Eye On A.I.
by Craig S. Smith
Latest episode
Why AI Goes Rogue: Turing Award Winner Explains Reward Failure |…
Why AI Goes Rogue: Turing Award Winner Explains Reward Failure |…
About this podcast
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.
Episodes
The newest 50 of 390 episodes
- Why AI Goes Rogue: Turing Award Winner Explains Reward Failure | Andrew Barto · 44 min · Episode 391Andrew Barto on Rewards Gone Rogue Andrew Barto helped found reinforcement learning. He and Richard Sutton wrote the field's standard textbook, and they shared the Turing Award…
- AI Agents Will Take 50% of Your Traffic — Is Your Data Ready? | Jeff Lunsford, CEO of Tealium · 56 min · Episode 39020% of enterprise website traffic is already coming from AI agents rather than humans, and that traffic converts at 38% more revenue per session than human visits. Within a year…
- How Zip's AI Superagents Automate Procurement End-to-End | Rujul Zaparde · 51 min · Episode 389Every business in the world has to procure things, and for most of them, that process is slow, manual, and full of money left on the table. Rujul Zaparde, co-founder of Zip…
- Is This the Cheapest Way to Use AI in 2026? (65+ Models Tested) | Iskander Malikov, Trioma · 55 min · Episode 388What if you didn't have to choose between ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, and instead, the platform chose for you? That's the core idea behind Trioma, a vertically integrated AI…
- Chat GPT's Creator Explains The Shocking Truth About How AI Understands the World | Ilya Sutskever · 44 min · Episode 387Craig Smith sits down with Ilya Sutskever - Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at Safe Superintelligence Inc. & former chief scientist at OpenAI and one of the primary minds behind…
- The Coordination Tax: Why AI Is Burning Out Your Best People | Dan O'Connell, Front · 51 min · Episode 386Everyone assumes AI in customer operations means fewer people and lower costs. The data from 700 customer operations leaders is more complicated, and more honest. Dan O'Connell…
- Ukraine's Secret Weapon: The Points System Winning the Drone War | Andrii Hrytseniuk · 34 min · Episode 385Ukraine tracks every confirmed drone kill with video evidence, deduplicates the data to prevent double-counting, converts verified strikes into e-points, and delivers newly…
- Why Current AI Cannot Be Conscious | Dr. Christof Koch · 1 h 1 min · Episode 384One in four patients currently being considered for life support withdrawal may actually be fully conscious, they just can't signal it. That single finding, from a landmark New…
- The Technology for Fully Autonomous Attack Is Already Here | Alex Liannyi, NORDA Dynamics · 19 min · Episode 383The AI systems guiding Ukrainian combat drones aren't running on expensive Nvidia chips. They're running on a Raspberry Pi Zero - a $15 hobby computer - and that single detail…
- Inside Ukraine's Drone War: Maj. "Phoenix" of Lasar's Group · 1 h 5 min · Episode 382The first armed drone Ukraine ever fielded wasn't built in a factory or procured from a defense contractor. It was built in four months by a network engineer using a Starlink…
- The Hidden Algorithm That Decides Which Software AI Will Recommend | Tim Sanders, G2 · 59 min · Episode 381Most companies investing in AI visibility are optimizing for the wrong thing. Being cited by an AI response and being recommended by an AI response are completely different…
- The Reason 30 Years of Cybersecurity Has Failed - and What Actually Fixes It | Trent Telford, Qanapi · 55 min · Episode 380Every major data breach in the last 30 years shares the same root cause: the data inside the wall was never protected, only the wall. And AI frontier models are now making that…
- 86% of What Coding Agents Do Is Just Reading — Not Solving | Alexander Whedon of Subquadratic · 55 min · Episode 379Every AI model in production today has the same hidden tax: doubling the context window quadruples the compute. That's what quadratic compute complexity means in practice, and…
- From 10 Drones a Month to Nearly 100,000 — Inside Ukraine's Largest Drone Manufacturer | Marko Kushnir, General Cherry · 38 min · Episode 378In 2023, General Cherry started making 10 drones a month. Today they're approaching 100,000. Marko Kushnir, communications director of one of Ukraine's top-five drone…
- In 5 to 10 Years, Using Weapons Without AI Will Be Considered Unethical | Yaroslav Azhnyuk, The Fourth Law · 53 min · Episode 377A Ukrainian entrepreneur who spent 14 years building cameras for pets pivoted to building cameras that down Shaheds, and is now building the autonomy software that could define…
- Inside Ukraine's Azov Drone R&D: The Engineer Building AI Weapons 18 km From the Front Line | Alexander Palamarchuk · 42 min · Episode 376The most consequential arms race in the world right now isn't nuclear, it's software. Craig Smith speaks with Alexander Palamarchuk, an engineer in the R&D department of…
- 95% of AI Agent Projects Fail to Reach Production. Here's Why | Manoj Saxena, TrustWise · 1 h 1 min · Episode 375It takes a few hours to build an AI agent. It takes six to seven months to get it into production. Manoj Saxena - the executive who commercialized IBM Watson - built TrustWise…
- From Zero to 150 Robots in Just 20 Months | Mike LeBlanc, Foundation Future Industries · 1 h 6 min · Episode 374Most humanoid robot companies are still running curated demos in replica environments. Foundation Future Industries is running 150 robots on real automotive production lines in…
- Why People Are Paying 10x More for AI - and What That Means for the Chip Market | Sid Sheth, d-Matrix · 51 min · Episode 373The AI chip market looks monolithic from the outside - NVIDIA dominates, and everyone else is fighting for scraps. But d-Matrix's CEO Sid Sheth argues that the market is quietly…
- American Companies Have 36 Months to Go AI-Native or Get Left Behind | Drew Cukor, TWG AI · 59 min · Episode 372The same tools that slowed the U.S. military down in Afghanistan (PowerPoint, Excel, email, and Word) are now slowing American businesses down in the AI race. Drew Cukor spent 30…
- In 5 Years, 90% of What You Use AI For Will Run on Your Smartphone | Paolo Ardoino, Tether · 59 min · Episode 371Hundreds of billions of dollars are flowing into AI data centers right now, and Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether - the company behind the world's most widely used stablecoin with 573…
- AI Agents Fixing Your IT Before You Even Know Something Broke | Erhan Giral & Ryan Manning, BMC Helix · 59 min · Episode 370Most enterprise IT teams spend the majority of their time fighting the same fires repeatedly. BMC Helix is building the AI system that handles those fires automatically…
- Real AI Transformation Costs HALF of Everyone's Salary for 2 Years | Chris Blackburn, Liatrio · 1 h 5 min · Episode 369Most companies think they're transforming with AI. They're not, and the gap between what they believe and what's actually happening on the ground is costing them far more than…
- "According to NASA's Definition of Life, I'm Not Alive" - Why Nobody Can Define Life | Dr. Kate Adamala · 46 min · Episode 368Nobody has ever built a cell from scratch - assembled entirely from purified molecules on a shelf - that can feed itself, grow, and split into daughter cells through its own…
- Video Is About to Stop Being One-Way (and That Changes Everything) | Victor Riparbelli, Synthesia · 40 min · Episode 367Every company is creating content that nobody reads, nobody watches, and nobody remembers, and the CEO of the AI platform that 90% of Fortune 100 companies use to fix that just…
- 6 in 10 Enterprises Can't Find the Root Cause When Their AI Workloads Fail | Paul Appleby, Virtana · 45 min · Episode 366Companies are spending billions building AI factories, but most of them can't tell you why their AI workloads are failing, whether their GPUs are actually being used, or what…
- Inside the Enterprise Browser Rebuilding Security for the AI Era | Bradon Rogers, Island · 56 min · Episode 365AI is moving faster than enterprise security systems were designed to handle. In this episode of Eye on A.I., Craig Smith speaks with Bradon Rogers, Chief Customer Officer at…
- What Industrial AI Actually Looks Like | Kriti Sharma, Nexus Black · 23 min · Episode 364Most AI is built for people sitting at desks. Kriti Sharma builds it for the people who work in refineries, aircraft hangars, and utility networks responding to wildfires at 4…
- The Biggest AI Security Problem Isn't the Model. It's This. | Devvret Rishi · 48 min · Episode 363What is an AI agent, really? Strip away the hype, and it's a model with access - to tools, APIs, databases, email, anything that lets it take real action instead of just…
- Big Pharma Fails 50% of the Time in Phase Three. AI Can Fix That | Vin Singh, BullFrog AI · 50 min · Episode 362It costs up to $2 billion and fifteen years to develop a drug, and big pharma still fails half the time at the final stage. BullFrog AI founder, Chairman, and CEO Vin Singh joins…
- AI Agents Are Failing and It's Almost Never the Model's Fault | Alberto Pan, Denodo · 42 min · Episode 361After two years of AI pilots, enterprises are finally diagnosing what went wrong, and the answer keeps coming back to data. Alberto Pan, CTO of Denodo, joins Craig Smith to walk…
- How Modern Science Got Consciousness Wrong From the Start | Philip Goff · 1 h 1 min · Episode 360What if consciousness isn't a byproduct of complex brains, but a fundamental feature of reality itself, present, in some rudimentary form, all the way down to electrons and…
- AI Is Reading 15 Million X-Rays a Year With No Human in the Loop | Prashant Warier, Qure.ai · 42 min · Episode 359Eighty percent of lung cancer cases are diagnosed too late, not because the signals aren't there, but because nobody was looking at the right moment. Prashant Warier, co-founder…
- Only 12% of Companies Generate Value From AI. Here's What They're Doing | Sanjeev Vohra, Genpact · 59 min · Episode 358Genpact surveyed 500 senior executives to understand why companies are investing in AI but not seeing the value, and what they found was both clarifying and uncomfortable…
- India Is Becoming an Architect of the Global AI Order | Ivana Bartoletti of Wipro · 56 min · Episode 357The Global AI Summit just happened in New Delhi, and the message from India was clear: this country is no longer just writing code for the rest of the world. It's becoming an…
- The New BRAIN Of the Enterprise | Ryan Gavin · 53 min · Episode 356One company now has more AI agents deployed in its organization than it has human employees. Slack's CMO Ryan Gavin dropped that stat into a conversation with Craig Smith, and…
- AI Is Already Resolving 90% of Customer Service Tickets - and It's Getting Smarter | Shashi Upadhyay, Zendesk · 57 min · Episode 355Zendesk went private two weeks before ChatGPT launched, and the moment it came out, it was obvious that customer service would never be the same again. Shashi Upadhyay, head of…
- Every Enterprise Is About to Have a 100,000 Agent Problem | Oren Michaels of Barndoor AI · 60 min · Episode 354AI agents can now connect to every tool your employees use. The problem is that connecting them and trusting them are two completely different things, and most enterprises have…
- More Customers Chose the AI Agent Than Anyone Expected | Tom Chen, Aircall · 57 min · Episode 353Every time you hit a phone tree or a chatbot with canned answers, you're experiencing the gap between what AI can already do and what most companies are still delivering. Craig…
- Why the Future of AI Isn't Just Bigger Models. It's Models That Evolve | Risto Miikkulainen of Cognizant · 1 h 4 min · Episode 352Most AI systems follow a gradient, a mathematical slope that tells them exactly how to improve, step by step, toward a known goal. Neuroevolution doesn't follow any gradient…
- How AI Is Reinventing Elder Care | Chia-Lin Simmons of LogicMark · 53 min · Episode 351One in four people over 65 will experience a fall, and for most of them, the technology designed to help is a device that hasn't meaningfully changed since the 1980s. Chia-Lin…
- The App of the Future Is Voice — Not a Screen. Mitel's CTO Luiz Domingos Explains Why. · 55 min · Episode 350Luiz Domingos has spent 25 years watching enterprise communications evolve, from IP telephony to cloud to AI, and his assessment of where things stand now is unusually concrete…
- Is ChatGPT Conscious? A Pioneer of AI Explains | Dr. Terry Sejnowski · 57 min · Episode 349A fly with 100,000 neurons can fly, find food, and reproduce. A $100 million supercomputer cannot. Dr. Terry Sejnowski used that observation to silence a room full of MIT AI…
- Your Child's Data Profile Starts Before They're Born | Eamonn Maguire of Proton · 56 min · Episode 348Your child's data profile doesn't start when they get their first phone. It starts before they're born, the moment a parent emails a gynecologist or visits a fertility clinic…
- Training AI Models Without a Billion-Dollar Data Center | Steffen Cruz of Macrocosmos · 47 min · Episode 347Training a frontier AI model today requires hundreds of thousands of GPUs, months of compute time, and a budget that only a handful of companies on earth can afford. Steffen…
- The Single Biggest Barrier to AI Adoption Isn't the Technology — It's This | Errol Gardner of EY · 55 min · Episode 346Errol Gardner has spent 35 years advising the world's largest organizations through major technology transitions, and his assessment of where enterprise agentic AI actually…
- Oliver Dial of IBM: Quantum Advantage Is Happening This Year · 51 min · Episode 345IBM's VP of Quantum Systems, Oliver Dial, has spent his career building quantum computers from the ground up, and he's unusually direct about what they can and can't do. In this…
- Why Agentic-First Startups Won't Disrupt Enterprises as Fast as Everyone Thinks | Kris Lovejoy · 57 min · Episode 344Kris Lovejoy, Global Strategy Leader at Kyndryl, has spent her career at the intersection of IT infrastructure and security. Right now, she's one of the people enterprises call…
- Loris Degioanni: Why AI Is Breaking Cybersecurity, and What Comes Next · 51 min · Episode 343AI 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…
- #342 Andrew Thangaraj: The $5,000 IIT Degree: Can India Fix Its Broken Education System? · 49 min · Episode 342What 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…
