What's Your Problem?

Xiao Wang is the founder of a company called Boundless. Xiao’s problem is this: How do you make it cheaper and easier for people to navigate the U.S. immigration system?

Xiao moved to the U.S. from China when he was three years-old. For many years, he took for granted that immigration was slow, complicated, and expensive to navigate. With Boundless, he’s built a platform to help people who try to figure out that system every year.

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Henrik Stiesdal got his start in wind power back in the 70s. The price of oil had gone way up, and he wanted to help his parents figure out a cheaper source of electricity for their farm. He went on to help create the modern wind industry. Five decades later, he’s still pushing the frontier.

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One of the most amazing things about ChatGPT and other, similar AI models: Nobody really understands what they can do. Not even the people who build them. On today’s show, we talk with Sam Bowman about some of the mysteries at the heart of so-called large language models. Sam is on the faculty at NYU, he runs a research group at the AI company Anthropic and he is the author of the illuminating paper Eight Things to Know About Large Language Models.

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Dan Friedmann is the CEO of Carbon Engineering. The company is at the frontier of a new industry, direct air capture. They just broke ground on a big plant in Texas that will pull carbon dioxide out of the air.

Dan’s problem is this: how do you bring the price of direct air capture way down? And how do you convince companies and governments to pay for scrubbing carbon out of the air?

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Does flying have to be bad for the environment? Val Miftakhov, the founder and CEO of ZeroAvia, doesn’t think so. His company built a plane that’s powered by hydrogen fuel, which produces zero carbon emissions. It had a successful test flight earlier this year and Miftakhov hopes it will be ready for commercial use by 2025. 

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Andrew Mason is the founder and CEO of Descript. Descript's software has made editing audio and video much simpler. 

The company recently received a large investment from OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. It's a sign that Descript is moving toward using generative AI to generate words and pictures. What will that mean for the people who currently do that work?

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Andrew Ponec is co-founder and CEO of the energy storage company Antora Energy. 

Andrew's problem is this: How can you store renewable energy in a way that is cheap enough and reliable enough for industrial use? He thinks the solution may be storing that energy as heat, in big blocks of graphite.

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Tammy Hsu and Michelle Zhu are the cofounders of Huue. 

Their problem is this: how do you get bacteria to produce indigo dye? And how do you do it cheaply and reliably enough to replace the toxic petrochemical process that's currently used to dye billions of pairs of jeans a year?

They're working with denim brands to commercialize their bacteria-produced dye. 

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Today's show is about a problem people have been trying to solve for a hundred years: how can we mass produce houses, like we do cars?

Listen for a house that looks like a UFO, a giant mobile home boom, and a visit to a 21st-century construction site where workers are putting up a factory-built house. This episode's a co-production with our friends at Planet Money, and a follow-up to last week's interview with the founder of Cover.

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Alexis Rivas is the co-founder and CEO of Cover.

His problem is: How do you build houses in a factory, the way you build cars? And how do you do it so they're cheaper and better than a traditionally built house?

Cover is following the Tesla model: starting with a high-end product but aiming for the mass market. "Nail it and scale it," he says.

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