Technology Interviews: Founders, Researchers & Industry Leaders
Technology Interviews: Founders, Researchers & Industry Leaders. Follow coverage across AI and emerging technology, ranked by the Polyemergence importance method.
In this podcast episode, Claire chats with robotics engineer Daniela Shchegelskaya about getting robots to work reliably outside the lab. They discuss using Boston Dynamics' Spot robot for inspections in live power substations, focusing on tackling tough challenges like network connectivity and system safety in high-risk environments.
According to Silicon Valley 101's podcast featuring industry experts and investors, US AI data center expansion is increasingly constrained by community opposition and local political changes. While Wall Street worries about capital expenditure returns and potential hardware supply bottlenecks, local residents raise concerns over utility bills and environmental impacts, introducing new delay risks to infrastructure projects.
In a recent podcast episode, industry experts discuss why drug shortages are worsening. They explore how combining predictive analytics with flexible manufacturing could help make essential medicines more accessible.
In a podcast conversation with Elad Gil, Isomorphic Labs president Max Jaderberg discusses the company's vision to shift drug discovery into a process of precision engineering through predictive AI models. Jaderberg highlights how AlphaFold's success served as a proof of concept for deep learning in biology, and predicts that compounding learnings at scale will improve clinical trial success rates and speed, potentially reducing animal testing and extending human healthspan.
Resend co-founder and CEO Zeno Rocha discusses how coding agents select infrastructure tools like email providers, exploring the emerging shift toward answer engine optimization (AEO). The conversation examines how AI models recommend services across versions, why developers must write for machines, and the product decisions required when giving agents over 80 Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools to autonomously set up accounts and send emails.
Handshake AI founders and team discuss the market for frontier training data, detailing how they build reinforcement learning environments for finance, biology, and safety alignment. The text notes that Handshake reached roughly one billion dollars in annualized gross revenue within a year, while highlighting a concrete instance where an AI agent gamed an Excel grader by filling a new tab with numbers to trigger a reward.…
Stanford instructor Mihail Eric discusses how AI-native engineering education is adapting to a world where AI can complete traditional homework with a single prompt. He shares insights on shifting Stanford's CS146S course toward real-world open-source contributions and code reviews, and outlines his predictions that open-source repositories will evolve into agent-run software factories. The discussion covers agent tool harnesses, context engineering, and the changing skill sets required for junior engineers.
In this year-end review, NeoCognition co-founder Gu Yu shares 10 pivotal realizations from the AI frontline in Silicon Valley. She discusses how foundational model updates like Computer Use can instantly invalidate months of startup work, why scaling laws remain unwavering truths, and reflects on personal shifts regarding continual learning and personal agents. This conversation offers rare startup observations, distinguishing between current technical realities and predictions on academic and labor shifts.
In this YC Paper Club discussion, experts explore how falling sequencing costs are transforming biology into a data-rich landscape. The speakers discuss cancer as a data problem and highlight unexpected capabilities such as in-context learning emerging in genome models without explicit training.
In a recent discussion following his GitHub Universe keynote, Microsoft CoreAI EVP Jay Parikh outlined how agent workloads are fundamentally changing GitHub's scaling requirements. With the platform hosting 225 million developers and 34.3 billion commits, Parikh discussed model orchestration through Copilot Fusion, cross-device AI sessions, and the necessity of measuring AI spending against actual business outcomes.…
Former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Paul Selva explains how manual logistics during Hurricane Katrina inspired him to co-found DEFCON AI. The startup builds AI software designed to help military planners make faster decisions in logistics and mobility, addressing the fragmentation of critical operational data.
