The Times Tech Podcast

Danny and Katie look at the implications for Tech with the return of President-elect Donald Trump to the Whitehouse. And media analyst, Renée DiResta joins Danny and Katie to talk about how the new digital media has changed politics - and what you can do to be heard. 

If we made robots think more like animals, how clever could they be? This week we hear from David Rajan, CEO of Opteran, a pioneering AI company which is reverse engineering biological brains to create a "radical new scientific approach to doing AI". And, Danny, the cat and the Tesla.

Satya Nadella is only the third boss in the tech giant's 50 year history, but he has pivoted Microsoft towards accelerating technology, and forging partnerships with leading companies including OpenAI. On a whistle-stop AI tour of the world and in his only UK interview this year - this exclusive conversation with Satya Nadella covers the dangers, pitfalls and growth of AI. What better time to sit down with the Microsoft supremo than almost two years after the public launch of ChatGPT? He tells Katie that his major worry is that nations miss the opportunity to take advantage of AI and technological innovation for economic growth "ultimately the benefits of it being much more broad spread are, I think... the real dream."

Katie and Danny are joined by Al Gore for big thoughts on how to take on the big challenges. Outside of AI, there is one area that is still getting a good amount of venture capital dollars and that's tackling climate change. But what's the right way to invest and will it work? Who decides the way forward, the investors, the tech giants or the politicians? And who better to answer these questions than Al Gore, former US Vice-President and now guru to climate campaigners worldwide. He's our guest this week. Follow us now for more big interviews coming up.

This week - money, invention and regulation as we delve deep into the mind of Vlad Tenev, the co-founder and CEO of Robinhood, a hugely influential App designed in their words to “democratise finance”. And did Danny cleverly predict in our first episode, that Sir Demis Hassabis would indeed win a Nobel Prize?

Danny joins Katie in London for the Times Tech Summit, where the co-founder and boss of Google DeepMind Sir Demis Hassabis sets out his startling view that AI has the potential "to cure all diseases" and could 'have general human cognitive abilities within ten years." But fundamentally - do we really understand what AI is? Professor Neil Lawrence, the inaugural DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning at Cambridge University, Faculty AI CEO, Marc Warner, and Naila Murray, Director of AI Research at Meta share their views. And Danny and Katie ponder whether AI mania could be more about money than the mind?