual physical reality. I first wrote about Geoship's plan to build long-lasting, inexpensive, earth-friendly, community-centric homes about 3 years ago. Last year, Geoship showed me a prototype. Now there's an actual built, powered, and furnished dome home in Nevada City, California. In this TechFirst, we chat with Geoship founder Morgan...

Is generative AI the beginning of the end for humans ... or the end of the beginning? And, did you know generative AI has been around since 1972? In this TechFirst we chat with Ilke Demir, a research scientist at Intel who is working on ethical generative AI applications, like a speech synthesis project that aims to enable people who have lost their voice to talk again, an open urban driving simul...

On November 16th, revenue for skippable ads dropped 50%, 60%, even 90% for many YouTube creators.  They say YouTube variously admits it was a bug, says it was fixed or will be fixed, or claims the payment drops are due to invalid traffic: code for "you're cheating." However, looking at their YouTube analytics doesn't support that claim. In this TechFirst, I chat with 5 creators who say they w...

So I did a Twitter Space with a bunch of really smart people, and they said I could upload the results to TechFirst. The only thing ... it's literally over 3 hours. So ... listen however long you'd like! The people on the Twitter Space include the host, Robert Scoble, as well as: Bryan Talebi, CEO of Ahura AI Tiarne Hawkins, director of AI at WeLocalize Chris Nakayama from Nufa/Mimesis Labs Ajay J...

Drone delivery is super-hot, but there aren't that many major players yet. Google's Wing is doing well, but Amazon is still just getting started, and few other significant players have major traction. Tiny Irish drone delivery company Manna Aero, however, has completed over 100,000 drone deliveries, is expanding to Dublin shortly, and will be expanding to mainland Europe and the United States this...

Imagine building a digital twin of an entire country: all inputs, outputs, activity, infrastructure, issues, challenges ... That hasn't happened yet, but a client used Bentley Systems's tools to create a baseline digital twin for Singapore. In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, we chat with Greg Demchak, who leads digital innovation at Bentley. Increasingly, the company is using digital...