Derek Kerton: Trends, The Future, Innovation | Turn the Lens podcast with Jeff Frick
Release Date: 10/11/2023
Turn the Lens with Jeff Frick
What if training a robot to do ONE thing automatically made it better at EVERYTHING? Pete Florence, Co-founder & CEO of Generalist and former Google DeepMind Senior Research Scientist, joins Jeff Frick at Humanoids Summit 2025 to reveal a breakthrough that fundamentally changes how we think about robot intelligence. The big discovery? Robotics has finally found its scaling laws—just like large language models. At 7 billion parameters, models cross an "intelligence threshold" where more data predictably equals more intelligence. No more hitting walls. No more plateaus. Just continuous...
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Five game-changing AI tips from my training with Kyle "KMo" Moschetto. Discover the RGCOA framework for prompt engineering, why paying for ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini is essential for serious work, and how understanding tokens, context windows, and temperature settings can dramatically improve your results. Practical, tested insights you can apply immediately to get more from generative AI tools. Stop the Slop: Five AI Fundamentals, Smarter Prompts, Real Results | Turn the Lens with Jeff Frick Ep 45 Transcript and Show Notes
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Carolina Parada and the team have delivered Gemini Robotics, Google DeepMind's vision-language-action (VLA) foundation model. Gemini Robotics provides the general-purpose 'understanding' enabling robots to go from pixel to action. How do you teach a machine to understand the physical world well enough to move through it, manipulate it, and help people in it, when every case is a corner case, never experienced in training? Embodied AI. AI with arms and legs and the ability to interact with the real world. Gemini Robotics is designed to generalize across platforms, so it works for robots that...
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Welcome back. The world has changed quite a bit since we launched Turn the Lens. And in 2025, my new episode frequency was not as high as I'd like. For a bunch of reasons, some in my control and some not, I haven't been as consistent as I want to be. And I know consistency matters. I appreciate it in the creators I follow, it matters to me, and it matters to you, our community. My commitment for 2026: More. More frequent, more consistent, more solo segments, same interesting guests and topics. More Turn the Lens. Part of that means new tools. Not only desktop tools like Claude and...
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Andra Keay, Managing Director of Silicon Valley Robotics, has been at the forefront of robotics research, commercialization, and policy for decades. A self-described “techno-pragmatist,” Andra has her pulse on the robotics industry, in the San Francisco Bay Area and around the world. Importantly, she is conscious and intentional to try and get ahead of the big issues we face down the road with the societal shifts coming as millions of robots, humanoid and other form factors, populate more of our world and interactions. Andra is pro RoboTopia, and against an AI apocalypse. And...
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Salvatore (Sal) Mercogliano (Sal), has a Ph.D. in Military and Naval History from the University of Alabama. He served in the Merchant Marine, has been an Adjunct Professor of History/Engineering at the US Merchant Marine Academy for over 17 years, and Chairs the Department of History, Criminal Justice, and Political Science for Campbell University for over 14 years. So when something happens with ships, shipping, the US Navy or other major maritime news around the world, I go to Sal to find out what’s really going on. Welcome to the first in a series of YouTube Show reviews that I hope can...
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Trump 2.0 starts tomorrow. 2025 started 19 days ago. Remember Project 2025? Might be a good time to study up on the subject, at least the basics. Not ready to read the full 920 pages? Google NotebookLM can help. I encourage you to upload the PDF yourself, and start asking questions. Sharing mine to help get you started. This is the Podcast Google NotbookLM created from the source material. Project 2025: Briefing doc, FAQ, Study guide, Podcast | Turn the Lens podcast with Jeff Frick Try it yourself - Transcript and Show Notes -
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Ray Kurzweil recently released his new book, *The Singularity is Nearer: When We Merge with AI*, a follow-up to his 2006 blockbuster, *The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology*. I had the chance to see him speak at our local bookstore as part of the launch event. A central theme of Ray’s talks is the exponential growth of computing power—how we’re constantly achieving more computations per second at a constant cost. While exponential curves are easy to discuss and graph, understanding these transformations on a visceral level is challenging. How can we fully grasp the scale...
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2,500 pages. How can you quickly and easily digest 2,500 pages of material? More than just a summary or table of contents, what if you could dive into the core issues, pull up a timeline, or even create a study guide? That’s exactly what you can do with Google NotebookLM, a powerful new free AI tool that requires no training, coding, or even RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) expertise to put the power to work on any assets you please. Simply upload your documents, videos, and other digital assets, start asking questions, and let it do the heavy lifting. And if you prefer a podcast format,...
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Dan Ariely, the renowned behavioral economist, prolific author, frequent TED speaker, and endowed professor at Duke University, has spent decades studying why people behave the way they do. And let’s just say that logic and reasoning do not top the list. I had the pleasure of seeing Dan speak in person in 2016, and almost a decade later, I was thrilled to host him for this conversation, where we could dive deeper into the drivers of decision making and human behavior. Dan’s latest book, *“Misbelief: What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things,”* served as our...
info_outlineWhat does the future look like? How long til we get there?
What models and assumptions will get flipped on their head?
Thrilled to share this conversation with Derek Kerton, Founder and Principal Analyst, Kerton Group in the latest episode of the Turn the Lens podcast with Jeff Frick
Derek and the team have created a unique process to bring the speed of Silicon Valley innovation, to three of the largest industries supporting our world, Telecommunications, Transportation, Energy, and all the ancillary industries that orbit the core.
The Cleantech Council Council connects cutting-edge technologies focused on sustainable, circular, and greener energy alternatives, to the largest multinational players on the planet. From SAF (sustainable aviation fuel), to pulling energy out of recycled aluminum through an almost reverse manufacturing process, to smart microgrids and the critical role EVs will play in an extended, modern, software-defined grid.
Derek and the team have done it before with the Autotech Council, and the Telecom Council, connecting auto manufacturers and their ecosystem of partners, to the latest technology breakthroughs..
Many megatrends are aligning to accelerate the move to energy alternatives, reducing our reliance on fossil fuels, and increasing our quality of life, from the air we breathe to more people-friendly urban centers.
From Silicon Valley to Paris, from micro-grids to alternative aviation and marine fuels, to electric cars’ role in softening supply and demand spikes, from government influence to Adam Smith’s invisible hand, to eBikes, we covered it all, or at least as much as we could in a fifty-minute conversation.
As Derek concluded, the future’s a lot closer than most people know.
Thanks again Derek.
The future is already here — it's just not evenly distributed - William Ford Gibson