TechFirst with John Koetsier

Can we get an open source medical AI that saves millions of lives? Everywhere on the planet, health care is a problem. In the US it's too expensive. In Canada it's too busy. In much of Africa and India it's too rare, and in many other countries including Western Europe, it's overwhelmed and overrun. AI could help, but only if we can get our act together, says HIPPO AI foundation founder Bart de Witte ...

ChatGPT is not actually generative AI, says Intel senior research scientist Ilke Demir. In this TechFirst we chat with an Intel scientist who has been working on generative AI for years. We talk about the genesis of generative AI, which is as far back as the 1970s, and we talk about ethical uses of generative AI and how we can use neuromorphic computing to help reduce the massive computation cost of generative AI. Plus, we also talk about what Intel is doing with generative AI, including several projects around privacy.

I’ve done a lot of shows on alternative energy ... green energy sources like wind, geothermal, solar ... but should nuclear be in the mix? Nuclear’s having a bit of a resurgence lately as a green option for reliable energy. To talk about why and where it might fit we chat with the founder and president of Nano Nuclear Energy, Jay Yu, and the CEO, James Walker. We discuss Zeus and Odin, their two nuclear reactors, safety, disposal after their usable lifespan, and what the ideal mix of green energy sources might be.

Would you get a whole-body MRI scan to check for cancer and other problems even if you don’t feel any symptoms? Some have done just that and saved their lives. Others simply find out that they're relatively healthy. I seem to fall somewhere in the middle. I recently did a 60-minute full-body MRI scan. I learned I'm mostly healthy, but there are some potential problems. The CEO and co-founder of the company that ran the MRI says that adopting these kinds of scans would be part of a switch from sick care to health care, and it could save both millions of lives as well as billions of dollars. We chat about the technology, how it works, what it can do, and what it can't do. We also talk about why doctors are in general skeptical ... and why my doctor specifically didn't take the results super-seriously.

Apple's likely releasing its massively expensive VR/AR/mixed reality headset, Reality Pro, next week at WWDC 2023. One key VR competitor says he's much less worried about Apple winning than he is worried that Apple will fail. Why? That would devastate the consumer VR market, setting back the industry years. In this TechFirst I chat with Varjo CEO and co-founder Urho Konttori, Finnish maker of one of the best VR headsets on the market. Their headsets are super-high resolution ("human eye resolution"), have a wide field of view, impressive color, and LiDAR for high-quality mixed reality without occlusion fails. We chat about the state of VR, where VR is going, what Apple will do, what Meta will do, and how independents can compete with the kind of ecosystem Apple can bring to bear.

Generative AI is going to drive a 10X transformation in gaming, says Unity CEO John Riccitiello. It'll create truly believable worlds ... so believable it might even become more real that our "real world." It will transform NPCs -- non-player characters -- into deep, intelligent, and differentiated characters who might be more fun to hang out with than your real friends. And it will make infinite worlds and infinite experiences more of a reality than a dream. In this TechFirst we hang out with Unity's CEO and chat about how generative AI will change gaming. We also discuss how Unity's runtime -- on 4 billion devices -- has an AI inference engine built into it ... one that Unity started making 5 years ago.

Huge chunks of our lives are already managed by AI. The songs we listen to, the routes we drive, the search results we see, the climate in our homes? When AGI takes over, will you even notice? In this TechFirst, we chat with Evan Coopersmith, a data scientist and AI researcher who says that when AI fully takes over ... we probably won't. And, he says, his bird can teach us a lot about what our future relationship with AI will be.

Imaging using an entire podcast as a prompt to GPT-5, or GPT-10. What would a massively capable generative AI do with a podcast? Create a movie? Score a soundtrack? Build an immersive world? John Gauntt is the host of The Augmented City podcast. He’s also a journalist, analyst, founder, and story teller who has been building an audio sci-fi ghost story about Seattle 100 years from now for the past half-decade He created a video companion to the podcast with Midjourney. In this episode of TechFirst, we'd going to learn how, why, and what it means for the future of podcasting and story telling. And we're also going to interview Beini Huang, the artist and designer on the project, as well as Keith Ancker, the audio engineer. Enjoy!

Facebook isn't what it used to be. It's shedding staff, dismantling efforts to create the metaverse, losing ground to TikTok in short-form video, bleeding ad revenue thanks to Apple's privacy changes, and generally following rather than leading tech industry trends. But it still has a massive number of users and some of the biggest apps on the planet. What can Facebook do to regain its mojo? And ... honestly ... can Facebook regain its mojo? In this TechFirst I chat with Brian Bowman, an entrepreneur and investor. He's focused on generative AI right now, but he's been in the ad space and multiple other spaces. He's a former Yahoo Executive, former CEO of Consumer Acquisition, and multiple other tech companies.

Is technology and AI out of control? Is AI already beyond our ability to manage and monitor? In this TechFirst, we chat with David B. Auerbach. He's a software engineer who has worked for Google and Microsoft and recently wrote a book. The title is a bit on the scary side ... MEGANETS: How Digital Forces Beyond Our Control Commandeer Our Daily Lives and Inner Realities. He says technology is already way out of control ... just like weather. "Rather than treating these technological systems as based on algorithmic recipes that we can just debug, it's better to think of them like the weather. The weather is a classically chaotic system that we cope with, but nobody thinks that we can actually control ..."