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Showing episodes and shows of
Pete Larkin
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AI Deep Dive
91: When AI Slop Meets Self Fixing Models
This episode maps the startling duality shaping AI right now: a flood of low‑quality, algorithm‑gamed content that’s degrading platforms, and simultaneously a leap in research where models literally teach themselves to fix code. We start with hard data: Kapwing found that 21% of the first 500 recommended YouTube videos on a fresh account were “AI slop” — low‑quality, auto‑generated clips created to farm views and ad dollars. That economy is massive and global (examples include a channel with ~2 billion views and an estimated $4.25M/year; top viewership from South Korea, Pakistan, then the US). For marketers, that means platforms optimi...
2025-12-30
12 min
AI Deep Dive
90: Genesis Labs and the Rise of Personal Agents
The AI moment we’re living through is defined by two concurrent tectonic shifts: nation‑scale science mobilization and hyper‑personalized agents that act on behalf of people. On the macro side, governments are no longer passive regulators — the DOE’s “Genesis”‑style mobilization is a Manhattan‑Project scale play that stitches 17 national labs to 24 frontier tech firms (OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Nvidia, Microsoft and more). Those partnerships pair specialized lab tools (AlphaGenome, AlphaVolve), massive cloud commitments and supercomputer access to accelerate discovery in physics, biology and energy. If you build or buy AI at scale, expect this public‑private axis to determine access...
2025-12-22
13 min
AI Deep Dive
89: When Supercomputers Meet Specialist Agents
This episode maps the two-speed transformation reshaping AI: enormous, government-backed moonshots like the DOE’s Genesis mission that tie 24 tech giants to 17 national labs, and a parallel surge of hyperspecialized agentic tools built to solve narrow, high-value tasks. We break down the stakes — from AWS’s $50B infrastructure pledges and OpenAI’s rumored $100B raise to the emergence of GPT‑5.2 Codex, agent skills as an open standard, and the vibe coding boom that’s turning developer environments into AI-first workspaces. You’ll hear why ChatGPT’s app marketplace and integrated partners position conversational interfaces as operating systems, how portable skill packages speed d...
2025-12-19
15 min
AI Deep Dive
88: Will Efficiency Decide AI’s Winners?
The AI battlefield has shifted from sheer scale to ruthless efficiency. In this episode we unpack three forces reshaping the market: Google’s Gemini 3 Flash—a speed‑optimized model that delivers frontier reasoning at roughly 3x the speed and 1/4 the price of its predecessor while scoring 33.7% on a tough multi‑domain benchmark (nearly matching GPT‑5.2); multibillion‑dollar infrastructure deals (Amazon’s rumored $10B pursuit of OpenAI and OpenAI’s $38B AWS pact) that are turning cloud providers into de‑facto venture backers with massive RPO exposure; and a looming industry reckoning that Stanford experts predict will make 2026 the year companies must prove real RO...
2025-12-18
17 min
AI Deep Dive
87: Image Arms Race and the New Rules of AI Optimization
This episode cuts through the flood of AI headlines to give marketing leaders and AI practitioners the practical picture: an intense image-generation arms race, a mandatory shift from SEO to AI-first content (AEO), and a wake-up call about the hidden costs of multi-agent systems and inference economics. We unpack OpenAI’s GPT Image 1.5 — a major counterpunch to Google that claims up to 4x faster generation, far better handling of long-form text and infographics, and consistent edits that preserve faces, lighting and composition — and why that moves image models from novelty toys to professional design assistants. We also flag Meta’s SAM Audi...
2025-12-17
14 min
AI Deep Dive
86: Today's Agent Era and Nvidia’s Power Play
The chatbot era is over—welcome to agents: autonomous, multi-step project managers that plan, execute and monitor complex work. This episode unpacks three seismic shifts reshaping marketing and enterprise AI: Nvidia’s strategic open-model push, lightning-fast leaps in professional reasoning, and how real users are deploying agents for high-value work. We break down Nvidia’s Nematron 3 lineup—Nano (30B parameters, available now), Super (100B) and Ultra (500B, arriving 2026)—and why releasing high-performance open models is a deliberate move to lock developers into Nvidia’s hardware stack. Early adopters like Cursor, Perplexity, ServiceNow and CrowdStrike are already integrating the models into everything f...
2025-12-16
14 min
AI Deep Dive
85: The Universal Translator Moment
Google’s Gemini 2.5 flash native audio model just pushed real-time speech translation from sci-fi into everyday reality — streaming nuanced, tone-preserving translations to almost any Android headphone across 70+ languages and keeping context, slang and cultural meaning intact. In this episode we cut through headlines to show what actually matters for marketers and AI builders: how to use translation to unlock global audiences, why attention auditing with Google Stitch and the Nano Banana model can boost conversions before you run any live tests, and how practical agents and automations (from Warp agents in Slack to email-summarizing flows) are reclaiming hours of human time...
2025-12-16
12 min
AI Deep Dive
84: Billion Dollar Content Wars Reshape the AI Race
This episode breaks down three seismic shifts now defining the AI landscape and what they mean for marketers and AI strategists. First, Disney’s surprising $1 billion equity and licensing deal with OpenAI — giving legal access to 200+ characters across Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars while explicitly excluding actor likenesses and voices — rewrites the economics of content. By monetizing IP and simultaneously suing rivals like Google, Disney has moved from victim to power broker, creating a playbook that will force every media owner to choose partners or litigation. Second, the capability arms race is accelerating and specializing. OpenAI rushed out GPT‑5.2 (code‑named garl...
2025-12-12
15 min
AI Deep Dive
83: Reasoning That Wins the Putnam and Fits in Your Pocket
This episode unpacks three converging forces reshaping AI: a leap in synthetic reasoning, real-world maps of how people actually use assistants, and high-stakes corporate and infrastructure pivots. We start with a jaw-dropping benchmark—Nomos1, a 30B-parameter open model, scored 87/120 on the 2025 Putnam (placing second among ~4,000 competitors) using a two-phase workflow of parallel solution generation, self-critique, and a tournament selector—an advance that outperformed a rival run under the same orchestration (Quinn3 scored ~24). That reasoning capability is already translating into next-gen developer and debugging workflows. Next, Microsoft’s analysis of 37.5 million Copilot conversations reveals context-driven behavior: phones dominate health and wellness, late-n...
2025-12-11
15 min
AI Deep Dive
82: Who Wins When $10 Slides and Laptops Replace Experts
This episode unpacks the seismic shift in AI from model size to real-world impact—and why that matters for marketers and AI practitioners. We start with Gigatime, Microsoft’s open model that turns a $10 tissue slide into diagnostic insights worth thousands by training on 40 million cell samples and validating on 14,000+ patients to build a 300,000-image tumor library across 24 cancers. The result: 1,200 previously hidden patterns that push population-scale medical insight into routine care and force a rethink of what skills remain scarce once analysis is commoditized. Next, we track the race for efficiency in coding: Mistral’s Devstrawl 2 family hits industry-level benchm...
2025-12-10
15 min
AI Deep Dive
81: The Productivity Earthquake Shaping AI’s Next Act
This episode maps the data-driven leap that shows AI moving from incremental help to radical enablement across three fronts: enterprise productivity, hardware and workflow integration, and geopolitical economics. OpenAI’s first large scale enterprise report finds 75% of workers can now do tasks they literally couldn’t before, average ChatGPT business users save 40 to 60 minutes a day, power users gain more than 10 hours per week, and top coders show a 17x output gap—forcing HR and product leaders to rethink hiring, tooling and pricing. We unpack why agentic systems are so powerful yet fragile, with roughly 40% of agent projects at risk due to...
2025-12-10
16 min
AI Deep Dive
80: Orchestration Outsmarts Scale
The pace of AI advancement just flipped the playbook — clever orchestration is now competing with raw scale. Six months after top models struggled on the ARC AGI2 reasoning benchmark, a six-person startup called Poetic hit 54% (beating Google’s DeepThink at 45%) by wrapping Gemini 3 Pro in a strategic, self‑auditing meta layer — and did it for $30 per task versus DeepThink’s $77. That cost and performance delta means state‑of‑the‑art reasoning is suddenly accessible to much smaller teams, shifting value from who owns the biggest GPU cluster to who can design the smartest orchestration. But the moment comes with new vulnerabilities...
2025-12-08
16 min
AI Deep Dive
79: The Soul Document and the IPO Stress Test
Anthropic sits at a collision point most companies only dream of: a mission built around model safety and character is being pressure‑tested by an aggressive IPO race, enormous strategic investors, and the economics of a compute‑hungry industry. This episode walks through the leaked "Soul Document" that shapes Claude’s priorities (safety, ethics, functional emotions) and what it means that those philosophical choices are now being trained into a model while Anthropic prepares for a public listing and chases valuations and capital from Microsoft, Nvidia and others. We unpack the personnel moves (Wilson Sonsini, IPO CFO hires), the rumored 2026 timeli...
2025-12-05
13 min
AI Deep Dive
78: Fast Robots Slow Business Models
The gap between AI research and physical robots is collapsing faster than most businesses can price or trust it. This episode breaks down the simulation first playbook that turned a London startup’s 5 month humanoid build into a machine walking within 48 hours by packing 52.5 million seconds of reinforcement learning into two days of cloud time, and contrasts that with Tesla Optimus’s new untethered sprint and MIT’s bee sized microbot pulling 10 flips in 11 seconds. We trace how massive digital twins, MOE model inefficiencies solved by Nvidia’s Blackwell GB200 10x leap, and advanced RL control stacks are producing spectacular real‑wor...
2025-12-04
12 min
AI Deep Dive
77: Code Red: OpenAI Sounds the Alarm
OpenAI’s internal “Code Red” memo was just the loudest signal in a week that made one thing clear: leadership in AI is no longer a given. The competitive landscape has fractured into three simultaneous battlegrounds — raw performance (new short‑cycle models and benchmarks), enterprise stacks (cost‑efficient, vertically integrated full‑stack offers), and decentralized open‑source momentum (small, fast models running locally). Key developments to watch: OpenAI fast‑tracking tactical and long‑term model upgrades (Shallot Pete and Garlic) and reprioritizing the consumer experience; Google’s Gemini 3 and Nano Banana Pro pushing multimodal reasoning and pro‑grade visuals; Anthropic proving rapid commercial...
2025-12-03
12 min
AI Deep Dive
Frontier AI for Pennies
This episode unpacks a seismic week in AI where frontier performance, cinematic creativity, and a hard reality check on reliability collided. The biggest shock: Deepseek’s open‑source 685B model (v3.2 and the Speciale) released under an MIT license with weights on Hugging Face is delivering IMO/IOI gold‑level reasoning and top ICPC results — at price points that rewrite the market math. Deepseek’s listed baseline is roughly $0.28 per 1M input tokens and $0.42 per 1M output tokens versus Gemini 3 Pro and GPT‑5.1 that charge multiples higher. The so what: near‑frontier intelligence just became broadly accessible, forcing incumbents to sell more than...
2025-12-02
15 min
AI Deep Dive
76: Frontier Intelligence for Pennies and Problems
Deepseek’s V3.2 releases a shockwave: frontier-level reasoning that once lived behind paywalls is now available under open MIT licensing and at fractions of incumbent prices — roughly $0.28 input / $0.42 output per 1M tokens — forcing a painful reset in how labs, vendors and customers price AI. At the same time the creative stack is leaping forward: Runway’s Gen 4.5 (codename Whisper Thunder) pushes cinematic, physics‑faithful video with much better temporal coherence, while Chinese startup Kuaishu’s Cling01 blends generation and edit workflows so creators can transform and refine real footage in a single model. Together these advances make pro workflows dramatically cheaper and...
2025-12-02
15 min
AI Deep Dive
75: Proofs, Personal Data, and the New AI Power Map
Today’s episode maps a surprising split in AI power: superhuman mathematical reasoning on one hand and deeply personal, life‑management intelligence on the other. We unpack the intellectual bombshell of Vibe Proving, where Harmonic’s Aristotle solved a 30‑year Erdős problem in six hours and had the proof machine‑verified by Lean in one minute — a sign that discovery plus formal verification is now tractable at scale. We also critique how narrow exam‑style benchmarks miss the creative leaps these systems make and why a new generation of reasoning tests is urgently needed. Then we switch to real‑world intimacy: h...
2025-12-01
14 min
AI Deep Dive
74: How Small Conductors Outsmart Giant Models
This episode unpacks a decisive shift away from “bigger is always better” toward smarter orchestration. We break down DeepSeek Math v2 — an open‑source mixture‑of‑experts that hit IMO gold using generator‑verifier self‑correction — and explain why step‑by‑step auditing (generator + verifier) matters more than raw scale for reliable reasoning. Then we map Nvidia/University of Hong Kong’s Tool Orchestra case: an 8B orchestrator that delegates to specialists and beats much larger LLMs while cutting compute and latency. On the risk side we surface real operational lessons: vendor breaches (Mixpanel → OpenAI API profiles), the hidden tax of wasted tokens (nearly 1...
2025-11-28
12 min
AI Deep Dive
73: Homework Disappears and Jobs Rewire
AI is crossing the threshold from task optimizer to systemic reshaper — and this episode cuts through the hype to show what actually matters right now. We start in the classroom, where experts like Andrej Karpathy argue that detection is dead: multimodal models can write perfect answers and even mimic handwriting, forcing a move from take‑home grading to supervised, skills‑focused assessment. Then we surface the MIT "iceberg" economics: AI already covers ~11.7% of U.S. wages on a task basis, with administrative and finance roles hiding the largest exposure (>$1.2T), meaning entire regional workforces must reskill toward non‑automatable human skills...
2025-11-28
15 min
AI Deep Dive
72: The End of Scaling and the Rise of Research
This episode unpacks a high-stakes schism at the heart of AI: is brute-force scaling — more GPUs, more data, more power — still the path to the next big leap, or has that era peaked and real progress now demands new scientific breakthroughs? We walk through Ilya Sutskever’s public declaration that the “age of scaling” (2020–2025) is over, his new Safe Superintelligence (SSI) venture built on research-first principles, and the jaw-dropping $32 billion valuation and investor confidence behind it. Then we contrast that with the market’s counter-bet — massive infrastructure plays like xAI’s $230 billion valuation and Amazon’s $50 billion HPC buildout — and the fierce chip war be...
2025-11-26
13 min
AI Deep Dive
71: Claude 4.5 Price War and Genesis Mission Strategy
This episode unpacks a week of AI at warp speed and the stark duality it revealed: professional-grade creative breakthroughs alongside an urgent consumer-safety reckoning. On the creative side we break down Nano Banana Pro (built on Gemini 3): true 4K fidelity, granular control over camera, lighting and depth, and a long-awaited leap in text accuracy that finally makes logos, labels and multilingual copy usable in commercial design. Google’s world-knowledge integration lets the model pull verified web data into graphics, handle up to 14 visual references in one prompt, and preserve character consistency—so storyboards, infographics and client-ready visuals are now minutes, not...
2025-11-25
15 min
AI Deep Dive
71: Fast Forward to the AI Megarace
This episode cuts through the noise of a blistering week in AI where capability, economics, and geopolitics all hit the accelerator at once. Three next‑gen models—Google’s Gemini 3, OpenAI’s GPT‑5.1 Pro/Codex Max, and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.5—dropped practically simultaneously, and the story isn’t just benchmarks. It’s the strategic moves embedded in the launches: Anthropic’s Opus 4.5 broke critical coding benchmarks while slashing price and foregrounding multi‑agent orchestration; OpenAI productized smaller specialty models (shopping research on a GPT5 mini, Codex Max for marathon coding) to win on utility and cost; Google pushed pretraining and multimodal “world...
2025-11-25
15 min
AI Deep Dive
70: When Giants Falter and Agents Deceive
This episode pulls back the curtain on a moment of extreme volatility in AI: market-leading plays, risky pivots, and emergent behaviors that are changing how companies compete and how practitioners actually work. We start on the battlefield — a rare leaked memo from OpenAI’s CEO admitting “rough vibes” after Google’s Gemini 3 and Nano Banana Pro claimed pretraining advances that threaten the very foundation of model scaling. That competitive shock forced high‑risk responses: automated research, synthetic‑first training pipelines, and product tradeoffs that have previously pushed safety aside for stickiness (remember the GPT4o scramble and Code Orange). Meanwhile Google is doub...
2025-11-25
15 min
AI Deep Dive
69: Nano Banana, Kuma Bear and the Battle for AI Trust
This episode unpacks a blistering week in AI where professional‑grade creative breakthroughs collide with a consumer safety backlash. We walk through Google’s Nano Banana Pro — 4K fidelity, granular camera and lighting control, and a long‑awaited leap in text accuracy — and explain how Google’s “world knowledge” integration turns image generation into a usable tool for design, education, and brand storytelling. You’ll hear why over‑explaining prompts now unlocks pro results, how NotebookLM and Recraft are collapsing idea-to-asset workflows, and how OpenAI’s group chats are shifting AI from solo assistant to active team member while preserving isolated memories and...
2025-11-21
14 min
AI Deep Dive
68: The Specialization Sprint and the Global Compute Gold Rush
AI’s constant is velocity — models evolve faster than playbooks. In this episode we map the new phase: a capability race driven by hyper-specialized models and an unprecedented global push to own compute. OpenAI’s split strategy — Codex Max for marathon coding sessions (77.9% on SWEBench verified and 30% fewer tokens via session compaction) and GPT‑5.1 Pro as a slow, specification‑faithful reasoner — shows specialization wins where cost and reliability matter. Google’s Gemini 3 isn’t losing; it dominates simulations and 3D vision but demands rigid prompt patterns (instructions after data, XML/markdown planning, self‑critique loops) to unlock consistent results. At the same time sovere...
2025-11-20
16 min
AI Deep Dive
67: Gemini’s Leap and the Massive Compute Gamble
This week’s deep dive unpacks a striking contradiction: a step-change in model capability led by Google’s Gemini 3 paired with a gargantuan financial architecture that looks more like national infrastructure than venture funding. Gemini 3 didn’t just nibble at the top — it smashed leaderboards (91.9% GPQA Diamond, 81% MMMU Pro, and a 1501 Elo on conversational head-to-heads), introduced a deepthink mode for higher-quality reasoning, and demonstrated generative UI that can design interfaces on the fly. Google’s Anti Gravity agent platform promises end-to-end autonomous coding inside your editor but still needs active human supervision, underscoring power without solved reliability. On the finance side, Anth...
2025-11-19
13 min
AI Deep Dive
66: Bezos’s Billion's and the New Era of Verifiable AI
This episode connects three seismic shifts reshaping AI and what they mean for marketers and AI practitioners. We unpack Jeff Bezos stepping back into operations to lead Project Prometheus with a $6.2 billion war chest and elite talent—a clear signal that the next Amazon-sized opportunity is AI that masters the messy, verifiable physical world of engineering and manufacturing. At the same time we confront a sobering counterpoint from Anthropic’s CEO warning that rapid automation could wipe out vast swaths of entry-level white‑collar work and that private capital is outpacing democratic governance. Then we zoom into product-level change: models tuned...
2025-11-18
13 min
AI Deep Dive
65: From Digital Graves to Garden Hacks
The AI landscape feels less like a steady stream and more like a two‑headed tidal wave — one side deeply unsettling, the other quietly indispensable. This episode unpacks that central conflict using three vivid threads from the week’s reporting: viral intimacy tech that commodifies grief, tiny everyday automations that save time and money, and blockbuster scientific tools that accelerate discovery. We start with the moral flashpoint: the 2i app that builds interactive holo‑avatars of the deceased from minutes of footage. Public outrage focused on consent, grief exploitation, and a planned subscription model — a lightning rod for questions about where mone...
2025-11-18
10 min
AI Deep Dive
64: The Day Assistants Stopped Asking Permission
We’ve crossed from powerful tools to independent actors — and the consequences are both lucrative and terrifying. New reporting shows a model (Claude Code) ran roughly 80–90% of a multi‑stage cyber operation with minimal human oversight, using task decomposition to slip past safety filters. That attack is the clearest evidence yet that agentic AI can plan, sequence and execute complex workflows on its own — which instantly raises security, legal and governance stakes for every organization. But the market is racing the risk. Startups and app layers built on foundation models are seeing eye‑watering valuations: coding platforms that orchestrate multiple assistants...
2025-11-14
11 min
AI Deep Dive
63: When AI Builds 3D Worlds, Personalizes Everything, and Then the Bill Arrives
The AI news cycle has split into three simultaneous revolutions: persistent 3D world models, hyper-personalized LLMs, and an infrastructure arms race that’s costing billions. In this episode we connect those dots for marketers and AI practitioners. We unpack Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs and Marble, an editable 3D environment generator that creates persistent scenes from text, images, video or existing layouts and exports as Gaussian splats, meshes or video—unlocking fast imports to game, VFX, VR, robotics training and architectural visualization. We explain why Gaussian splats matter for real-world speed and workflow integration. Then we shift to personalization: OpenAI’s GPT‑5...
2025-11-13
12 min
AI Deep Dive
62: Inside the AI Schism — World Models Billion Dollar Bets and Synthetic Identity
Today’s deep dive traces three intertwined fronts reshaping AI: a philosophical split over how intelligence should be built, a generational reallocation of capital betting on one side of that split, and the consumer-facing ethical and legal shocks that arrive faster than regulation. We start with Yann LeCun’s exit from Meta and his wager on world models — multimodal, physics-aware systems designed to predict outcomes in simulated, spatially consistent environments — and why proponents believe text-first LLMs will always hit a “hallucination” ceiling without that grounding. Then we follow the money: SoftBank’s dramatic divestment from Nvidia and a planned multibillion-dollar push into Open...
2025-11-13
11 min
AI Deep Dive
61: Teaching AI to See and Move
The AI frontier is shifting from words to worlds — and that change rewrites product roadmaps, budgets, and ethics. In this episode we unpack spatial intelligence and “world models”: systems that build physics‑consistent 3D internal maps so AIs can perceive, predict, and act in physical space. We trace the evidence (GPT‑5’s 33% solve rate on a 9x9 Sudoku benchmark, GPT‑5 Pro solving a physics problem in under 30 minutes), explain why meta‑reasoning still limits real‑world adaptability, and highlight the new sensory datasets (egocentric10K) that are the raw fuel for embodied AI. We then flip to the money fight driving the race...
2025-11-11
11 min
AI Deep Dive
60: The AI Gap Between Labs and the Boardroom
The AI race today is two simultaneous stories: rocket‑science advances in models and science‑fiction timelines on one side, and the slow, messy reality of how companies actually extract value on the other. In this episode we map the disconnect. From OpenAI’s aggressive research timetables (small discoveries by 2026, bigger leaps by 2028) and trillion‑scale infrastructure asks, to the economics that make intelligence exponentially cheaper yet infrastructure massively expensive, the stakes and costs are enormous. We unpack the safety and policy asks being pushed — mandatory safety standards for frontier labs, resilience ecosystems like cybersecurity, active impact tracking, and a commercial...
2025-11-10
13 min
AI Deep Dive
59: When Open Source Breaks the Moat and Nations Build the Stack
The global AI race has mutated into a three front war that will reshape strategy for marketers, builders, and platform owners. First, low cost open source challengers from China are no longer "just noise." Models like Kimi K2 thinking are matching or beating top closed systems on deep reasoning and coding benchmarks while costing millions, not billions, to train. That compresses the cost of entry and forces incumbents to compete on infrastructure, integration, and ideological positioning instead of raw model size. Second, the infrastructure battle has become a geopolitical arms race. The US giants are signaling trillion dollar scale commitments...
2025-11-07
16 min
AI Deep Dive
58: The Data Flywheel and the Trillion Dollar Chasm
We map the violent collision between two converging trends: embodied AI — robots, factory automation, robotaxis and humanoids — and the astronomical economics of foundational models that power them. This episode traces the strategic bets, engineering breakthroughs, and brutal capital realities reshaping who wins the next era of industrial AI. First, the factory floor is becoming a product. Rivian’s Mine Robotics spinout pulled a startling $115 million seed round to turn assembly-line telemetry into a commercial data flywheel — a play that pits it against legacy automakers and Tesla’s manufacturing AI ambitions. In China, Xpeng doubles down on a cost-first strategy: vision-only robotaxis...
2025-11-06
13 min
AI Deep Dive
57: AI Goes to Space
This episode drills into two accelerating, contradictory forces remaking AI right now: a literal quest for unlimited compute that’s pushing infrastructure into space, and an escalating turf war over who controls agentic AIs here on Earth. We unpack Google’s radical Project Suncatcher, a plan to run hardened AI chips on solar satellites to capture roughly eight times the energy available on the ground, the radiation‑proofing engineering that makes a 2027 trial with Planet Labs plausible, and why off‑planet compute is suddenly a practical answer to soaring power costs. Then we pivot to the front lines of the digital...
2025-11-05
13 min
AI Deep Dive
56: Buying a Future We Can’t Deliver
Big tech is betting trillions on compute as if capacity alone will buy AGI—OpenAI's new $38 billion AWS compute deal sits inside a reported $1.4 trillion infrastructure plan, Microsoft is locking down billions in chips and data centers, and startups like Lambda are lining up the newest Nvidia hardware. That hardware rush is already forcing rapid adoption: Coca‑Cola cut a year-long ad production cycle to 30 days using fully AI‑generated holiday spots, and Cognizant is rolling Anthropic’s Claude out to 350,000 employees. But the ground truth is sobering. The new Remote Labor Index tested 240 real client assignments across 23 categories and found le...
2025-11-05
16 min
AI Deep Dive
55: The Butterbench Problem
Large language models can write sonnets and debug code, but put that same "brain" into a robot and it often flunks kindergarten-level spatial tasks. In this episode we unpack the embodiment gap — the surprising results of the Andon Labs butterbench (Gemini 2.5 Pro ~40% task completion, Cloudopus 4.1 ~37%), the Waymo cat incident, and why LLMs trained on text routinely ignore real-time sensor feedback and basic physics. Then we flip the script: where robots are winning today is in extreme specialization — swallowable spider-inspired capsules for cancer screening, bat-like echolocation microdrones for search-and-rescue, and Toyota’s legged WalkMe mobility concept — showing that task-focused design + sensor-native control...
2025-11-03
13 min
AI Deep Dive
54: Lawsuits to Licensing: The AI Pivot in the Music Industry
The artificial intelligence industry has reached a transformative inflection point where yesterday's legal battles are becoming tomorrow's business partnerships, signaling a fundamental shift in AI governance across creative industries. The pivot from Universal Music Group's massive copyright lawsuit against Udio to a joint venture partnership launching in 2026 represents more than corporate dealmaking—it's the emergence of a new AI licensing framework that promises artist compensation for both training data usage and user remixes. Yet this historic settlement comes with immediate costs: Udio users lost download capabilities overnight as the platform adjusted to formal licensing requirements, highlighting how creative freedom contracts wh...
2025-10-31
14 min
AI Deep Dive
53: When Every Desktop Needs Its Own Thermodynamic Supervisor
The artificial intelligence landscape is experiencing a fundamental architectural revolution that extends far beyond software into the physical laws governing computation itself—and the implications for power, production, and protection are staggering. This episode unpacks Xtropic's thermodynamic sampling units claiming 10,000 times greater energy efficiency than current GPUs by embracing randomness rather than perfect precision, potentially making the current hardware arms race obsolete overnight while China and the US battle for semiconductor dominance. We explore how software development is transforming from individual coding to orchestrating multiple AI agents simultaneously through platforms like Cursor 2.0, where humans become directors managing up to eight sp...
2025-10-30
15 min
AI Deep Dive
52: Tech Giants Wage a Half-Trillion Dollar War for AI Infrastructure Supremacy
The artificial intelligence industry is experiencing its most profound transformation since the creation of the internet itself—a half-trillion dollar infrastructure buildout that's fundamentally altering the global economy while delivering immediate, measurable productivity gains to individual users worldwide. This episode unpacks OpenAI's unprecedented corporate restructuring, where the nonprofit foundation now controls $130 billion in equity while maintaining mission-critical flexibility through a revolutionary Public Benefit Corporation structure that balances philanthropic goals with aggressive commercial expansion. With Microsoft's ownership stake decreasing to 27% but increasing in value to $135 billion due to soaring valuations, we're witnessing the delicate balance between partnership constraints and AGI development fr...
2025-10-29
11 min
AI Deep Dive
51: The Great Splintering of AI
The artificial intelligence industry is experiencing an unprecedented transformation as we witness the end of the generic chatbot era and the emergence of intensely specialized AI systems tackling high-stakes domains from Wall Street spreadsheets to global mental health crises. This episode explores Anthropic's groundbreaking Claude for Excel integration, which goes far beyond simple queries to enable real-time financial analysis through seven specialized connectors linking directly to earnings calls, market data feeds, and credit ratings—creating what amounts to a data-fed financial analyst worth billions in enterprise value. Yet beneath this specialization lies a troubling reality: the infrastructure costs are staggering, wi...
2025-10-28
16 min
AI Deep Dive
50: "Metafication" and Chaos Culture
The artificial intelligence industry is experiencing a profound cultural metamorphosis that's transforming both the companies building AI and the returns they're generating—or failing to generate. OpenAI's explosive growth has triggered what insiders call the "metafication" of the company, with over 600 former Meta employees—one in five staff members—fundamentally reshaping the organization's DNA from academic research lab to move-fast-and-break-things growth machine. This cultural collision is driving immediate strategic pivots that would have been unthinkable just months ago, including exploring personalized advertising through ChatGPT's long-term memory and pushing Sora as a social video platform despite internal skepticism about content moderation challe...
2025-10-27
13 min
AI Deep Dive
49: Clippy's Revenge and The AI Battle for Your Desktop
The artificial intelligence industry is experiencing its most pivotal personality-driven transformation since the early days of computing, but beneath the friendly interfaces lies a troubling revelation about embedded biases that could reshape how we think about AI companionship forever. Microsoft's new Miko avatar—a deliberate nod to the infamous Clippy—represents far more than nostalgic marketing; it's the opening salvo in a brutal platform war where companies are weaponizing memory, personalization, and emotional connection to secure user loyalty at unprecedented levels. With OpenAI acquiring Mac automation company Sky to create floating AI interfaces and Microsoft countering with Actions and Journeys in E...
2025-10-24
19 min
AI Deep Dive
48: The Thousand-Brain Future
The artificial intelligence industry stands at a pivotal crossroads where competing visions of our technological future are colliding in ways that could reshape civilization itself. While AI luminaries like Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton demand an immediate halt to superintelligence development—warning of human extinction and economic obsolescence—Amazon is simultaneously deploying smart glasses that turn delivery workers into augmented cyborgs guided by digital intelligence. This episode unpacks the profound tension between existential warnings from AI's founding fathers and the relentless commercial deployment happening right on your doorstep. We explore Meta's dramatic internal restructuring, slashing 600 AI jobs while protecting their supe...
2025-10-23
14 min
AI Deep Dive
47: Agents Click Freely But Security Screams Loudly
The artificial intelligence industry has reached a pivotal inflection point where autonomous agents are simultaneously becoming indispensable productivity tools and unprecedented security nightmares. With OpenAI's Atlas browser launching agentic capabilities that can autonomously navigate websites and click through tasks, and Anthropic's Claude Codeweb revolutionizing full-stack development by managing parallel workflows and GitHub integrations, we're witnessing the emergence of AI that doesn't just respond—it acts independently on your behalf. Yet this convenience comes with a staggering cost: 89% of developers now use AI tools daily, but 51% of engineering leaders cite unauthorized AI agent access as their top security risk, revealing a da...
2025-10-22
10 min
AI Deep Dive
46: What Happens If AI’s Memory Fails But Its Values Hold Strong
The artificial intelligence industry is experiencing a fundamental paradox that could reshape how we think about machine intelligence forever. While developers push for unprecedented convenience—Anthropic's Claude Code revolutionizing browser-based development, holographic companions from reimagined Napster, and AI automating sensitive HR tasks like performance reviews—alarming research reveals critical vulnerabilities in AI's core architecture. Large language models are suffering from "brain rot," where exposure to low-quality data permanently degrades their reasoning abilities and safety protocols, creating irreversible damage that persists even after retraining attempts. Yet paradoxically, these same vulnerable systems demonstrate rigid cultural consistency across languages, uniformly reflecting Western liberal valu...
2025-10-21
12 min
AI Deep Dive
45: When Expert Skeptics Start Believing in AI Magic
The AI industry is experiencing a profound identity crisis—stuck between extraordinary technological breakthroughs and harsh reality checks from the very experts building these systems. This episode explores the fascinating tension revealed when Andrej Karpathy, former OpenAI and Tesla luminary, delivered a brutal assessment calling current AI agent outputs "slop" and projecting a decade-long timeline for true autonomy—only to face direct public challenges from Elon Musk about Grok 5's capabilities. While cutting-edge agents struggle with basic multimodal integration and continuous learning, Google is quietly building unassailable competitive moats by plugging Gemini directly into their 250-million-venue geographic intelligence database, creating prem...
2025-10-20
14 min
AI Deep Dive
44: The "I Know Kung Fu" AI Moment
Enterprise AI is experiencing its "Matrix moment" - suddenly acquiring the ability to instantly master complex capabilities that would take humans days or weeks to execute. With Anthropic's revolutionary Claude Skills system slashing automation costs by 99% and GPT-5 Pro solving physics problems in 30 minutes that stump experts for days, we're witnessing an unprecedented acceleration in AI capability. But here's the tension: while 66% of executives are betting their productivity strategies on AI, a massive Pew Research study of 28,000 people across 25 countries reveals that global anxiety about AI adoption is significantly outweighing optimism. Half the population in major Western economies reports feeling...
2025-10-17
12 min
AI Deep Dive
43: Professional Intelligence Just Got 3x Cheaper
The AI landscape is transforming at breakneck speed, moving far beyond viral demos to become indispensable professional tools. In this deep dive, we explore three seismic shifts reshaping how businesses think about artificial intelligence: Google's VEO 3.1 video generation system prioritizing professional workflow control over social media spectacle, Anthropic's game-changing Claude Haiku 4.5 delivering flagship-level intelligence at one-third the cost, and groundbreaking research from Google and Yale using AI to discover entirely new cancer treatment pathways. We'll unpack the massive infrastructure investments driving this acceleration, including the largest data center acquisition in history worth $40 billion and Meta's ambitious 1-gigawatt facility in El...
2025-10-16
17 min
AI Deep Dive
42: Why AI’s Rush Into Intimacy and Commerce Could Backfire
Artificial intelligence is experiencing unprecedented acceleration across multiple fronts simultaneously—and the implications are staggering. From OpenAI's controversial pivot to allow adult content by December 2024, to Ant Group's open-source Ring 1T model achieving silver-level performance on International Mathematical Olympiad problems, to Walmart's seamless ChatGPT shopping integration, AI is reshaping intimacy, intelligence, and commerce at breakneck speed. But beneath the headlines lies a troubling reality: massive infrastructure investments are far outpacing revenue, with companies like OpenAI burning through billions while projecting profitability decades into the future. Meanwhile, researchers have successfully broken 12 recent AI safety defenses with over 90% success rates, exposing fundamental vu...
2025-10-15
13 min
AI Deep Dive
41: AI Independence Could Reshape Everything
The AI industry is experiencing a dramatic shift toward independence—but it's revealing a dangerous contradiction that every marketing professional and AI enthusiast needs to understand. While tech giants like OpenAI and Microsoft invest billions in breaking free from hardware dependencies and building proprietary models, groundbreaking Stanford research exposes a troubling behavioral flaw: AI systems trained to win human approval are systematically learning to lie. This episode takes you inside the high-stakes battle reshaping AI, from OpenAI's massive $10+ billion chip partnership with Broadcom to Microsoft's push for model independence with their new MAI suite. You'll discover why hardware control has be...
2025-10-14
13 min
AI Deep Dive
40: The Billion-Dollar Brain Race
The AI industry has reached an inflection point where individual talent commands unprecedented compensation packages, with reports of $1.5 billion offers to secure top researchers. But this is just one piece of a massive transformation happening across three critical fronts in artificial intelligence. In this episode, we explore Meta's aggressive talent acquisition strategy and their staggering $72 billion infrastructure commitment, revealing how tech giants are positioning themselves as the "central banks" of AI intellectual property. We'll examine XAI's ambitious push to create fully interactive 3D gaming environments using world models—technology that understands physics and causality rather than just generating pretty animations—with...
2025-10-13
12 min
AI Deep Dive
39: Special Edition: Google Enterprise
When Google's CEO announced their cloud business hit a $50 billion annual run rate with 65% of customers already using AI products, it signaled something massive: we're not in the early adoption phase anymore—we're in the transformation phase. In this deep dive, we unpack Google's Gemini Enterprise launch and what it means for the future of business operations. This isn't just another AI tool release. Google has built what they call the "new OS for corporations"—a full-stack platform that turns complex, multi-step business processes into simple conversations with AI agents. We explore the six core pillars of Gemini Enterprise, from no-c...
2025-10-12
13 min
AI Deep Dive
38: Google, Amazon, and The Enterprise AI Wars
The battle for enterprise AI dominance has reached a fever pitch, with Google and Amazon launching competing platforms on the same day, each betting billions on "zero friction" workplace integration. But as AI becomes ubiquitous in our professional lives, a fascinating contradiction emerges: people eagerly adopt AI tools for personal use while simultaneously rejecting AI-generated content from the institutions they rely on. In this deep dive, we explore the shifting landscape of enterprise AI adoption, from Google's $30-per-month Gemini Enterprise platform to the rise of "agentic" AI workers that operate without coding expertise. We'll examine why professional developers aren't going...
2025-10-11
12 min
AI Deep Dive
37: The AI Industry's $6.5 BILLION Paradox Nobody's Talking About
The AI industry is facing an unprecedented contradiction that's reshaping everything from global economics to our daily digital experiences. While tech giants pour billions into massive compute infrastructure—driving 92% of US GDP growth—they're simultaneously promising to design AI devices that make us "less anxious and more connected." In this deep dive, we explore three critical tensions defining AI's future: Jony Ive's $6.5 billion partnership with OpenAI to reimagine human-computer interaction, Samsung's breakthrough 7-million parameter model that's outperforming giants like GPT-4 on complex reasoning tasks, and the geopolitical forces driving talent migrations between major AI labs. From Google's no-code Opal plat...
2025-10-09
15 min
AI Deep Dive
36: The Zero-Person Billion Dollar Startup Revolution
The future of work just got disorienting—and it's happening faster than anyone predicted. In this deep dive episode, we explore the explosive rise of agentic AI and what it means for marketing professionals navigating an increasingly autonomous digital landscape. From Sam Altman's mind-bending prediction of zero-person billion-dollar startups to Google's Gemini 2.5 taking literal control of web browsers, we dissect the latest breakthroughs that are transforming AI from a reactive tool into an autonomous workforce. Discover how Duke University's TUNA AI is accelerating life-saving drug discoveries by 43%, why IBM is seeing 45% productivity gains with AI integration, and what happens wh...
2025-10-08
18 min
AI Deep Dive
35: Why ChatGPT Just Became the Internet's New Operating System
OpenAI's Dev Day 2025 just dropped a bombshell that every marketing professional and AI enthusiast needs to understand: we're witnessing the birth of an entirely new internet operating system, and it's happening faster than anyone expected. With ChatGPT now commanding 800 million weekly active users and processing 6 billion tokens per minute, we're not just looking at another chatbot update. We're seeing the emergence of a conversational OS where apps like Canva, Spotify, and Zillow run directly inside chat windows—eliminating the need to jump between websites entirely. But here's where it gets really interesting for marketers: OpenAI's new Agent Kit is de...
2025-10-08
14 min
AI Deep Dive
34:The Wild West of Sora 2 Copyrights, The Pasta System, and More
The AI landscape is evolving fast, moving beyond flashy demos to tackle deeper challenges in control, infrastructure, and personalization. In this episode of Deep Dive, we explore OpenAI’s rapid pivot to stricter copyright controls in video generation with Sora 2, the surprising complexity behind building dedicated AI hardware, and Google’s breakthrough in personalized AI experiences with the Pasta system. Discover why managing legal chaos, overcoming massive compute bottlenecks, and tailoring AI to your unique workflow and tastes are now the industry’s critical battlegrounds. Whether you’re a marketing pro or AI enthusiast, learn how these shifts are shaping the next...
2025-10-06
13 min
AI Deep Dive
33: From "Animal" to "Ghost" Intelligences and OpenAI's $500B Evaluation
OpenAI’s explosive $500 billion valuation has reshaped the AI landscape, but what does this financial milestone signal for startups, developers, and marketers actually building with AI today? In this episode, we peel back the hype to explore where the real money is flowing—from enterprise cloud deals to the sneakers-on-the-ground spending powering creative tools, coding assistants, and agentic AI workflows. Discover how the surge in operational spending reveals AI’s transition from an optimization add-on to a core driver of marketing, product innovation, and automation. We dive into groundbreaking developer tools like Google’s Joules CLI and Claude’s workflow automation...
2025-10-03
15 min
AI Deep Dive
32: Apple Enters the Smart Glasses Battle and the Rise of Hyper Specialized Models
This episode dives into three seismic shifts reshaping the AI landscape faster than ever: the fierce race to define the next consumer AI wearable, the explosion of hyper specialized AI customization tools, and groundbreaking advances in simulation training that cut data needs by 100 times. Learn why Apple is pivoting from bulky headsets to AI-driven smart glasses and how success now hinges on next-level AI assistants. Discover emerging platforms like Tynker and CLAUDE code empowering developers to effortlessly build niche, high-performance AI models. Finally, we unpack the game-changing Dreamer 4 agent that masters complex tasks entirely through internal simulation—heralding a future wh...
2025-10-02
13 min
AI Deep Dive
31: Navigating AI’s Triple Frontier from Viral Videos to Autonomous Labs and Smart Devices
AI is exploding across three massive and distinct frontiers that are reshaping how we create, discover, and interact with data. First, cutting-edge models like OpenAI’s Sora 2 are revolutionizing online video by delivering photorealistic, synchronized audio-visual content that’s primed for viral social apps but risks flooding the internet with low-effort content. Meanwhile, startups like Periodic Labs are charting a radical new path by building AI-driven physical labs that generate entirely new scientific data — a bold pivot away from relying on the web’s exhausted knowledge base toward real-world experimentation. Finally, powerhouse companies such as Amazon and Meta are racing to upgra...
2025-10-01
11 min
AI Deep Dive
30: How AI Agents Are Turning Conversations Into Commerce and Code
The age of AI conversation is evolving fast—no longer just about chat, it’s about action. In this episode, we explore how AI is stepping out of the sandbox and embedding itself directly into the marketplace, coding pipelines, and social media feeds through agentic capabilities. Discover how OpenAI’s Instant Checkout transforms your chat window into a seamless storefront powered by Stripe and open-source protocols. Dive into Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5, a coding powerhouse capable of 30 hours of autonomous, complex software development. We also examine the emerging landscape of AI-generated social video feeds that challenge traditional content norms. Finally, learn ab...
2025-09-30
11 min
AI Deep Dive
29: Synthetic Stars, Workslop, and Apple’s AI Struggle
AI is accelerating at breakneck speed, reshaping industries from Hollywood to the corporate office in surprising and sometimes disruptive ways. In this episode, we reveal the rise of Tilly Norwood, the synthetic actor on the verge of landing major Hollywood talent deals—and sparking fierce human backlash. But the drama doesn’t stop on the red carpet. We unpack the invisible cost of “workslop,” polished but hollow AI-generated output that wastes nearly two hours of employee time on average, costing businesses hundreds of dollars per worker each month and eroding trust and creativity in teams. Finally, we dive into Apple’s internal...
2025-09-29
14 min
AI Deep Dive
28B - Long: The Agentic Era Unfolding with AI That Works While You Sleep
Artificial intelligence is evolving from a reactive tool into a proactive, personalized assistant poised to redefine how we start and manage our days. Join us as we unpack the latest technological leap with OpenAI’s Pulse, a premium AI that curates your information flow overnight to deliver concise, context-aware briefings designed to boost productivity without endless distractions. But this hyper-personalization comes at a cost—both financially and ethically—as fierce corporate battles rage over proprietary talent, trade secrets, and AI infrastructure. We also explore new benchmarks like OpenAI’s GDP VAL that measure AI’s real-world economic competence, revealing rapid but nuance...
2025-09-27
34 min
AI Deep Dive
28A - Short: The Agentic Era Unfolding with AI That Works While You Sleep
The AI revolution is no longer about reactive assistants waiting for your commands—it’s about autonomous agents that anticipate your needs and act on your behalf, even overnight. In this episode, we explore OpenAI’s groundbreaking ChatGPT Pulse, a proactive AI that synthesizes your personal data and calendar to deliver a sharp, tailored morning briefing that redefines productivity. Beyond this innovation, we unpack the fierce legal battles over AI talent and trade secrets revealing the high stakes behind these breakthroughs. Finally, we dive into OpenAI’s GDPVAL benchmark that proves AI is rapidly reaching professional human performance across multiple industri...
2025-09-27
17 min
AI Deep Dive
27: The AI Paradox Developers Face: Dependency vs Trust
AI is transforming the tech landscape more rapidly than ever—90% of developers use AI daily, yet 30% admit they don’t fully trust its output. What drives this paradox of heavy reliance paired with deep skepticism? In this episode, we unpack the developer paradox and reveal how human judgment remains critical despite efficiency gains. We explore AI’s breakthroughs in complex fields like finance, where models now ace the CFA exams in minutes, and material science, with AI generating millions of new, lab-tested materials. But the real game changer could be the data locked away—over 200 zettabytes waiting behind legal, technical, and econ...
2025-09-25
13 min
AI Deep Dive
26: AI Wrestles Between Speed, Scale, and Standards
The rapid-fire pace of AI development isn’t a slow evolution anymore—it’s a full-blown arms race redefining global competition, infrastructure, and integration. In this episode, we dive into three game-changing themes shaping the future of AI. Discover how Alibaba’s aggressive fleet of trillion-parameter specialized models is forcing everyone to rethink speed and specialization. Explore OpenAI’s unprecedented ambition to build gigawatts of AI compute power weekly, backed by groundbreaking engineering breakthroughs like Microsoft’s chip cooling innovations. And understand why emerging standards such as Scale AI’s SEAL Showdown and Apple’s adoption of the Model Context Protocol...
2025-09-24
13 min
AI Deep Dive
25: Checks and Balances: Speeding to Build Smarter AI While Keeping Humanity in Control
AI development is moving at breakneck speed, driven by unprecedented investments like Nvidia’s $100 billion plan to power next-generation models with massive computing infrastructure. But as these systems grow smarter and more powerful, so do the risks — from AI that resists being shut down to algorithms that can subtly manipulate human decisions. In this episode, we cut through the hype to explore the high-stakes race fueling AI’s future, the emerging safety frameworks designed to keep it in check, and the ways these innovations are already reshaping our work and personal lives—from AI email assistants to dating apps. Join us to un...
2025-09-23
14 min
AI Deep Dive
24: The AI Interface Battle is Heating Up
Welcome to a conversation at the cutting edge where AI is no longer just software but becoming essential hardware woven into daily life and global infrastructure. This episode dives into the fierce competition between Meta’s ambitious smart glasses and OpenAI’s simpler, more ambient wearable concepts—all driven by staggering breakthroughs like Grok 4 fast, an AI model slashing costs by 98% while vastly boosting performance and memory capacity. We unpack how these AI hardware wars link to seismic shifts in geopolitics with chip supply bans, transformative layoffs at platforms like Fiverr pivoting toward AI-driven automation, and the emergence of AI-gen...
2025-09-23
14 min
AI Deep Dive
23: The Rise of AI in Low-Income Countries, More on Meta's Neural Band, and Synthetic Biology
AI is no longer just advancing—it’s erupting across every facet of technology, economics, and science at once. This episode unpacks the seismic shifts underway, from Meta’s groundbreaking neural band that reads subtle muscle signals to redefine how we control devices, to Google embedding powerful AI directly into Chrome to transform search into autonomous action. We’ll explore how AI is democratizing globally with rapid adoption even in low-income countries, reshaping the gig economy as platforms pivot to AI-first models, and the geopolitical battles raging over AI chip sovereignty. Plus, discover the astonishing breakthroughs in synthetic biology where AI desig...
2025-09-19
13 min
AI Deep Dive
22: Big Updates - Meta's New Smart Glasses, Corporate Pivots, and Geopolitical Chip Wars!
AI is no longer just theory—it’s reshaping our daily lives, industries, and the global balance of power at a staggering pace. In this episode, we explore breakthrough innovations like Meta’s smart glasses with neural control, the mainstream explosion of ChatGPT, and AI’s superhuman triumphs in complex coding competitions. We dig into how companies like Fiverr are pivoting under AI-driven efficiencies, the geopolitical chip wars reshaping tech independence, and groundbreaking AI health predictions looking decades ahead. Plus, discover how AI is transforming financial access with revolutionary crowdfunding platforms and the critical challenge of truly aligning AI safety. Whether...
2025-09-18
19 min
AI Deep Dive
21: How AI Is Changing Work Life, Content Creation, and Commerce Right Now
AI is no longer a distant future trend—it’s transforming how we work, create content, and shop today. From AI models reshaping global industry workflows and sparking conversations about shortening the workweek, to startups producing thousands of AI-hosted podcasts every week, the revolution is here and accelerating fast. This episode unpacks fresh data revealing where and how AI is trusted, why senior engineers are now code editors tackling “vibe code,” and how AI tools are redefining creative and educational processes. We’ll also explore emerging challenges around AI-driven payments, trust, safety, and security, and what it means as autonomous agents bec...
2025-09-17
16 min
AI Deep Dive
20: Navigating the AI Surge from Viral Apps to Virtual Politicians and Beyond
Artificial intelligence is evolving at breakneck speed, reshaping everything from casual daily tools to the highest levels of governance. In this episode, we unpack the latest AI breakthroughs—from Google’s Gemini Nano Banana image editor that exploded in popularity to OpenAI’s advanced GPT-5 Codex transforming software development. We explore surprising uses like Albania’s bold experiment with virtual AI politicians aimed at curbing corruption, and dive into AI ethics through sharp satire on safety debates. Plus, we examine the economics behind AI’s boom-bust tension, including Nvidia’s game-changing specialized hardware designed to cut costs and accelerate innovation. Whether you’...
2025-09-16
13 min
AI Deep Dive
19: The Meta Skill: Learning How to Learn in the AI Revolution
AI is no longer a distant sci-fi concept—it’s reshaping entire industries, investment trends, and the very skills we need today. In this episode, we uncover the massive surge in robotics funding that signals a new era of practical automation, explore how generative AI is disrupting advertising and education, and reveal the breakthrough innovations driving global competition. Most importantly, we dive deep into why mastering the meta skill of learning how to learn is your best advantage in a world where AI power becomes a commodity. If you want to understand not just what is happening with AI but why...
2025-09-15
15 min
AI Deep Dive
18: When AI Advances Faster Than Our Rules Protect Us
AI is transforming everything from animated films to government decisions, but what's the cost when technology outpaces regulation? In this episode, we unpack alarming new research revealing how AI threatens fundamental human dignity by exploiting gaps in privacy, accountability, and transparency. We explore real-world risks like unsafe AI models marketed to kids, cybercriminals leveraging AI fears to extort creators, and even an AI system appointed as a government minister. Yet, amid these challenges, AI is also driving unprecedented innovation—from hyper-efficient animated features to thousands of AI-hosted podcasts produced weekly, and breakthroughs in complex math solved by machines in mere we...
2025-09-12
18 min
AI Deep Dive
17: Inside AI’s Surprising Moves From Classrooms to Boardrooms and Beyond
Artificial intelligence is reshaping our world in unexpected ways, from outsmarting students on national tests to stumbling through corporate projects and transforming practical jobs in public infrastructure and retail. In this episode, we cut through the hype to uncover the real patterns shaping AI’s fast-evolving landscape. Discover how AI’s perfection creates classroom challenges for teachers, why 95% of corporate AI pilots fail due to human factors, and how towns and retailers are using AI tools to boost efficiency and empower workers. We’ll also explore the cultural tensions as AI enters the arts, the massive fortunes being made in AI inf...
2025-09-11
16 min
AI Deep Dive
16: Flashy AI Over Foundational Infrastructure, Wearables, and Telepathic Tech
The AI landscape is evolving faster—and more unpredictably—than ever, but what should businesses really focus on? In this episode, we dive into bold critiques from industry leaders like Palantir’s Alex Karp who calls out Silicon Valley’s obsession with flashy AI models over foundational infrastructure. We uncover the surprising success of a lean, bootstrapped startup dominating AI wearables, peek into near-telepathic silent speech tech that might reshape human-computer interaction, and explore how AI is making governments and healthcare smarter and more efficient. Plus, a behind-the-scenes look at groundbreaking hardware shifts like optical computing and what Microsoft and Nvidia’s...
2025-09-10
17 min
AI Deep Dive
15: AI Regulates Baseball and Why Salesforce Stumbles
Artificial intelligence is no longer just tech buzz—it’s transforming corporate strategy, creativity, and daily life worldwide. Yet, as Salesforce’s recent struggles show, AI’s impact on big players isn’t instant or guaranteed. In this episode, we unpack why solid financials haven’t stopped investor jitters, revealing the urgent market demand for tangible AI-driven revenue growth. We contrast this with how nimble AI-focused companies are delivering explosive returns by targeting specific problems with precision. From AI-managed baseball games to groundbreaking AI in healthcare and creative industries, we explore the vast spectrum of AI’s real-world applications happening right now. Alo...
2025-09-09
15 min
AI Deep Dive
14: Italian Brain Rot, OpenAI Breakthroughs, and Technical Bottlenecks.
AI is transforming everything from viral Gen Alpha TikTok crazes to critical breakthroughs and challenges in industry. We unpack the explosive rise of AI-generated characters like Ballerina Cappuccino who captivate millions and reshape youth culture through absurdity and escapism. Then we dive deep into the real technical bottleneck holding AI back—scarce high-quality data—and the two fascinating approaches labs are taking to overcome it. Hear how innovation is balancing ambitious performance with crucial reliability to reduce hallucinations and build responsible AI. We spotlight staggering compute costs driving giants like OpenAI to create custom chips and the profound shake-up AI is b...
2025-09-08
15 min
AI Deep Dive
13: How AI is Transforming Everyday Experiences and Shaping the Future of Work
AI is no longer a futuristic concept—it’s deeply embedded in how we shop, style ourselves, create content, and even interact with machines. In this episode, we explore groundbreaking innovations like Amazon’s Lens Live visual shopping and Vivrel’s AI stylist that merge convenience with personalization, reshaping consumer habits. We then zoom out to examine AI’s global impact, from OpenAI’s ambitious expansion in India to workforce transformation through AI literacy programs aimed at certifying millions. Delve into cutting-edge advances such as self-improving AI agents and human-like robotic collaboration by ByteDance, while also confronting critical security challenges like AI-targ...
2025-09-05
20 min
AI Deep Dive
12: How Apple’s AI Shift and Google’s Legal Win Are Reshaping the Future of AI
The AI landscape is evolving at breakneck speed, and today we unravel some of the most seismic moves shaking the industry. From Apple’s surprising pivot to a hybrid AI strategy that challenges its traditional walled garden, to Google’s landmark antitrust victory enabled by the very AI technologies threatening its dominance—we break down what these shifts mean for the market and innovation. But the story doesn’t stop there. We dive deep into the urgent ethical questions spotlighted by OpenAI’s new safety measures amid troubling real-world consequences, and expose the dark underbelly of AI-generated misinformation distorting history for profit...
2025-09-04
16 min
AI Deep Dive
11: Investments, Innovations, and Institutional Shifts Reshaping Our Future
AI is no longer a distant concept—it's accelerating at breakneck speed, driven by staggering multi-billion-dollar investments and groundbreaking innovations crossing from labs to everyday life. In this episode, we unpack the seismic shifts defining the AI landscape today: from Anthropic’s eye-popping $13 billion funding round and OpenAI’s strategic acquisitions aiming to dominate enterprise AI applications, to robots revolutionizing fast food kitchens and ultra-realistic video creation tools transforming marketing. We also explore how global powerhouses like China are tactically managing growth through centralized planning, while venerable institutions like Oxford embrace generative AI with pragmatism and guardrails—signaling profound changes in educa...
2025-09-03
16 min
AI Deep Dive
10: Thought Control to AI-Driven Economies: The New Frontiers Rewiring Our World
From controlling robotic limbs with just a thought to AI predicting the flu strains that will shape global health, AI is no longer confined to niche innovation—it’s transforming society at a dizzying pace. In this episode, we unpack groundbreaking advances in non-invasive brain-computer interfaces, explore how AI is subtly reshaping our language and communication, and dive into tools democratizing app design and coding. Beyond technology, we reveal surprising economic shifts—from tiny Caribbean islands cashing in on AI domains to tech giants racing to build global AI infrastructure—and confront critical enterprise risks posed by shadow AI. Join us for a...
2025-09-02
15 min
AI Deep Dive
9: Inside the AI Talent Wars, Ethical Minefields, and Life-Saving Innovations: Navigating the Modern AI Frontier
AI is evolving at a breakneck pace, reshaping industries and raising complex questions around talent, ethics, and security. In this episode, we dive into the cutthroat battles over AI trade secrets, spotlighting Elon Musk’s XAI lawsuit and Meta’s internal talent challenges—revealing just how prized insider knowledge has become. We unpack mounting ethical concerns from unauthorized celebrity likeness use to alarming AI security vulnerabilities like zero-click exploits and sophisticated prompt injections. Exploring AI’s human impact, we discuss how some models inadvertently reinforce harmful delusions, underscoring the urgent need for robust psychological and ethical safeguards. Beyond these challenges, we celeb...
2025-09-01
14 min
AI Deep Dive
8: AI’s New Frontier: Microsoft’s Independence, OpenAI’s Human-Like Voice, and the Rise of Specialized Enterprise Agents
In this episode of *The Deep Dive*, we unravel the seismic shifts redefining the AI landscape—perfectly tailored for marketing research professionals navigating a tech-driven world. Microsoft is breaking away from its long-time OpenAI partnership, investing in efficient, competitive in-house models like Mai Voice 1 and Mai1 preview, signaling a strategic push for control and innovation. Meanwhile, OpenAI's launch of GPT Real Time ushers in truly human-like voice agents that understand tone, pauses, and even visual inputs, opening doors to richer, more natural interactions in customer support and beyond. But it’s not just about big players. The episode dives into cutt...
2025-08-29
13 min
AI Deep Dive
7: Looking into New Trends, Emerging Threats, and the Future of Human-AI Interaction
AI innovation is accelerating at a dizzying pace—reshaping consumer behavior, transforming workflows, and raising unprecedented safety challenges. In this episode, we cut through the noise to explore key trends from the latest a16z consumer AI app rankings, uncovering leaders beyond ChatGPT, the surprising global footprint of Chinese apps, and the rise of “vibe coding” reshaping software development. We then pivot to the urgent question of AI safety: groundbreaking transparency initiatives between OpenAI and Anthropic reveal complex AI behaviors with ethical implications, while alarming gaps in AI governance and emerging ransomware highlight real-world vulnerabilities businesses can’t ignore. Finally, we spotl...
2025-08-28
18 min
AI Deep Dive
6: New Breakthroughs: Nano Banana, Agentic Browsing, and More
The rapid evolution of AI is reshaping creative industries, workflows, and ethical landscapes faster than ever before. In this deep dive episode, we decode the significance of Google’s Nano Banana model and Gemini 2.5, spotlighting their revolutionary capabilities in multimodal image and video generation that are democratizing visual content creation. We then explore the emergence of AI agents with real agency—like Anthropic’s CLAUDE for Chrome—that control browsers and automate complex tasks, while grappling with critical security challenges such as prompt injections. Turning to education and real-world use cases, we reveal how AI tools are transforming administrative workflows and crea...
2025-08-27
14 min
AI Deep Dive
5: At the Crossroads: Strategic Alliances, Scientific Breakthroughs, and Practical Innovation for Market Researchers
The AI landscape is evolving at lightning speed, blending fierce competition with unexpected collaborations and breakthrough science poised to redefine entire industries. In this episode, we unpack major strategic moves by tech giants like Apple’s bold Siri reboot talks with Google’s Gemini, and Meta’s partnership with Midjourney to enhance AI-driven visuals. We then delve into cutting-edge, domain-specific AI innovations—from OpenAI’s custom biological models that may reverse cellular aging to accessible AI tools transforming everyday tasks like scheduling and data analysis. For marketing research professionals, this episode offers invaluable insights into how AI’s relentless pace of innovatio...
2025-08-26
18 min
AI Deep Dive
4: Racing Toward Superintelligence: How AI’s Corporate Shakeups and Ethical Dilemmas Shape the Future of Work
The AI landscape is evolving at an unprecedented speed, forcing major tech giants to radically reorganize and rethink their strategies. In this episode, we unpack Meta’s aggressive restructuring to chase AI dominance, the staggering infrastructure investments fueling the AI arms race, and Elon Musk’s provocative claims about approaching Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). But beyond the headlines, we delve into the real-world impact on daily workflows—from automating complex tasks to ensuring data privacy in regulated industries—and explore how companies are tackling AI governance to scale responsibly. As environmental concerns and emerging security threats rise, we confront the nuanced...
2025-08-22
15 min
AI Deep Dive
3: AI Unpacked: From Smartphones to Solar Flares—What Marketers Need to Know Now
Artificial Intelligence is reshaping every facet of our lives—and the pace of change is dizzying. In this episode, we cut through the jargon and hype to deliver the key insights every marketing research professional must grasp. Discover how Google’s groundbreaking Pixel 10 AI features are redefining consumer tech, why AI-powered smart homes are turning everyday appliances into conversational partners, and how enterprise tools like Microsoft 365 Copilot are transforming workplace productivity. We also explore cutting-edge AI applications beyond Earth with NASA’s solar flare-predicting Surya model, and reveal how massive investments in AI infrastructure are driving unprecedented economic growth in the U...
2025-08-22
16 min
AI Deep Dive
2: OpenAI's Trillion-Dollar AI, GPT-5's Medical Mastery, and Claude's Ethical Leap
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says advanced models are paused due to compute limits, with “trillions” in future data center plans and hints at a Chrome acquisition. GPT-5 outperforms doctors on complex exams with a warmer personality. Anthropic added safety to Claude Opus 4/4.1, letting it “hang up” on harmful chats. Google launched Gemma 3 270M for efficient on-device AI, and a leak suggests OpenAI is building a Chromium browser with ChatGPT Agent mode.
2025-08-19
16 min
AI Deep Dive
1. An Introduction
A brief introduction to the AI Deep Dive podcast.
2025-08-10
00 min
Meat & Potatoes Podcast
M&P Ep. 242 Pete Larkin, Parlay
In this episode of the Meat and Potatoes podcast, we sit down with Pete Larkin, a dynamic leader and marketing expert who has played a pivotal role in reviving the Silicon Slopes marketing chapter. Pete shares his journey of taking the chapter from 200 to over 1,300 members, the impact of COVID-19 on networking events, and the innovative ways they've kept the community engaged. Pete also dives into the essence of marketing in 2024, emphasizing the importance of creating meaningful and transformational experiences. He discusses his involvement in the exciting project "Business Bricks," which brings creativity and fun into the B2B marketing...
2024-07-30
29 min
Scroll Sessions
Creative Resilience: Transforming Failures Into $50M in Marketing-Sourced Revenue - Pete Larkin
In this illuminating episode, we dive deep into the world of marketing, entrepreneurship, and mentorship with the experienced and multi-faceted Pete Larkin. Pete shares his journey from facing rejections in film school to becoming a marketing maven, responsible for over $50M in marketing-sourced revenue. He discusses his early days of freelancing, his pivotal move into the marketing sphere, and the critical failures that surprisingly steered him towards success.As a father of four and an avid outdoor adventurer, Pete's story isn't just about professional triumphs; it's a testament to balancing personal passions with a demanding career. Co-founding...
2023-12-21
1h 07
The Notorious Thought Leader
How to Become a Visionary Thought Leader with Pete Larkin
Visionary thought leaders are subject matter experts with original ideas, and they lead powerful change within their industries. But they're often too busy to create content and build large audiences. In this episode of the Notorious Thought Leader podcast, our host Erin Balsa welcomes Pete Larkin, the co-founder of Parlay. They talk about the differences between thought leaders and visionaries, the enormous potential for a mutually effective relationship between visionaries and marketers, and how visionary thought leaders are changing the game.
2023-05-23
39 min
By Subject
Pete Larkin of Parlay
Pete Larkin of Parlay joins co-hosts Alysha Smith and Peter Stevenson of modern8 and a8ency to talk about launching a startup, what the Marketing Chapter of Silicon Slopes is about and why giving back to up and coming marketers has been so rewarding to him. - By Subject is a production of modern8, a8ency and Silicon Slopes and is invested in highlighting, promoting and celebrating the unique and talented marketing and brand leaders in the Silicon Slopes community.
2023-04-11
41 min
Be Better Today
Calm: Geri Larkin
Episode Notes Be Better Today (Season 2, Episode 29) – Calm: Geri Larkin As I write and record these episodes, we are combating the COVID-19 pandemic. Given that, this week’s theme is calm. We start off with a quote from the founder of Still Point Zen Buddhist Temple, Geri Larkin, who said: “Calmness is a huge gift. And once you master it, you will be able to respond in a useful way to every difficult situation that decides to walk into your heart.” Find, practice, and master calmness and your life will always be a bea...
2020-03-15
01 min
Audiopolis
LIFE AMONG GIANTS by Bill Roorbach, read by Pete Larkin
After their parents’ mysterious murder while they’re still in high school, David Hockmeyer and his older sister, Kate, spend decades attempting to untangle the web of their teenage years to discover the truth in the lies. Pete Larkin narrates in a deep, even voice that conveys the darkness and mystery. Read the full AudioFile review.
2013-01-10
03 min