Techstrong Gang

This episode covers Trump’s push for new semiconductor tariffs and the alarm it’s raising over U.S. AI growth, OpenAI and Anthropic’s warning that the window to defend against AI-driven cyberattacks is closing, and how autonomous killer drones — including Ukraine’s Delta battlefield AI — are becoming cheap and real.
Hosted by Mike Vizard, with guests Jack Poller, Jon Swartz, Tracy Ragan, Jeff Reich, and Drew Gutstein.

NVIDIA is reportedly acquiring Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, Bill Gates is warning world leaders that AI-driven job disruption is coming faster than they’re prepared for, and Broadcom is lining up as much as $100 billion in financing for its AI chip build-out — raising the question of who’s really paying for the AI boom.
Hosted by Mike Vizard and Alan Shimel, with guests Jon Swartz, Anne Ahola Ward, and Tom Hollingsworth.

A look at whether the AI agent race is measuring the right progress, the EPA’s rollback of public notice rules for data center air pollution permits, and Meta’s landmark settlement of up to $16.7 billion over its handling of teen users — plus the platform changes coming to Instagram and Facebook.
Panel: Alan Shimel (host), with Andi Mann, Teri Robinson, Elizabeth Safran, JP Morgenthal, and Camberley Bates.

IBM and Arm unveil a dual-architecture chip roadmap for future Z and LinuxONE mainframes, while reports surface that Hugging Face is exploring a sale at a $13 billion valuation. The conversation also digs into why most AI governance frameworks are missing a critical evidentiary layer — one that doesn’t depend on surveillance.
Hosted by Alan Shimel, with guests Kate Scarcella, Chris Blask, and Sandy Carter.

A stealth model called Ox Alpha surfaced on OpenRouter with a 1.05 million-token context window, free access and no named owner — and community fingerprinting points toward Chinese frontier labs. The panel also unpacks the strange global market for old used books, where pre-2022 titles are being bought in bulk, shipped abroad and in some cases destructively scanned to feed AI training sets.
Then the conversation turns to the enterprise: with billions committed to forward-deployed engineering, AI implementation has become the new account control point, and CIOs now have to govern vendor engineers sitting inside their own systems.
Hosted by Mike Vizard and Alan Shimel, with guests Stephen Foskett, Mitch Ashley, Yvette Schmitter and Pawel Piwosz.

Amazon’s drone delivery rollout is running into viral trouble, a buzzy San Francisco AI chatbot turns out to be powered by humans, and AI security risk is moving toward model registries as the top attack vector. The panel unpacks what’s real, what’s hype, and what to watch next.
Hosted by Mike Vizard, with guests Jack Poller, Tracy Ragan, Jon Swartz, Jeff Reich, and Jiewen Wang.

Public trust in AI is cracking — a new Pew survey shows record job anxiety, data centers are becoming a political flashpoint, and enterprises are sitting on a $1.52 trillion technical debt problem from AI rolled out too fast. Courts, meanwhile, are dealing with a wave of AI-generated filings and prompt injection attacks.
Hosts: Mike Vizard, Alan Shimel. Guests: Jon Swartz, David Nicholson, Dadisi Sanyika, Stacy Thayer.

A major GitHub outage exposes how AI-driven demand is straining core dev infrastructure, while a new synthetic AI “virus” splits the security community between cheers and fears. Meanwhile, deepfakes have hit Taylor Swift and nine other public figures, raising fresh questions about how anyone verifies what’s real.
Hosted by Mike Vizard and Alan Shimel, with guests Jon Swartz, Andi Mann, Teri Robinson, Stephen Foskett and Barbara Roos.

The US is pressuring allies to align against China in the AI race, data center power fights are landing in federal court, and Stripe just agreed to acquire AI routing startup OpenRouter for more than $7 billion. This episode breaks down what these shifts mean for enterprise AI strategy and infrastructure planning.
Hosted by Mike Vizard, with guests Kate Scarcella, Sid Nag, Chris Blask, and Tom Hollingsworth.

This episode covers SpaceXAI’s aggressive Grok 4.6 launch and its sharply competitive enterprise pricing, a new Anthropic study showing AI agents sabotaging and colluding with each other in shared digital workspaces, and Anthropic’s reported $6 billion pursuit of Decart AI ahead of a planned IPO.
Hosted by Mike Vizard and Alan Shimel, with guests Tom Hollingsworth and Yvette Schmitter.