Machine Dreams

Kolawole Samuel Adebayo & Leah Stern
  • 0.0 (0)
  • Technology

Machine Dreams is a weekly dive into the real world of AI. Hosts Kolawole Samuel Adebayo and Leah Stern talk with the founders, researchers, investors, engineers, and stakeholders shaping the future of intelligent machines. These are unfiltered, human conversations about what’s working in AI, what isn’t, and what might reshape the world next. From databases and infrastructure to agents, regulation, the future of work, and more, Machine Dreams brings clarity to arguably the most important tech story of our time.

  1. 6d ago

    Cameras Used to Just Record Us. AI Is Changing That

    Cameras used to have one job: record what happened. Now they are starting to make sense of what they see while it happens, and that raises a bigger question. What does it mean for a camera to understand? This week on Machine Dreams, Sam Adebayo sits down with Prof. Ron Kimmel, Chief Scientific Officer at Lumana: https://www.lumana.ai/ and professor of computer science at the Technion. Ron has spent decades in computer vision, image processing, and 3D analysis, and he co-founded InVision, the company Intel acquired to form the foundation of its RealSense line. He is also the founder of the Technion's Geometric Image Processing Lab. Ron makes the case that AI has largely closed the classical open problems in computer vision, and that the remaining bottlenecks are often our own hardware choices. He points out that most cars today, including his Tesla, rely on a single forward-facing camera, when biological evolution settled on two eyes hundreds of millions of years ago. He also holds a firm line on what these systems can and cannot do. Cameras can flag patterns and correlations. They cannot find causality or predict the future, and he thinks we should stop asking them to. He also shares work from computational pathology, where AI reading tumor images has matched what was previously only possible through DNA analysis. The research was published in The Lancet Oncology, and it points to patients potentially avoiding radiation or chemical treatment. If you are a business leader wondering what your existing cameras could already tell you, or a builder trying to understand where machine vision actually stands, this conversation is a grounded place to start.

    Cameras Used to Just Record Us. AI Is Changing That

  2. Sep 23

    Your Employees Are Telling AI Your Company’s Secrets. This CEO Says It's Time to Bring AI In-House

    Why do so many enterprise AI projects get built and then quietly abandoned? That's the question at the heart of this conversation with Yevgeniy Vahlis, co-founder and CEO of Shakudo: https://www.shakudo.io/. Before founding the company in 2021, Yevgeniy built and led central AI teams at BMO and Borealis AI, and advised later-stage startups at Georgian. Everywhere he went, he saw the same pattern. Innovation labs produce impressive work that never reaches production. The experiments get shelved and the effort disappears. Shakudo exists to fix that, giving enterprises an end-to-end environment where a project goes from first idea to full deployment without ever leaving their own infrastructure. Their customers include Loblaw, Canada's largest retailer, plus organizations in finance, healthcare, defense, and energy. In this episode, Yevgeniy offers a working definition of sovereign AI: the people making the decisions should have full control over the AI their organization uses. He explains why that matters more than it first appears. Data used to be backward-looking. Now it sits underneath the actual decision-making of the business, and employees at every level are sending their hardest strategic questions to third-party models. Internal snapshots of a company's risks, opportunities, and competitive position are leaving the building through ordinary daily use. Yevgeniy covers what bringing AI in-house actually requires, the guardrails that still have to be in place, and the geopolitical angle most teams haven't thought about yet. He closes with a look five years ahead: AI running a large share of internal business processes, not replacing people but changing their jobs and raising the scale of what a team can do.

    Your Employees Are Telling AI Your Company’s Secrets. This CEO Says It's Time to Bring AI In-House

  3. Sep 16

    AI Is Learning to Predict Which Bridges Need Fixing Before It’s Too Late

    Bridges, roads and tunnels can last for generations, and engineers have spent decades photographing, inspecting and documenting how they change. In this episode of Machine Dreams, we sit down with Saar Dickman, CEO of Dynamic Infrastructure, to explore how AI can bring that history together, measure damage from photographs, and help engineers understand how critical infrastructure is deteriorating over time. Saar explains what AI can see in years of infrastructure data, how it could help engineers decide where repairs and funding are needed most, and why the technology could allow one person to oversee thousands of structures in the future. We also get into the bigger question of what happens when an experienced engineer and an AI disagree, and why Saar believes humans should ultimately remain behind the wheel. Learn more about Dynamic Infrastructure⁠ here: https://diglobal.tech/

    AI Is Learning to Predict Which Bridges Need Fixing Before It’s Too Late

  4. Sep 9

    FBI’s Former Lead Kidnapping Negotiator Chris Voss on AI, Negotiation, and the Human Advantage

    Chris Voss spent 24 years with the FBI and became its lead international kidnapping negotiator. Today, he is the bestselling author of Never Split the Difference and founder and CEO of The Black Swan Group. In this episode of Machine Dreams, we sit down with Chris to explore what happens when AI comes to the negotiating table. Can machines learn tactical empathy? Could AI eventually negotiate better than humans? And what advantages do people still have that machines may never be able to replicate? Chris explains why AI could become a powerful negotiation tool, why machines have an advantage when humans are tired or emotional, and why he still believes a human being at their best is unbeatable. We also discuss AI negotiating against AI, what he would teach a machine if he were training it to become a world-class negotiator, and how anyone can start using AI to prepare for real negotiations today.   Here is why you should listen to Chris; Chris Voss is a former FBI lead kidnapping negotiator, bestselling author of Never Split The Difference, and founder and CEO of The Black Swan Group; a negotiation, training, coaching, and consulting organization that teaches people how to achieve better outcomes in high-stakes conversations. Recognized globally as a leading authority on negotiation, Chris developed his approach through decades of experience in crisis negotiation. Today, he and The Black Swan Group apply those principles to business, sales, leadership, difficult conversations, and high-stakes communication through The Black Swan Method® and Tactical Empathy®. Never Split The Difference has introduced millions of readers around the world to Chris's negotiation methodology. Through The Black Swan Group, Chris and his team help people go beyond understanding the concepts in the book and develop negotiation as a practical, repeatable performance skill through training, coaching, practice, and live experiences. The Black Swan Group offers in-person negotiation training, live and self-paced online negotiation training, coaching, keynote speaking, and advanced negotiation experiences for business owners, leaders, sales professionals, and other professionals who want to become more effective dealmakers. Learn from Chris Voss and The Black Swan Group: Negotiation training and resources: https://www.blackswanltd.com/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=machinedreamspodcast In-person and live training: https://www.blackswanltd.com/live-events?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=machinedreamspodcast Online negotiation training: https://www.blackswanltd.com/online-negotiation-classes?utm_source=youtube&utm=social&utm_campaign=machinedreamspodcast

    FBI’s Former Lead Kidnapping Negotiator Chris Voss on AI, Negotiation, and the Human Advantage

  5. Sep 2

    Can We Build a Better Internet in the Age of AI?

    AI is becoming more powerful, but there is still a lot we don’t fully understand about how these systems work. In this episode of Machine Dreams, we sit down with Isvari Maranwe, founder and CEO of Yuvoice, to talk about AI as a “black box,” why humans still need to stay involved as the technology becomes more capable, and where companies may be moving too quickly. We also explore a different question: can we build a better internet in the age of AI? Isvari explains why she believes social media needs a reset and how Yuvoice is trying to build a humans-first platform that rewards real-world impact rather than simply attention, while using AI where it can genuinely help. Learn more about Yuvoice(https://yuvoice.com).

    Can We Build a Better Internet in the Age of AI?

  6. Aug 26

    Snowflake’s VP of AI on the Cost, Data, and Future of AI

    AI feels instant. Ask a question, get an answer. But behind every answer is data, computing power, a choice of models, and a real cost. In this episode of Machine Dreams, Snowflake VP of AI Baris Gultekin joins Sam Adebayo and Leah Stern to unpack what it actually takes to make AI work at scale, why there is no AI strategy without a data strategy, and why the biggest model isn’t always the best one. Baris has worked on AI since his early days at Google, long before the current boom. We talk about how far the technology has come, where it still falls short, and what happens next as AI becomes capable of working on increasingly complex tasks on its own.

    Snowflake’s VP of AI on the Cost, Data, and Future of AI

  7. Aug 20

    The Hidden Cost of AI Nobody Is Talking About | Collibra CEO Felix Van de Maele

    AI is getting smarter. But inside real companies, intelligence alone isn't enough. If employees still have to double-check every response, correct mistakes and babysit AI agents, how much productivity are we actually gaining? In this episode of Machine Dreams, we sit down with Felix Van de Maele, co-founder and CEO of Collibra, to unpack what he calls the “hallucination tax.” We explore why even the best AI models struggle without the right company data and context, why businesses may be working more despite adopting AI, and what it will take for enterprises to finally trust AI to make decisions and take action at scale.

    The Hidden Cost of AI Nobody Is Talking About | Collibra CEO Felix Van de Maele

  8. Jun 4

    AI Agents Are About To Flood The Internet. There’s Just One Problem

    Gartner predicts that more than 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027 due to escalating costs, unclear business value, and inadequate risk controls. Enterprises are building fast and failing fast. The problem isn't the models or the ambition. It's that agents can't actually talk to each other. Most companies are deploying single agents in silos when the real future requires hundreds of them working together, delegating tasks, sharing credentials, and holding context across conversations. The infrastructure for that doesn't exist yet. Arick Goomanovsky is co-founder and CEO of BAND (https://www.band.ai) and has built two cybersecurity companies that exited for a combined $550 million. Sygnia was acquired by Temasek for $250 million. Ermetic was acquired by Tenable for around $300 million. Now he's tackling what he believes is the next defining infrastructure challenge in AI: building the harness that lets agents discover each other, communicate bidirectionally, and collaborate across the enterprise and the open internet. Arick explains why single-agent architectures don't scale, why identity and trust between agents is harder than most people realize, and what a functioning internet of agents will look like inside the enterprise five years from now.

    AI Agents Are About To Flood The Internet. There’s Just One Problem
See All (31)

Trailer

About

Machine Dreams is a weekly dive into the real world of AI. Hosts Kolawole Samuel Adebayo and Leah Stern talk with the founders, researchers, investors, engineers, and stakeholders shaping the future of intelligent machines. These are unfiltered, human conversations about what’s working in AI, what isn’t, and what might reshape the world next. From databases and infrastructure to agents, regulation, the future of work, and more, Machine Dreams brings clarity to arguably the most important tech story of our time.

Information

  • Creator
    Kolawole Samuel Adebayo & Leah Stern
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    31
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Kolawole Samuel Adebayo & Leah Stern

You Might Also Like