Radical Talks

John Maslin, CEO and Co-Founder of Vulcan Elements, joins Radical Partner Molly Welch to unpack the overlooked physical infrastructure behind AI. While chips dominate most conversations, John explains why rare earth magnets are a foundational dependency across data centers, semiconductor manufacturing, robotics, EVs, and defense systems, and why today’s globally concentrated supply chain poses real economic and national security risk. Drawing on his work rebuilding domestic magnet manufacturing, the discussion explores what it takes to reshore critical industrial capacity, why execution matters more than policy alone, and how physical constraints will increasingly shape AI at scale.

Databricks Chief AI Scientist Jonathan Frankle joins Radical Partner Vin Sachidananda for a special conversation from Radical Ventures’ AI Masterclass Series. Together, they explore what it takes to move AI from academic insight to real-world, enterprise-scale deployment. Drawing on Jonathan’s experience co-founding Mosaic ML and now leading research at Databricks, the discussion covers why early efficiency gains feel “quaint,” how open-source serves as scientific proof, and why evaluation remains the missing infrastructure for enterprise AI adoption. A practical conversation for founders and technical leaders building AI systems that need to perform in production.

The story of modern AI cannot be told without Geoffrey Hinton and Jeff Dean. In this special episode of Radical Talks, recorded live at NeurIPS, the longtime collaborators and friends join Radical Ventures Co-Founder Jordan Jacobs to explore how bold ideas finally met the infrastructure required to scale them. From early breakthroughs at Google to the choices shaping today’s systems, they reflect on the leadership decisions, risks, and responsibilities that will define what comes next for AI.

Joelle Pineau is one of the architects behind modern AI — and as Chief AI Officer at Cohere, she’s focused on turning breakthrough research into real-world impact. In this special episode of Radical Talks, recorded live at Radical Ventures’ AI Founders Masterclass, Joelle joins Radical Partner Sanjana Basu to explore how frontier AI actually makes its way from the lab into the enterprise. Drawing on her experience building FAIR at Meta and now leading applied AI at Cohere, Joelle shares how leadership judgment, culture, and rigor shape what gets built and what ultimately lasts. Along the way, she unpacks her Plus-One principle, the responsibility that comes with deploying powerful systems, and what it takes to lead high-performance AI teams at scale.

Fei-Fei Li, renowned AI researcher and CEO and Co-founder of World Labs, is pushing the field toward its next frontier: spatial intelligence. Fresh off the commercial launch of Marble — World Labs’ generative world model that turns simple prompts into fully editable 3D environments — she joins host Molly Welch to explore why modeling and reasoning about the physical world remains the missing dimension in today’s AI paradigm. Drawing on the legacy of her ImageNet work, which helped ignite the deep learning revolution, Fei-Fei shares why spatial intelligence is her latest North Star and how World Labs is building frontier models that give creators unprecedented control over virtual worlds.

May Habib co-founded WRITER in 2020 after previously co-founding a localization startup, bringing her longtime passion for language technology to enterprise AI. Under her leadership as CEO, WRITER has developed into a full-stack AI platform serving global companies like Salesforce, Uber, and Vanguard while continuously adapting to the unprecedented pace of change in the generative AI landscape.

The following post is based on the latest Radical Talks episode with host Molly Welch, Partner at Radical Ventures, and featuring Ted Mabrey, Head of Palantir Commercial. Listen to the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.

Radical Partners Molly Welch and Aaron Rosenberg are joined by General Reasoning Co-founder and CEO Ross Taylor to discuss the AI approach powering today's reasoning revolution: reinforcement learning.

The AI revolution is changing nearly every industry, from software to content creation, yet one crucial area remains largely untouched: the design of physical things. While AI is great at manipulating digital bits, the physical world — from skyscrapers to spacecraft — still relies on traditional engineering approaches that haven’t fundamentally changed in decades.

This gap represents a huge, untapped opportunity. Physical systems could benefit enormously from AI-assisted design, but it’s a tough problem to solve. Current AI models struggle with quantitative and spatial reasoning, and training data is scarce. P-1 AI, a company co-founded by former Airbus CTO Paul Eremenko, is working to bridge this gap by developing an agent capable of mastering the physics and quantitative reasoning needed for physical design.

While consumer voice AI has long frustrated users with clunky interactions, enterprise voice AI has reached a turning point. The architectural improvements over the past 12-18 months have enabled natural, contextual conversations that are revolutionizing industries from recruiting to healthcare. 

Sanjana and Arsham join host Molly Welch to discuss why voice represents the most natural human interface, the breakthrough technology stack that's finally working, and how companies like Ribbon are already deploying voice agents that interview candidates 24/7 with Fortune 500 customers.