AI is a Joke, with Joel Beasley

This is definitely the funniest episode of my podcast: Software-engineer-turned-comedian Joel Beasley explains how he uses A.I. to quantify and optimize his comedy, with a lot of laughs along the way.

Joel:

• Two decades of experience as a software developer, including several CTO positions.

• Hosts the popular "Modern CTO Podcast", a top half-percent podcast globally.

• Most recently, a comedian who took off professionally as the opening act for comedy big-wig Jeff Allen on a US-wide tour.

Today's episode should be accessible — and hilarious! — to any interested listener.

The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.

Why 95% of AI Projects Fail and How to Be the 5% with Jon Krohn

95% of AI projects fail.

Here’s how to be the 5%.

On the latest episode of the Signal to Noise Podcast, I sat down with Michael Newcomer to unpack:

• Why AI capabilities are doubling every seven months

• How to identify and prioritize high-ROI AI projects

• The #1 trait of a great data scientist

… and much more!

If you're leading AI adoption or just trying to stay sane while doing it, this one's essential.

Creative Machines: AI in Music and Art, with Prof. Maya Ackerman

Humans haven't been able to distinguish Mozart from machine since the 1980s... why is it that we're only now freaking out about A.I. creativity? Prof. Maya Ackerman explains in today's episode!

More on Maya:

• Associate professor of computer science and engineering at Santa Clara University, where she specializes in generative A.I. research, a field she’s been immersed in for decades.

• Author of the brand-new book "Creative Machines: A.I., Art & Us".

• Co-founder and CEO of lyric- and music-generation startup WaveAI.

• Holds a PhD in computer science from the University of Waterloo.

Today's episode should be accessible — and fascinating! — to any interested listener.

The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.

Multi-Agent Human Societies, with Dr. Vijoy Pandey

AI agents will collaborate with us and each other to solve humanity’s biggest challenges. BUT a major hurdle toward this elysian future is being able to TRUST agents. In today's episode, Dr. Vijoy Pandey reveals solutions.

More on Vijoy:

• Brilliantly thoughtful and well-spoken engineering researcher who heads Outshift, a major tech incubator inside of Cisco.

• Focused on the Internet of Agents (specifically, AGNTCY | A Linux Foundation Project) and the Quantum Internet.

• Prior to Cisco, held engineering leadership roles (including CTO roles) at Google, IBM, Nortel Networks and others.

• Holds a PhD in Computer Science from University of California, Davis.

Dr. Pandey explains complex concepts so clearly and eloquently that anyone interested in AI or the future should enjoy today's episode.

The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.

Mixture-of-Experts and State-Space Models on Edge Devices, with Tyler Cox and Shirish Gupta

Mixture-of-experts models? State-space models? Easily running these cutting-edge LLM approaches on any device? In today's episode, deep experts Shirish and Tyler masterfully reveal all.

Shirish Gupta:

• Returns to my podcast for the third time this year!

• Director of A.I. Product Management at Dell Technologies, where he's been for over 20 years!

• Holds a Master's in Engineering from the University of Maryland.

Tyler Cox:

• Distinguished Engineer at Dell in the Client Solutions Group CTO.

• Leads on-device A.I. innovation programs across a wide range of products, including A.I. PCs, workstations, and edge computing platforms.

• Holds a Master's in Software Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin.

Today's episode will be particularly appealing to hands-on practitioners (e.g., data scientists, AI/ML engineers, software developers) as well as anyone who could benefit from considering shifting A.I. workloads from the cloud to local devices.

The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.

Frontier AI Agents for Data Science, with Sphinx’s Rohan Kodialam (Copy)

Rohan Kodialam has raised $9.5m to have A.I. agents work alongside you in Jupyter Notebooks, working as fluently with data as ChatGPT does with language. Hear all about Sphinx in today's episode!

More on Rohan:

• Founder/CEO of Sphinx.ai — you can check out their free tier right now.

• Previously head of A.I. development in the data strategies group of Citadel.

• Holds an M.Eng. in A.I. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Rohan is an exceptional speaker covering a fascinating topic so anyone might enjoy listening in but this episode will be particularly appealing to folks who work hands-on with data such as data scientists and analysts.

This episode was filmed live at Bessemer Venture Partners — thanks to Bhavik Nagda and Charles Birnbaum for hosting us! Videography by Eliana Alvarez Martinez.

The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.

Global Issues Accelerated by AI (with Solutions), feat. Stephanie Hare

Exciting day: Today's episode with tech researcher, broadcaster and author Dr Stephanie Hare is our first with video on Spotify! Enjoy our discussion on A.I. ethics with a globally renowned expert on the topic.

More on Dr. Hare:

• Co-presents the show “Artificial Intelligence: Decoded” on BBC television and contributes to the BBC World Service.

• Her first book, "Technology Is Not Neutral: A Short Guide to Technology Ethics", was named a Financial Times Best Technology Book of summer 2022.

• Her writing has featured in The Washington Post, The Guardian, the Harvard Business Review and many more prestigious venues.

• Worked at Accenture, Palantir Technologies and Oxford Analytica.

• Held the Alistair Horne Visiting Fellowship at St Antony's College, University of Oxford.

• Holds a PhD from the The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

Today's episode is accessible to any interested listener; no particular expert background is required.

The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.

Guest Co-Host of Last Week in A.I., Episode #222

The only podcast I listen to is "Last Week in AI". I was therefore delighted to return as co-host of the weekly news show in the most recent episode, #222. In an action-packed episode, we covered:

• OpenAI's Sora 2 for text-to-video generation.

• Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4.5 (with its particular strengths in coding and agentic tasks).

• Meta's new AI-video creation feature and its new "Meta AI" app.

• A number of exciting new academic papers.

• California’s SB 53, the "Transparency in Frontier AI Act", has become law, requiring large AI companies to disclose safety and security processes, while SB 942 mandates AI detection tools for user-generated content.

• And much more... including battles over intellectual property, startup funding, and the integration of AI into everyday tools and services like Microsoft’s AI agents for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

Thanks again Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris for having me on!

See here for free access to the full 90-minute episode.

Future-Proofing Your Career in the AI Era, feat. Sheamus McGovern

Feel like A.I. is transforming your role so rapidly you can't keep up? Fear no more! Today, Sheamus McGovern — founder of the world's biggest data-science conference — has solutions for you.

More on Sheamus:

• Ten years ago founded the world-leading Open Data Science Conference (ODSC) — don't miss ODSC AI West in San Francisco next week!

• Also serves as Venture Partner and Head of A.I. at Cortical Ventures.

• Prior to ODSC, was a data engineer, software architect and A.I. expert., particularly in finance, including quant hedge funds.

• Holds an electrical engineering degree from Northeastern University and a graduate computer science degree from Boston University.

Today's episode is accessible to anyone keen to thrive in the A.I. era. Hands-on practitioners like data scientists, software developers and A.I. engineers will find it particularly valuable.

The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.

Should You Build or Buy Your AI Solution? With Larissa Schneider

Larissa Schneider's startup Unframe AI has raised $50m to bring A.I. solutions to businesses of all sizes. In today's wildly informative episode, she reveals exactly when you should build versus buy A.I.

More on Larissa:

• Co-Founder and COO of Unframe, leading global strategy and operations.

• Decade of experience in enterprise tech, having driven strategic growth and partnerships for fast-scaling organizations through IPO and M&A.

Today's episode is an exceptional one that you shouldn't miss! Whatever your role, if you are interested in building commercially successful A.I. systems, you will be delighted you did.

The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.

Boost Your Profits with Mathematical Optimization, feat. Jerry Yurchisin

Mathematical Optimization (unlike A.I., Machine Learning or Statistics!) is *uniquely* capable of solving real-world problems like maximizing profit. In today's episode, guru Jerome Yurchisin explains how.

More on Jerry:

• Over a decade of experience in operations research and data science.

• Specializes in enhancing commercial/industrial decision-making.

• Before joining Gurobi Optimization, worked in consulting (OnLocation and Booz Allen Hamilton).

• Prior to that, taught math at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Today's episode will be particularly appealing to hands-on practitioners but, leveraging his extensive education background, Jerry excels at explaining complex topics so anyone looking to understand how Mathematical Optimization can make your business more profitable should listen in.

The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.

In Case You Missed It in September 2025

The guests we had on my show in September were *extra* extraordinary. ICYMI, today's episode highlights the best parts of my convos with them:

1. Aurélien Géron, the bestselling ML author of all time, on why AGI may resist human control.

2. Shirish Gupta and Ishan Shah on how to make an A.I. hardware purchase that will still be relevant five years from now.

3. Renowned University of Oxford economics professor Carl Benedikt Frey on whether A.I. could allow for a billion-dollar company with a single employee.

4. David Loker on how CodeRabbit makes A.I. code-reviews more secure than with humans alone.

5. Graph guru Amy Hodler on the future of graph networks, including causal and multimodal functionality.

The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.

Dragon Hatchling: The Missing Link Between Transformers and the Brain, with Adrian Kosowski

What do dragons, macarons and potato latkes have in common? They've sparked a revolutionary model that's poised to replace the Transformer. Today, Adrian Kosowski reveals this big breakthrough.

Adrian:

• Chief Scientific Officer and co-founder of Pathway.

• Theoretical computer scientist, quantum physicist and mathematician.

• Earned his PhD at 20 years old and went on to serve as a tenured researcher at Inria at 23 and associate professor at École Polytechnique.

• Has authored more than 100 scientific papers spanning graph algorithms, distributed systems, quantum information and A.I.

In today's highly technical episode, Adrian demonstrates how the Pathway team have brought devised the Baby Dragon Hatching (BDH) architecture, thereby allowing attention in LLMs to function more like the way the biological brain functions. This is revolutionary because (relative to the today-ubiquitous Transformer architecture) BDH allows:

• Reasoning to be generalized across more complex and extended reasoning patterns, approximating a more human-like approach to problem-solving.

• Saving time/compute/money through sparse activation at inference time.

• Allowing for more interpretability.

The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.

Automating Code Review with AI, feat. CodeRabbit’s David Loker

Today, enjoy hearing from the super-intelligent engineer David Loker on how A.I. transforming software development by dramatically accelerating code reviews and automatically improving code bases. It's a great one!

(He also, like me, is a big fan of GPT-5... hear why later in the episode.)

More on David:

• Director of A.I. at CodeRabbit (who've raised $88m in venture capital including a $60m Series B a couple weeks ago, congrats!)

• Previously Lead Data Scientist, ML Engineer and Senior Software Engineer at firms like Netflix and Amazon.

• Holds a Master of Mathematics in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo.

Today's episode will be particularly appealing to software developers and other hands-on practitioners (data scientists, ML engineers, etc.) but David is an outstanding communicator of complex info so any interested listener will enjoy it.

The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.

LLMs, Agentic AI & Blackmail with Jon Krohn

Name a podcast host more charismatic than Modern CTO's Joel Beasley! I appeared on his show to detail how Agentic A.I. is transforming enterprises and was laughing all the way through.

In a bit more detail, we discussed:

• The difference between LLMs and Agentic A.I.

• How businesses can get an ROI from A.I.

• Why understanding AI misalignment is crucial for future implementations.

• My new consulting firm, Y Carrot, which specializes in creating and deploying bespoke A.I. software for enterprises.

Listen to or watch the full episode here: moderncto.io/jon-krohn-2/

Graph Algorithms, GraphRAG and Causal Graphs, with Graph Guru Amy Hodler

For *years*, I'd been trying to get Amy Hodler on my show. Finally she's here! A graph-network guru, Amy fills us in on graph algorithms and cutting-edge applications like GraphRAG and Causal Graphs. Enjoy!

More on Amy:

• Graph-tech evangelist and co-author of O'Reilly books on Graph Algorithms and Knowledge Graphs.

• Decades of experience in emerging tech at companies like HP, Hitachi, Neo4j, and Cray.

• Founder of GraphGeeks.org, a community for people passionate about graphs and connected data.

Today's episode will probably appeal most to hands-on data/AI practitioners but Amy is such a tremendous communicator that anyone who wants to know the latest on graph networks (and their powerful real-world use-cases!) will enjoy it.

The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.

AI for Manufacturing and Industry, with Hugo Dozois-Caouette

Today's episode is all about the *vast* opportunities for applying A.I. to industrial applications such as manufacturing. Our guide is Hugo Dozois-Caouette, co-founder and CTO of MaintainX.

Hugo:

• Co-founded MaintainX, a CMMS ("Computerized Maintenance Management System") back in 2018, steering the firm to tremendous success, including a recent $2.5 billion valuation and a total of over $250m in venture capital raised.

• Previously served as Lead Software Engineer at Autodesk and Fujitsu.

• Holds a B.Eng. in Computer Engineering from the Université de Sherbrooke in Quebec.

Today's episode is mostly high-level and so should be fascinating to any listener. I was blown away by the data volumes created by manufacturing and how untapped A.I. applications are there.

The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.

In Case You Missed It in August 2025

ICYMI, today's episode provides the top moments from conversations I had with my podcast guests in August. Interestingly, in August all of these episodes took off on YouTube in an unprecedented way:

1. Julien Launay, co-founder and CEO of the wildly successful Adaptive ML, explains how LLMs are trained including the pre-training and the increasingly critical post-training phases.

2. Michelle Yi provides her brilliant take on shocking misalignment research from Anthropic, which showed that A.I. agents will frequently resort to blackmailing humans when its goals are threatened.

3. Kirill Eremenko, CEO of the learning platform SuperDataScience, describes what it takes to become an A.I. Engineer.

4. And Akshay Agrawal who explains how his rapidly-adopted marimo notebook can be converted into a full-blown, click-and-point web app in *seconds*.

The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.

Hopes and Fears of AGI, with All-Time Bestselling ML Author Aurélien Géron

Aurélien Géron is the best-selling author of ML books of all time. Today's episode is his first interview in a *decade*... and it's a stunner! He reveals his next book as well as his deep thoughts on AGI.

Aurélien:

• Is the author of O'Reilly's "Hands-On Machine Learning" series of books. The fourth edition in the series will be on bookshelves in the coming months.

• Was Co-Founder and CTO of Wifirst, an exceptionally successful French tech company.

• Was previously a product manager at Google.

• Holds an MEng in Computer Science from AgroParisTech.

The start of today's episode (on Aurélien's books) may appeal primarily to hands-on practitioners like data scientists and software developers. The bulk of the episode, however, will appeal to anyone looking to understand how Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will overhaul work, life and society for humans.

The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.

8 Steps to Becoming an AI Engineer, with Kirill Eremenko

The #1 fastest-growing role in many countries (including the US) is A.I. Engineer. Want to become one? ...or add the skillset into your existing role? Today, Kirill Eremenko provides an 8-step roadmap!

Many of you will already know Kirill:

• Founder and CEO of SuperDataScience.com, the eponymous e-learning platform.

• Founded the SuperDataScience Podcast nine years ago and hosted the show until he passed me the reins five years ago.

• With over 3 million students, he’s the most popular data science and A.I. instructor on Udemy.

• He holds a Master’s from The University of Queensland in Australia and a Bachelor’s in Applied Physics and Mathematics from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.

Today's episode will be of primary interest to hands-on practitioners like data scientists and software developers.

The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.