Eye on A.I. is a biweekly podcast, hosted by longtime New York Times correspondent Craig S. Smith. In each episode, Craig will talk to people making a difference in artificial intelligence. The podcast aims to put incremental advances into a broader context and consider the global implications of the developing technology. AI is about to change your world, so pay attention.
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AI has fundamentally changed the cybersecurity threat landscape, not by inventing new attack types, but by collapsing the timeline. The same tools that make software developers more productive are now being used by attackers to move from vulnerability disclosure to active exploit in a matter of hours. That shift, argues Loris Degioanni, CTO and founder of Sysdig, changes everything about how defense needs to work. In this episode, Craig Smith talks with Loris Degioanni about why human-centered s...
What if the most competitive exam in the world is also the most destructive? In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith sits down with Professor Andrew Thangaraj, faculty at the Department of Electrical Engineering at IIT Madras, to explore how one of India's most prestigious institutions is quietly dismantling the system it helped build. Andrew lays out the honest reality of higher education in India. Two and a half crore kids reach college age every year. Only 90 lakh make it to college. And th...
Celia Merzbacher of QED-C offers an insider's view on the quantum industry, revealing market growth exceeding forecasts and diverse early use cases in pharmaceuticals, energy, and finance, often through hybrid systems. She underscores the understated importance of quantum sensing, already impacting areas like biomedical imaging and GPS. Merzbacher clarifies that AI and quantum are complementary, with AI advancing quantum hardware and algorithms. Enterprises should start preparing for this technological paradigm shift now.
What if you could train a frontier AI model without building a single data centre? In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith sits down with Steffen Cruz, co-founder and CTO of Macrocosmos, to explore a radical alternative to the way AI models are built today. Instead of billion-dollar GPU warehouses, Steffen is training large language models using idle compute from devices distributed around the world, coordinated through the Bittensor blockchain. Steffen breaks down why the centralised data cen...
What if your child already has a data profile, and they haven't even been born yet? In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith sits down with Eamonn Maguire, Director of Engineering for AI and ML at Proton, to explore one of the most urgent and underappreciated questions in the age of AI: who owns your data, who is building a profile on you, and what can actually be done about it? Eamonn brings a rare combination of depth and range to this conversation. With a PhD from Oxford, a postdoc at CERN, ...
What if the country that trains the world's engineers finally built the infrastructure to match its talent? In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith sits down with Amith Singhee, Director of IBM Research India and CTO of IBM India and South Asia, to explore where India actually stands in the global AI race and what it will take to close the gap. Amith gives an honest, ground-level assessment of why India has been slow to compete. The talent has always been there. But until recently, the investm...
What does it actually take to prove that AI delivers real value in the industries that keep the world running? In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith sits down with Debdas Sen, CEO of TCG Digital and Joint Managing Director of Lummus Digital, to explore what serious enterprise AI looks like when it is applied to some of the most complex, high-stakes problems on the planet. Problems like compressing years of catalyst research into weeks, predicting refinery failures before they happen, and acc...
What if the country that produces the world's top AI talent finally figured out how to keep it? In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith sits down with Professor Mausam, one of India's leading AI researchers, AAAI Fellow, and founding head of the Yardi School of Artificial Intelligence at IIT Delhi, to get an honest and unflinching diagnosis of why India has fallen so far behind the US and China in artificial intelligence and what it will actually take to close that gap. Mausam breaks down the ...
Why IBM Is Betting Everything on Small AI Models In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith sits down with Sriram Raghavan, Vice President of AI at IBM Research, to explore one of the most important debates in enterprise AI right now. Do you actually need a massive model to get world class results? IBM's answer is no, and Sriram breaks down exactly why. Sriram explains why IBM chose to train its Granite models directly using reinforcement learning rather than distilling from larger models like mo...
What if the country that trained the world's engineers finally decided to keep them? In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith sits down with Abhishek, the civil servant leading India's $1.2 billion national AI Mission, to explore how one of the world's largest and most diverse nations is mounting a serious challenge to US and Chinese dominance in artificial intelligence. Abhishek breaks down the honest story behind India's late start. World-class talent, but no research ecosystem to retain it. ...
Most enterprises are excited about agentic AI. But very few are actually deploying it in production. In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith sits down with Adi Kuruganti, Chief AI and Development Officer at Automation Anywhere, to break down why agentic AI is so hard to get right in the enterprise and what it actually takes to move from a promising pilot to a mission-critical deployment. Adi explains why the future of enterprise automation is not agentic AI alone, but the combination of determ...
What happens when AI writes code faster than anyone can test it? In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith sits down with Dan Faulkner, CEO of SmartBear, to explore one of the most underappreciated risks of the AI coding boom. As tools like Claude Code and Codex push software development to unprecedented speed, the systems built to validate that software are being left behind. Dan makes a distinction that every engineering leader needs to hear: clean code passing unit tests is not the same as an...
This episode is sponsored by Modulate. Most voice AI focuses on transcription. Velma takes it further by actually understanding conversations, analyzing tone, timing, stress, and intent using its Ensemble Listening Model architecture. Explore the live preview: https://preview.modulate.ai/ What does it actually mean to build a foundation model for robots? In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith sits down with Sergey Levine, co-founder of Physical Intelligence and professor at UC Berkeley, to ex...
AI has been trained like software. But what if it should be grown like life? In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith sits down with Sebastian Risi, professor and leading researcher in neuroevolution and artificial life, to explore a fundamentally different approach to building intelligence, one inspired by how nature evolves, grows, and adapts. Sebastian explains why traditional AI systems are limited by fixed architectures and one-time training, and how evolutionary algorithms can create syst...
Quantum computing has been "5 years away" for decades. So what's actually holding it back? In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith sits down with Izhar Medalsy, Co-founder & CEO of Quantum Elements, to break down the real bottleneck in quantum computing today and why the future of the industry may depend more on classical systems and AI than quantum hardware itself. Izhar explains how digital twins of quantum systems are being used to simulate real hardware, generate massive amounts of tra...
AI is changing more than just productivity. It's changing what we can trust. In this episode, Kevin Tian, Co-founder and CEO of Doppel, breaks down how AI is enabling a new wave of social engineering attacks—from deepfake phone calls to impersonation across LinkedIn, YouTube, and search engines. The reality is this:Deepfakes are just one part of a much bigger problem. Attackers are now operating across multiple channels at once, using AI to manipulate people, not just systems. And as these attac...
This episode is sponsored by Modulate. Most voice AI focuses on transcription. Velma takes it further by actually understanding conversations, analyzing tone, timing, stress, and intent using its Ensemble Listening Model architecture. Explore the live preview: https://preview.modulate.ai/ Baris Gultekin, Head of AI at Snowflake, breaks down how enterprise AI is actually being built, deployed, and scaled today. From running AI directly inside governed data environments to enabling natural languag...
This episode is sponsored by tastytrade. Trade stocks, options, futures, and crypto in one platform with low commissions and zero commission on stocks and crypto. Built for traders who think in probabilities, tastytrade offers advanced analytics, risk tools, and an AI-powered Search feature. Learn more at https://tastytrade.com/ This episode dives into why Pathway's Baby Dragon Hatchling (BDH) might mark the beginning of the post-transformer era in AI. Zuzanna Stamirowska, Pathway's CEO and co‑a...
AI often looks fully automated. But behind the scenes, a huge amount of human judgment is shaping how these systems actually work. In this episode, Craig Smith speaks with Phelim Bradley, co-founder and CEO of Prolific, a platform that connects millions of real people with researchers and AI labs to evaluate and improve AI systems. They explore the hidden human layer behind modern AI, why traditional benchmarks are becoming less reliable, and why AI companies increasingly rely on real human feed...
AI is not just getting smarter. It is getting faster by learning how to optimize the hardware it runs on. In this episode, Sharon Zhou, VP of AI at AMD and former Stanford AI researcher, explains how language models are beginning to write and optimize their own GPU kernel code. We explore what self improving AI actually means, how reinforcement learning is used in post training, and why kernel optimization could be one of the most overlooked scaling levers in modern AI. Sharon breaks down how GP...
This episode is sponsored by tastytrade. Trade stocks, options, futures, and crypto in one platform with low commissions and zero commission on stocks and crypto. Built for traders who think in probabilities, tastytrade offers advanced analytics, risk tools, and an AI-powered Search feature. Learn more at https://tastytrade.com/ Artificial intelligence is reaching a turning point. Instead of building bigger and bigger models, what if the real breakthrough comes from letting AI evolve? In this ep...
In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith speaks with Amanda Luther, Senior Partner at Boston Consulting Group and global lead of BCG's AI Transformation practice, about what their latest 1,500-company AI study reveals about the widening gap between AI leaders and laggards. Only 5% of companies are truly "future-built" with AI embedded across their core business functions. These firms are seeing measurable gains in revenue growth, EBIT margins, and shareholder returns. Meanwhile, 60% of organiza...
This episode is sponsored by tastytrade. Trade stocks, options, futures, and crypto in one platform with low commissions and zero commission on stocks and crypto. Built for traders who think in probabilities, tastytrade offers advanced analytics, risk tools, and an AI-powered Search feature. Learn more at https://tastytrade.com/ In this episode of Eye on AI, Nick Frosst, Co-Founder of Cohere and former Google Brain researcher, explains why Cohere is betting on enterprise AI instead of chasing AG...
This episode is sponsored by tastytrade. Trade stocks, options, futures, and crypto in one platform with low commissions and zero commission on stocks and crypto. Built for traders who think in probabilities, tastytrade offers advanced analytics, risk tools, and an AI-powered Search feature. Learn more at https://tastytrade.com/ Voice AI is moving far beyond transcription. In this episode, Carter Huffman, CTO and co-founder of Modulate, explains how real-time voice intelligence is unlocking some...
This episode is sponsored by tastytrade. Trade stocks, options, futures, and crypto in one platform with low commissions and zero commission on stocks and crypto. Built for traders who think in probabilities, tastytrade offers advanced analytics, risk tools, and an AI-powered Search feature. Learn more at https://tastytrade.com/ AI is changing how software is built, but it is also quietly breaking how security works. In this episode of Eye on AI, host Craig Smith sits down with Subho Halder, co-...
Construction is one of the least digitized industries in the world, and not because it resists technology. It resists bad technology. In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith sits down with Olek Paraska, CTO of Togal AI, to break down why construction productivity has barely improved in 50 years and why pre-construction is the real bottleneck holding the industry back. Olek explains how most estimating and takeoff work is still done manually, why automating this phase can unlock massive efficie...
In this episode of the Eye on AI Podcast, Craig Smith sits down with Steve Brown, founder of CureWise, to explore how agentic AI is reshaping healthcare from the patient's perspective. Steve shares the deeply personal story behind CureWise, born out of his own experience with a rare cancer diagnosis that was repeatedly missed by traditional medical pathways. The conversation dives into why modern healthcare struggles with complex, edge-case conditions, how fragmented medical data and time-constr...
AI is getting smarter, but now it needs better judgment. In this episode of the Eye on AI Podcast, we speak with Robbie Goldfarb, former Meta product leader and co-founder of Forum AI, about why treating AI as a truth engine is one of the most dangerous assumptions in modern artificial intelligence. Robbie brings first-hand experience from Meta's trust and safety and AI teams, where he worked on misinformation, elections, youth safety, and AI governance. He explains why large language models sho...
In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith sits down with Jarrod Johnson, Chief Customer Officer at TaskUs, to unpack how agentic AI is changing customer service from conversations to real action. They explore what agentic AI actually is, why chatbots were only the first step, and how enterprises are deploying AI systems that resolve issues, execute tasks, and work alongside human teams at scale. The conversation covers real-world use cases, the economics of AI-driven support, why many enterprise...
Inference is now the biggest challenge in enterprise AI. In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith speaks with Nick Pandher, VP of Product at Cirrascale, about why AI is shifting from model training to inference at scale. As AI moves into production, enterprises are prioritizing performance, latency, reliability, and cost efficiency over raw compute. The conversation covers the rise of inference-first infrastructure, the limits of hyperscalers, the emergence of neoclouds, and how agentic AI is d...
