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 experience in AI, she co-leads the Advancing Humans with AI (AHA) initiative and explores what it wi...
Jul 02, 2025•37 min
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 Harvard’s Public Interest Tech Lab and Data Privacy Lab. They discuss the future of privacy protection, t...
Jun 28, 2025•55 min
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 mindset to everything he does. In this episode of Pioneers of AI, we talk with Torres not just about A...
Jun 25, 2025•30 min
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 program, Roots & Shoots. Plus, the Jane Goodall institute shared audio from a cutting edge acoust...
Jun 21, 2025•59 min
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 of the Take It Down Act. As an entrepreneur, her company, Alecto AI, helps users remove deepfake por...
Jun 18, 2025•36 min
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 a massive creative challenge: How could he use an AI tool known for surreal, dream-like visuals to craft ...
Jun 14, 2025•57 min
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 intelligent machines — robots that can serve as learning partners in classrooms and even assist in navigating...
Jun 11, 2025•37 min
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, and Sony. But her journey hasn’t been without challenges. From online harassment to personal struggles...
Jun 07, 2025•49 min
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 each step in fascinating detail – all the manufacturing, compute power, and cost involved, starting b...
Jun 04, 2025•35 min
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 enlightenment. Discover how his own AI creation "Deepak Chopra.ai" serves as a digital guru, why th...
May 31, 2025•33 min
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, we explore the root causes of the women’s health gap, how AI can offer a new level of access to he...
May 28, 2025•31 min
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 build an AI-first organization, and what political leaders across both parties misunderstand about cre...
May 24, 2025•34 min
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 it means to build an AI-native company, and discuss how to scale without growing. Plus, we take a c...
May 21, 2025•42 min
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 for our future, and how he thinks founders in AI and beyond can build a winning strategy. Plus we di...
May 14, 2025•43 min
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 episode of Pioneers of AI, we dive into how this assembly line works, the importance of keeping hum...
May 07, 2025•31 min
This week, Pioneers of AI is bringing back one of our favorite and first episodes. It’s our conversation with Dr. Joy Buolamwini, founder of Algorithmic Justice League and poet of code. In this episode, we explore how bias in data sets and algorithms, especially in facial recognition, is crucial to AI’s future, how Dr. Buolamwini uncovered the deep roots and impacts of bias in AI, and how to mitigate its harms. Learn more about Pioneers of AI: http://pioneersof.ai/ Follow Pioneers of AI on all c...
Apr 30, 2025•38 min
One of the biggest debates in the AI revolution is its environmental impact – especially the vast amounts of energy we need to run AI, and the carbon emissions that could follow. Yet AI is also a super powerful tool for smarter, cleaner energy use around the world. Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and Inflection AI and friend of our show, joins to share his take. He weighs AI’s potential for environmental help and harm, depending how humans deploy it. We dive into the consumer’s role, what s...
Apr 23, 2025•34 min
If you’re looking for outside-the-box innovation and boundless energy — look to the youth. Dr. Taniya Mishra and her company SureStart are doing just that as they train the next generation of AI innovators with pie-in-the sky ideas that could solve some of our biggest challenges. SureStart operates under the fundamental ethos that to build safer AI tools that can reach everyone, we need diverse technologists to lead us. In this episode of Pioneers of AI, we hear from Dr. Mishra about why diversi...
Apr 16, 2025•36 min
Jonathan Ross and his company Groq are building AI chips focused on fast inference, increasing the speed with which AI models can process new information. But it’s not just about speed. Faster inference means that AI can deliver answers more quickly, and in turn save on energy and compute costs. In this episode of Pioneers of AI, we explore why Groq’s chips are making waves, how AI will create more jobs, and the importance of democratizing access to AI. Learn more about Pioneers of AI: http://pi...
Apr 09, 2025•35 min
AI start-ups are shaking up the world of venture funding and changing what investors decide to back. At this year’s Abundance Summit, Dr. Rana el Kaliouby moderated a discussion with leading AI investors Anj Midha, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, and Dave Blundin, founder of Exponential Ventures. In this special live panel presentation, we dive into how AI start-ups are scaling fast with less capital, whether AI start-ups’ increasing valuations are justified, and where the value lies in ...
Apr 02, 2025•30 min
A great manager can make a person feel more satisfied and included at work, and set them on a great career trajectory. But a bad manager can cost a company lots of time and money, or even drive away valuable talent. Katherine von Jan is building a better manager, powered by AI. As CEO and co-founder of Tough Day, von Jan is building AI management tools based on the best leaders and latest research, tailored for a company's values and norms. Tough Day might handle basic questions about PTO, but i...
Mar 26, 2025•37 min
Wearable technology tracking your health has become commonplace, helping us to take charge of our wellness. Alicia Chong Rodriguez, founder and CEO of BloomerTech, is creating specialized wearables in the form of bras that can help women gain insight into their heart health and provide tools to help improve it. In this episode of Pioneers of AI, we’ll learn more about how his technology can help women better understand their cardiovascular health, the challenges of developing technology you can ...
Mar 19, 2025•37 min
The workforce is changing. With the rise of AI agents, businesses and their employees will work in tandem with these digital assistants. Marc Benioff is at the forefront of this shift. As the CEO of Salesforce, he’s helping his own company fully adopt this technology while providing a suite of agents through Agentforce to companies across the globe. On this episode of Pioneers of AI, we’ll dive into Agentforce and how it works, how AI agents will reshape work, and how these agents could revoluti...
Mar 12, 2025•28 min
Gavin Uberti thinks that his company Etched can be the “biggest company of all time.” His competitive advantage: faster, specialized AI chips that drive down the cost of inference. In this episode, we explore how cheaper chips could democratize AI, the big bet Uberti is making on transformer models, and how Etched is standing up to chip giant Nvidia. Learn more about Pioneers of AI: http://pioneersof.ai/ Follow Pioneers of AI on all channels: https://linktr.ee/pioneersofai At the center of AI is...
Mar 05, 2025•30 min
Ever wish you could be in two places at the same time? Digital twins are making that dream a reality. These AI-powered clones can sound, look, and think just like us, allowing us to be in two places at once. In this episode, recorded live at On Air Fest in Brooklyn, NY, Rana el Kaliouby and special guest Natalie Monbiot explore AI clones and the process of creating one. They also dive into the tools used to make these clones and examine the ethical and philosophical implications of living alongs...
Feb 26, 2025•37 min
We all hit those “now what?” moments in our careers. Logan Currie knows them well. After years of helping people navigate career transitions, she co-founded Careerspan — an AI-powered career companion designed to guide you through what’s next. But can AI really help with career decisions? How does it compare to a human coach? In this episode, we explore AI’s role in career transitions, why self-reflection matters, and how technology can make job searching less stressful. Learn more about Pioneer...
Feb 19, 2025•36 min
Love, dating, and AI — what could go wrong? Or right? In this Valentine’s Day special, Rana el Kaliouby and a series of expert guests explore how AI is reshaping romance. First, Will Wu, Chief Technology Officer at Match Group, gives us a peek at how AI is already at work in apps like Tinder and Hinge, helping users choose their best profile pictures and refining match recommendations. Next, the team at Gottman Inc. shares how AI is being used to improve relationships. Their AI-powered tools ana...
Feb 12, 2025•49 min
AI isn’t here to take over. It’s here to empower. That’s the vision Kanjun Qiu, co-founder of Imbue, is working to make a reality. In this episode, Qiu challenges the dominant AI narrative and shares why the future shouldn't be about machines running the show, but about humans harnessing AI as a tool for creativity, decision-making, and personal agency. Qiu and host Rana el Kailouby explore how AI agents can help everyone build their own software, how we can take back control of our data, and wh...
Feb 05, 2025•38 min
Feeling a little overwhelmed by AI? You’re not alone. Ethan Mollick, Wharton professor and author of Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, breaks down the "AI crisis" — and why it’s totally normal. Ethan shares his tips for working with AI as a thought partner, and reveals how AI is already reshaping classrooms, boardrooms, and beyond. From treating AI like your co-worker to rethinking how we educate future generations, this conversation is packed with practical advice, and a dose of opti...
Jan 29, 2025•32 min
Nvidia, the world’s largest AI chip manufacturer, just made waves by announcing a new cutting-edge superchip as well as a family of models that promise to revolutionize how AI interacts with our physical world. On this episode of Pioneers of AI, Kari Ann Briski, Vice President of AI Models, Software and Services at Nvidia, sits down with us to explore the company’s full-stack approach to AI. Briski shares the company’s journey from accelerated computing to generative AI, the rise of sovereign AI...
Jan 22, 2025•25 min
