Latest Interviews
Showing 271–285 of 1,195 transcripts.
Clear all filters- The Economist8 min
Why is Saudi Arabia buying up the video game industry?
Led by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, a consortium is acquiring Electronic Arts for $55 billion while deploying a $38 billion Savvy Games portfolio to dominate the global gaming sector. This strategy targets the 330 million Arabic-speaking demographic and diversifies the Kingdom's oil-dependent economy by creating 39,000 jobs and leveraging competitive gaming for soft power. Although immediate content changes to existing Western franchises remain uncertain, the initiative integrates local cultural narratives and sports assets to eventually establish a distinct "Saudi accent" in international game development.
- Goldman Sachs8 min
Can the Rally Continue?
Ashok Varadhan maintains a constructive outlook on U.S. equities, projecting a policy interest rate normalization near 3% within the year and a market consolidation in the fourth quarter before a 2026 resumption. While advising investors to remain long and hedge downside risks through cheaply priced puts during a low-volatility environment, he identifies a structural shift away from fiat currencies into assets like Bitcoin and AI-driven stocks as a response to fiscal expansion. This strategy navigates potential Q4 risks from a government shutdown that delays critical economic data, ensuring the portfolio capitalizes on the enduring technological investment cycle while accounting for tariff absorption and crowded consensus positions.
- The Economist13 min
Has science finally cracked the secret to invisibility?
Alok Jha, Professor Sir John Pendry, John Pendry
Physics professor John Pendry introduced metamaterials as geometrically engineered structures capable of manipulating light paths to achieve the effects described in his "invisibility cloak" concept. This theoretical framework, initially named by Pendry's wife to aid a 2005 DARPA presentation, faced early skepticism before David Smith's team at Duke University successfully constructed a functional prototype for radar waves. The field has since evolved from resolving debates over negative refraction to experimental recreations of conditions existing near black holes.
- Y Combinator13 min
This Startup Is Trying To Delete 29% Of All CO2 Emissions
Remora has launched a solid-pellet based carbon capture system that reduces CO2 emissions by up to 90% in hard-to-electrify diesel trucks and freight trains, converting the captured gas into beverage-grade CO2 for commercial reuse. Backed by $117 million in venture capital, the Detroit-based company is vertically integrating its manufacturing to deploy modular retrofits to major partners like Ryder and Union Pacific while testing the technology on a repurposed locomotive. Co-founders Paul Gross and Christina Reynolds aim to scale this point-source solution to capture one billion tons of carbon annually by overcoming the logistical challenges of retrofitting diverse vehicle fleets.
- Goldman Sachs18 min
The Future of Software Engineering: Cognition’s Russell Kaplan
Cognition, founded by former Olympiad medalists and now valued at $4 billion, is advancing software engineering by deploying Devin, an autonomous AI agent capable of executing end-to-end development tasks. The company differentiates itself through a dual-product strategy combining Devin for independent execution with the recently acquired Windsurf IDE for human-in-the-loop collaboration, targeting enterprise integration into proprietary codebases. While AI capabilities in coding are projected to double every seven months, Cognition aims to elevate Devin to senior engineer status within a year, though future growth is anticipated to be constrained by energy availability rather than data scarcity.
- The Economist7 min
Mark Carney on dealing with Donald Trump
Mark Carney, Donald Trump, Zanny Minton Beddoes, Prime Minister Carney, Sani
Prime Minister Carney attributes Canada's recent economic stagnation to persistent tariff uncertainty while characterizing U.S. trade policy as a coercive "mafioso" strategy driven by President Trump. In response to this geopolitical rupture, Ottawa is pivoting toward strategic sovereignty by bolstering Arctic defense and cultivating a "variable geometry" of trade alliances to reduce reliance on the American market. This dual approach acknowledges a permanent shift toward high-tariff U.S. protectionism, compelling Canada to prioritize self-sufficiency and diversify global partnerships beyond traditional transatlantic frameworks.
- RAISE Summit16 min
Dr. Ilya Burkov (Nebius): Powering Next‑Gen Biotech Research with High‑Performance AI and Cloud GPUs
Nebius, a vertically integrated Dutch cloud provider, leverages its unique pay-as-you-go infrastructure and top-tier supercomputer ranking to support biotech and healthcare firms in overcoming hardware bottlenecks. The platform enables critical advancements in drug discovery and radiology diagnostics for organizations like Converge Bio and Simulacra AI, which achieved significant accuracy gains and speedups over hyperscaler alternatives by utilizing on-demand H100 GPU capacity. Looking toward 2025, the company aims to expand its global footprint by integrating agentic AI and multi-omics data processing to address workforce shortages and accelerate time-to-market for new treatments.
- RAISE Summit9 min
Yuri Frayman, Co-Founder & CEO, Cast AI: Robots Will Feed the World… If We Build the Rails
SoftBank Vision Fund portfolio companies are constructing the physical infrastructure necessary to transition AI from knowledge work into the global economy, aiming to replicate the prosperity seen with previous industrial revolutions. While addressing critical constraints in energy and compute, these initiatives prioritize workforce re-education and decentralized, open-source architectures to navigate regulatory fragmentation and ensure fair access against well-funded commercial labs. The deployment of large-scale, cloud-agnostic inference networks over the next decade will ultimately determine which entities successfully harness this AI abundance.
- RAISE Summit18 min
A fireside Chat with Paddy Srinivasan, CEO of DigitalOcean ft. Semafor
DigitalOcean CEO Patti and Reid Hoffman discuss the platform's role in serving 3 million developers by providing specialized AI infrastructure for both native startups and traditional firms integrating large language models. The conversation highlights critical global bottlenecks, including power constraints necessitating nuclear energy and a talent war driving new hiring protocols for AI automation engineers. Hoffmann forecasts a massive economic expansion where AI increases the technology sector's share of global GDP to 25% within a decade, alongside a predicted dispersion of value beyond current market leaders.
- RAISE Summit20 min
Karl Havard, COO, Nscale on 3 Things Sovereign AI Must Deliver: Control, Compliance, and Growth
Carl, CCO of Nscale, defines "sovereign AI" as a full-stack alternative to US hyperscalers that integrates energy generation, data center construction, and model hosting to ensure total infrastructure control. Geopolitical instability and US legislative threats, such as the Patriot Act and potential tariffs, are driving European governments to adopt this "Sovereign First" model to secure data compliance and economic growth through localized "AI Growth Zones." By coordinating renewable energy surpluses with high-density AI hardware requirements, this strategy aims to retain domestic research talent and bypass the physical and legal vulnerabilities of reliance on foreign cloud providers.
- RAISE Summit17 min
A fireside Chat with Ramin Hasani, Co-Founder & CEO of Liquid AI ft. Robert Cahill (Enhance Venture)
Liquid AI, an MIT spin-off founded by Ramin Hassani, is deploying a unique full-stack foundation model platform that utilizes biologically inspired Liquid Neural Networks to run generative AI directly on edge devices. This architecture achieves linear scaling rather than the quadratic costs of standard Transformers, enabling powerful on-device intelligence in resource-constrained hardware like smartphones and satellites without relying on data centers. Positioned as a specialized "gatekeeper" alongside massive cloud-based Oracles, the Boston-based company targets a projected $1 trillion on-device AI market by 2035 with applications spanning consumer electronics, automotive, and aerospace sectors.
- RAISE Summit20 min
SQORUS & Oracle: How AI is transforming step by step our industries. Use cases by ONET
Cyril Grira, Geoffrey, Gaurit Champenois, Romain Guyettremotier
Oracle, Skorus, and ONET Airport Services unveiled a comprehensive digital transformation at a 40th-anniversary celebration that leverages Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to reduce annual baggage losses by 25%. Led by Cyril Grira of Oracle, Geoffrey of Skorus, and ONET CIO Guillaume de Montessu, the project utilizes Autonomous Database 23ai, AI-powered vision services, and generative AI to shift operations from rigid timing-based SLAs to value-driven, real-time decision-making. Future initiatives plan to advance this system toward autonomous mission assignment and augmented reality interfaces to further optimize ground service productivity across Charles de Gaulle and other major hubs.
- RAISE Summit13 min
Ioannis Antonoglou (Reflection AI): Building The Next Superintelligence After AlphaGo
Reflexion AI co-founder Yiannis and his team argue that AGI requires no new scientific breakthroughs, but rather the assembly of existing knowledge to solve the foundational "root node" problem of autonomous coding agents. Differentiating from well-funded competitors like DeepMind and OpenAI, the startup prioritizes a ruthless focus on software development while shifting training paradigms toward reinforcement learning in simulated environments. The founders also analyze the global landscape, attributing Europe's lag to market fragmentation and regulation, while asserting that mission alignment offers a superior talent acquisition strategy to massive signing bonuses.
- RAISE Summit20 min
A Fireside Chat with Luc Julia, Renault & Matthieu de Chanville, Shift for Good
Luc Julia, Matthieu de Chanville
Luc Beaulieu, Renault's Chief Scientific Officer, highlights the critical lag between century-old automakers and agile startups regarding AI adoption, noting that legacy software cycles remain incompatible with the rapid hardware refresh rates required for software-defined vehicles. While dismissing the feasibility of Level 5 autonomy and humanoids, Beaulieu champions specialized "physical AI," geo-fenced Level 4 robot taxis, and virtual sensor technologies to enhance manufacturing efficiency and reduce environmental impacts. These insights are further reinforced by the "Software Republic" consortium, which includes Renault and Thales, as it advances a vision where artificial intelligence serves as a specialized tool to augment human capability rather than replace it.
- RAISE Summit18 min
An AI conversation with Prashanth Chandrasekar, CEO of Stack OverFlow
Prashanth Chandrasekar, Henry Shi, Prashant
Stack Overflow has pivoted from a traditional Q&A hub into a revenue-generating knowledge intelligence layer by licensing its data to major AI providers like Google and Microsoft while launching enterprise solutions for corporate workflows. This strategic shift addresses a 64% year-over-year traffic decline caused by user migration to AI search, transforming trust deficits among senior developers into a premium verification service rather than a code-generation competitor. Despite risks to junior developer roles, the company remains profitable and is expanding its talent pipeline through certification challenges and asynchronous human-to-human chat features.