TechStuff

How do LLMs solve math problems? This week in the News Roundup, Oz and Karah explore what AI models could mean for the fashion industry, the humble-but-mighty device our modern world depends on, and what Anthropic’s researchers learned about the inner workings of their LLM. On TechSupport, The Washington Post’s technology reporter Gerrit De Vynck explains the state of the AI race and h...

Zak Brown is the CEO of McLaren Racing, the second-oldest Formula 1 team. When he joined in 2016, McLaren was in a difficult spot — lagging behind in race wins, sponsorships, and morale. Brown set out to transform the team by elevating their in-house racing technology and fostering active collaboration. He led the team to win the F1 Constructors’ Championship last year, their first one...

What even is a crypto mixer? This week in the News Roundup, Oz and Karah dig into potential Slack-enabled corporate espionage, the recall of a Kim K-beloved product and the group chat that broke the internet. On TechSupport, The Washington Post’s technology columnist Geoffrey Fowler discusses 23andMe’s financial woes and what it means for the genetic data of the roughly 15 million peop...

This is the first episode of a new podcast called Levittown. It’s a real-life horror story for the AI generation. In this six-part series from Bloomberg, Kaleidoscope and iHeartPodcasts, reporters Olivia Carville and Margi Murphy take listeners from the quiet suburbs of New York to as far as New Zealand and into the darkest corners of the internet. Where tech moves faster than the law, and i...

How do you calm down a chatbot? This week in the News Roundup, Oz and producer Eliza Dennis dig into the book that Meta doesn’t want you to read, chatbot reactions to stressful stimuli, and the new home of Pokémon Go data . On TechSupport, 404 Media ’s Joseph Cox discusses a tool with surprising data scraping capabilities that is used by US agencies like ICE. See omnystudio.com/...

Astro Teller is Alphabet’s Captain of Moonshots. He oversees projects at X – the moonshot factory behind innovations like Waymo and Google Brain. To celebrate X’s 15 years of pushing boundaries, Astro Teller decided to take listeners inside the factory. On The Moonshot Podcast , inventors and entrepreneurs behind breakthrough technologies reflect on their projects, both the highs...

Could AI help you land an internship? This week in the News Roundup, Oz and producer Eliza Dennis explore the rise of vibecoding, what it means for the future of software development and how one college programmer hopes to reform the Big Tech hiring process. On TechSupport, Oz chats with the founder and researcher of the Exponential View newsletter, Azeem Azhar, about the latest AI innovation and...

David Eagleman is a neuroscientist, author, entrepreneur and host of the podcast Inner Cosmos . In his podcast, he explores how our brains interpret the world and construct reality. Eagleman sits down with Oz to discuss AI relationships, the human urge to anthropomorphize chatbots and the benefits of living on the exponential curve. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What if AI could read your mind? This week in the News Roundup, Oz and producer Eliza Dennis explore the latest tech investment in the US, Meta’s brain-to-text breakthrough and the creation of the woolly mouse. On TechSupport, 404 Media ’s Jason Koebler takes us to an AI-generated film festival… spoiler: the tech isn’t there yet.  See omnystudio.com/listener for priva...

Bradley Hope is a journalist, author and co-founder of Project Brazen, a narrative non-fiction production studio. His piece in Wired , ‘A Spymaster Sheikh Controls a $1.5 Trillion Fortune. He Wants to Use It to Dominate AI,’ outlines how one Gulf royal – Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed al Nahyan – came to control vast sums of sovereign wealth. Hope sits down with Oz to discuss She...

This week, Oz is on the road, at the Web Summit Qatar, and he’s not alone. Joining him from the iHeart pop-up studio in Doha is a very familiar figure, Jonathan Strickland. Oz and Jonathan sit down to discuss some of the highlights of the Web Summit, including the future of the AI chip race, advances in augmented reality and how news organizations are grappling with AI. See omnystudio.com/li...

Ben Taub is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and staff writer at The New Yorker . His piece, “Russia’s Espionage War in the Arctic,” covers tensions at the Russian border with Norway, an area Russia uses as a testing ground for future intelligence operations. Taub sits down with Oz to discuss the technology being used for survival and for espionage, as the war in...

This week, TechStuff teams up with Part-Time Genius for a special crossover episode. Oz and Mangesh Hattikudur, host of Part-Time Genius , discuss a largely misunderstood group of machine destroyers. The Luddites. Joining them is tech journalist Brian Merchant, author of Blood in the Machine , to dig into the history of humans fighting against job automation, why we equate Luddites with technophob...

Hany Farid is a professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. He's been a leading voice on digital forensics for over two decades—pioneering ways to identify if an image, audio or video has been digitally altered. Since the rise of social media, Farid has kept busy helping news organizations, government agencies and law enforcement deter...

What do the Brits want from Apple? This week in the News Roundup, Oz and producer Eliza Dennis explore how lithium-ion batteries and wildfires don’t mix, the UK government’s demand for a backdoor to iPhones and the James Webb Space Telescope–it rocks! On TechSupport with 404 Media ’s Emanuel Maiberg, a new study finds that AI might affect our critical thinking skills. And f...

Geoffrey Hinton is a computer scientist, cognitive psychologist, and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics. His work on artificial neural networks earned him the title, ‘Godfather of AI,’ but in recent years, he’s warned that without adequate safeguards and regulation, there is an “existential threat that will arise when we create digital beings that are more intelligent tha...

Do smart fridges help business? This week in the News Roundup, Oz and producer Eliza Dennis unpack Walgreens’ refrigeration woes, the future of supersonic planes, and what the Vatican has to say about AI. On TechSupport with 404 Media ’s Joseph Cox, the FBI’s unique relationship to one encrypted phone company. And finally, Oz tests out Google’s virtual office assistant in W...

Meredith Whittaker is the president of the Signal Foundation and serves on its board of directors. She is also the co-founder of NYU’s AI Now Institute. Whittaker got her start at Google, where she worked for 13 years until resigning in 2019 after she helped organize the Google Walkouts. She speaks with Oz about learning on the job, championing data privacy and being awarded the Helmut Schmi...

Is China winning the AI race? This week in the News Roundup, the story that roiled US stock markets on Monday – DeepSeek. Oz and producer Eliza Dennis unpack the hype. On TechSupport with 404 Media’s Jason Koebler, how human ingenuity continues to subvert tech. We hear how one coder has decided to entrap AI web crawlers. And finally, Oz digs into our love affair with personal data in W...

Nathaniel Rich is a novelist, essayist and writer-at-large for The New York Times Magazine. Rich sits down with Oz to talk about his essay, “Can Humans Endure the Psychological Torment of Mars?” The piece explores NASA's CHAPEA (“Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog”) mission, a simulation meant to test a major challenge of Mars missions – isolation. See omn...

In this episode of  Smart Talks with IBM , Malcolm Gladwell speaks with Ric Lewis, IBM’s Senior Vice President of Infrastructure.  They discuss how hardware capability has enabled the matrix math required to run large language models. Furthermore, they delve into some creative examples of how to put AI to work: from your bank to your local coffee shop.  Ric underscores the imp...

Is AI charging you different prices for groceries than your roommate? This week, Oz and Karah bring you a news roundup featuring a look at surveillance pricing and the rise of AI companies eager to work with the U.S. military. On TechSupport with 404 Media’s Jason Koebler, the hosts dive into last weekend's temporary TikTok ban and why Mark Zuckerberg didn’t want it to end. And finally...

Jessica Lessin is the founder and CEO of The Information , a media company that’s a trusted source for tech readers and tech leaders. She’s reported on the industry for almost two decades and is deeply familiar with the culture shifts in Silicon Valley. Lessin sits down with Oz to discuss these trends, including tech titans appealing to the new Trump administration. See omnystudio.com/...

Are you sharing misleading Instagram stories? This week, Oz and Karah bring you a news roundup including a ChatGPT-powered gun and a free app that’s keeping people informed about the LA wildfires. On TechSupport with 404 Media’s Joseph Cox, they get to the bottom of why a group of hackers have become so fond of U-Haul user data; and a look at when the world split into digital natives a...

Nicholas Thompson is the former editor-in-chief of Wired and current CEO of The Atlantic. There, he negotiated a controversial partnership with OpenAI that The Atlantic ’s newsroom referred to as “a devil’s bargain.” In his free time, he uses AI to help himself run faster and write better. Through it all, he maintains a worldview perhaps best described as “techno-enth...