If you follow me on Substack or LinkedIn, you may already know that I dropped a new trailer over the weekend for “The AI Artifacts Podcast,” a show that I’m going to co-host with my old friend and former colleague Sarah Luger (PhD). Season 1’s first episode will arrive for Halloween, featuring an intro to what we care about. We’ll also preview the types of topics we’ll get into through a series of interviews with founders, technical experts, and analysts who work in or around AI.
Let’s face it, though, AI is everywhere at the moment, so that bar may be deceptively low. But that’s the opportunity we saw to capture a range of discussions about AI’s reach and capabilities. When I walked across the TechCrunch Disrupt show floor in September, it was nearly impossible to look down an aisle and not see startups that were marketing the fact that they use (or claim to use) AI as a core part of what they do. There are healthcare applications, legal services, enterprise SaaS offerings of all shapes and sizes, agtech use cases, communications platforms, and many others.
Sarah and I knew we wanted to do something in a podcast format to learn more about what’s happening, but we also wanted to scope out our approach. For me, the first question for the premise was simple: “Why now, and what is fueling this current boom for AI across so many sectors?” Yes, the answer to that question starts out plainly enough. Large language models have reached the point of being useful for a wide array of general tasks. But when are they the best alternatives? What choices are being made as they are deployed? And in work contexts, what are they doing to change the nature of the professional humans in the loop?
That’s where we want to take the new podcast, above all we want to learn more about the experiences our guests are having as they deploy and engage with AI and machine learning.
I first got into journalism professionally about 20 years ago, and my reasons were pretty simple. It’s a great excuse to ask strangers for random information and get smarter about topics that you want to know more about. Creating artifacts in the form of articles, interviews, newsletters, websites, and podcasts to share those learnings with others has been most of my life’s work. Storytelling and editing, after all, force you to grapple with what you know and challenge assumptions that might otherwise go unchecked.
That brings us to today. We’re going to have a lot of fun doing this podcast, but it’s ultimately about getting a better idea about where things are going. Visit AIArtifacts.net to catch every episode and let us know what you think.