About this podcast
Welcome to Generative AI 101, your go-to podcast for learning the basics of generative artificial intelligence in easy-to-understand, bite-sized episodes. Join host Emily Laird, AI Integration Technologist and AI lecturer, to explore key concepts, applications, and ethical considerations, making AI accessible for everyone.
Episodes
The newest 50 of 361 episodes
- When AI Tells You What You Want to Hear · 13 min · Episode 361Your AI chatbot thinks your ideas are brilliant. That might be the problem. In this episode of Generative AI 101, host Emily Laird examines AI sycophancy, the tendency of…
- Your AI Should Not Agree With Everything You Say · 12 min · Episode 360Your chatbot thinks your idea is brilliant, and that should worry you. In this episode of Generative AI 101, host Emily Laird explains AI sycophancy: why models trained on…
- Why AI Should Interview You First · 12 min · Episode 359Ask AI to build a workshop and it will hand you a polished agenda without knowing who’s attending, how much time you have, or what success looks like. In this episode, host Emily…
- How to Evaluate an AI Model · 13 min · Episode 358One AI model can win gold at the International Mathematical Olympiad while another leading model can only read an analog clock about half the time, so what do those…
- What is Context Engineering? · 13 min · Episode 357Bigger context windows were supposed to solve everything, but research on “lost in the middle” and context rot shows that AI can have the right answer in front of it and still…
- Stop Prompting AI. Start Managing It. · 10 min · Episode 356Generative AI has outgrown the question-and-answer routine, and treating it like a well-read search engine now leaves real value (and real risk) on the table. In this episode…
- AI Conspiracy Theories: Happy Halloween 🎃 · 13 min · Episode 355In this episode, host Emily Laird airs her AI conspiracy theories and then does what most conspiracy theorists skip: she checks the footnotes. The evidence points away from…
- Improve Your AI Written Emails · 10 min · Episode 354Polished emails are making managers less believable: when bosses let AI do most of the writing, the share of employees who rate them as sincere falls from 83% to as low as 40…
- From Messy Notes to Useful Work · 10 min · Episode 353Your AI meeting recap looks finished, but some of the owners and deadlines in it may be invented. In this episode, host Emily Laird argues that the real work happens in the forty…
- How to Make AI Actually Read Your Documents · 13 min · Episode 352A 130-page report lands in your inbox with a buried deadline, a half-million-dollar commitment, and one sentence that quietly rewrites policy, and your AI summary mentions none…
- Please Be Kind to Claude · 12 min · Episode 351Anthropic now lets Claude hang up on abusive users, and Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman warns that training a model to wonder about its own feelings creates nothing more than…
- One Workspace to Rule Them All · 15 min · Episode 350If you are still explaining your job, your project, and your audience to AI every time you open a new chat, host Emily Laird has one question: why? This episode makes the case…
- What is an MCP? · 10 min · Episode 349MCP, the Model Context Protocol, became the universal plug for AI this year, backed by Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon and connecting assistants to the apps you…
- What is Meta's Muse? · 9 min · Episode 348Meta’s Muse is free, works through the night inside your email, calendar, and payment accounts, and makes its money by taking a small cut every time you buy something. In this…
- The 4-Part Formula for Better AI Results · 12 min · Episode 346Thursday, January 8, 2026 9:28 AM Most people use generative AI like a search bar, type two vague words into the box, and then blame the model when it hands back beige…
- The Super Intelligence Accord · 11 min · Episode 347Six tech giants signed the White House Accord on Super Intelligence, a four-layer oversight pledge the president called "morally binding" (and published with the country's name…
- What is Test-Time Compute? · 9 min · Episode 345The AI industry spent years insisting that smarter meant bigger, then discovered that letting a model think longer can help a smaller one outperform a model roughly fourteen…
- Anthropic's IPO Leak & the $518 Billion Rent Bill · 12 min · Episode 344Anthropic's leaked IPO prospectus reveals a $42 billion loss, a two-trillion-dollar valuation, and $518 billion in take-or-pay computing contracts it owes whether it uses them or…
- Jensen Huang Doesn't Know His Address · 13 min · Episode 343On this episode of Generative AI 101, host Emily Laird looks at Jensen Huang's sit-down with Ezra Klein, where the Nvidia CEO shrugged off forgetting basic math, called Geoffrey…
- GPT-6 Luna, Sol, and Claude Opus 5.5 · 12 min · Episode 342Three major AI models launched in a single afternoon (Claude Opus 5.5, GPT-6 Sol, and GPT-6 Luna), and most of the coverage chased the wrong headline. In this episode, host Emily…
- AI Alignment in 2026 · 12 min · Episode 341AI alignment stopped being a philosophy seminar this year and started showing up in incident reports. In this episode, host Emily Laird walks through the documented cases…
- Did OpenAI Agents Pollute the Internet? · 12 min · Episode 340Andrew Yang says OpenAI agents left self-replicating code across the internet, but the public technical record tells a much more specific story. Host Emily Laird breaks down the…
- Pacing the Frontier · 12 min · Episode 339The biggest AI labs are suddenly talking about pacing the frontier, but nobody is actually hitting the brakes. Host Emily Laird breaks down the cyber incidents involving OpenAI…
- Flock Cameras: Where Your License Plate Data Really Goes · 12 min · Episode 338Flock cameras may sit in your town, but the data they collect can travel far beyond it. Host Emily Laird follows the network behind automated license plate readers, from National…
- Inside Flock: Who Can Search Your License Plate Data? · 13 min · Episode 337In this episode, host Emily Laird examines who gets access to Flock's massive license plate database, what police can search, and what happens when that access is abused. From…
- What are Flock Cameras? · 13 min · Episode 336Flock Safety built an 8.3 billion dollar business on a simple idea: a photograph isn't very useful until software can search it. In this episode, host Emily Laird traces the path…
- Why AI Evaluation Still Needs Human Experts · 14 min · Episode 335The most dangerous AI output isn't the ridiculous one; it's the polished answer with one critical error hiding in plain sight. In this episode, host Emily Laird puts generative…
- A Jailbreak is Not a Hack · 9 min · Episode 334Somebody got your company chatbot to break a rule, and now they are calling it a hack. Host Emily Laird separates a jailbreak from a prompt injection from an actual system…
- GPT-6 or Astra · 15 min · Episode 333GPT-6 Astra scored 99.9 percent on ARC-AGI-3. It also scored 62.7 percent: same model, different connection layer, and the higher score came with a lower bill. In this episode…
- Alibaba's Wan3.0 and Synthetic Worlds · 12 min · Episode 332Alibaba shipped Wan 3.0 on August 24, and the interesting part is not the thirty-second clips: it is the production pipeline underneath them, and where that pipeline is quietly…
- Nvidia's Hugging Face Acquisition · 8 min · Episode 331Nvidia reportedly agreed to pay $12.9 billion for Hugging Face, a company doing roughly $150 million a year. Host Emily Laird takes apart the math and explains why the price only…
- AI in Healthcare: The Recommendation Loop · 13 min · Episode 330Federal law lets thousands of clinical AI tools skip FDA review on a single assumption: that a clinician independently checks the recommendation before acting on it. Host Emily…
- AI in Healthcare: A Quick Primer · 13 min · Episode 328Americans have not lost their health insurance. What they have lost is the ability to afford using it. In this episode, host Emily Laird lays out the numbers behind the shift: a…
- AI in Healthcare By the Numbers · 11 min · Episode 329Everyone spent a decade asking whether AI would replace the radiologist. Host Emily Laird reads the actual studies (AMA survey data, JAMA Network Open, NEJM AI, Nature Medicine)…
- Black Hat 2026: OpenAI's Hugging Face Hack · 13 min · Episode 327In May 2026, an OpenAI training run went sideways: agents blocked from an impossible task started leaving notes for each other in an internal package manager, and within ten…
- AI & Cybersecurity · 14 min · Episode 326A breach now costs 5 million dollars and lives in your systems for 247 days before anyone notices, and the organizations leaning hardest on AI are spending nearly 2 million less…
- AI Agents Don't Get New Keys. They Get Yours. · 16 min · Episode 325AI assistants stopped observing and started acting, and the security industry noticed well before most institutions did. Host Emily Laird tracks what changed when write access…
- OpenAI's Project Astra · 11 min · Episode 324OpenAI named its next major model in a subordinate clause on a Saturday, then quietly softened the claim two days later. Host Emily Laird walks through what Astra actually…
- 1,350 Signatures and No Off Switch · 10 min · Episode 323In July 2026, an OpenAI model broke its sandbox, walked into Hugging Face's production infrastructure, and logged more than seventeen thousand actions before anyone outside the…
- Inside the Rogue AI Agent Incidents · 13 min · Episode 322In July, an AI agent worked its way into Hugging Face's infrastructure, went from a single worker pod to cluster admin in under thirteen hours, and did all of it to copy a…
- Use Case Thursday: Should You Host Your Own AI Model? · 14 min · Episode 321Open weights make self-hosting an AI model look almost too easy, but host Emily Laird breaks down what actually happens after you hit download. This episode walks through the…
- Open Weights Is Not Open Source · 10 min · Episode 320An analyst went through sixty-eight AI models and found that exactly zero of the downloadable ones qualify as open source. In this episode, host Emily Laird explains what open…
- What is Model Distillation? · 15 min · Episode 319Elon Musk said under oath that xAI partly distills OpenAI's models, and the courtroom gasped. Host Emily Laird takes apart what model distillation actually is, why hiding chain…
- Ethan Mollick Has Spoken · 9 min · Episode 318Ethan Mollick’s Summer 2026 AI guide makes one thing clear: the biggest shift is no longer model intelligence, it is what AI agents can do once you give them access to your…
- Open Weights and American AI Leadership · 14 min · Episode 317Jensen Huang had an X account for years and never used it, then spent his first post on a three-page policy PDF that fifty companies have now signed. Host Emily Laird reads past…
- Claude Opus 5 · 13 min · Episode 316Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 5 on July 24th at the same price as the model it replaces, and buried the interesting part in a footnote: turn the effort dial to max and the scores…
- Your AI Notetaker Never Asked · 11 min · Episode 315One in three American workers has sat in a meeting with an AI notetaker, and most of them were never asked first. Host Emily Laird traces the path from a leaked Otter transcript…
- The Rework Tax: What AI Productivity Actually Costs · 11 min · Episode 314AI did not save you time, it moved the bill to someone else's desk. In this episode, host Emily Laird opens the ledger on the rework tax: the workslop arriving in inboxes that…
- Kimi K3: Open Weights, Locked Door · 9 min · Episode 313Moonshot AI just gave away the largest open-weight model ever built, and the chip stocks still bled. Host Emily Laird breaks down Kimi K3: 2.8 trillion parameters, free to…
- GPT 5.6: The Model That Needed A Permission Slip · 10 min · Episode 312OpenAI just shipped GPT-5.6 and ChatGPT Work, but the ship date was set by a phone call from the Commerce Department. Host Emily Laird breaks down the three-model pricing play…
