Inside AI

What and why should we still learn when AI can do so much for us?

In this episode, Marcel and EPFL experts Patrick Jermann and Francesco Mondada explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping education, from coding and assessment to the very purpose of learning. Drawing on real experiments at EPFL, they reveal what AI gets right, where it falls short, and why true learning still requires effort, curiosity, and human interaction.

Production: Ethan Nyffenegger

What happens when AI stops being just a tool—and starts acting like an autonomous agent?
In this episode of Inside AI, host Marcel Salathé speaks with EPFL professor and Applied Machine Learning Days co-founder Bob West about the growing rift shaping today’s AI landscape. Drawing on insights from his sabbatical at Microsoft Research, West unpacks how AI has evolved into a general-purpose technology with real-world power.

From the surprising persuasive abilities of large language models, to hidden English-centric biases, to the emerging need for “machine psychology,” the conversation explores how modern AI systems think, adapt, and influence us. They also tackle the risks of AI as a self-improving actor—and the hopeful promise of accelerating scientific discovery and medical breakthroughs.

A deep dive into the future of human–machine intelligence, and what it means for the world we’re rapidly entering.

Production: Melissa Anchisi

In this episode, Marcel sits down with Dr. Eamonn Maguire, Director of Engineering for AI and ML at Proton, for a wide-ranging conversation about privacy-preserving AI, the evolution of Proton’s products from anti-abuse systems to Lumo—Proton’s private, end-to-end encrypted alternative to ChatGPT—and the deeper implications of today’s rapidly shifting AI landscape. They discuss Proton’s mission as a privacy-first alternative to Big Tech, what it takes to build secure AI services, the challenges of agentic systems, open models like Apertus, and why the future of AI must balance innovation with user protection.
More information at : https://proton.me/

Production: Ethan Nyffenegger

Can a small Swiss lab out-reason trillion-parameter giants? In this episode, Aldo Podestà, founder & CEO of Giotto.ai, explains how his team reached the #1 spot on the ARC-AGI v2 leaderboard—with a ~200M-parameter system scoring 23.19% on an extremely challenging, non-memorization reasoning benchmark. Aldo traces his journey from EPFL math student to entrepreneur, the Kaggle win that sparked the company, and why Giotto spun out a successful vertical product before going 100% R&D. Aldo also talks about why the next big leaps will come from generating small programs to check answers and from better hardware.
More info:
- https://www.giotto.ai/
- https://arcprize.org/arc-agi

Production: Ethan Nyffenegger

In this episode, Marcel talks with Annie Hartley, EPFL Professor and Director of the Laboratory for Intelligent Global Health & Humanitarian Response Technologies (LiGHT), about building trustworthy medical AI that works in the field. They cover LiGHT’s cross-institution work with EPFL and Harvard/Ariadne Labs, operational hubs in Rwanda and India, why neutrality matters in humanitarian tech, and how to evaluate models via clinician collaboration and real-world trials.

They also discuss Meditron (a medical LLM pipeline), truly open models like Apertus, and MOOVE, a massive open validation platform where experts collaborate to align medical LLMs with real-world standards.

Find out more:
LiGHT Laboratory: https://www.light-laboratory.org/
Join the MOOVE: https://jointhemoove.org/

Production: Ethan Nyffenegger