Dan Hendrycks is the Director and co-founder of the Center for AI Safety, and an advisor to Scale AI and xAI. He joins Big Technology Podcast for a discussion of AI's growing risk profile, and what to do about it. Tune in to hear Hendricks explain why virology expertise in AI models is an immediate concern and how these systems might soon enable devastating hacks. We also cover intelligence explosion scenarios, the geopolitical implications of AI development, and why an international AI arms rac...
Mar 26, 2025•1 hr 14 min
Amir Efrati is the co-executive editor of The Information. He's back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover: 1) Is there a market for NVIDIA's GPU chips outside of the cloud providers? 2) Why NVIDIA is making the case that we're early in the AI buildout 3) Whether NVIDIA's focus on Robotics is real or marketing 4) NVIDIA's chip roadmap 5) Amazon's cheaply priced AI chips 6) Coreweave's revenue issues - what they mean 7) The state of OpenAI 9) OpenAI's talent retention issues...
Mar 21, 2025•1 hr
Yann LeCun is the chief AI scientist at Meta. He joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss the strengths and limitations of current AI models, weighing in on why they've been unable to invent new things despite possessing almost all the world's written knowledge. LeCun digs deep into AI science, explaining why AI systems must build an abstract knowledge of the way the world operates to truly advance. We also cover whether AI research will hit a wall, whether investors in AI will be disappointed, a...
Mar 19, 2025•1 hr 2 min
Reed Albergotti is the technology editor at Semafor. He's back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover 1) Gruber turns on Apple 2) Has Apple lost its credibility? 3) Apple stock takes a hit after downgrades 4) Will we even use a phone in the future? 5) Will AI investing stop in a tough market? 6) The spectrum of AI outcomes and the wisdom of massive capex 7) Tesla risks and opportunities 8) OpenAI releasing agent APT 9) Vibecoding is fun 10) Reed on Amazon's proprietary AI ch...
Mar 14, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 383
David Baszucki is the CEO of Roblox. He joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss how the company envisions generative AI playing into game creation on Roblox. Tune in to hear his vision for a future where users can prompt entire game experiences and modify them in real time using AI. We also cover child safety concerns, Hindenburg Research allegations, and whether parents should give their kids money to spend on Roblox. Hit play for an insightful conversation about the intersection of gaming, AI,...
Mar 12, 2025•51 min•Season 1Ep. 382
Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover 1) Siri’s poor performance 2) Amazon leaves Apple in the dust 3) Should Apple replace Siri with ChatGPT? 4) Apple’s market cap is closer to $4 trillion than $3 trillion 5) Microsoft and OpenAI’s evolving relationship 6) Why AI wrappers are rising 7) Will AI take our jobs... now? --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. For weekly updates on the sh...
Mar 07, 2025•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 381
Panos Panay is the senior vice president of Devices & Services at Amazon. Daniel Rausch is the Vice President of Alexa at Amazon. The two join Big Technology Podcast to discuss how the company rearchitected Alexa, blending a deterministic system with the latest generative AI technology to create something that can both turn your lights off and speak with you about philosophy. We also discuss how all big tech companies seem to be converging on the same contextually aware, general AI assistant...
Mar 05, 2025•56 min•Season 1Ep. 380
Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover 1) OpenAI's release of GPT 4.5 2) Is GPT 4.5 a major advance or what? 3) What better EQ gets you in an AI model 4) What reasoning advances can be built on top of GPT 4.5 5) Is AI product or model more important? (cont.) 6) Gary Marcus says OpenAI is in trouble 7) Anthropic releases Claude Sonnet 3.7 8) NVIDIA earnings 9) Jensen says reasoning costs 100x typical LLMs 10) Meta wants to build a standalone AI...
Feb 28, 2025•59 min•Season 1Ep. 279
Mark Chen is the chief research officer at OpenAI. Chen joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss the debut of GPT 4.5, the company's largest model, which is going live today. In this bonus episode, Chen speaks about what the new model says about the AI scaling wall, how scaling traditional GPT models compares to reasoning models like OpenAI's o1, how important EQ is for AI models today, whether product matters more than models, and how OpenAI's talent bench looks after last year's departures. Tun...
Feb 27, 2025•25 min•Season 1Ep. 378
Chris Hayes is the author of The Siren's Call: How Attention Became The World's Most Endangered Resource and the host of MSNBC's All In With Chris Hayes. He joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss his No. 1 bestselling book, digging into why he wrote it, how news differs from social platforms (and to what degree), and why We also cover the strange psychology of fame, how figures like Trump and Musk weild attention for political power, and why most social platforms are seeing declining user engag...
Feb 26, 2025•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 377
Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover 1) Satya Nadella's criticism of AI benchmark hacking 2) Ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati's new Thinking Machines Lab startup 3) There are too many AI startups 4) Why foundation models have commoditized 5) Did Google 'DeepSeek' itself? 6) Grok3 arrives 7) How do you evaluate whether models are good? 8) Grok3 at the top of Chatbot arena 9) Benedict Evans on Deep Research 10) Does using AI tools make our brains atr...
Feb 21, 2025•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 376
Saagar Enjeti is the co-host of Breaking Points. He joins Big Technology podcast to asses whether the Big Tech CEOs will win their Trump bet, assessing the stakes involved, the positioning, and the likely outcomes. We talk about Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, Jeff Bezos, and, of course, Elon Musk. Stay tuned as we discuss how the U.S. and China will handle the AI battle, especially after DeepSeek. And we end with a fun back and forth on Apple Intelligence and The Vision Pro, of which ...
Feb 19, 2025•58 min•Season 1Ep. 375
Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover 1) Musk's $97 billion bid for OpenAI 2) Whether the bid is real 3) How damaging could holding up OpenAI's for-profit conversion be? 4) Musk throws OpenAI off its rhythm 5) New OpenAI roadmap: GPT-4.5 and GPT-5 are coming 6) Should models flip dynamically between standard LLM and reasoning 7) Anthropic strikes back 8) Apple + Alibaba partnership 9) iPhone SE launch looms 10) TikTok is back in app stores......
Feb 14, 2025•51 min•Season 1Ep. 374
Evan Ratliff is the host of Shell Game. Ratliff joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss how he cloned his voice with AI and sent it to interviews, social calls, and therapy. In this conversation, we learn about why he conducted the experiment and what it portends for the future of voice AI. Tune in for a lively discussion with plenty of fun anecdotes from when Ratliff send his AI voice clone out into the wild. --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast a...
Feb 12, 2025•47 min•Season 1Ep. 373
Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover 1) New data showing ChatGPT's impressive growth since mid-2024 2) Was ChatGPT voice mode responsible? 3) How important ChatGPT's growth is for OpenAI 4) How seriously DeepSeek challenged ChatGPT's traffic numbers 5) Does brand matter or are bots interchangeable? 6) OpenAI does the Reddit AMA 7) Experimenting with OpenAI's Deep Research 8) Why AI reasoning methods contain so much promise 9) New Gemini rele...
Feb 07, 2025•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 372
Rev Lebaredian is the Vice President, Omniverse & Simulation Technology at NVIDIA. He joins Big Technology Podcast for a conversation about NVIDIA's push to develop AI that understands the dynamics of the real world, including physics. In this conversation, we cover how NVIDIA is building this technology, what it might be useful for (things like robotics and building common sense into AI models), how it will change labor, and even potentially warfare. We also cover how AI videos today posses...
Feb 05, 2025•1 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 371
Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover 1) The DeepSeek impact on Silicon Valley 2) The four areas of margin in AI 3) How OpenAI is positioned after this week 4) Whether OpenAI can be fine losing the lead on model building 5) DeepSeek's impact on Anthropic 6) Why Amazon is happy about DeepSeek 7) Should NVIDIA be taking the worst of it? 8) Okay, let's discuss Jevon's Paradox 9) We have a discord now 10) Apple made Siri even dumber --- Join us o...
Jan 31, 2025•58 min•Season 1Ep. 370
Reid Hoffman is the co-founder of LinkedIn, a legendary Silicon Valley investor, and author of the new book Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future. Hoffman joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss his optimistic case for AI, the massive investments flooding into the field, and whether they can possibly pay off. Tune in to hear Hoffman's insider perspective on OpenAI's $6.6 billion raise, the emergence of Chinese AI competitor DeepSeek, and why he believes these unprecedented...
Jan 29, 2025•56 min•Season 1Ep. 369
M.G. Siegler is a writer and investor and the author of Spyglass. Siegler joins Big Technology for a bonus depisode to discuss DeepSeek R1, the Chinese open-source AI model and its impact on the tech industry. Tune in to hear why DeepSeek's ability to match OpenAI's performance at just 3-5% of the cost could upend the AI industry's economic model. We also cover the immediate market fallout, why Silicon Valley's scaling hypothesis might be invalidated, and what this means for companies like Micro...
Jan 27, 2025•46 min•Season 1Ep. 368
Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover 1) DeepSeek r1, an efficient, cheap reasoning model from China 2) How DeepSeek stacks up against the state of the art 3) Does DeepSeek invalidate the billions of dollars invested in current foundational models 4) DeepSeek's wild origin story 5) How DeepSeek changes U.S. and China's AI rivalry 6) OpenAI, Softbank, and Oracle team up to invest up to $500 billion in AI infrastructure in a program called Star...
Jan 24, 2025•57 min•Season 1Ep. 367
Demis Hassabis is the CEO of Google DeepMind. He joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss the cutting edge of AI and where the research is heading. In this conversation, we cover the path to artificial general intelligence, how long it will take to get there, how to build world models, whether AIs can be creative, and how AIs are trying to deceive researchers. Stay tuned for the second half where we discuss Google's plan for smart glasses and Hassabis's vision for a virtual cell. Hit play for a f...
Jan 22, 2025•57 min•Season 1Ep. 366
Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover 1) Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban 2) Will Apple and Google comply even if the White House doesn't enforce? 3) What does TikTok's behavior tell us about its ties to China's government? 4) How TikTok might stick around 5) Will Elon Musk buy TikTok 6) TikTok CEO Shou Chew is going to sit at the dias during Trump's inauguration 7) Chinese app Little Red Book, or RedNote takes off 8) Does China want American...
Jan 17, 2025•55 min•Season 1Ep. 365
Eugenia Kuyda is the founder and CEO of Replika, an AI companion app where people befriend — and sometimes fall in love with — AI bots. Kuyda joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss the nature of these relationships, and what they say about our society. In this conversation, Kuyda reveals Replika's ambition for its "phase two," a plan to have AI friends join us in the real world, helping us keep in touch with friends, get off social media, or even watch movies together. Tune in for a fascinating...
Jan 15, 2025•54 min•Season 1Ep. 364
Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover 1) Sam Altman declares the path to AGI is clear 2) Could AGI come before GPT-5? 3) Up next: Superintelligence 4) Anthropic raising $2 billion 5) NVIDIA says robotics is a multi-trillion opportunity 6) NVIDIA has a personal 'supercomputer' 7) Smarter NPCs are here 8) Meta's AI training copyright issues 9) Zuckerberg's fact check reality check 10) Motives of Zuckerberg's moderation moves 11) TikTok ban migh...
Jan 11, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 363
Ryan Broderick writes the Garbage Day newsletter and hosts the Panic World podcast. He joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss how the internet has fundamentally changed since the pandemic, in a special episode with Ranjan Roy and Alex Kantrowitz. Tune in to hear Broderick's insights about the rise of viral normie culture which includes Hawk Tuah and the Costco Guys, why sites like BuzzFeed are struggling to adapt, and how platforms are shifting from follow models to algorithmic feeds. We also c...
Jan 08, 2025•58 min•Season 1Ep. 362
Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover 1) Skydiving with the Meta Raybans 2) OpenAI's GPT-5 delay 3) AI's crucible year 4) We finally know what OpenAI's definition of AGI is 5) Was AGI just a financial thing all along? 6) Trump throws TikTok a lifeline 7) The best divestment ever 8) Meta changes its political leadership 9) Manifesting in twenty twenty thrive --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast a...
Jan 04, 2025•47 min•Season 1Ep. 361
Casey Newton is the author of Platformer and co-host of Hard Fork. He joins Big Technology Podcast for our annual predictions episode. Tune in to hear Newton analyze 2024's major developments in AI, debate whether AI agents will take off in 2025, and explore what might happen to companies like Apple, Google, and OpenAI in the coming year. We also cover quantum computing breakthroughs, self-driving car expansion, and what a potential Trump presidency could mean for tech antitrust. Hit play for an...
Jan 01, 2025•51 min•Season 1Ep. 360
Brian Chesky is the CEO and co-founder of Airbnb. This week on Big Technology Podcast , we roll back the clock to our interview with Chesky in 2023, where he discussed cleaning fees, listening to customer feedback, and getting involved in the details of the product and user experience. This interview was one of the earliest moments Chesky shared his 'Founder Mode, philosophy, passionately talking about why he gets in the details, even as CEO. Please enjoy this holiday throwback. Alex and Ranjan ...
Dec 27, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 359
Dr. Rona Novick is a clinical psychologist and Dean Emerita of Yeshiva University's Azrieli School. Jinja Birkenbeuel is CEO of Birk Creative, and a parent of three children. They join Big Technology Podcast to discuss the right amount of technology to give to kids and how it impacts the developing brain. Tune in to hear their insights about pandemic-era screen time, the creation vs. consumption debate, how parents should approach digital supervision, and why schools are struggling to manage pho...
Dec 25, 2024•59 min•Season 1Ep. 358
Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover 1) OpenAI's o3 reasoning model 2) Is reasoning a real step forward or a head fake after other methods hit a wall 3) Is AI reasoning too expensive 4) AI models attempt to trick their trainers 5) Are we getting close to AGI? 6) Is it silly to start discussing AI sentience now? 7) 1-800-CHAT-GPT 8) Okay, we call ChatGPT 9) Assessing Neuralink's prospects 10) Meta brings Live AI to its smart glasses 11) And l...
Dec 20, 2024•54 min•Season 1Ep. 357
