GAEA Talks

This week on GAEA Talks, Graeme Scott sits down with Davood Shamsi, Director of AI at J.P. Morgan Chase, Stanford-trained mathematician, former Apple language model lead, and co-author of the forthcoming O'Reilly book From Models to Money.
Filmed in our new London studio, Davood lays out the framework at the heart of his book. He explains why the vast majority of Gen AI pilots fail to produce real ROI, why so many enterprises are quietly hosting "zombie pilots" that nobody wants to kill, and why measuring an efficiency pilot the same way as a strategic bet is one of the biggest mistakes leaders are making right now. He then takes us inside the elegant simplicity of the transformer architecture, explains why data centres are quietly making electricity cheaper for consumers, and walks through the tribal-knowledge shift that will change the value of long-tenured employees inside every large organisation.
Topics covered:
The three questions every AI pilot must answer
The zombie pilot problem inside large enterprises
Efficiency vs compounding vs strategic bet pilots - and why measurement has to change
The Amazon Just Walk Out and IBM Watson lessons
Privacy-first AI - what Apple's approach still teaches every industry
The IPA thesis - why transformers are elegantly simple
Why data centres are quietly making electricity cheaper
The tribal knowledge shift and the future value of long tenure
The price of anarchy and how AI could close the gap in every organisation

This week on GAEA Talks, Graeme Scott sits down with James Palles-Dimmock, CEO of Quantum Motion, Cambridge-trained physicist, and one of the sharpest voices in the world on how quantum computing will actually reach useful scale.
Filmed in the new London studio, this is one of the most technically substantive and hype-free conversations on quantum computing GAEA Talks has recorded. James's argument is simple and radical. Quantum computing will not scale by adding qubits one at a time in a university lab. It will scale by riding the only industrial process that can hit millions or billions of units, which is CMOS. That is the bet Quantum Motion is making, backed by over one hundred and sixty million dollars of funding, a deployed machine at the National Quantum Computing Centre and a leading position in DARPA's Quantum Benchmarking Initiative.
Topics covered:
What a quantum computer actually is (and what it is not)
Why silicon spin qubits are the only credible route to million-qubit scale
The AI and quantum crossover - why quantum is a data generator for AI, not a competitor
Why AI's real limitation is data and world models, not architecture
The Landauer limit and reversible computing
Steve Jobs's "bicycle of the mind" and specific vs general AI
The scientific method in one line - "try to make mistakes as quickly as possible"
Sovereign AI as resilience, not autarky
The Quantum Motion roadmap to a utility-scale quantum computer by 2032 to 2033
Why the real breakthroughs will come from a fourteen year old in her bedroom, not a warehouse

This week on GAEA Talks, Graeme Scott sits down with Professor Michael Jacobides - Sir Donald Gordon Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at London Business School, academic advisor at the BCG Henderson Institute, and one of the most respected minds anywhere on how AI is reshaping the structure of the modern enterprise.
Filmed live in our new London studio, this is a masterclass in cutting through the current AI hype. Michael explains why the current wave of Gen AI is built on capital markets expectations rather than business outcomes, why the only people making real money from AI today are the picks and shovels, and why "AI first" is one of the silliest strategic frames in the market. He walks through his white rabbit and EBITDA elephant framework, the difference between productivity gains and value proposition disruption, the Chinese pragmatism versus US "race to become God" divide, and why the historical link between US academia and industry that produced everything from the Ethernet to the transformer paper is now being deliberately torn apart.
Topics covered:
Why AI needs to be analysed as an ecosystem, not a technology
The capital markets problem in Gen AI valuations
The picks and shovels reality - who is actually making money today
Gen AI as a mass persuasion technology, not a truth technology
The white rabbit and EBITDA elephant framework
Why value proposition disruption matters more than productivity
The Chinese pragmatism versus US "race to become God" divide
Why the DARPA-to-transformer academic pipeline is under threat
Teddy Roosevelt's rule - feet on the ground and eyes on the stars

This week on GAEA Talks, Graeme Scott sits down with Lesley Li - TEDx speaker, three-time Innovate Finance Women in FinTech Powerlist honouree, and CEO of the wealthtech company U Impact.
Filmed live in the new London studio, this is one of the most human conversations we have recorded on the show. Lesley grew up in the Drung ethnic minority of southern China, arrived in the UK with almost no English, took her first job as a cleaning girl and went on to earn two Master's degrees from the University of Cambridge and spend more than a decade at J.P. Morgan, Barclays and Mizuho. A sudden collapsed lung in 2024 became the turning point that led her to leave banking and dedicate her work to reigniting the human spark inside a rapidly automating world.
In this episode she lays out her Temple of Wisdom framework, explains why productivity will inevitably plateau while innovation is the true differentiator, and argues that friction is a feature not a bug in the age of AI.
Topics covered:
The Temple of Wisdom - experience, deep thinking, consciousness and the spark
Why most professionals are still on rubble rather than bricks
The Feel, Think, Act loop for humans in the AI age
Slow reading for faster thinking - Lesley's Intelligent Investor experiment
The neuroplasticity cost of outsourcing thought to LLMs
The smart contrarian framework and the mediocrity trap
The UK's engineering brain drain into financial services
Reciprocal AI - "make AI your bitch, not be the bitch of AI"

This week on GAEA Talks, the format flips. Graeme Scott, the man who normally asks the questions, is in the hot seat. Guest host Georgie Barrat - one of the UK's leading technology journalists - interviews him on the topic he is most associated with: the real meaning of sovereign AI.
Recorded live in the new London studio, this is a long-form, single-topic deep dive. Sovereign AI is one of the most-used and least-understood phrases in modern AI, and Graeme has been making the case for over a year that almost everyone in the public conversation is talking past each other. In this episode he sets out what he believes sovereign AI really means, why the token economy is a trap, why local and private AI is already shipping inside Apple and Google's stack, and why the UK is uniquely positioned to lead the next AI wave.
Topics covered:
What sovereign AI means to a person, a company, a multinational and a country
The recent US restriction on a major foundation model and what it taught the industry
Why the token economy is costing the UK more than people realise
The Apple, Google and AMD hardware play that nobody is talking about
The three stakeholders shaping the AI narrative and what each one is incentivised to obscure
The cognitive decline research starting to emerge from heavy LLM use
The three questions every leader should be able to answer about their AI architecture
The worst case and best case scenarios for the average person in the next three years
Why the UK's innovation DNA from Stephenson's Rocket to Alan Turing makes this the country's moment