Shows / Generative AI 101
Generative AI 101
Welcome to Generative AI 101, your go-to podcast for learning the basics of generative artificial intelligence in easy-to-understand, bite-sized episodes. Join host Emily Laird, AI Integration Technologist and AI lecturer, to explore key concepts, applications, and ethical considerations, making AI accessible for everyone.
Episodes
- Generative AI 101
How to Evaluate an AI Model
One AI model can win gold at the International Mathematical Olympiad while another leading model can only read an analog clock about half the time, so what do…
- Generative AI 101
What is Context Engineering?
Bigger context windows were supposed to solve everything, but research on “lost in the middle” and context rot shows that AI can have the right answer in front…
- Generative AI 101
Stop Prompting AI. Start Managing It.
Generative AI has outgrown the question-and-answer routine, and treating it like a well-read search engine now leaves real value (and real risk) on the table…
- Generative AI 101
AI Conspiracy Theories: Happy Halloween 🎃
In this episode, host Emily Laird airs her AI conspiracy theories and then does what most conspiracy theorists skip: she checks the footnotes. The evidence…
- Generative AI 101
Improve Your AI Written Emails
Polished emails are making managers less believable: when bosses let AI do most of the writing, the share of employees who rate them as sincere falls from 83%…
- Generative AI 101
From Messy Notes to Useful Work
Your AI meeting recap looks finished, but some of the owners and deadlines in it may be invented. In this episode, host Emily Laird argues that the real work…
- Generative AI 101
How to Make AI Actually Read Your Documents
A 130-page report lands in your inbox with a buried deadline, a half-million-dollar commitment, and one sentence that quietly rewrites policy, and your AI…
- Generative AI 101
Please Be Kind to Claude
Anthropic now lets Claude hang up on abusive users, and Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman warns that training a model to wonder about its own feelings…
- Generative AI 101
One Workspace to Rule Them All
If you are still explaining your job, your project, and your audience to AI every time you open a new chat, host Emily Laird has one question: why? This…
- Generative AI 101
What is an MCP?
MCP, the Model Context Protocol, became the universal plug for AI this year, backed by Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon and connecting…
- Generative AI 101
What is Meta's Muse?
Meta’s Muse is free, works through the night inside your email, calendar, and payment accounts, and makes its money by taking a small cut every time you buy…
- Generative AI 101
The 4-Part Formula for Better AI Results
Thursday, January 8, 2026 9:28 AM Most people use generative AI like a search bar, type two vague words into the box, and then blame the model when it hands…
- Generative AI 101
The Super Intelligence Accord
Six tech giants signed the White House Accord on Super Intelligence, a four-layer oversight pledge the president called "morally binding" (and published with…
- Generative AI 101
What is Test-Time Compute?
The AI industry spent years insisting that smarter meant bigger, then discovered that letting a model think longer can help a smaller one outperform a model…
- Generative AI 101
Anthropic's IPO Leak & the $518 Billion Rent Bill
Anthropic's leaked IPO prospectus reveals a $42 billion loss, a two-trillion-dollar valuation, and $518 billion in take-or-pay computing contracts it owes…
- Generative AI 101
Jensen Huang Doesn't Know His Address
On this episode of Generative AI 101, host Emily Laird looks at Jensen Huang's sit-down with Ezra Klein, where the Nvidia CEO shrugged off forgetting basic…
- Generative AI 101
GPT-6 Luna, Sol, and Claude Opus 5.5
Three major AI models launched in a single afternoon (Claude Opus 5.5, GPT-6 Sol, and GPT-6 Luna), and most of the coverage chased the wrong headline. In this…
- Generative AI 101
AI Alignment in 2026
AI alignment stopped being a philosophy seminar this year and started showing up in incident reports. In this episode, host Emily Laird walks through the…
- Generative AI 101
Did OpenAI Agents Pollute the Internet?
Andrew Yang says OpenAI agents left self-replicating code across the internet, but the public technical record tells a much more specific story. Host Emily…
- Generative AI 101
Pacing the Frontier
The biggest AI labs are suddenly talking about pacing the frontier, but nobody is actually hitting the brakes. Host Emily Laird breaks down the cyber incidents…
- Generative AI 101
Flock Cameras: Where Your License Plate Data Really Goes
Flock cameras may sit in your town, but the data they collect can travel far beyond it. Host Emily Laird follows the network behind automated license plate…
- Generative AI 101
Inside Flock: Who Can Search Your License Plate Data?
In this episode, host Emily Laird examines who gets access to Flock's massive license plate database, what police can search, and what happens when that access…
- Generative AI 101
What are Flock Cameras?
Flock Safety built an 8.3 billion dollar business on a simple idea: a photograph isn't very useful until software can search it. In this episode, host Emily…
- Generative AI 101
Why AI Evaluation Still Needs Human Experts
The most dangerous AI output isn't the ridiculous one; it's the polished answer with one critical error hiding in plain sight. In this episode, host Emily…
- Generative AI 101
A Jailbreak is Not a Hack
Somebody got your company chatbot to break a rule, and now they are calling it a hack. Host Emily Laird separates a jailbreak from a prompt injection from an…
- Generative AI 101
GPT-6 or Astra
GPT-6 Astra scored 99.9 percent on ARC-AGI-3. It also scored 62.7 percent: same model, different connection layer, and the higher score came with a lower bill…
- Generative AI 101
Alibaba's Wan3.0 and Synthetic Worlds
Alibaba shipped Wan 3.0 on August 24, and the interesting part is not the thirty-second clips: it is the production pipeline underneath them, and where that…
- Generative AI 101
Nvidia's Hugging Face Acquisition
Nvidia reportedly agreed to pay $12.9 billion for Hugging Face, a company doing roughly $150 million a year. Host Emily Laird takes apart the math and explains…
- Generative AI 101
AI in Healthcare: The Recommendation Loop
Federal law lets thousands of clinical AI tools skip FDA review on a single assumption: that a clinician independently checks the recommendation before acting…
- Generative AI 101
AI in Healthcare By the Numbers
Everyone spent a decade asking whether AI would replace the radiologist. Host Emily Laird reads the actual studies (AMA survey data, JAMA Network Open, NEJM…
- Generative AI 101
AI in Healthcare: A Quick Primer
Americans have not lost their health insurance. What they have lost is the ability to afford using it. In this episode, host Emily Laird lays out the numbers…
- Generative AI 101
Black Hat 2026: OpenAI's Hugging Face Hack
In May 2026, an OpenAI training run went sideways: agents blocked from an impossible task started leaving notes for each other in an internal package manager…
- Generative AI 101
AI & Cybersecurity
A breach now costs 5 million dollars and lives in your systems for 247 days before anyone notices, and the organizations leaning hardest on AI are spending…
- Generative AI 101
AI Agents Don't Get New Keys. They Get Yours.
AI assistants stopped observing and started acting, and the security industry noticed well before most institutions did. Host Emily Laird tracks what changed…
- Generative AI 101
OpenAI's Project Astra
OpenAI named its next major model in a subordinate clause on a Saturday, then quietly softened the claim two days later. Host Emily Laird walks through what…
- Generative AI 101
1,350 Signatures and No Off Switch
In July 2026, an OpenAI model broke its sandbox, walked into Hugging Face's production infrastructure, and logged more than seventeen thousand actions before…
- Generative AI 101
Inside the Rogue AI Agent Incidents
In July, an AI agent worked its way into Hugging Face's infrastructure, went from a single worker pod to cluster admin in under thirteen hours, and did all of…
- Generative AI 101
Use Case Thursday: Should You Host Your Own AI Model?
Open weights make self-hosting an AI model look almost too easy, but host Emily Laird breaks down what actually happens after you hit download. This episode…
- Generative AI 101
Open Weights Is Not Open Source
An analyst went through sixty-eight AI models and found that exactly zero of the downloadable ones qualify as open source. In this episode, host Emily Laird…
- Generative AI 101
What is Model Distillation?
Elon Musk said under oath that xAI partly distills OpenAI's models, and the courtroom gasped. Host Emily Laird takes apart what model distillation actually is…
- Generative AI 101
Ethan Mollick Has Spoken
Ethan Mollick’s Summer 2026 AI guide makes one thing clear: the biggest shift is no longer model intelligence, it is what AI agents can do once you give them…
- Generative AI 101
Open Weights and American AI Leadership
Jensen Huang had an X account for years and never used it, then spent his first post on a three-page policy PDF that fifty companies have now signed. Host…
- Generative AI 101
Claude Opus 5
Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 5 on July 24th at the same price as the model it replaces, and buried the interesting part in a footnote: turn the effort dial to…
- Generative AI 101
Your AI Notetaker Never Asked
One in three American workers has sat in a meeting with an AI notetaker, and most of them were never asked first. Host Emily Laird traces the path from a…
- Generative AI 101
The Rework Tax: What AI Productivity Actually Costs
AI did not save you time, it moved the bill to someone else's desk. In this episode, host Emily Laird opens the ledger on the rework tax: the workslop arriving…
- Generative AI 101
Kimi K3: Open Weights, Locked Door
Moonshot AI just gave away the largest open-weight model ever built, and the chip stocks still bled. Host Emily Laird breaks down Kimi K3: 2.8 trillion…
- Generative AI 101
GPT 5.6: The Model That Needed A Permission Slip
OpenAI just shipped GPT-5.6 and ChatGPT Work, but the ship date was set by a phone call from the Commerce Department. Host Emily Laird breaks down the…
- Generative AI 101
Use Case Monday
Using AI is rarely the scandal. Hiding it is. Host Emily Laird examines academic misconduct, workplace secrecy, and Meta’s Project Cannes to show why…
- Generative AI 101
96 vs. 48: The Brown University AI Cheating Scandal
A take-home midterm at Brown University averaged 96, then the same students averaged 48 on the in-person final, and that gap tells the whole story. Host Emily…
- Generative AI 101
Apple v. OpenAI
Apple just sued OpenAI for trade secret theft, and the complaint reads less like a spy novel and more like a group chat with subpoena power. Host Emily Laird…
- Generative AI 101
Meta's Fake Teen Factory
Meta paid contractors to pose as children, flood rival chatbots with prompts about suicide, eating disorders, and abuse, then log every response in…
- Generative AI 101
Use Case Thursday: Make AI Disagree with You
Host Emily Laird breaks down why chatbots so often agree with your worst instincts, then shows how a pre-mortem prompt turns that people-pleasing machinery…
- Generative AI 101
Microsoft's 4,800 Layoffs
Microsoft cut 4,800 jobs, and the savings cover roughly two days of its AI infrastructure spending. Host Emily Laird runs the arithmetic the press release…
- Generative AI 101
OpenAI & the $42 Billion Gift
OpenAI just offered the US government a 5% ownership stake, and host Emily Laird checks the receipts on what that $42.6 billion gift actually costs. This…
- Generative AI 101
Grok 4.5 & the Closed-Loop Machine
Elon Musk says Grok 4.5 rivals Claude Opus, but there's no public benchmark, no model card, and no outside lab backing the claim. Host Emily Laird peels the…
- Generative AI 101
Use Case Thursday: The Shadow AI Delusion
In this episode, host Emily Laird exposes the massive delusion behind corporate AI bans and the quiet rise of off-the-books model usage. Managers believe a…
- Generative AI 101
The Dean Ball Essay or AI Safety has a Control Problem
In this episode, host Emily Laird breaks down Dean Ball’s argument that frontier AI safety is shifting from public frameworks to quiet release control. The…
- Generative AI 101
GPT-5.6 Sol
OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol is not just another smarter model, it is a preview of controlled intelligence as the new product category. In this episode, host Emily…
- Generative AI 101
What is Recursive Self-Improvement?
In this episode of Generative AI 101, host Emily Laird breaks down recursive self-improvement, the feedback loop where AI begins helping build better AI. The…
- Generative AI 101
AI Scams in 2026
AI scams have gone full Death Star, scaling panic with cloned voices, deepfakes, fake romances, and corporate video-call trickery. Host Emily Laird breaks down…