AI has been “old news” since the 1950s, but Mehrab Momin of aiCTO Services breaks down why it suddenly feels everywhere, how founders should actually think about AI (data first, buzzwords later), and why Houston’s physical-world industries might be the perfect playground for the next wave, from vision models to humanoid robots.

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 00:00 Show intro and guest setup
 01:10 Fractional AI CTO explained
 03:10 Early AI work and swarm intelligence
 05:10 AI “flavors” from ML to deep learning
 07:10 Transformers and the LLM leap
 09:10 Where AI shows up in industry
 12:00 Language, context, and why LLMs work
 18:00 Energy AI applications and examples
 19:30 Computer vision basics and VLMs
 23:30 Open source models and fine-tuning
 26:20 Houston vs Bay Area AI maturity
 29:20 Solar, drones, and practical vision AI
 31:00 Humanoid robots and physical AI
 33:20 Edge computing and model stacks
 36:00 Testing, validation, and “AI going rogue”
 37:20 Common startup mistakes with AI
 40:20 Human intuition vs machine intelligence
 48:00 Language preservation and climate tech link
 51:20 What’s next for Houston startups
 53:50 How to connect and wrap-up 

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