In this episode, Illia Polosukhin, a co-author of the seminal "Attention Is All You Need" paper and co-founder of Near AI, joins us to discuss his vision for building private, decentralized, and user-owned AI. Illia shares his unique journey from developing the Transformer architecture at Google to building the NEAR Protocol blockchain to solve global paymen ... Show More
Oct 7
Recurrence and Attention for Long-Context Transformers with Jacob Buckman - #750
Today, we're joined by Jacob Buckman, co-founder and CEO of Manifest AI to discuss achieving long context in transformers. We discuss the bottlenecks of scaling context length and recent techniques to overcome them, including windowed attention, grouped query attention, and laten ... Show More
57m 23s
Sep 23
Inside Nano Banana 🍌 and the Future of Vision-Language Models with Oliver Wang - #748
Today, we’re joined by Oliver Wang, principal scientist at Google DeepMind and tech lead for Gemini 2.5 Flash Image—better known by its code name, “Nano Banana.” We dive into the development and capabilities of this newly released frontier vision-language model, beginning with th ... Show More
1h 3m
Sep 16
Is It Time to Rethink LLM Pre-Training? with Aditi Raghunathan - #747
Today, we're joined by Aditi Raghunathan, assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University, to discuss the limitations of LLMs and how we can build more adaptable and creative models. We dig into her ICML 2025 Outstanding Paper Award winner, “Roll the dice & look before you leap ... Show More
58m 26s
Jul 2024
Sal Khan, Founder and CEO of Khan Academy
Sal Khan, founder and CEO of Khan Academy, joins Behind the Tech to discuss his journey from a curious child fascinated by science and technology to a global leader in education innovation. Sal shares his early inspirations that led him to pursue a career in engineering and a deg ... Show More
1h 12m
Sep 8
Sal Khan is hopeful that AI won't destroy education
This is Hank Green, cofounder of Complexly. You might remember last year when I turned the tables on Nilay and interviewed him on his own show. That was a ton of fun, and it was so much fun that they’ve brought me back again. This time, I’m stepping in for Nilay to host the next ... Show More
1h 3m
Nov 2024
Episode 300: Benjamin Riley
Send us a textEpisode 300: Navigating AI and Human Cognition
In this special 300th episode of My EdTech Life, I sit down with Benjamin Riley, founder of Cognitive Resonance, to explore the intersection of AI and human cognition in education. We discuss everything from the hype su ... Show More
57m 32s
Sep 2024
Education in the Age of AI
The role of AI in the classroom is evolving rapidly. When students and teachers embrace this technology, it has the ability to democratize access to education through programs like IBM SkillsBuild. In this episode of Smart Talks with IBM, Dr. Laurie Santos, host of Pushkin’s The ... Show More
41m 59s