Practical AI
Daniel Whitenack and Chris Benson
300 episodes
Making artificial intelligence practical, productive & accessible to everyone. Practical AI is a show in which technology professionals, business people, students, enthusiasts, and expert guests engage in lively discussions about Artificial Intelligence and related topics (Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Neural Networks, GANs, MLOps, AIOps, LLMs & more).
More about the show
The focus is on productive implementations and real-world scenarios that are accessible to everyone. If you want to keep up with the latest advances in AI, while keeping one foot in the real world, then this is the show for you!
Episodes page 1 of 6
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Exploit Development, Agentic Vulnerability Discovery, and Fake PoCs
AI is changing cybersecurity, accelerating vulnerability research and exploit development while raising new questions about reliability, risk, and guardrails. Daniel and Chris talk with Spencer McIntyre, Director of…
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Is Education Failing our Students in this AI-Driven World?
Schools and universities are failing to adapt to our modern world, in which AI is becoming increasingly pervasive in all aspects of life and work. In fact, AI may be changing what should be considered foundational…
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Narrative intelligence and the human advantage
As AI reshapes how we work, create, and think about our roles, staying adaptable means understanding not just the technology, but our own stories and identities. Reed Frerichs joins Daniel and Chris to explore…
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Open models and the future of Physical AI with NVIDIA
As AI moves beyond the cloud and into robots, vehicles, and other physical systems, new approaches to models, simulation, and inference are emerging. Daniel and Chris are joined by Ming-Yu Liu, Vice President of Cosmos…
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From AGENTS.md to Enterprise Deployment
AI agents are moving beyond laptops and prototypes and into enterprise environments where security, compliance, scalability, and reliability matter. Nick Kuhn from VMware Tanzu Platform joins Daniel and Chris to…
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How to get discovered in AI search
AI search is changing how people discover information and how brands need to think about visibility. Daniel and Chris talk with Liam Dunne and Ben Moore, co-founders of Discovered Labs, about the shift from traditional…
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Computer-Use Agents and the Future of the Agentic Internet
Longtime followers of Practical AI know that multi-repeat guest and friend Demetrios Brinkmann combines brilliant insight and playful banter into one fun-filled show, and this conversion with Chris was no different.…
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Less about Models; More about Architecture
As AI moves from experimentation to enterprise deployment, are organizations thinking too much about models and not enough about architecture? In this episode, Daniel and Chris talk with Chetan Gupta, Chief AI Officer…
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Building the Foundation for the Agentic AI Era
How do we build an AI ecosystem where agents, tools, and systems can work together at scale? Angie Jones, VP of the Agentic AI Foundation, joins Chris to discuss the open standards and projects shaping the agentic…
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AI Proficiency: From Users to Builders
As AI continues to reshape how organizations work, companies are increasingly asking what AI proficiency should look like across their workforce, and how they can help employees adapt without simply mandating AI…
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Models, Harnesses, and Multi-Agent Systems
AI has moved far beyond chatbots, but what exactly are AI models, agents, agent harnesses, and multi-agent systems, and why do they matter? In this episode, Daniel and Chris break down the terminology behind today's…
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Reconstructing how OpenAI agents attacked Hugging Face
What happens when AI agents driven by a top frontier model escape their secure sandbox? Join Daniel and Chris as they unpack the AI wonk's equivalent of a murder mystery! OpenAI agents went rogue and successfully…
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Surviving the New Economics of a Post-Agentic World
The agentic transformation isn’t coming. It has already begun. Companies are deploying thousands — and sometimes tens of thousands — of AI agents. Enterprise software giants are watching their old economic moats…
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The Future of AI Infrastructure with CoreWeave
As AI applications become more complex, the infrastructure powering them needs to evolve. Corey Sanders, SVP of Product at CoreWeave, joins Chris to discuss why AI requires a fundamentally different approach than…
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Building Durable AI Agents
What does it take to move AI agents from demos to reliable production systems? In this episode, Hamza Tahir explores how MLOps principles are shaping the future of generative AI, covering workflows, agent harnesses,…
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Image Generation and Visual Intelligence with Black Forest Labs
How has AI image generation evolved from blurry outputs to powerful visual intelligence models? Dustin Podell, Co-Founder and Researcher at Black Forest Labs, explains the progression from diffusion to flow matching,…
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AIUC-1: Building trust in AI agents
How do we build trust in AI agents before the AI hailstorm arrives? Emil Lassen from the Artificial Intelligence Underwriting Company (AIUC) joins the show to discuss how the enterprise flywheel of standards,…
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Zero Trust for AI Agents
As AI agents become more capable and autonomous, they also introduce new security challenges. In this 'Fully Connected' episode, Dan and Chris unpack Anthropic’s Zero Trust for AI Agents security framework and what it…
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Breaking down the 2026 Stanford AI Index Report
AI models can win math olympiads… but still struggle to read an analog clock. In this fully connected episode, Dan and Chris break down the latest Stanford AI Index Report and explore what it reveals about the current…
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Rebooting Enterprise AI with MCP and Kubernetes
What happens when AI agents start acting less like chatbots and more like coworkers? In this episode, Dan and Chris sit down with Craig McLuckie, CEO of Stacklok to explore MCP, Kubernetes, ToolHive, enterprise AI, and…
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Hermes Agent: Agents that grow with you
Open Source AI is entering a new era, one shaped by self-improving AI Agents, recursive learning systems, and rapidly evolving AI Tools that blur the line between software and autonomous collaborators. In this episode,…
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U.S. Congressman Beyer on AI challenges facing America and the World
U.S. Congressman Don Beyer returns to Practical AI for another far-reaching conversation with Chris about many of the most important AI challenges facing America and the world. Blending political savvy and…
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The Myth of Model Wars: Open vs Closed AI in 2026
In this fully connected episode, Dan and Chris break down one of the biggest questions in AI today: do open vs. closed models still matter? From the rise of physical AI and edge devices to the shifting landscape of…
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The mythos of Mythos and Allbirds takes flight to the neocloud
In this Fully-Connected episode, Dan and Chris start with Anthropic's Mythos frontier model, parsing what is publicly known about its cybersecurity capabilities and projecting its possible implications from "We've been…
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Open Source Self-Driving with Comma AI
Autonomous driving is not just a big tech or closed-source game, it's becoming accessible through open innovation and real-world deployment. Dan and Chris sit down with Harald Schäfer, CTO at Comma AI, to explore how…
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Post-Mortem of Anthropic's Claude Code Leak
In this fully connected episode, Dan and Chris break down the Anthropic Claude Code leak, what went wrong and what it reveals about agentic systems, AI architecture, and AI safety. They also explore how the open source…
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Agentic Coding and the Economics of Open Source
AI is rapidly transforming how software is built, shifting economic incentives from open source code and collaboration toward on-demand, personalized development through agentic coding a.k.a. vibe coding. In this…
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AI at the Edge is a different operating environment
What does “AI at the edge” really mean in 2026, and why does it matter now more than ever before? In this episode, we’re joined by Brandon Shibley, Edge AI Solutions Engineering Lead at Qualcomm’s Edge Impulse, to…
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Humility in the Age of Agentic Coding
What happens when an AI hater starts building with AI agents? In this episode, we talk with software engineer Steve Klabnik, known for his work on the Rust programming language, about his journey from criticizing AI to…
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AI policy and the battle for computing power
AI is reshaping global power, from chip manufacturing and computing power to AI governance and US-China relations. In this episode, Ben Buchanan, Assistant Professor at The Johns Hopkins University and former White…
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Cognitive Synthesis and Neural Athletes
As AI accelerates innovation and adoption, leaders are facing rising cognitive load, shifting systems, and new emotional realities inside their organizations. In this episode, Deloitte’s Chief Innovation Officer…
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AI incidents, audits, and the limits of benchmarks
AI is moving fast from research to real-world deployment, and when things go wrong, the consequences are no longer hypothetical. In this episode, Sean McGregor, co-founder of the AI Verification & Evaluation Research…
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Inside an AI-Run Company
AI agents are moving from demos to real workplaces, but what actually happens when they run a company? In this episode, journalist Evan Ratliff, host of Shell Game, joins Chris to discuss his immersive journalism…
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How is AI shaping democracy?
As AI increasingly shapes geopolitics, elections, and civic life, its impact on democracy is becoming impossible to ignore. In this episode, Daniel and Chris are joined by security expert Bruce Schneier to explore how…
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Controlling AI Models from the Inside
As generative AI moves into production, traditional guardrails and input/output filters can prove too slow, too expensive, and/or too limited. In this episode, Alizishaan Khatri of Wrynx joins Daniel and Chris to…
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2025 was the year of agents, what's coming in 2026?
In this start-of-year FC episode, Chris and Daniel break down what really mattered in AI in 2025, and what to expect in 2026. They explore the rise of AI agents, the practical reality of multimodal AI, and how…
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Beyond chatbots: Agents that tackle your SOPs
As AI reshapes the workplace, employees and leaders face questions about meaningful work, automation, and human impact. In this episode, Jason Beutler, CEO of RoboSource, shares how companies can rethink workflows,…
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The AI engineer skills gap
Chris and Daniel talk with returning guest, Ramin Mohammadi, about how those seeking to get into AI Engineer/ Data Science jobs are expected to come in a mid level engineers (not entry level). They explore this growing…
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Technical advances in document understanding
Chris and Daniel unpack how AI-driven document processing has rapidly evolved well beyond traditional OCR with many technical advances that fly under the radar. They explore the progression from document structure…
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Chris on AI, autonomous swarming, home automation and Rust!
This episode is a special crossover between the Practical AI podcast and The Changelog podcast. Chris was recently invited by longtime friends Jerod Santo and Adam Stacoviak, cohosts of The Changelog, to join them on…
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Beyond note-taking with Fireflies
Fireflies CEO, Krish Ramineni shares how the company is transforming AI-powered note-taking into a deeper layer of knowledge automation. He breaks down the technology behind real-time functionality like Live Assist,…
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Autonomous Vehicle Research at Waymo
Waymo’s VP of Research, Drago Anguelov, joins Practical AI to explore how advances in autonomy, vision models, and large-scale testing are shaping the future of driverless technology. The conversation dives into the…
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Are we in an AI bubble?
Dan and Chris unpack whether today’s surge in AI deployment across enterprise workflows, manufacturing, healthcare, and scientific research signals a lasting transformation or an overhyped bubble. Drawing parallels to…
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While loops with tool calls
Dan and Chris sit down (again) with Jared Zoneraich, co-founder and CEO of PromptLayer, to discuss how prompt engineering has evolved into context engineering (and while loops with tool calls). Jared shares insights on…
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Tiny Recursive Networks
In this fully connected episode, Daniel and Chris explore the emerging concept of tiny recursive networks introduced by Samsung AI, contrasting them with large transformer based models. They explore how these small…
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Dealing with increasingly complicated agents
As AI systems move from simple chatbots to complex agentic workflows, new security risks emerge. In this episode, Donato Capitella unpacks how increasingly complicated architectures are making agents fragile and…
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The impact of AI on the workforce: A state-level case study
Daniel sits down with Chelsea Linder, VP of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at TechPoint, to explore the what AI innovation and impact look like on the ground. They discuss Chelsea's journey from the VC world into…
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We've all done RAG, now what?
Longtime friend of the show Rajiv Shah returns to unpack lessons from a year of building retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines and reasoning models integrations. We dive into why so many AI pilots stumble, why…
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Creating a private AI assistant in Thunderbird
In this episode, Daniel and Chris are joined by Chris Aquino, software engineer at Thunderbird to hear the story of how they developed a privacy-preserving AI executive assistant. They discuss various design decisions…
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Cracking the code of failed AI pilots
In this Fully Connected episode, we dig into the recent MIT report revealing that 95% of AI pilots fail before reaching production and explore what it actually takes to succeed with AI solutions. We dive into the…
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