Jessica Jensen

AI:AM LIVE — August 19, 2026 — RAND's Jessica Jensen and Aspen Digital's Jeremy Greenberg on the 1,179 AI Tools Aimed at Disasters, OpenAI's Justin Uberti on Making Voice Real-Time, and a Cancer Trial Stopped Early for Working

The third show of the relaunch week opened on a biology run — Anthropic's report that Claude designed working protein binders, a Merck/Moderna cancer combination whose phase 3 was halted early because withholding it had become unethical, and GenBio's preview of a whole-cell model — then spent two hours on the gap between what AI can do and where it actually lands. Jessica Jensen of RAND and Jeremy Greenberg of Aspen Digital presented the AIDE Report's census of 1,179 AI products aimed at disasters and emergencies, and the awkward findings underneath it: most need continuous connectivity, most vendors do not publicly advertise 24/7 support, and the county emergency manager with a disaster starting in the next hour has no way to evaluate any of them. Justin Uberti, who co-created WebRTC at Google and now heads Realtime AI at OpenAI, explained how GPT-Live got the turn detector out of the audio path — and why a system that keeps talking while a frontier model reasons behind it may not be the architecture the bitter lesson deletes. Cue, the show's on-air AI co-host, put its own question to him. The close ran on AI economics: Stripe's closed acquisition of OpenRouter, the OpenAI/Replit deal, and what happens to app-layer companies when the model underneath them gets cheap.