Apr 01, 2026

The Moonshot Podcast S2, Episode 2: Coding The Natural World

This episode of The Moonshot Podcast delves into the future of biological engineering, showcasing how AI and computational biology are transforming our interaction with living systems. Host Astro Teller first speaks with Brad Zamft of Heritable Agriculture about programming plants for increased yield, pest resistance, and drought resilience. Next, Relly Brandman from project A-Life explains how they're using AI to create a "virtual cell," shifting biomanufacturing from slow trial-and-error to a predictable engineering discipline for producing diverse materials like medicines, fuels, and textiles.

Mar 31, 2026

This AI Company Catches Fraud Across the Internet

Variance, emerging from three years in stealth with a $21 million Series A, is transforming enterprise risk and compliance through purpose-built AI agents. Founded by ex-Apple engineers, the company automates complex tasks like fraud detection, content review, and identity verification for Fortune 500s and platforms such as GoFundMe. They discuss the strategic reasons for stealth, technical challenges of integrating disparate data sources (including UI scraping), the shift from legacy systems to self-healing AI agent architectures, and how their lean, AI-maximalist team detects sophisticated threats like state-sponsored fraud rings.

Mar 19, 2026

How Linear Algebra Powers Machine Learning (ML)

Fangfang Lee from IBM explains how linear algebra is the mathematical foundation of machine learning, enabling computers to understand data. The summary covers key concepts like vectorization, similarity metrics (Euclidean distance, cosine similarity), and dimensionality reduction using Singular Value Decomposition (SVD).

Mar 16, 2026

Beyond the Hype: What AI Actually Can (and Can't) Do • Jodie Burchell & Michelle Frost • GOTO 2026

Jodie Burchell and Michelle Frost of JetBrains offer a measured, research-grounded perspective on the state of generative AI. They discuss the shifting definitions of AI, the enduring importance of foundational machine learning principles, historical parallels to previous 'AI summers,' the measurement problem of AGI, and what the evidence actually says about AI's impact on developer productivity.

Feb 12, 2026

Rivian’s Roadmap to AI Architecture and Autonomy with Founder and CEO RJ Scaringe

Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe discusses the company's complete pivot from a rules-based '1.0' autonomy system to a vertically integrated, neural network-based architecture. He outlines the essential ingredients for success in autonomous driving—from custom inference chips to a robust data flywheel—and explains why a software-defined vehicle architecture is non-negotiable for survival. Scaringe also touches on the upcoming R2 model, the importance of market choice, and how superior, proprietary data will be the key differentiator in the age of AI-driven vehicles.

Jan 28, 2026

Fuzzy Extractors are Practical

Amey Shukla from the University of Connecticut presents a novel system for biometric key derivation that closes the long-standing gap between the theory and practice of device-level authentication. The talk introduces a practical fuzzy extractor system, "Zeta then Lock," which, combined with an integrated machine learning feature extractor, achieves 105 bits of entropy with a 92% true accept rate for iris biometrics, overcoming the "more errors than entropy" problem that plagued previous designs.