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Eye On A.I.

Eye On A.I.

Craig S. Smith 362 Episodes Oct 9, 2026

Eye on A.I. is a biweekly podcast hosted by longtime New York Times correspondent Craig S. Smith. Each episode features conversations with people making a difference in artificial intelligence. The podcast aims to put incremental advances into a broader context and consider the global implications of the developing technology. AI is about to change your world, so pay attention.

Episodes

Chat GPT's Creator Explains The Shocking Truth About How AI Understands the World | Ilya Sutskever
Chat GPT's Creator Explains The Shocking Truth About How AI Understands the World | Ilya Sutskever Oct 9, 2026 41:45 Craig Smith sits down with Ilya Sutskever - Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at Safe Superintelligence Inc. & former chief scientist at OpenAI and one of the primary minds behind GPT-3, GPT-4, and the deep learning revolution that preceded it - for a conversation that covers the intellectual history of deep learning and the hardest current questions simultaneously. Ilya's most important argument is
The Coordination Tax: Why AI Is Burning Out Your Best People | Dan O'Connell, Front
The Coordination Tax: Why AI Is Burning Out Your Best People | Dan O'Connell, Front Oct 6, 2026 51:14 Everyone assumes AI in customer operations means fewer people and lower costs. The data from 700 customer operations leaders is more complicated, and more honest. Dan O'Connell, CEO of Front, joins Craig Smith with findings from a survey of customer support, service, and account management leaders that reveal what's actually happening as enterprises deploy AI at scale, and the central finding is
Ukraine's Secret Weapon: The Points System Winning the Drone War | Andrii Hrytseniuk
Ukraine's Secret Weapon: The Points System Winning the Drone War | Andrii Hrytseniuk Oct 2, 2026 33:54 Ukraine tracks every confirmed drone kill with video evidence, deduplicates the data to prevent double-counting, converts verified strikes into e-points, and delivers newly ordered weapons to frontline units in two weeks instead of twelve months. Andrii Hrytseniuk, CEO of Brave1- Ukraine's government defense innovation agency - joins Craig Smith to explain in precise operational detail how what s
Why Current AI Cannot Be Conscious | Dr. Christof Koch
Why Current AI Cannot Be Conscious | Dr. Christof Koch Sep 30, 2026 01:01:59 One in four patients currently being considered for life support withdrawal may actually be fully conscious, they just can't signal it. That single finding, from a landmark New England Journal of Medicine study, is the practical stakes behind one of the most philosophically rich conversations in this series. Dr. Christof Koch - former president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, 25-year co
The Technology for Fully Autonomous Attack Is Already Here | Alex Liannyi, NORDA Dynamics
The Technology for Fully Autonomous Attack Is Already Here | Alex Liannyi, NORDA Dynamics Sep 24, 2026 19:09 The AI systems guiding Ukrainian combat drones aren't running on expensive Nvidia chips. They're running on a Raspberry Pi Zero - a $15 hobby computer - and that single detail tells you more about how Ukraine's drone war is actually being fought than any headline about AI weapons. Craig Smith sits down with Alex Liannoy, CTO of NORDA Dynamics, for a technically specific and operationally candid c
Inside Ukraine's Drone War: Maj. "Phoenix" of Lasar's Group
Inside Ukraine's Drone War: Maj. "Phoenix" of Lasar's Group Sep 21, 2026 01:05:49 The first armed drone Ukraine ever fielded wasn't built in a factory or procured from a defense contractor. It was built in four months by a network engineer using a Starlink terminal and a large agricultural quadcopter frame, and the man who built it, Maj Phoenix, co-founder of Lasars Group, joins Craig Smith in Kyiv to explain exactly how it happened and what the battlefield looks like now. The
The Hidden Algorithm That Decides Which Software AI Will Recommend | Tim Sanders, G2
The Hidden Algorithm That Decides Which Software AI Will Recommend | Tim Sanders, G2 Sep 14, 2026 58:49 Most companies investing in AI visibility are optimizing for the wrong thing. Being cited by an AI response and being recommended by an AI response are completely different outcomes, with click-through rates that differ by a factor of 70. Tim Sanders, Chief Innovation Officer of G2 and executive fellow at Harvard's AI Institute, joins Craig Smith to explain the hidden mechanics behind how ChatGPT
The Reason 30 Years of Cybersecurity Has Failed - and What Actually Fixes It | Trent Telford, Qanapi
The Reason 30 Years of Cybersecurity Has Failed - and What Actually Fixes It | Trent Telford, Qanapi Sep 10, 2026 55:19 Every major data breach in the last 30 years shares the same root cause: the data inside the wall was never protected, only the wall. And AI frontier models are now making that wall easier to breach than ever, scanning codebases externally to discover undisclosed vulnerabilities and write exploits before anyone knows the hole exists. Trent Telford, Chairman, CEO & Founder of Qanapi, joins Craig S
86% of What Coding Agents Do Is Just Reading — Not Solving | Alexander Whedon of Subquadratic
86% of What Coding Agents Do Is Just Reading — Not Solving | Alexander Whedon of Subquadratic Sep 8, 2026 54:45 Every AI model in production today has the same hidden tax: doubling the context window quadruples the compute. That's what quadratic compute complexity means in practice, and it's the reason enterprises are spending most of their AI engineering budget on context management rather than on the actual problems they're trying to solve. Alexander Whedon, co-founder and CTO of Subquadratic, joins Crai
From 10 Drones a Month to Nearly 100,000 — Inside Ukraine's Largest Drone Manufacturer | Marko Kushnir, General Cherry
From 10 Drones a Month to Nearly 100,000 — Inside Ukraine's Largest Drone Manufacturer | Marko Kushnir, General Cherry Sep 3, 2026 38:17 In 2023, General Cherry started making 10 drones a month. Today they're approaching 100,000. Marko Kushnir, communications director of one of Ukraine's top-five drone manufacturers, joins Craig Smith for one of the most operationally specific conversations available about what drone warfare looks like at industrial scale, from the daily feedback loops with front-line units that drive product iter
In 5 to 10 Years, Using Weapons Without AI Will Be Considered Unethical | Yaroslav Azhnyuk, The Fourth Law
In 5 to 10 Years, Using Weapons Without AI Will Be Considered Unethical | Yaroslav Azhnyuk, The Fourth Law Aug 31, 2026 53:10 A Ukrainian entrepreneur who spent 14 years building cameras for pets pivoted to building cameras that down Shaheds, and is now building the autonomy software that could define how wars are fought for the next generation. Yaroslav Azhnyuk, co-founder of Fourth Law, joins Craig Smith in Kyiv to explain why Ukraine has become what he calls the Defense Valley or the Florence of Defense: a dense, fas
Inside Ukraine's Azov Drone R&D: The Engineer Building AI Weapons 18 km From the Front Line | Alexander Palamarchuk
Inside Ukraine's Azov Drone R&D: The Engineer Building AI Weapons 18 km From the Front Line | Alexander Palamarchuk Aug 27, 2026 41:48 The most consequential arms race in the world right now isn't nuclear, it's software. Craig Smith speaks with Alexander Palamarchuk, an engineer in the R&D department of Ukraine's Azov Brigade, calling in from approximately 18 kilometers from the front line in the Pokrovsk region. What emerges is one of the most technically candid accounts available of what drone warfare actually looks like from

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