Pioneers of AI AI’s journey from the lab to the marketplace
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Dec 24, 2025 
Join Anima Anandkumar, a Caltech professor focusing on AI and climate modeling, Daphne Koller, the CEO of Insitro working on AI-driven drug discovery, and Raquel Urtasun, founder of Waabi specializing in autonomous driving. They discuss the evolving relationship between academia and industry in AI innovation. Discover how physical AI can revolutionize climate science, the creation of digital twins for drug predictions, and the importance of efficient models. Their insights shape the future of AI, emphasizing human well-being and interdisciplinary collaboration.
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Industry Drives Frontier AI
- Industry now releases ~90% of frontier models and attracts most PhDs, shifting AI's center of gravity.
- Daphne Koller argues physical, interdisciplinary AI innovation increasingly requires industry-scale resources and incentives.
Make Academia More Porous
- Universities should adopt porous models that enable deep collaboration with industry to tackle large, interdisciplinary problems.
- Anima Anandkumar urges academia to lean into partnerships to combine foundational knowledge with industrial engineering and scale.
Building AI Weather Models
- Anima described building high-resolution AI weather models in collaboration with NVIDIA and national labs.
- She framed 'physical AI' as modeling the world in 3D plus time to accelerate costly physical experiments.