Author: What’s Your Problem?

  • Creative Technology at Pixar

    Danielle Feinberg is a Visual Effects Supervisor at Pixar Animation Studios. Danielle’s problem is this: How do you optimize technology so that you can spend more time being creative?

    Danielle Feinberg has worked at Pixar for 26 years. Earlier in her career, she was the director of photography on movies like Coco and Wall-E. She talks about how new software shapes creative work.

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  • How To Make AI Safer & More Reliable

    Yaron Singer is the founder and CEO of Robust Intelligence. Yaron’s problem is this: How do you reduce AI’s security and reliability risks?

    Yaron was a computer science professor at Harvard and worked at Google before starting Robust Intelligence. The company’s software tests AI models and datasets for problems with performance and security.

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  • Quantum Computers Could Change Everything

    Chris Monroe is the co-founder and chief scientist of IonQ. Chris’s problem is this: How do you build a quantum computer that will actually work? Quantum computing has the potential to transform fields from drug development to clean energy to cybersecurity, but so far no one has been able to build a quantum computer that can reliably outperform existing computers.

    Monroe is also a physics professor at Duke University, and he talks Jacob through the principles that make quantum computing possible.

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  • The 2023 Unhedged Stock Draft

    Seven stocks are powering the market: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla. How will they do in the second half of this year? Ethan Wu hosts as Rob ‘Value This’ Armstrong takes on Elaine ‘The Lex Flex’ Moore. In three rounds they pick their winners for the second half of 2023, and tell us why they chose them. If you enjoyed this preview of the new podcast Unhedged, subscribe to the show now: https://apple.co/478A3VS

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  • Predicting Human Health with AI

    Charles Fisher is the co-founder and CEO of Unlearn AI. Charles’ problem is this: How do you build an AI model that can predict human health?

    Charles and his colleagues have built a predictive model of health that is already being used in clinical trials, and might one day be deployed to predict individuals’ health outcomes.

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  • Breastfeeding, Black Market Baby Formula, and Bobbie

    Laura Modi is the founder and CEO of Bobbie, a company that makes baby formula and sells it directly to parents. Laura’s problem is this: how do you launch a startup in a highly regulated industry that has pretty much been a duopoly for decades?

    Part of Laura’s answer is marketing, which raises another question: how do you get people to consider formula despite so much messaging that breastfeeding is better?

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  • Making Immigration Cheaper & Easier

    Xiao Wang is the founder of a company called Boundless. Xiao’s problem is this: How do you make it cheaper and easier for people to navigate the U.S. immigration system?

    Xiao moved to the U.S. from China when he was three years-old. For many years, he took for granted that immigration was slow, complicated, and expensive to navigate. With Boundless, he’s built a platform to help people who try to figure out that system every year.

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  • The Wind Power Pioneer Still Pushing the Frontier

    Henrik Stiesdal got his start in wind power back in the 70s. The price of oil had gone way up, and he wanted to help his parents figure out a cheaper source of electricity for their farm. He went on to help create the modern wind industry. Five decades later, he’s still pushing the frontier.

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  • The Mystery at the Heart of ChatGPT

    One of the most amazing things about ChatGPT and other, similar AI models: Nobody really understands what they can do. Not even the people who build them. On today’s show, we talk with Sam Bowman about some of the mysteries at the heart of so-called large language models. Sam is on the faculty at NYU, he runs a research group at the AI company Anthropic and he is the author of the illuminating paper Eight Things to Know About Large Language Models.

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  • Scrubbing Carbon from the Air

    Dan Friedmann is the CEO of Carbon Engineering. The company is at the frontier of a new industry, direct air capture. They just broke ground on a big plant in Texas that will pull carbon dioxide out of the air.

    Dan’s problem is this: how do you bring the price of direct air capture way down? And how do you convince companies and governments to pay for scrubbing carbon out of the air?

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