TechSurge: Deep Tech Podcast
Exploring topics at the intersection of emerging technology, geopolitics, and business.
Hosted by Celesta Capital.
The TechSurge: Deep Tech VC Podcast shares the latest insights directly from legendary Silicon Valley leaders, daring new founders, and visionary technologists.
Join us as we examine the factors shaping the next major technology cycle shift of AI, examine emerging global tech hubs, and analyze where investment dollars are flowing next.
Each discussion delves into the intersection of technology advancement, market dynamics, and the founder journey, offering insights into the vast opportunities and complex challenges ahead.
For entrepreneurs, investors, or anyone interested in where we're headed next, this is your guide to understanding the technologies and companies poised to transform the future.
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Patrick Pilarski: Alberta Plan Co-Author On Reinforcement Learning & AI-Powered Prosthetics
For all the competition among AI labs, their primary products are built in much the same way: a large language model is pre-trained on enormous datasets, post-trained, deployed, and refreshed every so often. In 2022, three researchers in Alberta, Canada published a contrarian roadmap for AI that rejects that entire premise.
In this episode of TechSurge, host David Goldman speaks with Patrick Pilarski, who co-wrote the Alberta Plan with Richard Sutton and Michael Bowling. Pilarski is a Canada CIFAR AI Chair, an Amii Fellow, and a professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Alberta, where his lab builds prosthetic limbs that learn to anticipate what their users intend. In 2017, he was one of three Amii researchers who brought DeepMind’s first international research office to Edmonton, serving as its co-lead until 2023.
The conversation opens with the Alberta Plan’s core premise: an agent that constructs all of its knowledge from its own stream of experience, with no artificial separation between training and deployment, what Pilarski calls “temporal uniformity.” He contrasts this with how today’s major AI labs bolt reinforcement learning onto pre-trained language models during post-training, and addresses head-on why his co-author Rich Sutton has publicly argued that LLMs are a dead end.
Pilarski also breaks news on the podcast: he will soon join ExperienceFlow.AI, a San Francisco-based company with a research lab led scientifically by Richard Sutton, as Head of Edge Superintelligence, focused on bringing continual learning to computing environments where connectivity and compute are limited. He argues that the industry’s massive data center build-out does not lock AI into a single architectural path, and that existing hardware and software stacks have far more flexibility than commonly assumed.
The episode closes with a tour through Pilarski’s own research: how AI-powered prosthetic limbs learn to predict user intent in minutes rather than months, a landmark bone-anchored prosthetic surgery performed in Alberta, and the prospect of supernumerary limbs and wearable technology as a path toward genuine human augmentation. Pilarski also discusses a paper he co-authored arguing that AI agent safety concerns dominating recent headlines are, in fact, reinforcement learning problems the field has studied for decades.
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Fred Thiel, Chairman and CEO of Marathon Digital, dives us into the world of blockchain and cryptocurrency mining. Fred discusses the technological advancements in Bitcoin mining, including significant improvements in energy efficiency, and provides insights into the future of Bitcoin, predicting substantial growth in its value and its linkages with AI inference data centers. He also explains the relationship between Bitcoin and global economic factors, the potential for regulatory changes, and the evolving role of cryptocurrencies in both developed and developing markets, highlighting Bitcoin’s growing role as a store of value and a driver of financial sovereignty in the digital age.
Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra discusses his journey in the semiconductor industry and the growing strategic importance of the memory industry in the age of AI. He highlights innovation in high bandwidth memory (HBM), which enables faster data access and lower power consumption. Sanjay also discusses Micron’s plans to build new U.S. semiconductor factories and the role of the CHIPS Act in bringing semiconductor manufacturing back to the U.S. He shares his insights on the resurgence of hardware innovation and what it takes to drive technological leadership in a rapidly evolving industry.
Former CEO of PepsiCo and New York Times bestselling author Indra Nooyi joins host Michael Marks for a wide-ranging conversation to share her insights on the growth of big tech companies, the impact of AI, CEO-board relationships, and much more.
Indra currently serves on the boards of Amazon, Phillips, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, the National Gallery of Art, and is a Dean’s Advisory Council Member at MIT School of Engineering. Her New York Times bestselling memoir My Life In Full offers insight and a call-to-action from one of the world’s most-admired business leaders on how our society can blend work and family — and advance women — in the 21st century. She is widely considered to be one of the world’s top CEOs for her leadership at global giant PepsiCo over 12 years.
Driven both by surging demand and rapid technology advancements, an emerging area of health innovation called “bioconvergence” is driving improvements in human health and sustained interest from investors. This episode will explore these new applications merging engineered technologies with scientific disciplines, including in diagnostics, therapeutics, and elsewhere.
Nobel Laureate Dr. Jim Rothman, Dr. Melanie Mathieu of Prellis Biologics, and Daniel Dornbusch of Excision join host Michael Marks for an in-depth discussion covering advancements in CRISPR technology, the role of AI in drug discovery, the future of personalized medicine, and much more.
Legendary technology founder and venture investor Vinod Khosla joins host Michael Marks for a wide-ranging discussion on the future of AI, major tech cycles, the importance of being honest with founders, and much more. Vinod shares his predictions for the next 25 years of technology advancement and how we should be assessing the risks and benefits as the adoption of artificial intelligence continues to accelerate.
Celesta Capital is a global deep tech venture firm enabling visionary founders at the forefront of scientific and engineering breakthroughs.
Celesta's team has spent decades founding, leading, and scaling global technology businesses, collectively founding more than 40 companies. We understand how to partner with founders to help turn prototypes into powerhouses.
From semiconductors and systems to breakthrough biology, we seek out the physics‑defying, code‑rewriting breakthroughs that will power the next decade of technology advancement.
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