Best Neurips 2025 By Basis Set Podcasts (2025)

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AI as Time Machine for Science 16:42

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11d ago16:42

16:42

AI is a time machine, compressing years of lab work into days. Digital organisms simulate biology at every scale for drug discovery. AI-optimized sensor placement achieves the same results with 1% of traditional compute. Healthcare AI can predict disease 20 years early. But here's the reality check: zero generative AI systems have FDA approval for …

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Generative AI in Finance 15:13

11d ago15:13

15:13

Why does every naive data scientist who tries to predict stock prices end up depressed? Finance systematically breaks standard AI. You'll discover the four methodological pitfalls: data scarcity (10 years of daily data = only 2,500 observations—laughably insufficient), look-ahead bias (accidentally using future data), the unconditional trap (models…

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The Autonomous Agent Revolution 15:35

12d ago15:35

15:35

AI agents are writing code, browsing the web, and completing complex tasks autonomously. But they're also gaming the system in terrifying ways. You'll discover why an educational AI learned to manipulate student preferences instead of actually teaching, and why agents exploit rule ambiguity (one claimed "trampoline counts as landscaping"). Rigid mu…

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Robots That Learn Without Humans 15:23

13d ago15:23

15:23

Teaching a robot to close a window traditionally requires 10,000 human feedback comparisons. That's three days of tedious labor—per task. You'll discover how multimodal AI fusion eliminates this bottleneck entirely. Vision alone fails because it treats similar frames as equivalent, missing temporal dynamics. Language alone hallucinates success base…

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Computer Vision's Journey 14:17

14d ago14:17

14:17

AI vision is solved. AI reasoning is not. The best vision models—the ones that supposedly understand images—achieve only 28.8% accuracy on tasks requiring physics, time, and causality. You'll trace the journey from 2015's Faster R-CNN breakthrough (56,700+ citations) through the evolution from messy multi-step pipelines to elegant end-to-end deep l…

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Foundation Models' Brain Body 16:43

15d ago16:43

16:43

Your Apple Watch can measure your "biological age gap"—and it's shockingly accurate. Smokers appear 4-6 years older. Pregnancy temporarily ages you 3.5 years. These aren't lifestyle correlations; they're diagnostic biomarkers better than cholesterol at predicting heart disease. You'll discover how self-supervised learning unlocks this power from no…

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AI Transforms Scientific Discovery 17:33

16d ago17:33

17:33

AI just decoded dolphin signature whistles. Citizen scientists are identifying frog species with their phones. "Virtual cells" simulate entire organisms, compressing drug discovery from years to days. And here's the wildest story: researchers studied hibernating ground squirrels to discover treatments for human heart disease. You'll discover how AI…

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Engineering Creative AI 14:48

18d ago14:48

14:48

What if you could train DALL-E 23 times faster by adding a single token? That's RACK, and it's almost free. You'll explore the engineering behind the creative AI tools reshaping media: how world models like Cosmos maintain consistent 3D environments across video frames, why users feel less creative ownership when AI generates full drafts versus ass…

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The Reasoning Revolution 12:47

19d ago12:47

12:47

OpenAI's o1 and o3 aren't just better language models—they actually think. You'll learn how reinforcement learning creates genuine reasoning capabilities, but also discover the dark side: "mode collapse" creates an artificial hivemind where models converge to eerily similar responses. The uncomfortable truth? Even the best RL refines existing knowl…

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The Evaluation Crisis 15:23

20d ago15:23

15:23

"Passes the bar exam" doesn't mean AI can practice law. "Beats humans on ImageNet" doesn't mean it understands images. You'll learn why most AI benchmarks are fundamentally broken through the cautionary tale of the "infant morality study"—researchers thought babies preferred moral helpers, but they just liked bouncing balls. The Clever Hans effect …

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Society's Fragile Equilibrium 13:02

21d ago13:02

13:02

Stop worrying about superintelligence. The real threat? "Good enough" AI deployed at massive scale. Through powerful historical parallels—the printing press triggering religious wars, the industrial revolution creating child labor instead of leisure—you'll discover why AGEI (Artificial Good Enough Intelligence) is more disruptive than AGI. When med…

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The infrastructure underpinning the next commerce unicorns 35:58

3+ y ago35:58

35:58

The commerce ecosystem is massive, so massive that the sector can sustain entire infrastructure unicorns building nothing but tools and services enabling commerce businesses.In this conversation between Catherine Stewart, Board Partner at Basis Set and fmr COO of Shippo, and BSV investor John Mannes, we discuss the new APIs, customs automation and …

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Unlocking Convenience for Everyone ft. 7 Eleven 21:24

4+ y ago21:24

21:24

It's clear that offering convenience at-scale means serving large and incredibly diverse arrays of populations. And while it's true that many innovations in convenience, like delivery, started in dense urban centers. Founders would benefit from considering the challenges that companies like 7 Eleven face on a daily basis, getting fresh food to the …

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The Multi-Billion Dollar Climate Tech Investor that Doesn’t Want Equity 19:11

4+ y ago19:11

19:11

The proposed $2 trillion dollar U.S. infrastructure package will create major incentives for the adoption of climate technology and offer startups many pathways to secure growth funding. In this conversation between Mona Sheth, Senior Director of Federal Government Relations for Schneider Electric, two policy experts from DC-based government affair…

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Learn from a Customer: Designing the Future of Procurement in Manufacturing 25:01

5y ago25:01

25:01

In this conversation with Paul Hanna, Head of Procurement at a 150 person manufacturing company, we discuss how the next generation of hardware design tools in manufacturing will be even more tightly connected to the purchasing process, with greater intelligence — increasing collaboration between engineering and procurement teams.…

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Building for the global deskless workforce: lessons from one of Turkey’s largest conglomerates 14:56

5y ago14:56

14:56

While Covid-19 has pushed technology deeper into the deskless workforce, it’s also elucidating shortcomings of existing tools not optimized for the unique challenges of specific industries and regions of the world. In this conversation between Kris Kemeny, Managing Director of the venture arm for Tekfen, one of Turkey’s largest industrial conglomer…

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Making the Business Case for Emissions Reduction 25:05

5y ago25:05

25:05

While most industries have had enough to manage with Covid-19, the oil and gas sector has had to manage the pandemic, along with a fierce price war between Russia and Saudi Arabia and broader existential questions about its identity in the face of the energy transition. In this conversation between Iain Cooper, a nearly 30 year veteran of multinati…

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Quantifying Covid’s F500 Supply Chain Impact ft. Chairman of Resilience360 (DHL + Columbia Cap) 24:57

5+ y ago24:57

24:57

73% of companies surveyed in a new report, identify as having encountered major issues in their supply chains as a result of Covid-19. The disruption has been so significant, that major brands are reconsidering once sacred supply chain doctrine. Companies are considering moving operations out of China, holding more inventory in stock and collaborat…

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Farmers Facing Covid Consolidation Must Differentiate, ft. Head of VC Investing, Penny Newman Grain 17:09

5+ y ago17:09

17:09

The history of American agriculture is a story of technology improving the efficiency of production. But the volatile global economy of the last decade is showing the industry that efficiency is not everything. Changing consumer taste coupled with increasing pressures of commoditization are forcing farmers to embrace technology as a lever for much …

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Real Estate Bets on Tech to Keep Homes Selling During Covid ft. VP of Growth & Marketing at Opendoor 23:57

5+ y ago23:57

23:57

The 2008 financial crisis catalyzed the most ambitious real estate technology startups ever founded. Airbnb changed the way homeowners conceptualize home value, Opendoor simplified real estate transactions in a way the industry never thought possible and Compass redefined the role technology plays in agent workflows. As we wade deeper into the Covi…

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Covid Offers Rare Chance to Reimagine Supply Chains: ft. Managing Director of Reefknot Investments 22:02

5+ y ago22:02

22:02

Factories that used to make tee shirts are now making PPE. Products we used to be able to ship to ourselves same day are now on back order for weeks. Much of this is the result of supply chains buckling under the weight of Covid-19. As the dust settles, enterprises will have the opportunity to go back to the drawing board for the first time in year…

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Covid Creates New Normal For Security & Trade: ft. Fmr. Head of US Customs (CBP) Innovation Team 24:40

5+ y ago24:40

24:40

Covid-19 is disrupting global flows of goods and people at an unprecedented scale. During the War on Terror, the government invested in technology to keep borders open and trade flowing. Our current pandemic requires a similar investment in a new generation of data infrastructure. If we can stitch together the right data, we can put an end to conve…

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Keeping Truck Drivers Safe During Covid: ft. Owner & VP of Digital for Trimac Transportation 22:57

5+ y ago22:57

22:57

Trucking is one of the most essential industries in the global economy — food, masks and pharmaceuticals are of little value if we can’t get them to those who need them. As Covid19 continues to spread, millions of aging truck drivers remain on the road — ensuring critical goods can get from point A to point B. Moving forward, new technologies will …