This week on the GeekWire Podcast: Newly unsealed court documents reveal the behind-the-scenes history of Microsoft and OpenAI, including a surprise: Amazon Web Services was OpenAI’s original partner. We tell the story behind the story, explaining how it all came to light.
Federal employees received high marks for their work. At the same time, the public also wants more from them, and federal agencies more broadly, especially around technology.
These are among the top findings of a survey of a thousand likely voters from last August by the Center for Accountability, Modernization and Innovation (CAMI).
Stan Soloway, the chairman of the board for CAMI, said the findings demonstrate at least two significant issues for federal executives to consider.
Stan Soloway is the chairman of the board for the Center for Accountability, Modernization and Innovation (CAMI).
“It very clear to us from the survey was that public actually has faith, to a certain extent, in public employees. The public also fully recognizes that the system itself is not serving them well,” Soloway said on Ask the CIO. “We found well over half of the folks that were surveyed said that they didn’t believe that government services are efficient. We found just under half of respondents had a favorable impression of government workers. And I think this is very much I respect my local civil servant because I know what they do, but I have a lot of skepticism about government writ large.”
CAMI, a non-partisan think tank, found that when it comes to government workers:
47% favorable vs 38% unfavorable toward government workers (+9% net)
Self-identified very conservative voters showed strong support (+30% net)
African Americans showed the highest favorability (+31% net)
Self-identified independents are the exception, showing negative views (-14% net)
At the same time, when it comes to government services, CAMI found 54% of the respondents believe agencies aren’t as efficient or as timely as they should be.
John Faso, a former Republican congressman from New York and a senior advisor for CAMI, said the call for more efficiencies and timeliness from citizens echoes a long-time goal of bringing federal agencies closer to the private sector.
“People, and we see this in the survey, look at what government provides and how they provide it, and then to what they’re maybe accustomed to in private sector economy,” Faso said. “Amazon is a prime example. You can sit home and order something, a food product, an item of clothing or something else you want for your house or your family, and oftentimes it’s there within a day or two. People are accustomed to getting that kind of service. People have an expectation that the government can do that. I think government is lagging, obviously, but it’s catching up, and it needs to catch up fast.”
Faso said it’s clear that a solid percentage of the reason for why the government is inefficient comes back to Congress. But at the same time, the CAMI survey demonstrated that there are things federal executives could do to address many of these long-standing challenges.
CAMI says respondents supported several changes to improve timely and efficient delivery of benefits:
40% preferred hiring more government workers
34% preferred partnering with outside organizations
Those self-identified as very liberal voters strongly favored more workers (+32% net)
Those identified as somewhat conservative voters prefer outside partnerships (-20% net)
Older voters (55+) preferred outside partnerships
“Whether it’s the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) or Medicaid and Medicare, the feds set all the rules for the administration and governance of the programs. So the first question you have to ask is, what is the federal role?” Soloway said. “Even though we have now shifted administrative responsibility for many programs to the states and to some cases, the counties, and reduced by 50% the financial support for administration of these programs, while the states have a lot to figure out and are somewhat panicked about it, because it’s a huge lift. The feds can’t just walk away. This is where we have issues of policy changes that are needed at the federal level, which we can talk about some of the ones that are desperately needed to give the states kind of the flexibility to innovate.”
Soloway added this also means agencies have to break down long-established siloes both around data and processes.
The Trump administration, for example, has prioritized data sharing across the government, especially to combat concerns around fraud. The Office of Management and Budget said in July it was supercharging the Do Not Pay list by removing the barriers to governmentwide data sharing.
Soloway said this is a prime example of where the private sector has figured out how to get different parts of their organization to talk to each other and where the government is lagging.
“What is the federal role in helping to break down the silos and integrate applications, and to the certain extent help with the administration of programs with like beneficiaries? The data is pretty clear that there’s a lot of commonality across multiple programs, and when you think about the number of different departments and the bureaucracy that actually control those programs, there’s got to be leadership at the federal level, both on technology and to expand process transformation, otherwise you’re not going to solve the problem,” he said. “The second thing is when we talk about issues like program integrity, there are ways you can combat fraud and also protect the beneficiaries. But too often, the conversations are either/or any effort to combat fraud is seen as an effort to take eligible people off the rolls. Every effort to protect eligible people on the rolls is seen as just feeding into that so that’s where the federal leadership, and some of that is in technology, some of it’s in policy. Some of it’s going to be in resources, because it requires investments in technology across the board, state and federal.”
Respondents say technology can play a bigger role in improving the delivery of federal services.
CAMI says respondents offered strong support for using AI to improve government service delivery:
48% support vs 29% oppose using AI tools (net +19%)
Self-identified republicans show stronger support than democrats (+36% vs +7% net)
Men are significantly more supportive than women (+35% vs +3% net)
Support is strongest among middle-aged voters (30-44: +40% net)
Soloway said CAMI is sharing its survey findings with both Congress and the executive branch.
“We’re trying to get the conversations going and get the information to the right people. When we do that, we find, by and large, on both sides, there’s a lot of support to do stuff. The question is going to really be, where’s the leadership going to come from that will have the enough credibility on both sides to push this ball forward?” Soloway said.
Faso added state governments also must play a big role in improving program delivery.
“You have cost sharing between the federal and state governments, and you have cost sharing in terms of the administrative burden to implement these programs. I think a lot of governors, frankly, are now really looking at themselves and saying, ‘How am I going to implement this?’” he said. “How do I collaborate with the federal government to make sure that we’re all enrolling in the same direction in terms of implementing these requirements.”
AI Robot Team Assistant Service and Chatbot agant or Robotic Automation helping Humans as technology and Human Job integration as employees being guided by robots.
Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Al Williams took a break to talk about their favorite hacks last week. You can drop in to hear about articulated mirrors, triacs, and even continuous 3D-printing modifications.
Flying on an airplane this weekend? Maybe wait until you get back to read about how the air traffic control works. Back home, you can order a pizza on a Wii or run classic Basic games on a calculator.
For the can’t miss articles, the guys talked about very low Earth orbit satellites and talked about readers who dumpster dive.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and don’t be shy. Tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
This week Jonathan chats with Nicholas Adams about OpenRiak! Why is there a Riak and an OpenRiak, which side of the CAP theorem does OpenRiak land on, and why is it so blazingly fast for some operations? Listen to find out!
Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show right on our YouTube Channel? Have someone you’d like us to interview? Let us know, or have the guest contact us! Take a look at the schedule here.
For millions of users, the Spotify experience is heavily driven by algorithmic discovery. But thanks to the recent integration with ChatGPT, more users are taking an conversation route to discover new podcasts.
In this episode, we explore Amazon Ring’s newly introduced Familiar Faces feature that utilizes AI for facial recognition. We discuss the convenience of identifying familiar people at your doorstep, the privacy concerns it raises, and the legal implications surrounding biometric data. Learn about how this feature works, potential inaccuracies, and privacy laws in certain U.S. […]
Someone listening to last week’s GeekWire Podcast caught something we missed: a misleading comment by Alexa during our voice ordering demo — illustrating the challenges of ordering by voice vs. screen. We followed up with Amazon, which says it has fixed the underlying bug.
On this week’s show, we play the audio of the order again. Can you catch it?
Plus, Microsoft announces a “community first” approach to AI data centers after backlash over power and water usage — and President Trump scooped us on the story. We discuss the larger issues and play a highlight from our interview with Microsoft President Brad Smith.
Join Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi as they swap their favorite hacks and stories from the week. In this episode, they’ll start off by marveling over the evolution of the “smart knob” and other open hardware input devices, then discuss a futuristic propulsion technology you can demo in your own kitchen sink, and a cheap handheld game system that get’s a new lease on life thanks to the latest version of the ESP32 microcontroller.
From there they’ll cover spinning CRTs, creating custom GUIs on Android, and yet another thing you can build of out that old Ender 3 collecting dust in the basement. The episode wraps up with a discussion about putting Valve’s Steam Deck to work and a look at the history-making medical evacuation of the International Space Station.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
This week Jonathan and Randal chat with Jose Valim about Elixir! What led Jose to create this unique programming language? What do we mean that it’s a functional language with immutability?
Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show right on our YouTube Channel? Have someone you’d like us to interview? Let us know, or have the guest contact us! Take a look at the schedule here.
This week on the GeekWire Podcast: Amazon and Microsoft are racing to define the next era of consumer AI, on multiple fronts. We discuss Amazon’s attempt to upgrade Alexa into a true generative AI home chatbot — complete with a new web portal and updated Alexa app — while Microsoft tries to win over retailers with a new Copilot Checkout feature.
Plus, we explore Google’s upcoming “AI Inbox” for Gmail, which promises to act like an executive assistant for your email. We talk about our smart bird feeder experiment that resulted in “fuzzy birds,” due to improper focal length. And we share our initial experience with AI automation on the Windows PC desktop using Vy from Seattle startup Vercept.
Finally, we offer a Netflix recommendation, Cover-Up, the documentary about legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. We couldn’t help but wonder: what would uncover if he could digitize all those notes and put them through an AI model?
The Defense Logistics Agency is initially focusing its use of artificial intelligence across three main mission areas: operations, demand planning and forecasting, and audit and transparency.
At the same time, DLA isn’t waiting for everyone to be trained or for its data to be perfect.
Adarryl Roberts, the chief information officer at DLA, said by applying AI tools to their use cases, employees can actually clean up the data more quickly.
Adarryl Roberts is the chief information officer at the Defense Logistics Agency. (Photo courtesy of DLA).
“You don’t have a human trying to analyze the data and come up with those conclusions. So leveraging AI to help with data curation and ensuring we have cleaner data, but then also not just focusing on ChatGPT and things of that nature,” Roberts said on Ask the CIO. “I know that’s the buzzword, but for an agency like DLA, ChatGPT does not solve our strategic issues that we’re trying to solve, and so that’s why there’s a heavier emphasis on AI. For us in those 56 use cases, there’s a lot of that was natural language processing, a lot around procurement, what I would consider more standardized data, what we’re moving towards with generative AI.”
A lot of this work is setting DLA up to use agentic AI in the short-to-medium term. Roberts said by applying agentic AI to its mission areas, DLA expects to achieve the scale, efficiency and effectiveness benefits that the tools promise to provide.
“At DLA, that’s when we’re able to have digital employees work just like humans, to make us work at scale so that we’re not having to redo work. That’s where you get the loss in efficiency from a logistics perspective, when you have to reorder or re-ship, that’s more cost to the taxpayer, and that also delays readiness to the warfighter,” Roberts said at the recent DLA Industry Collider day. “From a research and development perspective, it’s really looking at the tools we have. We have native tools in the cloud. We have SAP, ServiceNow and others, so based upon our major investments from technology, what are those gaps from a technology perspective that we’re not able to answer from a mission perspective across the supply chain? Then we focus on those very specific use cases to help accelerate AI in that area. The other part of that is architecting it so that it seamlessly plugs back into the ecosystem.”
He added that this ensures the technology doesn’t end up becoming a data stovepipe and can integrate into the larger set of applications to be effective and not break missions.
A good example of this approach leading to success is DLA’s use of robotics process automation (RPA) tools. Roberts said the agency currently has about 185 unattended bots that are working 24/7 to help DLA meet mission goals.
“Through our digital citizen program, government people actually are building bots. As the CIO, I don’t want to be a roadblock as a lot of the technology has advanced to where if you watch a YouTube video, you can pretty much do some rudimentary level coding and things of that nature. You have high school kids building bots today. So I want to put the technology in the hands of the experts, the folks who know the business process the best, so it’s a shorter flash to bang in order to get that support out to the warfighter,” Roberts said.
The success of the bots initiative helped DLA determine that the approach of adopting commercial platforms to implement AI tools was the right one. Roberts said all of these platforms reside under its DLA Connect enterprisewide portal.
“That’s really looking at the technology, the people, our processes and our data, and how do we integrate that and track that schematically so that we don’t incur the technical debt we incurred about 25 years ago? That’s going to result in us having architecture laying out our business processes, our supply chain strategies, how that is integrated within those business processes, overlaying that with our IT and those processes within the IT space,” he said. “The business processes, supply chain, strategies and all of that are overlapping. You can see that integration and that interoperability moving forward. So we are creating a single portal where, if you’re a customer, an industry partner, an actual partner or internal DLA, for you to communicate and also see what’s happening across DLA.”
Training every employee on AI
He said that includes questions about contracts and upcoming requests for proposals as well as order status updates and other data driven questions.
Of course, no matter how good the tools are, if the workforce isn’t trained on how to use the AI capabilities or knows where to find the data, then the benefits will be limited.
Roberts said DLA has been investing in training from online and in person courses to creating a specific “innovation navigators course” that is focused on both the IT and how to help the businesses across the agency look at innovation as a concept.
“Everyone doesn’t need the same level of training for data acumen and AI analytics, depending on where you sit in the organization. So working with our human resources office, we are working with the other executives in the mission areas to understand what skill sets they need to support their day-to-day mission. What are their strategic objectives? What’s that population of the workforce and how do we train them, not just online, but in person?” Roberts said. “We’re not trying to reinvent how you learn AI and data, but how do we do that and incorporate what’s important to DLA moving forward? We have a really robust plan for continuous education, not just take a course, and you’re trained, which, I think, is where the government has failed in the past. We train people as soon as they come on board, and then you don’t get additional training for the next 10-15 years, and then the technology passes you by. So we’re going to stay up with technology, and it’s going to be continuous education moving forward, and that will evolve as our technology evolves.”
Roberts said the training is for everyone, from the director of DLA to senior leaders in the mission areas to the logistics and supply chain experts. The goal is to help them answer and understand how to use the digital products, how to prompt AI tools the best way and how to deploy AI to impact their missions.
“You don’t want to deploy AI for the sake of deploying AI, but we need to educate the workforce in terms of how it will assist them in their day to day jobs, and then strategically, from a leadership perspective, how are we structuring that so that we can achieve our objectives,” he said. “Across DLA, we’ve trained over 25,000 employees. All our employees have been exposed, at least, to an introductory level of data acumen. Then we have some targeted courses that we’re having for senior leaders to actually understand how you manage and lead when you have a digital-first concept. We’re actually going to walk through some use cases, see those to completion for some of the priorities that we have strategically, that way we can better lead the workforce and their understanding of how to employ it at echelon within our organization, enhancing IT governance and operational success.”
The courses and training has helped DLA “lay the foundation in terms of what we need to be a digital organization, to think digital first. Now we’re at the point of execution and implementation, putting those tools to use,” Roberts said.
This week, Hackaday’s Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up over coffee to bring you the latest news, mystery sound results show, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous seven days or so.
On What’s That Sound, Kristina had no idea what was going on, but [Flippin’ Heck] knew it was a flip dot display, and won a Hackaday Podcast t-shirt! Congratulations!
After that, it’s on to the hacks and such, with not one but two ways of seeing sound. We also take a look at benchmarking various Windows releases against each other on 12-year-old hardware.
We also talk about painting on floppies and glitching out jpegs in a binary text editor. Finally, we discuss the history and safety of autopilot, and take a look at the humble time clock.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Download in DRM-free MP3 and savor at your leisure.
This week on the GeekWire Podcast: The FCC delivered a massive shakeup to the drone industry right before the holidays, adding foreign-made drones (most notably from industry giant DJI) to its “Covered List” of national security threats.
While the move effectively bans the sale of future foreign-made drone models in the U.S., we explore why it may represent an unexpected economic opportunity for the Pacific Northwest.
Plus, the results are in. After ignoring John’s advice and deciding to retrofit his 2007 Toyota Camry with a modern infotainment system, Todd shares the outcome.
Security researcher Jon “Gainsec” Gaines and YouTuber Benn Jordan discuss their examination of Flock Safety’s AI-powered license plate readers and how cost-driven design choices, outdated software, and weak security controls expose them to abuse.
An illustration by ChatGPT based on its interpretation of our year-end GeekWire Podcast discussion.
The past year may go down as one of the most consequential in technology history, in both the Seattle tech community and the world. But in some ways, it’s not without precedent.
As we sat down to reflect on the past year, we rewound all the way back to January — when, as part of a larger discussion with Bill Gates, we asked the Microsoft co-founder to compare the early days of the PC with these early years of AI.
Gates reflected on the PC era as a moment of computing becoming free, effectively.
“Now what’s happening is intelligence is becoming free,” he said, “and that’s even more profound than computing becoming free.”
As we looked through GeekWire’s top stories of the year, almost every one felt like a subplot to that larger narrative. On this special year-end episode of the GeekWire Podcast, we reviewed the articles that resonated most with readers, and compared notes to make sense of it all.
Listen below, and continue reading for episode notes and links.
Enigma of success: ‘Brutal reality’ of tech cycles
The unexpected way AI is affecting jobs — not by replacing workers directly, but by pressuring companies to cut costs as they pour money into infrastructure.
MIT study: 95% of projects using generative AI have failed or produced no return.
Worker stress: Mandates to use AI, but no playbook on how.
One tech veteran’s take: “The enigma of success is a polite way of describing the brutal reality of tech cycles. … The challenge, and opportunity for leadership, is whether the bets actually compound into something durable, or just become another slide deck for next year’s reorg.”
Bill Radke on KUOW: “The tech industry had quite a year. Amazon ordered their workers back to the office. You must come back to the office. Are you here? Good. You’re laid off. Not all of you. Just the humans.“
A pivotal year for Amazon
Andy Jassy’s explanation: Not financially driven, not even really AI driven — it’s culture.
After rapid growth, Amazon trying to get back to operating like “the world’s largest startup.”
The new motto seems to be: Get small and nimble, faster.
Can Amazon find that next pillar of business, as Jeff Bezos used to say?
Magdalena Balazinska, director of the Paul G. Allen School: “Coding, or the translation of a precise design into software instructions, is dead. AI can do that. We have never graduated coders. We have always graduated software engineers.”
The issue was explored by the New York Times in its Daily podcast on Code.org and the shifting landscape for coding education. See the response from Hadi Partovi of Code.org.
Complex alchemy of interest rates, regulation, and market conditions.
AI becomes real
Brad Smith at Microsoft’s annual meeting: Asked Copilot’s researcher agent to produce a report on an issue from seven or eight years ago. Fifteen minutes later: 25-page report with 100 citations.
What’s happening now: the shift from individual productivity to team productivity, from people using AI to organizations figuring it out.
As companies implement AI agents, we move from desktop/individual applications to true enterprise services, playing to Seattle’s strengths.
Quote of the Year
“We look forward to joining Matt on his private island next year.” — Kiana Ehsani, CEO of Vercept, after her co-founder Matt Deitke left to join Meta for a reported hundreds of millions of dollars.
Stickler of the Year
Proud Seattleite and grammarian Ken Jennings on Jeopardy!, correcting a contestant: “Sorry, Dan, we are sticklers in Seattle. It’s Pike Place — no s.”
Feel-Good Moment of the Year
Ambika Singh, CEO and founder of Armoire, accepting the Workplace of the Year award at the GeekWire Awards: “It is not a surprise to any of you that we are losing community outside of these walls in this country. But here, it feels alive and well.”
Tin Can co-founder and CEO Chet Kittleson. (Tin Can Photo)
If you’re looking for an uncommon thinker, how about a tech industry veteran developing and selling landline phones in 2025 — and selling out of them in the process?
Chet Kittleson is the co-founder and CEO of Tin Can, a Seattle startup making Wi-Fi enabled landline phones designed to let kids talk to friends and family with just their voices. No screens, no AI.
GeekWire recognized Kittleson as one of our Uncommon Thinkers for 2025, a program presented in partnership with Greater Seattle Partners honoring inventors, scientists, and entrepreneurs transforming their industries in unexpected ways.
In this episode, he talks about the moment at school pickup that sparked the idea, why his own kids don’t own devices, what happened when they eliminated screens on family road trips, and the $12 million seed round led by Greylock that will fuel the company’s next chapter.
Listen below, subscribe wherever you listen, and keep reading for takeaways and highlights.
It’s a “connection factory,” not a nostalgia play. Kittleson pushes back on the idea that Tin Can is primarily about retro appeal.
“People always ask us about nostalgia and retro. … I don’t think it’s about that. I think it’s about connection,” he said. “We found a form factor that is familiar, and that’s certainly been beneficial. And people love nostalgia. … But we feel like we’re more of a connection factory than we are bringing back the bell bottoms.”
The landline was kids’ first social network — we just forgot. Kittleson grew up in La Conner, Wash., using the family phone to organize roller hockey games and playdates.
“As a social network, the landline had 100% penetration. Everybody had one,” he said. “I think we all forgot that we were major beneficiaries of that as kids.” When he mentioned this to other parents at school pickup, they all started reciting their childhood best friends’ phone numbers from memory.
Texting isn’t connection — it’s just communication. Kittleson cited a study in which stressed kids were split into three groups: one texted their mom, one called their mom, one saw their mom in person.
The kids who called or saw their mothers released oxytocin and calmed down. The texting group? “There was no chemical effect. It was like nothing happened,” Kittleson said. “It’s not connection. You are communicating, but that’s not the same thing as connecting.”
The new funding brings hardware expertise to the table. The $12 million round was led by Greylock and includes participation from David Shuman, chairman of the board at Oura, the smart ring company.
“We are a bunch of technologists with very little hardware experience,” Kittleson said. Shuman, he said, is contributing an immense amount of knowledge on supply chain, manufacturing, and cash flow.
His mom made him an uncommon thinker. When Kittleson was a kid, he wrote terrible songs. His uncle gently told him he wasn’t a great singer. His mom supported him, no matter what.
“Whatever you want to do, if you work hard enough, if you believe, if you’ve got the guts, you can do it,” she told him. That, Kittleson said, made him “more inclined to be open to the idea that I could be the reason something like the landline comes back.”
The 2025 Uncommon Thinkers on stage at the GeekWire Gala. From left: Anindya Roy (Lila Biologics), Kiana Ehsani (Vercept), Max Blumen (Tin Can, accepting for co-founder Chet Kittleson), Jay Graber (Bluesky), Brian Pinkard (Aquagga), and Jeff Thornburg (Portal Space Systems). (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)
At the GeekWire Gala this week, we spent time talking backstage with five of this year’s Uncommon Thinkers — the inventors, scientists, and entrepreneurs who were selected in partnership with Greater Seattle Partners for their work transforming industries and the world.
You can hear the full conversations on this week’s episode of the GeekWire Podcast. As I mentioned at the end, I came away with an unexpected sense of optimism.
Jeff Thornburg of Portal Space Systems spent years building rocket engines for Elon Musk at SpaceX and Paul Allen at Stratolaunch. Now he and his team are reviving a NASA concept from decades ago: spacecraft propelled by focused sunlight.
Jeff Thornburg, CEO of Portal Space Systems, addresses the audience while being recognized as a 2025 Uncommon Thinker at the GeekWire Gala. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)
When I asked what the world will look like “if Portal succeeds,” he made a classic entrepreneurial pivot: “When we’re successful,” he said, “we become the backbone of Earth-Moon logistics.”
From there, he said, it’s about protecting orbits for commerce, supporting human presence on the moon, and eventually pushing out to Jupiter’s moons.
Anindya Roy of Lila Biologics is using AI to design proteins from scratch — molecules that have never existed in nature — to fight cancer. He trained in David Baker’s Nobel Prize-winning lab at UW, so he saw the before and after of machine learning’s impact on the field.
Anindya Roy of Lila Biologics on stage at the GeekWire Gala, where he was honored as a 2025 Uncommon Thinker. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)
Before: success rates below 1%, ordering hundreds of thousands of designs to find one that worked. Now: 5-20% success rates, ordering a few hundred designs to find a drug candidate.
“If you told me a couple of years ago that we can design an antibody from a computer, I would not believe you,” he said.
Jay Graber of Bluesky runs the decentralized social network that has become a leading alternative to X. But while most tech CEOs build moats, she and her team are building a protocol designed to help users leave.
Jay Graber, CEO of Bluesky, is recognized as a 2025 Uncommon Thinker during the GeekWire Gala. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)
She talks about Bluesky and the underlying AT Protocol as a “collective organism,” and describes her role as guiding and stewarding the ecosystem rather than controlling it.
The industry and the world would be better off, she says, if leaders would think about their role “more as guides and stewards, rather than just dictators or emperors as they like to style themselves.”
Kiana Ehsani of Vercept came to Seattle from Iran for her PhD, spent four years at the Allen Institute for AI, and is now competing with OpenAI and Google in the AI agent space with a fraction of their resources.
Kiana Ehsani, CEO of Vercept, accepts her 2025 Uncommon Thinker award on stage at the GeekWire Gala. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)
The ultimate vision is to help people move beyond mouse, keyboard, and touchscreen, letting them interact with computers the way they’d talk to a coworker.
AI agents are still early, she cautions. “Think of ChatGPT three years ago. Don’t think of it today.” Her advice for getting started with AI agents: “Start small, start with simple tasks that you don’t want to do, and then slowly build on top of it to see the magic.”
Brian Pinkard of Aquagga is tackling forever chemicals, the PFAS compounds that have spread through our water, food chain, and bloodstreams. The industry standard is to filter them out and then landfill or incinerate the waste, approaches that don’t truly solve the problem and can simply move it elsewhere.
Brian Pinkard, CTO of Aquagga, speaks on stage at the GeekWire Gala after being named a 2025 Uncommon Thinker. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)
Aquagga uses technology originally designed to destroy chemical weapons to break PFAS down into inert salts under extreme heat and pressure. Pinkard didn’t believe it was possible until he saw the data. “I’m a skeptic, I’m cynical, I’m a scientist,” he said. “I wanted to see proof.”
His bigger vision is to transform hazardous waste processing entirely. Today, huge volumes of wastewater are trucked to incinerators and burned — which he calls “thermodynamic insanity.”
We’ll speak on a future episode with our sixth honoree, Chet Kittleson, co-founder and CEO of Tin Can, the startup making WiFi-enabled landline phones to help kids connect without screens.
Amazon is experimenting again. This week on the GeekWire Podcast, we dig into our scoop on Amazon Now, the company’s new ultrafast delivery service. Plus, we recap the GeekWire team’s ride in a Zoox robotaxi on the Las Vegas Strip during Amazon Web Services re:Invent.
In our featured interview from the expo hall, AWS Senior Vice President Colleen Aubrey discusses Amazon’s push into applied AI, why the company sees AI agents as “teammates,” and how her team is rethinking product development in the age of agentic coding.
Threat actors are embracing ClickFix, ransomware gangs are turning on each other – toppling even the leaders – and law enforcement is disrupting one infostealer after another
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