Latest Interviews
Showing 706–720 of 3,244 interview transcripts.
Clear all filters- 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 Summit22 min
Inception Fund & AI: From Inception to Exit Building AI Giants from Europe and the Nordics
Former professor Peter Sarlin founded the private AI lab Silo AI in 2017 and led the bootstrapped company to a $700 million exit when acquired by AMD in 2022, establishing the largest pure-play AI acquisition in Europe. Sarlin attributes this success to a contrarian philosophy that prioritized functional machine learning over hype while hiring primarily from academia, resulting in a workforce of over 220 AI scientists before the strategic sale. Beyond this specific case study, Sarlin highlights that the fragmentation of the European single market remains the primary barrier preventing regional startups from scaling into trillion-dollar enterprises, forcing founders to adopt a global-first strategy despite Europe's strengths in industrial AI applications.
- 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 Summit23 min
Oege De Moor (XBOW) & Apoorv Agrawal (Altimeter): Hackers with GPUs Offensive Security in the AI Era
Oege De Moor, Apoorv Agrawal, Uhey Dhimur
Altimeter Capital-backed startup Expo has deployed an autonomous AI agent that ranks as the world's top ethical hacker, identifying over 1,200 vulnerabilities including critical zero-days in enterprise giants like Palo Alto Networks and Salesforce within a single week. This superhuman capability forces a strategic industry shift toward AI-driven defense to combat a "skill shortage" in malicious actors that has enabled nation-states to automate attacks with unprecedented speed. While the market anticipates a major cyber incident within twelve months due to rising AI-generated code risks, human security roles are expected to evolve from technical execution to the strategic orchestration of these autonomous systems.
- 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.
- RAISE Summit29 min
Anjney Midha of a16z: Algorithmic Independence The Next Frontier in National Infrastructure
The event defines Sovereign AI as a four-tiered strategy for achieving technical and cultural independence, utilizing methods like mid-training to correct deep-seated biases rather than simple fine-tuning. As nations transition from closed-source prototypes to open-source models, a geopolitical divide is emerging where "hypercenters" like the US and China face competition from Europe's "Mistral Compute" initiative while non-hypercent nations adopt joint-venture models to retain value. The discussion concludes with predictions that general-purpose robotics and universal computer use will mature within two years, leveraging Europe's specific strengths in computer vision to secure its strategic position in the global AI landscape.
- RAISE Summit18 min
Aurélien Rodriguez, Director at Cohere: Building AI for Security-Minded Enterprises
In this session, a former Meta AI researcher now directing foundation model training at Cohere explains how the company prioritizes secure, grounded generation over pursuing Artificial General Intelligence. The discussion highlights a strategic shift toward on-premise deployment and retrieval-augmented pipelines that ensure data remains within client environments while minimizing hallucinations through strict source verification. By leveraging co-development partnerships with entities like Fujitsu and RBC, the organization focuses on specialized, high-value tools that deliver concrete business impact in regulated sectors without mimicking human biology.
- RAISE Summit34 min
Bruno Gagliardo, Global Head of Data & AI @ Sanofi : Molecule to Market, Driving AI Transformation
Bruno Gagliardo, Larry Orimoloe
Sanofi CEO Bruno Gagliardo unveiled a five-year strategy to transform the pharmaceutical giant into a "pharma tech" leader by migrating 85,000 employees to a cloud-based data mesh architecture powered by large-scale AI. The initiative integrates the RAISE governance framework and a $100 million impact barrier to mitigate hallucination risks while accelerating drug discovery and regulatory submissions from 19 weeks down to five. This cultural shift prioritizes AI augmentation over replacement, utilizing agentic systems and a hybrid build-or-buy approach to deliver substantial efficiency gains across research, manufacturing, and commercial operations.
- All-In Podcast27 min
Alibaba's Joe Tsai on US-China Rivalry, AI Future, Owning the Nets/Liberty, Caitlin Clark's Impact
Joe Tsai, Caitlin Clark, Chamath, Jason, Friedberg
Business leader Joe Satt outlines Alibaba's strategic pivot toward AI-driven efficiency, highlighting a 14.5% stock surge following the Qwen 2.5 Max launch and a corporate culture where 30% of engineering code is now AI-generated. He contrasts U.S. and Chinese market dynamics by discussing the WNBA's surge in popularity driven by Caitlin Clark while arguing that U.S.-China relations represent necessary economic competition rather than bitter rivalry, noting China's 50% corporate AI adoption rate. Satt further critiques structural differences in American versus Chinese education and governance, asserting that the future of technological progress relies on cooperation in fields like medicine rather than a zero-sum race for dominance.
- RAISE Summit19 min
A Fireside Chat: Beyond Asimov's Laws: How GenesisAI is Bringing AI to the Physical World
Omar, Sebastien Detranier, Francois Beaufort, Theo Varontas
Genesis AI is a Paris-San Francisco startup backed by Eclipse, BP France, and Alvin that aims to automate 50% of the global economy's physical tasks by applying internet-scale foundation models to general-purpose robotics. Co-founder Sebastien Degraffe leverages a proprietary physics engine and a three-pronged data strategy to solve the scarcity of diverse robotics training data, differentiating the firm from competitors reliant on expensive human-in-the-loop collection methods. With a seed round exceeding $100 million, the company plans to deploy Proof of Concepts in pharmaceutical labs and hotels within the next year while targeting full-scale commercialization of adaptable, generalist machines over a three-to-five-year timeline.
- Milken Institute36 min
Influence to Shape Platforms for Good | Asia Summit 2025
Ross Butler, Bhumi Pednekar, Curtis S. Chin
Actors Bhumi Pednekar and Ross Butler discuss their respective careers of dismantling stereotypes in Indian and Hollywood cinema while highlighting the societal pressures to pursue traditional professions over creative arts. Beyond entertainment, both advocates emphasize the transformative power of social media for disaster relief and mental health awareness, with Pednekar leading UNDP climate initiatives and Butler championing cross-cultural co-productions in Southeast Asia. Looking forward, the duo plans to collaborate on a project bridging Indian and Asian narratives while mentoring emerging talent to redefine regional storytelling globally.
- Goldman Sachs44 min
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center’s CEO on the Future of Cancer Treatment
Selwyn M. Vickers, Brian Robinson, Dr. Selwyn Vickers
Memorial Sloan Kettering leverages its vast biobank and dual expertise in computational oncology to drive a "golden era" of cancer treatment, where AI-driven predictive models and breakthroughs in immunotherapy have transformed survival rates for aggressive malignancies. Concurrently, the institution confronts rising youth cancer incidence and systemic health inequities by developing accessible genetic screening tools and deploying low-infrastructure immunotherapy protocols globally. These clinical and technological advances are grounded in a leadership philosophy that prioritizes professional excellence to dismantle socioeconomic barriers and improve care access for underserved populations.
- a16z56 min
Opendoor CEO: Building the Amazon for Homes
Kaz Nejatian, Alex Rampell, Erik Torenberg
CEO Kaz Nejatian is steering Opendoor away from its failed inventory-heavy iBuyer model toward a software marketplace aiming to control 10% of housing supply to disrupt traditional agent monopolies through 1% commissions. Following a strategic pivot triggered by the "triple whammy" of Zillow's competition, rising interest rates, and capital pullback, the company now operates in every U.S. market with features like Dallas' seven-day return window to build high-frequency demand. The ultimate vision is to internalize the entire real estate transaction chain by bundling financing and insurance, thereby reducing friction and delivering net value to consumers while avoiding the pitfalls of operating as a low-frequency asset-holding business.