Pioneers of AI

The world of brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs, is here. Implanted into the brain, BCIs can pick up neural signals for all kinds of use cases – turning thoughts into words without speaking or typing, or even sharing thoughts with third parties before they’re spoken. AI makes this tech much more powerful, processing and interpreting brain data at unprecedented speeds.

Live from Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco, host Rana el Kaliouby explores the extreme promise and privacy concerns of BCIs with two leading experts: Matt Angle, CEO of the BCI developer Paradromics, and Nita Farahany, professor of law and philosophy at Duke and author of The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology.

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Few companies have as much influence over AI’s trajectory as OpenAI. Reid Hoffman sits down with CFO Sarah Friar to understand the precipice of the moment we are in and the decisions that could shape what comes next for each of us.

This conversation was recorded live as part of Masters of Scale Summit on October 21, 2026, at the Presidio Theatre in San Francisco.

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It often feels like the world is divided when it comes to AI — do you lean in, or opt out?

But what if that tension exists within your own household? This week, we're reprising a candid conversation between host Rana el Kaliouby and her two kids. Her son Adam is an AI enthusiast and her daughter Jana is an AI skeptic, a dynamic she wrote about in a recent essay, "I'm an AI Scientist, My Daughter Refuses to Use AI, and I'm Okay with It." She asks them both to explain their different perspectives on AI, how they've embraced it and how they haven't — prompting Rana to reflect on her role as a mother and an AI leader raising both of them.

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Journalist Kevin Roose has closely watched and written about the AI race for about a decade, and his new book “The AGI Chronicles” documents the handful of driven people at the center of OpenAI, Google Deepmind, and Anthropic – along with their messy relationships, rivalries, decisions, and breakthroughs on the quest to create artificial superintelligence. Kevin recently left his role as a New York Times tech columnist and co-host of the podcast Hard Fork to start a new show, Machine Gods.

Host Rana el Kaliouby sits down with Kevin to explore what his books reveals about the AI headlines we’re all obsessing over, his concerns around AI safety, and whether AGI is already here.

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Thibault “Tibo” Sottiaux is OpenAI’s head of Product & Platform, making him responsible for the AI tools used by more than a billion users worldwide. Host Rana el Kaliouby spoke with Tibo about why he’s “proud” OpenAI delayed its latest Astra model over safety concerns, the new suite of agentic products released at DevDay, and what it’s like to lead inside a frontier AI company in this extraordinary moment in history.

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On this week’s episode we’re excited to share an episode from our sister podcast Possible, a podcast that sketches out the brightest vision of the future.

Useful robots won’t be programmed one task at a time; they’ll need to adapt to unfamiliar objects, environments, and robot bodies. Physical Intelligence cofounder Chelsea Finn (named last month to the TIME100 AI list for 2026) joins Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger to explain how general-purpose robot models learn to act in the messy physical world. She explores why lower-quality training data can strengthen a model, what months of failed laundry-folding attempts revealed, and how the same system can work across different robot platforms. A robot mistaking an oven for a drawer becomes a lesson in the strange line between useful generalization and obvious error. They also examine why robot demos can mislead, how hardware reliability can stall progress, and what it will take to move AI off the screen and into the world.

Congratulations to Chelsea, recently named one of TIME’s 100 most influential people in AI:

https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/2026/chelsea-finn/

For more info on the podcast and transcripts of all the episodes, visit https://www.possible.fm/podcast/

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For the past four decades Sherry Turkle has studied the social and psychological implications of AI. She’s the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT, founding director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, and author of the upcoming book Artificial Intimacy: Who Do We Become When We Talk to Machines? Sherry sits down with Rana to deliver a warning about the slippery slope we’re all stepping on to with our use of AI.

Sherry is direct and unfiltered in explaining why artificial intimacy is an oxymoron, what happens when humans become emotionally attached to AI, and why replacing human relationships with AI means we’ve basically given up on each other. But don't you worry, she leaves us with a strong message of agency and hope.

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Rudina Seseri is the Founder and Managing Partner of Glasswing Ventures, recently named one of America’s Top Venture Capital Firms of 2026 by TIME and Statista. With a focus on early-stage AI-powered companies, Rudina has been investing in AI since 2016 and has always been ahead of the curve. Host Rana el Kaliouby talks to Rudina about the shifting AI investing landscape, where she sees the real value in AI, and what she looks for in a founder before she writes her first check.

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For decades, e-commerce rewarded the biggest brands that could buy their way to the top of search results. AI is changing that. Shopify COO Jess Hertz joins Rapid Response to share what Shopify's data reveals about the agentic shopping revolution in real time, and how the company is building the infrastructure layer that makes products discoverable and purchasable by AI. Plus, why Shopify's engineers can spend freely on AI tokens while the rest of the business world agonizes over ROI, and what it looks like when a company powering over 14% of online shopping decides to win the future or die trying.

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Fifteen years ago Wade Foster, CEO of Zapier, co-founded the software company with a simple idea: link thousands of apps that were never designed to talk to each other, so people could work seamlessly between them. Now, he's turning Zapier into the go-to connector for companies and their AI agents. Host Rana El Kaliouby sits down with Wade to talk about the day he paused the entire company to call a "code red," how he's scaling AI from individual employees to the whole organization, and how Zapier has redesigned its product from the ground up as AI has transformed the way people work.

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In the world of AI, data is king. And in reporting on tech for nearly 30 years, Axios’ Chief Technology Correspondent Ina Fried has extensively covered concerns around consumer data, privacy, and Big Tech. In the latest edition of her long-running series “What They Know About You,” Ina dives into the privacy and data sharing policies of AI consumer products from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, and more. She tells host Rana el Kaliouby why data is key to AI companies’ business models, how they’re getting more of it, and how that could impact everyday users.

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Few leaders have a better real-time read on how AI is actually reshaping the workforce than Hayden Brown. As CEO of Upwork, the platform where 18 million freelancers meet the businesses that need them, she sees what the monthly jobs report can't: which skills are surging, which jobs are quietly disappearing, and why 23% of businesses that moved work to AI are already bringing humans back. Brown joins Rapid Response to share what she's actually seeing on the ground, why she refused to blame AI when she laid off a quarter of Upwork's staff, and what the data says about the gap between AI hype and AI reality.

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Stories of people standing in line for hours to get their drivers license or being wrongfully denied government food assistance are common in America. Few people think, “I can solve this problem.” But the CEO of Promise, Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, sees a solution in AI. Promise is a software company designed to help move money in and out of government benefit programs (like SNAP) to better serve the people who rely on them – and better serve taxpayers, too. Host Rana el Kaliouby speaks with Phaedra about how Promise is making these systems cheaper and faster with AI.

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In the first half of 2026 alone, investors poured $3 billion into the next frontier of AI: World Models. Google DeepMind, Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs, Yann LeCunn’s AMI labs, and Odyssey are all building in this space. In this episode, host Rana el Kaliouby speaks with the co-founder and CEO of Odyssey Oliver Cameron. They dive into the trillion dollar opportunity behind world models, why they are the next frontier of AI, and how they will be applied to a range of industries, from education to healthcare.

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Critterz was one of the first feature films built primarily with AI, but OpenAI abruptly shut down Sora, the very tool its director was relying on. Nik Kleverov, Chief Creative Officer of Native Foreign, joins Rapid Response from the Cannes Lions festival to make the case for why AI isn't killing Hollywood, it's about to reinvent it. He breaks down why 2026 is year zero for mass adoption of AI in the film industry, and why human talent is more in demand than ever when great storytelling is the goal. Kleverov also confronts the darker side of the technology: deepfakes, scams, and the blurring line between real and generated, and offers a surprising possible solution.

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This week we reprise our episode with robotics developer Grace Brown, co-founder and CEO of Andromeda, an Australia- and US-based company. A recently launched study, led by nurses, will analyze how Andromeda’s humanoid robot Abi fits into the everyday routine of patients in dementia care. Abi is a social robot designed for the aging population, with a goal to address the loneliness epidemic. In this interview, Rana el Kaliouby sits down with Brown to talk about why physical AI needs emotional intelligence, how nonverbal cues make or break human-robot interactions, and the importance of designing robots people actually want in their lives.

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For nearly two decades, Amy Webb's annual Tech Trends Report was required reading for anyone trying to keep up with technology. But this year, Webb killed the report and replaced it with something more applicable for leaders in an AI era.

In this episode, CEO of Future Today Strategy Group Amy Webb joins host Rana el Kaliouby to unpack her 2026 Convergence Outlook and examines how AI-driven convergences such as compute shock, living intelligence, and emotional outsourcing will reshape business and daily life.

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Is it possible for us to ever wholeheartedly trust a machine the way we would a human? According to Charles Duhigg, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and New York Times bestselling author of The Power of Habit and Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection, the answer is no. And that’s what stops us from being able to emotionally connect with AI chatbots.

In this episode, host Rana el Kaliouby and Duhigg dissect what's really happening when people confide in ChatGPT and why real connection depends on reciprocity and vulnerability, two things AI can't offer.

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In the last year, Canva redefined itself from the ground up. Co-founder and Chief Product Officer Cameron Adams joins Rapid Response live from the Cannes Lions festival to explain why the so-called SaaSpocalypse never kept him up at night, how Canva shifted from a design company to an AI company without losing what made it great, and why being only 1% of the way there is actually the most exciting place to be. Adams also shares the specific steps anyone can take to get real impact from AI tools rather than just falling down the rabbit hole, and makes the case that in a world of commoditized models, your organization's unfair advantage is the only thing that matters.

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AI's promise is real. But the challenge to realizing its value isn't technology—it's people. Rana el Kaliouby joins WorkLab's Molly Wood to explore what can stall progress. The conversation explores how emotional intelligence, empathy, and communication are essential for hybrid human–AI teams to thrive. Rana makes the case that leaders must foster trust and readiness, rethink workflows, and keep humans at the center to unlock AI's full potential and ensure sustainable adoption.

Learn more about Pioneers of AI:http://pioneersof.ai/

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