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Semiconductor Shortage and the Global Supply Chain Squeeze

Frank Chen and Zoran Basich

Frank Chen and Zoran Basich of a16z cover the bigger picture of the chip shortage that has led to stalled production for major U.S. automakers.

Amazon Narratives — Memos, Working Backwards From Release, More

Colin Bryar, Bill Carr, and Sonal Chokshi

When you hear stories about Amazon’s “invention machine” — which led to a company with not just one or two products but several successful diverse lines of business — we often hear about things like: Memos...

The Machine that Made the Vaccine

Stephane Bancel, Jorge Conde, and Hanne Winarsky

This episode of Bio Eats World takes us from a world of pipette and lab benches to a world of industrial robots making medicines.

Fintech for Gen Z and Millennials

Amira Yahyaoui, Anish Acharya, Seema Amble, and Lauren Murrow

How tech-enabled financial tools can cut through bureaucracy, downsize student debt, and optimize consumers’ financial futures from an early age.

Degrading Drugs for Problematic Proteins

Carolyn Bertozzi and Lauren Richardson

Many diseases are caused by proteins that have gone haywire in some fashion. So how do you get rid of these problematic proteins? Dr. Bertozzi and her lab developed a class of drugs that, in essence, tosses the disease-related proteins into the cellular trash can.

The Biology of Aging

Laura Deming, Kristen Fortney, Vijay Pande, and Hanne Winarsky

Once a fringe field, the science of aging is now entering a new phase with the first clinical trials of aging-related drugs. As the entire field shifts into this moment of translation, what have we learned? What are the basic approaches to developing aging-related drugs? How is studying aging helping us understand diseases like cancer and Alzheimer's—and increasing the amount of time we are healthy—today? 

Tiktok and ‘Seeing Like an Algorithm’

Eugene Wei and Sonal Chokshi

The algorithm that powers TikTok, the short video platform that grabbed massive marketshare in cultures and markets never experienced firsthand by the engineers and designers in China, beating out other apps in the U.S. But with talk of U.S. ownership/partnership for TikTok, what happens if the algorithm isn't included? And what can we learn from the "creativity network effects" flywheel of TikTok; about "algorithm friendly" product design; and more broadly, for the future of video.

GPT-3, Beyond the Hype

Frank Chen and Sonal Chokshi

What's real, what's hype when it comes to all the recent buzz around the language model GPT-3? What is "it", how does it work, where does it fit into the arc of broader tech trends (natural language, neural networks, deep learning approaches, more) -- and are we really getting closer to artificial general intelligence?

Section 230, Content Moderation, Free Speech, the Internet

Mike Masnick and Sonal Chokshi

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act has been in the headlines a lot recently, in the context of Twitter, the president's tweets, and an executive order put out by the White House just this week. So we break it all down -- what it is and isn't, its evolution, where platforms and content moderation comes in -- explaining nuances, debunking popular rhetoric, and more.

The Environment, Capitalism, Technology

Andrew McAfee, Marc Andreessen, and Sonal Chokshi

It used to be that the only way for humanity to grow — and progress — was through destroying the environment. But is this interplay between human growth vs. environment really a zero-sum game? Even if it were true in history, is it true today? If capitalism is not responsible for environmental degradation, than who or what is? And where does (and doesn’t) technology come in? We interview MIT economist Andrew McAfee about all this and more, given his new book, More from Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources — and What Happens Next.