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TED Radio Hour : NPR

Published

1 month ago

July 25, 2025

The Editors

Illustration by Luke Medina/NPR/Photo by Andrey Popov/Getty Images

TED Radio Hour: Prophets of Technology, Part 3

Illustration by Luke Medina/NPR/Photo by Andrey Popov/Getty Images

Some devices and innovations seem to pop up out of nowhere — like in late 2022, when OpenAI launched ChatGPT free to the public. But in reality, these technological milestones come from decades of research, computation and vigorous debates over how an invention may irrevocably change what it means to be human — for better or worse.

As artificial intelligence infiltrates every aspect of our lives, NPR host Manoush Zomorodi has spoken to some of the experts who have predicted and shaped today’s digital landscape. In TED Radio Hour‘s special series Prophets of Technology, these pioneers share their insights on how we got here and where they think we’re headed next.

Here are some of their key takeaways:

1. Our brains and AI will one day merge and act as one

Futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil has worked on early forms of artificial intelligence for the past six decades. He believes we should stop thinking of human intelligence and computer intelligence as two separate things. “We’re actually going to merge,” Kurzweil told Zomorodi.

“We’re going to be able to think of things and we’re not going to be sure whether it came from our biological intelligence or our computational intelligence,” said Kurzweil, who has predicted many of the breakthroughs in computation and AI. “It’s all going to be the same thing. And that’s what’s gonna happen in the 2030s.”

But could merging with machines diminish the value of the human mind? Kurzweil doesn’t think so; in fact, he sees this merging as simply the next step in expanding human potential. “We’ll be proud of what we’re able to create. At least for me, that’s what gives me meaning,” Kurzweil said.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sherry Turkle is not a futurist — she’s a psychologist who has been a keen observer of technology’s impact on the human psyche. In recent years, she has turned her focus to studying AI chatbots. She says bots like ChatGPT could end up undermining the very things that make us human, such as the ways we process emotions.

Turkle spoke with one woman who was using ChatGPT to write all her love letters. The woman claimed that the chatbot was able to write “love letters closer to how she really feels than she could do herself,” Turkle recalled.

The real concern, Turkle explained, isn’t whether the AI-generated love letter is more eloquent — it’s that this woman will miss out on the emotional experience of introspection: the process of turning inward, understanding her own feelings and putting them into words.

“Even those of us who couldn’t write very good love letters summoned ourselves in a certain kind of special way when we wrote a love letter. And the love letter was not just about what was on paper. It was about what we had done to ourselves in the process of writing it,” Turkle said. “And that is something that’s being undermined by the use of technology, even if this woman feels that her final-product letter is more pleasing to her.”

2. We’re seeing exponential gains in medical advancements

AI is altering how we create new medicines and treat diseases.

One example of this is vaccine development. Kurzweil, the futurist, reflected on how the biotech company Moderna drastically sped up the process for developing a COVID-19 vaccine with the help of AI.

“It used to take years to do that kind of thing,” said Kurzweil. “So we’ll be able to actually create medications for diseases that will take days rather than years.”

AI is also paving the way for advancements in biotech, like with the gene-editing tool CRISPR. Biochemist Jennifer Doudna, the co-discoverer of CRISPR, described a future scenario where someone gets their DNA sequenced and discovers they have susceptibility to Alzheimer’s disease.

“It’s possible to use a technology like CRISPR to change those genetics so that that person no longer has that susceptibility,” Doudna said. “I mean, that would be extraordinary if we get to that point. Will we get there in 30 years? I don’t know. But I think it’s entirely possible that we will.”

3. Guardrails are essential, and experts say we need to act quickly

As AI continues developing at breakneck speed, many experts are calling for regulation and guardrails to preserve digital privacy and civil liberties and to safeguard against unintended consequences.

For example, when it comes to brain monitoring and enhancement (think EEG headbands, smartwatches and earbuds that monitor and modulate brain activity), who gets access to all that mental information?

Lawyer and AI ethicist Nita Farahany emphasized the need for laws protecting cognitive liberty, “a right to self-determination over our brain and mental experiences” — in other words, who owns and will have access to our most private thoughts and emotions.

“There’s still these thoughts you have, the way you react and feel that isn’t expressed in your eyes and your text messages and your GPS location data,” Farahany said.

That’s what she feels is at risk without ethical guidelines on emerging neurotechnology.

“When we get to this world of brain transparency,” Farahany explained, “if we don’t have the right kind of safeguards in place, that which I think is so fundamental to what it means to be human … may suddenly not be our own.”

This episode is Part 3 of TED Radio Hour‘s three-part series: Prophets of Technology, conversations with the minds crafting our digital world. Listen to Part 1 here. Listen to Part 2 here.

Click to listen to the full conversations with Sherry Turkle (2024), Mustafa Suleyman (2024), Jennifer Doudna (2022) and Nita Farahany (2024).

Love podcasts? For handpicked episode recommendations every week, NPR just launched Pod Club — a newsletter written FOR podcast fans BY podcast fans. Subscribe here!

This digital story was written by Katie Monteleone and edited by Sanaz Meshkinpour.

This episode of TED Radio Hour was produced by Rachel Faulkner White and Harsha Nahata. It was edited by Sanaz Meshkinpour and Manoush Zomorodi.

Our production staff at NPR also includes James Delahoussaye, Matthew Cloutier and Fiona Geiran.

Our audio engineers were Robert Rodriguez and Simon-Laslo Janssen.

Talk to us on Instagram (@manoushz) and Facebook, or email us at TEDRadioHour@npr.org.

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Will GenAI Companies Ever Make Money?

Published

43 minutes ago

September 1, 2025

Andrea Nepori

According to a recent MIT report, 95% of organizations are seeing no (or very limited) returns from their internal generative AI pilot programs, despite large investments in their implementation. The study has its limitations, especially given the limited sample size of professionals and executives surveyed. But it offers a stark counterargument to the optimistic narratives promoted by OpenAI, Anthropic, and other prominent genAI companies.

Skepticism around their products’ ability to help companies increase revenue and profit, even in the medium to long term, is becoming more common, and not just among AI optimists anymore. This shift has intensified after GPT-5, OpenAI’s latest LLM, failed to live up to the heightened expectations set by Sam Altman himself.

While the use case and profitability of genAI applications is still very much to be proven, the IT industry’s bet on genAI and the companies developing it is already massive. From 2013 to 2020, cloud infrastructure capital expenditure grew from $32 billion to $119 billion, driven mostly by the rise of social media platforms and video content.

Post-Covid, the curve goes wild: in 2024, spending reached $285 billion, and in 2025, the top 11 cloud providers are forecasted to invest almost $400 billion. That’s more than they’ve committed in the past two years combined and the figure mostly stems from the massive compute needs for training and inferring LLM models.

A Complex Answer

The fundamental disconnect between the money companies are spending to compete in the AI race and the potential return on investment is widening as fast as their capex. A growing cadre of experts is asking the same fundamental question: with this uncertainty around the effectiveness of its real-world business application, will gen AI as a market ever be able to make money?

In a moment of profound change, the answer is complex and open to interpretation. On one side, we need to take the “inevitabilism” of Altman, Amodei, and other AI maximalists with a sizable grain of salt. It’s simply not true that a future where their particular flavor of genAI dominates the workplace and integrates into our lives at all levels is “inevitable”, despite what they’d like us to take at face value as they scour for even more funding dollars.

On the other hand, it’s undeniable that, despite the debate about its applicability, genAI represents a technological revolution. The technology itself is formidable, and its positive impact on at least personal productivity is undeniable. Yet it remains vastly unclear, as the MIT study demonstrates, whether it will ever be able to justify its technological costs.

A Bubble?

These two sides of the same coin can be true at the same time: genAI is one of the most important technologies of all time, and we’re in a bubble regarding its potential and applications. Remarkably, this admission comes from Sam Altman himself. OpenAI’s CEO, in a recent interview with US reporters, tried to deflate expectations he helped set up in the past:

“Are we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited about AI? My opinion is yes. Is AI the most important thing to happen in a very long time? My opinion is also yes.”

To make matters worse, all generative AI services we’re currently using personally and at work (including ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, Microsoft Copilot, and Google Gemini) are heavily subsidized by either investors’ or companies’ money. While the combined number of their active users already exceeds one billion, both OpenAI and Anthropic will close 2025 reporting billions in revenue and even more in losses.

Like Uber?

The playbook we’re seeing unfold isn’t far removed from that of other hyperscale platforms like Uber. A moment will come when prices must rise to start returning capital to the large number of investors. Uber delayed that moment for years, collecting eager investors’ money with the far-fetched promise of autonomous driving—until that didn’t work anymore.

OpenAI and Anthropic are doing the same, dangling the promise of AGI (artificial general intelligence) or ASI (artificial super intelligence) to collect billions in funding while waiting long enough for the technology to become indispensable. But while ride-hailing had immediate benefits in disrupting an established industry with lower cost solutions, the AI startups’ bet is far bolder and definitely way more expensive to maintain.

A Skeptic at Goldman Sachs

Jim Covello, the Head of Global Equity Research at Goldman Sachs, is among the genAI skeptics. He says that to earn a relevant return on investment, gen AI should be able to solve extremely complex problems that justify its immense cost.

In a Goldman Sachs report published in 2024, Covello explains:

“We estimate that the AI infrastructure buildout will cost over $1tn in the next several years alone, which includes spending on data centers, utilities, and applications. So, the crucial question is: What $1tn problem will AI solve? Replacing low- wage jobs with tremendously costly technology is basically the polar opposite of the prior technology transitions I’ve witnessed in my thirty years of closely following the tech industry. While the question of whether AI technology will ever deliver on the promise many people are excited about today is certainly debatable, the less debatable point is that AI technology is exceptionally expensive, and to justify those costs, the technology must be able to solve complex problems, which it isn’t designed to do.”

One year after Goldman Sach’s report, we are still very much hearing the same narrative, with AI companies swearing by the scaling myth, saying all they need is just a bit more data, just a bit more training, and just a bit more investor money to get all that.

A $1 Trillion Question

It’s a $1 trillion question: what happens when the financial realities can no longer be delayed, with investors and companies realizing that the chasm between costs and applications can’t be filled?

History suggests that bubbles burst when the gap between investment and practical returns becomes unsustainable. The dot-com crash of 2001 offers a sobering reminder of what occurs when investor enthusiasm dramatically outpaces actual utility, even though the fundamental technology (the Internet) was so important that it would later become ubiquitous.

If businesses begin demanding concrete returns on their AI investment and find them lacking a significant market correction could follow. Companies that have built their valuations on AI promises may face a harsh reckoning with reality, negatively affecting the global economy as a consequence.

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CP AXTRA Unveils Digital Transformation Vision and Partners with Tencent Cloud to Power AI-Driven Retail Tech

Published

2 hours ago

September 1, 2025

Advertorial Desk

BANGKOK, Sept. 1, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — CP AXTRA, the operator of Asia’s leading wholesale and retail businesses — Makro and Lotus’s — based in Thailand, is accelerating its digital transformation journey as part of its commitment to shaping the future of smart retail. At the core of this vision is a commitment to leveraging cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) to significantly increase manpower efficiency, enabling team members to focus on higher-value, strategic tasks while driving online sales and aligning with the evolving needs of today’s consumers.

The delegation of CP AXTRA visiting Tencent Headquarter in Shenzhen

This transformation is supported by CP AXTRA’s strategic partnership with Tencent Cloud, the cloud business of global leading technology company Tencent. The collaboration, formalized earlier this year through a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), combines CP AXTRA’s retail expertise with Tencent Cloud’s advanced technology solutions — setting a new benchmark for innovation in retail across Asia and beyond.

Under this partnership, CP AXTRA is deploying Tencent Cloud’s comprehensive suite of services, including Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), AI powered big data and database solutions, as well as advanced container management solutions such as Tencent Kubernetes Engine (TKE). These tools are instrumental in optimizing operations across more than 2,600 stores in Thailand, enabling scalable digital innovation and significant cost efficiencies.

A cornerstone of this transformation is Tencent Kubernetes Engine (TKE), which help CP AXTRA achieve elastic scaling, enabling IT infrastructure to adapt dynamically to fluctuating business demands. Complementing this, AI-driven innovations are revolutionizing inventory management and sales forecasting, laying the foundation for a more intelligent, responsive retail ecosystem.

As part of its digital expansion, CP AXTRA has also officially launched its Weixin/WeChat Mini Program, offering a seamless shopping experience for Chinese-speaking consumers across Asia. The Mini Program allows customers to explore and purchase a curated selection of Thai products directly from their smartphones, without needing to travel — making “Thailand to your hands” a reality. From everyday essentials to local favorites, all products are delivered with CP AXTRA’s trusted quality and service.

This initiative underscores CP AXTRA’s ambition to provide a cross-border lifestyle shopping experience that blends reliable Thai sourcing with the speed and convenience expected by modern consumers in China and across the region.

Chen Rui, Vice President of International Business and Managing Director for Southeast Asia at Tencent Cloud, said, “We are honored to partner with CP AXTRA on their transformative journey toward smart retail. By combining Tencent Cloud’s advanced AI and cloud infrastructure with CP AXTRA’s deep industry expertise, we are helping to solve complex challenges and unlock new opportunities for growth. Our solutions, such as the Tencent Kubernetes Engine, are enabling CP AXTRA to scale dynamically, optimize operations, and achieve significant cost efficiencies across thousands of stores. Together, we are setting a new standard for digital innovation in the retail sector and demonstrating the immense potential of cloud technology to drive sustainable business success.”

Tarin Thaniyavarn, Group Chief Technology & Data Officers and Group Chief E-Commerce Officer, CP AXTRA Public Company Limited, added, “At CP AXTRA, we are committed to redefining the future of retail in Southeast Asia through bold innovation and strategic partnerships. Our digital transformation roadmap is not just about adopting new technologies—it’s about empowering our people and creating smarter, more agile operations that benefit both our customers and our teams. By harnessing the power of artificial intelligence and working closely with Tencent Cloud, we are reducing repetitive workloads, enabling our employees to focus on higher-value tasks, and setting ambitious targets for online growth. This partnership is a testament to our dedication to sustainable, technology-driven progress and our vision to lead the region into a new era of smart retail.”

This partnership is more than a technological upgrade — it represents a transformative redefinition of customer experiences and retail innovation. By addressing key challenges in scalability, AI integration, and infrastructure optimization, CP AXTRA is strengthening its position as a retail tech leader in Asia. With Tencent Cloud’s proven global footprint, serving over 10,000 clients across over 80 countries, this alliance also further cements Tencent Cloud’s position as the trusted cloud partner for enterprises driving digital innovations worldwide.

About Tencent Cloud

Tencent Cloud, one of the world’s leading cloud companies, is committed to creating innovative solutions to resolve real-world issues and enabling digital transformation for smart industries. Through our extensive global infrastructure, Tencent Cloud provides businesses across the globe with stable and secure industry-leading cloud products and services, leveraging technological advancements such as cloud computing, Big Data analytics, AI, IoT, and network security. It is our constant mission to meet the needs of industries across the board, including the fields of gaming, media and entertainment, finance, healthcare, property, retail, travel, and transportation.

About CP AXTRA

CP AXTRA Public Company Limited, is an operator of Asia’s leading wholesaler and retailer, Makro and Lotus’s. The Company is based in Thailand, with operation across 10 countries. CP AXTRA is committed to fulfilling people’s lives with good health, love, joy, and well-being, by providing solutions and meeting customers’ daily needs with technology, innovation, and operational excellence.

With over 30 years of retail experience, CP AXTRA is a trusted partner for both B2B and B2C customers, offering a comprehensive range of products and services. Today, it manages over 2,600 offline stores in Thailand and Asia, with strong online presence.

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Alibaba’s AI Cloud Surge Challenges Tech Giants’ Dominance

Published

2 hours ago

September 1, 2025

Coin World

Alibaba’s China Hong Kong-listed shares surged 15% following its recent quarterly earnings report, driven largely by robust performance in its cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI) divisions. The company’s Cloud Intelligence Group reported a 26% year-on-year increase in revenue, with AI-related product sales maintaining triple-digit growth for eight consecutive quarters [2]. This has positioned Alibaba’s cloud services as a critical pillar for monetizing AI, mirroring the strategies of global tech giants such as Microsoft and Google [2].

Alibaba’s CEO, Eddie Wu, highlighted the strong demand for AI, stating that AI-related product revenue now constitutes a significant share of external customer revenue [2]. The company has continued to expand its AI capabilities, including the development of a new AI chip to support its cloud division and reduce reliance on foreign GPU suppliers [2]. This move aims to enhance performance and reduce costs in Chinese data centers, aligning with broader efforts to control more of the AI stack domestically [1].

Despite the strong cloud performance, Alibaba’s overall financial results showed mixed outcomes. Group revenue for the quarter totaled approximately 247.7 billion yuan, a modest increase that fell slightly below some forecasts [1]. While the cloud segment contributed to improved operating profits, other divisions such as China’s e-commerce and local services were affected by rising operating costs and aggressive price competition in the food delivery market [1]. Ele.me, Alibaba’s food delivery unit, reported margin pressures due to heavy subsidies and fierce competition, a challenge shared by other players in the sector [1].

The company’s financial strategy has shifted toward prioritizing high-value AI and cloud investments while reducing spending on lower-return projects [1]. Management signaled a potential pullback from aggressive subsidy tactics in food delivery and is exploring premium services and asset sales to improve unit economics. Alibaba is also considering an initial public offering (IPO) for its cloud unit, a move that could elevate the segment’s profile and attract independent valuation for its AI assets [1].

Investor reaction has been positive, particularly regarding the cloud and AI growth trajectory, though short-term concerns remain over margin pressures in local services and instant commerce. Analysts are divided on whether the AI and cloud segments can fully offset near-term profit challenges or if continued competition will keep margins depressed for several quarters [1]. However, the share price jump suggests that the market is optimistic about Alibaba’s long-term AI monetization potential.

Alibaba’s advancements in AI and cloud computing have global implications, increasing competition with major cloud providers like Amazon and Microsoft [1]. If the company’s AI tools and in-house chips scale effectively, it could offer a compelling alternative in regions such as Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. However, geopolitical factors and trade restrictions will require Alibaba to balance global ambitions with local supply chain and regulatory constraints.

Source: [1] Alibaba AI Revenue Rises While China Food War Hits Profit (https://meyka.com/blog/alibaba-ai-revenue-rises-while-china-food-war-hits-profit/) [2] Alibaba (BABA) June quarter 2025 earnings report (https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/29/alibaba-baba-june-quarter-2025-earnings-report.html) [3] Alibaba’s cloud-computing business is thriving, and it has a … (https://www.marketwatch.com/story/alibabas-stock-rises-as-cloud-computing-business-shines-and-with-a-new-ai-chip-in-the-works-6bb26ce5)

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