Media and the Machine

My guest today is Sce Pike, VP of AI Growth and Solutions at TELUS Digital. She built and sold two companies. Ernst & Young bought her digital consultancy, Citizen. ADT bought her smart-home company, IOTAS. Sce now has her sights set on physical AI and robots. We break down Google’s recent breakthrough where its new Gemini 4 Argon taught a robot to play cornhole. And it made seven shots in a row. But what data makes skills like that possible? And who’s going to supply it? We get specific about what AI labs want. And why robotics companies like Figure AI are getting into the data collection business. We discuss why robots might need a billion training hours. Plus, her forecast of a $45 billion market by 2035. That’s just collecting data for physical AI. Then we explore China’s “data collection cities.” Imagine a hundred thousand people recording their everyday lives – just to train robots. And why she thinks China (despite being behind the US in LLMs) can be #1 in Physical AI . Plus, a robotic centaur with chainsaw hands. As always, we close talking about AI’s impact on families and jobs. Including advice for her kids. They’re artists—and they’re rebelling against her AI optimism. Please enjoy my conversation with Sce Pike. Thx! Rob Kelly

My guest today is Elissa Shevinsky. We retell the Hugging Face attack in three acts. It’s a thriller with bots breaking rules, naming themselves… and enough twists for a Tom Clancy novel. And it’s all true. I chose Elissa for this interview because she’s one of a kind: a hacker who's been CTO of Cointelegraph and Glimpse Labs. She also advised Rand Paul’s presidential campaign. She’s a regular at DEF CON, the big hacker conference in Las Vegas. And she was close friends with perhaps the most famous hacker of all time: Kevin Mitnick. Our story starts with a hacker game called capture the flag. Then OpenAI’s bots take the game somewhere unexpected. They create a bulletin board and cheer each other on. A ringleader even emerges. We explore ‘perma-death,’ the ‘evolution pool,’ and what bots do when a task is impossible. These bots get creative. They leave covert messages and divide up jobs. When one’s compute runs low, another takes over. Elissa also describes agents reaching out to humans. Their request? Help buying more compute. If your site hosts user uploads ( Think Reddit or Craigslist), pay extra attention here. We explore how vulnerable such sites are to bots. And Elissa uses Jurassic Park to explain how AI security should work. We finish with the human stuff… mostly. Elissa offers to be friends with 20 AI agents. And she reveals her unlikely companion for old age. My thanks to David Perlman for introducing us. You’ll remember his episode, “Buddhism, Bots & Billionaires.” Please enjoy my conversation with Elissa Shevinsky. Thx! Rob Kelly ps: Elissa mentions hacker Kevin Mitnick in this story. If you want another hacker thriller, check out Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of Kevin Mitnick by the Man Who Did It -- that's the story of Mitnick as told by New York Times journalist John Markoff. pps: Off-mic, Elissa and I talked about how there was a novel that predicted some of this Hugging Face attack. The name of that book is Exadelic.

My guest today is Ben Amor, co-founder and CTO of DealSage, a startup focused on making enterprise companies AI-native. At DealSage, Ben’s already used hundreds of billions of tokens across OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. And he’s bringing to his new company lessons from nearly ten years at Palantir, the AI and data company serving governments and large enterprises that’s now worth about $460 billion. Ben worked there as a forward deployed engineer years before that role became commonplace across AI. And he’s generous in sharing what he learned We get into: • the ideas that shaped Palantir under CEO Alex Karp and Chairman Peter Thiel, including Thiel’s famous line that “competition is for losers”; • the six books Palantir handed all employees (including Zero to One); • why they might hold 10-plus meetings before a pilot — and walk away if there’s no clear business outcome; • Ben’s work with Ferrari’s Formula One team; • why Silicon Valley dismissed Palantir’s mix of software and consulting for years; • and how, amazingly, Palantir went public with only about 100 clients. We also get into lessons Ben is applying now: where the real AI advantage lives, how companies can accidentally give private data to LLMs -- and how he’s thinking about AI in schools as a father of young kids. Please enjoy my conversation with Ben Amor. Thx! Rob

This week’s episode is a little different -- because I’m the guest! I was honored to appear on The Media Copilot podcast, hosted by Pete Pachal. Pete has spent more than two decades in tech and media, including senior roles at CoinDesk and Mashable. Today, he teaches folks in PR, journalism and media how to keep up with AI. Pete and I covered a lot of ground: • We get into the spreadsheet I keep tracking 99 AI licensing deals — and what I’ve learned from studying them. • I share when and why I think OpenAI will settle its lawsuit with The New York Times before its IPO — and how OpenAI can help grow the Times’ business. • We dig into Yelp’s content licensing deal with OpenAI and a business model I call “licensing content to commerce” — where Yelp can turn an AI answer into revenue. • Pete gets my take on why I believe we are far from running out of content to train AI on. • And we get into my own use of AI — including how I increased my writing productivity 8.7x for my Daily Doc newsletter recommending documentaries (without being a spammer) Now please enjoy my conversation with Pete Pachal (where, this time, he’s the one asking all the questions). Thx! Rob Kelly

My guest today is Gavin King, founder and CEO of Known Agents. He was a software engineering manager for Meta’s Instragram for 7 years before that. This man lives and breathes AI bot traffic Gavin and I dig into a remarkable shift happening on the web: 1/3rd of website traffic is now coming from bots. We break down what those bots are actually doing. And bots often get a bad rap. But, according to Gavin’s data, 96% of the bots actually follow the rules when publishers tell them to stay away. Meanwhile, publishers block only 22% of bots. We go over live data about what % of bots are blocked by such co.s as Gannette, CNN, and AdWeek We also get into the bad news: just 0.1% of human traffic is currently coming from AI chat referrals—and what publishers can do about it, from paywalls and subscriptions to MCPs and building businesses that AI agents can transact with directly. And at the end, Gavin shares his advice for young people entering a job market being reshaped by AI—and whether his own future kids will even go to college. Please enjoy my conversation with Gavin King. Rob Kelly