The Times Tech Podcast

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Cristobal Valenzuela, founder of Runway, to talk about using AI to edit and create videos (3:00), starting out at art school (6:50), quitting his job and starting the company in 2018 (8:30), his art career (9:30), rushing to raise money before his visa ran out (14:10), the critical breakthroughs (16:45), what “diffusion” is (18:30), the...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Stability.ai's founder Emad Mostaque, to talk about whether artificial intelligence (AI) is going to kill us all (3:30), why AI is the most important invention since the internal combustion engine (8:00), the next leap (12:40), the explosion of large language models and chatbots (17:00), why he is being sued (21:40), how AI can improve h...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Loyal founder Celine Halioua, to talk about extending the life of dogs (3:00), pushing to get first product on market in 2025 (6:10), the regulatory path (10:40), growing up in Texas (15:40), how health anxiety seeded her passion for longevity science (21:00), leaving Oxford after being sexually harassed (25:10), coming to San Francisco...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Vijay Pande, head of Andreessen Horowitz’s $1.5bn bio fund, to talk about how artificial intelligence is impacting healthcare (3:30), tools that “understand” biology (8:50), trying to eliminate cancer (12:50), trying to get techie founders to get into healthcare (14:25), America’s plunging life expectancy (18:00), the (potential) end of...

The Sunday Times' tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Stephen Hsu, founder of SuperFocus.ai, to talk about genetic testing of children (5:15), his new startup SuperFocus (9:15), the hallucination problem for artificial intelligence (11:40), how the Ai revolution could go very badly (17:55), creating an army of AI workers (24:00), how companies are reacting (27:30), starting a company amid t...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Ben Rapoport to talk about his plan it implant his first brain-computer interface in a human this year (5:00), his background in neurosurgery and electrical engineering (10:30), why BCI’s are ready now (13:30), Precision’s approach (16:45), preventing the device being rejected by the body (23:15), what this device will allow (24:45), res...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Matt Welsh, founder of Fixie.ai, to talk about how artificial intelligence will replace human programmers (3:25), its growing capabilities (8:20), the power of natural language prompts (13:20), running the numbers (16:15), historical precedents (21:30), on whether there is a development “brick wall” coming (25:00), why this AI moment has...

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The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent brings on Parker Conrad, founder and chief executive of Rippling, to talk about getting caught in the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (3:30), receiving a call at 5:30 am (8:30), how wide the SVB blast radius was (11:00), moving $130m to JP Morgan in three hours (13:45), raising $500m in a day (17:00), why some people still didn’t get paid (23:40), the growing v...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson things on Sean Gourley, founder of Primer AI, to talk about how he got into the industry (3:45), and then getting into counterintelligence (6:40), the image recognition revolution (9:00), raising money from the CIA (11:00), AI in war (16:30), how machines beat human Top Gun pilots (20:00), AI as the “third offset” (22:00), how the US is still...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Tom Harries to talk about his previous cremation startup (3:20), how he got into human composting (5:00), the problems with burial and cremation (8:20), society’s changing attitude toward funerals (13:50), perfecting the microbial breakdown process (14:50), controlling temperature (21:10), using human remains to reforest land (24:20), ra...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Stuart Russell, professor at UC Berkeley and one of the world’s leading experts on artificial intelligence (AI), to talk about working in the field for decades (4:00), AI’s Sputnik moment (7:45), why these programmes aren’t very good at learning (13:00), trying to inoculating ourselves against the idea that software is sentient (15:00),...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Noam Shazeer, founder of Character.ai, to talk about his work at Google (4:00), joining the search giant in 2000 (6:50), what is deep learning (5:10), starting on language models in 2015 (9:10), starting the company in 2021 (10:50), virtual therapists (15:00), monetizing (20:40), what is possible (23:00), growing up coding and doing math...

The Sunday Times tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Matt LeDucq, founder of Forum Mobility, to talk about drayage (4:25), its health impacts (6:20), starting out in renewable energy twenty years ago (9:10), how drayage is like solar decades ago (12:10), the coming wave of electric lorries (13:30), building giant depots (16:45), the cost question (18:20), and electric grid challenge (20:20)...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Cameron McLain, co-founder of Giant, to talk about why he chose the name (3:05), what he did before starting a venture fund (7:00), moving to America (8:30), dabbling in Buddhism philosophy (10:30), getting into the music industry (12:45), starting and selling a company (15:25), finding good founders (17:30), bringing in Lord Browne as a...

The Sunday Times’ correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Lara Hodgson, founder of NOW, to talk about her previous companies (3:15), how a payment problem led to the launch of Now (8:55), meeting US political star Stacey Abrams (12:15), the Now account (15:15), the origins of the “net 30 “ payment model (22:00), the state of the economy (23:30), her meandering career (28:15), taking advantage of bei...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Trevor Martin of Mammoth Biosciences, to talk about “programming biology” (4:10), the slow grind of innovation (7:25), CRISPR (10:20), the problems he’s trying to solve (16:15), curing thousands of diseases (19:40), reaching for a science fiction future (24:40), meeting Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna (27:40), starting the company (35...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Saman Farid, founder of Formic, to tlak about why we need more robots (3:40), the labour shortage (7:20), the growing universe of jobs that are automatable (10:00), the latest AI bubble (13:45), growing up in China (21:20), being inspired by China’s rapid industrialization (23:30), how AMerica is losing 10,000 factory workers each day (2...

The Sunday Times tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Callery Means, founder of TrueMed, to talk about his early days in politics (4:20), how the food industry avoided sugar taxes (7:45), the links between industry and institutions of trust (12:00), the “food compass” and why it says Lucky Charms is better than chicken breast (18:00), why we consume 100 times more sugar than we used to (23:4...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Seshu Madhavapeddy co-founder and chief executive of Frore Systems, to talk about why our devices underperform and we don;t know it (4:20), the problem with fans (8:00), inventing a new chip (13:00), how it works (17:30), why he started the company (20:30), getting into an IIT in India (21:40), leaving Nortel at the peak of the dotcom bo...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Eddie Martucci, co-founder and chief executive of Akili Interactive, to talk about making the first prescription video game (3:40), the original pitch (6:10), sweeping the floors of his parents’ pharmacy (13:20), how he landed on video games as medicine (16:40), why ADHD is more present that it used to be (19:00), targeting a “weak link”...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on analyst Benedict Evans to talk about Chat GPT and machine learning (5:00), how it gets things wrong (10:00), the “fluent bullshit” problem (12:00), whether this is a genuine breakthrough moment (15:20), what this means for humans (18:25), “prompt engineering” (23:00), humans as curators rather than creators (26:40), tech’s mid-life crisi...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent brings on Bryan Johnson, tech entrepreneur and Kernel founder, to talk about reversing his biological age with “the blueprint” (4:50), eating dinner at 11:00 am (12:15), pleasure through pain (15:45), rethinking what it means to be human (17:30), changing society (23:00), how this philosophy dovetails with his startup Kernel (24:50), the “cognitive crisis" (26:...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Joshua March, founder of SciFi Foods to talk about why he is trying to brew burgers (3:30), mixing meat and plants (6:00), the cost challenge (8:00), growing up in small town England and his first startup (11:50), launching a social media software company (15:00), finding a technical co-founder and starting a meat company (17:20), leanin...

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Patrick Torbey and Lio Mora about engineering plants (3:45), the age of biology (6:15), their $180 houseplant (11:25), indoor pollution (13:45), meeting at a startup incubator (17:30), founder dating (20:55), raising money (24:30), spending four years developing the first plant (27:25), the market education problem (33:00), why certifica...