For as far as we’ve come with AI and robotics, there’s still a huge gap when it comes to combining the two. AI excels in the digital space, and in the physical world, robots are often pre-programmed. That’s where physical AI comes in. It’s critical for things that can’t tolerate the kinds of mistakes that are common in today’s statistics based AI, like self driving cars or managing the power grid. In the latest installment of our oral history project, we meet a central figure in these efforts, MIT's Daniela Rus. We Meet:   Daniela Rus is the Director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Credits: This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

Astro Teller, Alphabet’s Captain of Moonshots, joins us for a conversation about the importance of failure, workplace culture in a moonshot factory, and not throwing away your shot. We Meet:  Astro Teller is the Captain of Moonshots at X, Alphabet's Moonshot Factory Credits: This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco. This episode originally ran in April 2025.

AMD provides high-performance computing power that runs everything from your gaming console and personal laptop, to the giant supercomputers and AI systems that power the cloud. Its head of AI discusses the move from sequential to massively parallel processing, and the company's strategy to embed AI from big cloud machines to tiny client devices. We Meet:   AMD’s SVP for AI Vamsi Boppana Credits: This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

We explore how one group is using AI to help people talk, listen and understand in large groups, in hopes of counteracting forces that have undermined our ability to communicate online, in the latest installment of our oral history project. We Meet:   Yasmin Green, CEO of Jigsaw, a unit within Google that addresses threats to open societies. Credits: This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

What do you think it would be like to lead AI efforts and the overall digital transformation of the CIA? This week, we find out as we dive into a world of espionage and secrets in the latest installment of our oral history project.  We Meet:   Retired Deputy CIA Director for Digital Innovation Jennifer Ewbank  Credits: This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

How we build products, why we build them, and what we think they’re for have always changed, but these days developers and engineers who love things like product roadmaps might find the current AI scene a little disorienting. That’s because there often isn’t a roadmap. If there is? It’s constantly changing. This week, we meet the CTO of IBM Research and she tells us about the current landscape and what she imagines for the future.  This episode was recorded at TEDAI in Vienna, Austria.  We Meet:   IBM Research CTO Anna Topol   Credits: This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens, and special thanks to Dajana Doskoc and Alina Nikoloau at TEDAI Vienna. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

Agentic AI is one of the hottest topics going in tech circles, but if pinning down exactly what we’re talking about feels a bit like a moving target, it’s not your imagination. What agents are capable of doing is changing almost as quickly as what people want to do with them.  We Meet:   VP of Agentic AI at AWS Swami Sivasubramanian   Credits: This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

What’s an astronaut’s time worth? Answering that question is not a perfect science, but at more than $100,000 an hour (not counting salary - that's just to keep one alive) on the International Space Station, it’s safe to say it’s more than you want to pay for bagging up trash.  This week, we take a field trip in New York City to see some space robots that could help with this problem.  We Meet:   Icarus Robotics CEO Ethan Barajas  Icarus Robotics CTO Jamie Palmer    Credits: This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

Might a lack of legacy healthcare tech infrastructure in rural communities offer an advantage over mature markets? A  founder makes the case in the latest installment of our oral history project. We Meet:   Homeward Co-Founder & President Amar Kendale   Credits: This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

You've likely heard that artificial intelligence is gobbling up electricity and drinking water, and causing a global race to build more energy capacity.  Have you ever stopped to consider why? Or what we’re doing to bring compute power and sustainability closer together? This episode was recorded in front of a live audience at TechBBQ, the largest tech conference in the Nordics. It's held each year in Copenhagen, Denmark. We Meet:   Caspar Høgh, Co-Founding Partner Noon Ventures  Yasser Nour, CTO & Co-Founder Lotus Microsystems Ruben Bryon, CEO & Co-Founder Datacrunch Credits: This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens, and it was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco. 

EU AI Act architect and lead author Gabriele Mazzini shares his experience drafting the law. He also talks about his concerns with implementation and its potential impact on European competitiveness, and how that led him to quit his job, in the latest installment of our oral history project. This episode was recorded at TEDAI in Vienna and originally ran in 2024. We Meet: MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate & MIT Connection Science Fellow Gabriele Mazzini Credits: This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens, and it was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco. 

One of the world's hottest AI startups, Builder.AI, imploded earlier this year. We dig into what actually went down at the company and what journalists and investors can learn from the experience.  We Meet:   Journalist Varsha Bansal Credits: This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

Despite our best efforts, sometimes what we say we want isn’t precisely what we mean. Nowhere is that felt more acutely than when we’re giving instructions to a machine, whether that’s coding or offering examples to machine learning systems. We unpack the alignment problem in the latest installment of our oral history project. We Meet:  Brian Christian, University of Oxford researcher, and author of The Alignment Problem  Credits: This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

In all the noise about AI agents it’s easy to miss a fundamental change that’s taking place. For these agents to be effective, people have to feel safe delegating things to them. When we do? How we use this tech starts to feel less like a tool and more like real collaboration.  This week, we explore agentic powered legal work in the latest installment of our oral history project. We Meet:   Thomson Reuters Chief Product Officer David Wong Credits: This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

What would you say if someone offered you a taste of a salmon filet that doesn’t contain fish?   The protein content, carbs, and even the omega 3s are basically the same, but what it doesn’t contain are things like microplastics and mercury.  Join us for a factory tour of a startup called New School Foods for a peek at the next-generation of plant-based foods. We Meet:   New School Foods CEO Chris Bryson Credits: This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

We explore how generative AI is revolutionizing game development at Roblox, in the latest installment of our oral history project. We Meet:   Kiran Bhat, Senior Director of Engineering at Roblox Credits: This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

This is the final installment of a special series documenting the race to build superintelligent AI systems. The Race to Superintelligence is a deep dive into the rapidly expanding world of artificial intelligence. Join us as we explore the groundbreaking, mystifying and world-changing potential of the next machine age.  Support for this program comes from The Pulitzer Center’s AI Accountability Network, supporting and bringing together journalists reporting on AI, and with AI, globally. Credits: The Race to Superintelligence is created and produced by Jennifer Strong, with Emma Cillekens, Daniela Hernandez, and Meg Marco. We had additional research and production assistance from Sonya Gurwitt, Niamh McAuliffe, Anthony Green and Luke Robert Mason. The show is mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski.

The U.S. trade war is expected to add billions of dollars to things like building AI data centers, and for companies trying to figure out and manage their exposure, it’s never been a more complicated task.  But what if we could build a map that could show us how supply chains, tariffs and trade policy are playing out in real time? We Meet:   Evan Smith, CEO Altana Credits: This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

Developing and scaling AI systems brings new security challenges, and companies are scrambling to figure out just how to handle some of the more pressing ones. I was recently joined on stage by co-founders from two Canadian unicorns, Cohere and Tailscale, to dig into these challenges at Web Summit Vancouver. We Meet:   Avery Pennarun, Co-founder & CEO, Tailscale                  Ivan Zhang, Co-founder, Cohere   Credits: This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

What if instead of software coaching you on how to use it–what buttons to push and what file menus to open–the software could just use itself, once it knew what you wanted?  We explore Intuit's new AI agents in the latest installment of our oral history project. We Meet:   Alex Balazs, CTO of Intuit   Credits: This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.