The Intelligence Age

AI, Indigenous Language Sovereignty, and Decolonizing Technology Full Show Notes: https://www.theintelligenceagepodcast.com/846 In this conversation, Mark Smith speaks with Natasha MacDonald, an Inuit educator and Heritage Lab volunteer, about protecting Indigenous language and culture in the age of AI. Natasha explains how her community is using closed-loop technology, community vetting, and local control to preserve Inuktitut without handing data to big tech. We also discuss colonial la...

Microsoft AI, model routing, and the move toward portable workflows Full Show Notes: https://www.theintelligenceagepodcast.com/845 Mark Smith and Joris de Gruyter, who has spent four years deep in the Microsoft AI ecosystem, discuss where AI has become useful recently and where the rough edges remain. The conversation centers on model choice, vendor lock-in, local versus cloud inference, and how Markdown and open standards are becoming a portability layer for notes, skills, and AI workflows...

Te Reo Māori, translation, and using AI without losing human meaning Full Show Notes: https://www.theintelligenceagepodcast.com/844 Mark Smith speaks with Tane Karamaina, a senior translator working across Te Reo Māori and English, about how language, culture, and AI intersect in real-world translation work. The conversation explores why translation is never just word-for-word substitution, how AI can support but not replace human judgment, and the risk of homogenizing dialects as language t...

AI, context, and New Zealand’s data center future Full Show Notes: https://www.theintelligenceagepodcast.com/843 Mark Smith speaks with Oliver Hartwich about how AI has changed since January, why agentic tools have become the real shift, and what that means for workflows, context, and cross-model collaboration. They also dig into New Zealand’s position in the global AI and infrastructure landscape, especially around data centers, energy, solar, batteries, and water use. Key topics In thi...

Data sovereignty, governance debt, and AI for Māori startups Full Show Notes https://www.theintelligenceagepodcast.com/842 Amber Taylor joins Mark Smith to unpack Māori data sovereignty at the point of AI system design, with a sharp focus on what startups need to think about before they build. The conversation gets practical fast, moving from governance debt and investor pressure to the risks of using third party AI platforms with sensitive indigenous knowledge. We discuss why governan...