- Alp Uguray0:00
Cool—so to kick things off, I love starting with your journey and origin story. You grew up in Nashik, your father served in the military, and your family had deep roots in the community. Somewhere in that environment, you developed this incredible curiosity about technology and what’s possible. I read that watching Jurassic Park—seeing those special effects—sparked something in you about computer graphics and building imaginary worlds. Can you take me back to that time? What was it about that moment or that period that made you think, “I want to build things like that”?
- MIT Prof. Ramesh Raskar0:45
Yeah. I come from a small town well outside Mumbai—about 200 kilometers out. Most of my extended family were farmers in agriculture. And when you’re in farming, you realize nature does not negotiate. You have to figure out how to make it work. My father wasn’t a farmer, but the rest of the family was, so I learned a lot.
There was curiosity, but not much else to do—so I spent a lot of time in the city library reading books. I did my engineering, did well, started my PhD—and then Jurassic Park came out in the mid-90s. It was like, “Wow, this is amazing. I want to build that.” I love geometry, I love math, and it felt like the perfect combination: how to create special effects using computer code.
Since then, I’ve been mesmerized by images. I joke with colleagues in other fields: they build this whole thing and in the end they just get a number on the command line and know something worked. But in computer graphics or computer vision, you see an image—you see something real. It’s instant verification.
Then I saw South Park in the late 90s and thought: this is as entertaining as Jurassic Park—and it doesn’t use fancy effects. That made me realize storytelling matters. So I abandoned computer graphics as my core direction and moved toward machine learning.
- Alp Uguray2:19
That’s really cool. What about South Park made you think that? Was it the storyline, the characters, the representation?
- MIT Prof. Ramesh Raskar2:40
It’s a cartoon. Even the shadows are just circles. The interactions aren’t realistic—sometimes they don’t even look at each other. But it’s hilarious. It made me realize human emotions don’t need photorealism. They need functional realism.
Back then, most applications of computer graphics were entertainment and games. Nvidia was a new company, and colleagues were joining to build better gaming tech. It didn’t feel like the right thing for me. Of course, I was “wrong” in the sense that Nvidia went on to do much more than games—but at the time, that’s how I saw it.
- Alp Uguray4:05
That’s contrarian—everyone goes one direction, you went another. What happened next after you made that decision?
- MIT Prof. Ramesh Raskar4:20
Two things. First: I’m attracted to hard problems. Computer vision, machine learning, and human-computer interaction are difficult—and that’s exciting.
Second: the scope of what you can solve felt limitless—space imaging, transportation, agriculture, and more. It’s like the whole world becomes your lab.
After my PhD, it was the dot-com era. Colleagues were joining Yahoo, AltaVista, Google—stock options exploding. I was confused because that didn’t excite me. I wanted to do something deeply scientific. So I joined Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL) in Cambridge—like a Bell Labs for computer vision and HCI.
When I interviewed, I asked people why they weren’t leaving for startups and IPOs. They said, “We love what we’re doing here.” That was a strong signal. They had no stock options—just good research and a retirement plan—and I still chose it. Throughout my life, I’ve chosen depth, meaning, and passion over money or instant fame. And it has worked out.
- Alp Uguray6:15
So it’s solving difficult problems versus going where the money is—especially today with the AI arms race.
- MIT Prof. Ramesh Raskar6:30
Money should be a secondary goal. The best intersection is an amazing problem + real impact.
I tell people: you need something for your mind, something for your heart, and something for your wallet. You’re very lucky if one thing satisfies all three. Otherwise, it’s okay if you need multiple projects. It’s similar to Ikigai.
- Alp Uguray7:54
You’ve worked in computer graphics, cameras, robotics, multimedia—also at places like Google X and Facebook. Today you’re advocating decentralized AI: split learning, edge intelligence, data staying local. What do you think everyone’s missing?
- MIT Prof. Ramesh Raskar8:20
This centralization vs decentralization debate is interesting, but to me it’s also predictable.
In every field you have: foundry era → garage era → bazaar era. Computing had mainframes (foundry), PCs (garage), then the internet (bazaar). Mainframes were centralized; PCs empowered individuals; the internet connected everything.
So I’m surprised we’ve stayed so long in the foundry era for AI—where data, compute, talent are centralized: huge salaries, massive clusters, even nuclear power plant-scale energy talk. That phase is necessary. There’s nothing “wrong” with it.
But if you look 3–5 years ahead, we move into the garage era: AI on the edge. You and I can create our own AI, train or fine-tune our own models, choose architectures, share notes. Then the bazaar era is when billions of agents and micro-AIs communicate and coordinate.
Does that mean companies like OpenAI are doing it wrong? No—foundry era is required early. But you should also prepare for the shift toward edge ownership and networked agents.
And it’s already happening: Nvidia released Nemotron. Microsoft has the Phi small language models. And you see progress in compact models globally.
- Alp Uguray12:37
Right now it’s like ownership vs renting. We rent intelligence, and we give away data. Most compute happens elsewhere. Five years from now, how does that world look?
- MIT Prof. Ramesh Raskar12:55
It’s absurd: we pay to rent models, and we give them data that makes them better.
Once we can run—and even train—models on our own devices, we mostly pay for electricity. Benefits: privacy, low latency, and rapid innovation. Once people own micro-models, innovation accelerates.
Also: scale isn’t only “intelligence.” Scale is often compression. The next frontier isn’t bigger—it’s closer: closer to your data, your context, your needs.
- Alp Uguray16:58
I want to talk about “Agent Zero”—a private AI for every citizen. How do you imagine that working?
- MIT Prof. Ramesh Raskar17:15
We started talking about “an agent for every person” years ago—before ChatGPT. People thought it was impossible because hosting costs were enormous. But we’re almost there. You can run a lot locally now, with a mirror in the cloud if needed.
We called it Agent Zero—the base personal agent. It’s like the mainframe era when people said, “a computer on every desk.” Here it’s “an agent for everyone.” Regardless of wealth, bandwidth, or political system, everyone should have an agent that is secure, authenticated, private, and ethical.
The moment that happens, decentralization unlocks creativity. Centralization tends to create consumers; decentralization creates owners and creators.
(For context on the “Agent Zero for every citizen” framing, see: MIT NANDA & India’s DPI — Agent for every citizen.)
- Alp Uguray18:54
How would it be executed? Like an app on your phone running locally without sending data out?
- MIT Prof. Ramesh Raskar19:10
Smartphone is a reasonable starting point—but the agent shouldn’t be seen as “just an app.” It’s diffused across your life: email, messages, WhatsApp, desktop—like the movie Her. It interacts through different surfaces.
Technically it might begin as an app, but you’ll likely also want a replica in the cloud for recovery, authentication, and interoperability. If my agent talks to your agent, we need an “exchange,” like a telephone system.
We describe phases: agent foundations → agentic commerce → agentic societies. Foundations include authentication, trust, registries, certification. Commerce is how agents earn/spend, find jobs, transact. Societies is where agents form organizations, even “justice systems.”
- Alp Uguray23:03
Do you think the internet becomes a network of agents—less about static websites and more about my agent negotiating for me?
- MIT Prof. Ramesh Raskar23:20
For consumers, that sounds like utopia. But businesses will resist because they want the direct relationship.
If you ask your agent for an Uber, Uber wants you in their app to upsell, show ads, build a flywheel. They don’t want to be intermediated. Same with shopping: too little friction hurts sales. There’s a sweet spot where people browse and discover.
So the UX will evolve. You might see “agentic friction”—ads or steps before an agent completes an action. It’ll be fascinating.
And for entrepreneurs: this feels like 1995. Take existing ideas and “agentify” them. You’ll also see entirely new categories: agent repair shops, agent universities, even “agent churches” to instill values.
- Alp Uguray28:24
So intelligence multiplies with many agents collaborating rather than one AGI-like model?
- MIT Prof. Ramesh Raskar28:35
Exactly. This goes back to Marvin Minsky’s Society of Mind: intelligence is many components working together.
Even centralized models are moving toward decentralization via mixtures of experts and tool-using workflows. The natural progression is that each person runs their own specialist agent, and when a task appears, agents discover and collaborate in real time.
That’s when a new capitalism emerges: specialists pricing their work. And we need mechanisms for knowledge pricing—pricing data and models.
- Alp Uguray32:23
So agents could be priced like markets—better accounting agents charging more?
- MIT Prof. Ramesh Raskar32:40
Yes, and quality can fluctuate—like pump-and-dump behavior. We need infrastructure to validate agent quality continuously—like a live reputation score, similar to how your credit score evolves.
And we must learn from the early web: Tim Berners-Lee and others focused on consensus, leaving security and payments for later. With the agentic web, we have a chance to bake trust into the infrastructure from the start.
- Alp Uguray34:24
If an agent makes a wrong decision at scale—who’s responsible?
- MIT Prof. Ramesh Raskar34:40
Like raising a child: early oversight, then autonomy. There’s no single answer—especially when agents create more agents.
Agent Zero is anchored to your identity, but it can create Agent 1, 2, 3, etc. Each may need to prove credentials from Agent Zero—like multi-factor trust. They may live inside a new justice system.
- Alp Uguray37:28
What about LLM-as-a-judge—AI judging AI?
- MIT Prof. Ramesh Raskar37:40
Agent evaluation is much harder than model eval. If you want to evaluate an agent, you often need something smarter than the agent—chicken-and-egg.
Anthropic recently published a useful piece on why evals for agents are uniquely difficult: Demystifying evals for AI agents.
We’ve explored ideas inspired by blockchains: proofs that are expensive to generate but cheap to verify. We call it “proof of wit.” The details matter, but the goal is asymmetric verification.
- Alp Uguray40:44
Let’s shift to healthcare. What breakthroughs are you most excited about—especially when AI can tap into deep private data like medical records?
- MIT Prof. Ramesh Raskar41:05
I’ve been in digital health for a long time. I started a health innovation team during a sabbatical when I helped build an AI group at Facebook. I realized: with billions of engaged users, you can recruit for clinical trials, collect telemetry, and make huge progress.
A lot of health problems are solvable if you have data. But privacy regulations like HIPAA and siloed systems prevent centralizing it.
If there were a way to coordinate across silos—securely—and compensate contributors, you could build “population AI”: optimizing outcomes for a population, not just individuals.
Now shift from “AI” to “AI agents”: every hospital, payer, patient, dataset, compute node can act like an agent in a bazaar. People are asking similar questions at scale, so costs can be amortized.
- Alp Uguray47:10
Healthcare feels decentralized but locked—bad decentralization. Silos prevent network effects.
- MIT Prof. Ramesh Raskar47:25
Exactly. When data is siloed, nobody wins. CIOs either hoard data because they think it’s valuable, or they sell it too cheaply because they don’t know the price—creating a broken market.
Imagine every dataset and compute node had a “CIO agent” negotiating within policy constraints—privacy, security, consent—so elastic markets can form.
- Alp Uguray50:35
Even operationally, hospitals can’t quote a price like a modern market. It’s fragmented.
- MIT Prof. Ramesh Raskar50:55
Right. Finance evolved from calling a broker to using Robinhood dashboards. Healthcare needs similar transparency and real-time markets.
There are emerging “syntax protocols” for commerce, but we also need system-level and global-level protocols. Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) is one example. Coinbase has x402. Useful—but we need deeper negotiation and coordination layers for real agent economies.
- Alp Uguray52:25
Infrastructure is centralized too—NVIDIA GPUs, TPUs, etc. How do we build decentralized ecosystems on top of that?
- MIT Prof. Ramesh Raskar52:45
The pendulum always swings: mainframes → PCs → cloud → edge. The entire stack will oscillate.
We’ll need an “OSI stack” equivalent for the agentic web. Chips will range from Raspberry Pi to the latest accelerators. And now you see CPU, GPU, and NPU. The ecosystem will be heterogeneous—and that’s good.
Soon we won’t “use AI.” We’ll live with AI agents—like we live in a city or with family. It becomes ambient.
- Alp Uguray54:48
From a workforce lens: in America, identity is tied to work. If agents drive productivity and automate tasks, what happens to society?
- MIT Prof. Ramesh Raskar55:10
Two possibilities:
The red curve (quiet dystopia): platform wars and walled gardens. A few companies control the “agent store” the way mobile became iOS/Android—secure but restrictive. Then you get one global accounting agent, one global legal agent, and the middle class erodes. People still have jobs, but they’re soulless—serving centralized intelligence.
The green curve: billions of micro-AIs. Everyone has their own agent, improves it, trains it, shares it, sometimes charges for it, sometimes uses it for nonprofits. Protocols stay open. We need new institutions like ICANN, W3C, Mozilla, IETF equivalents for the agentic era. This unleashes long-tail creativity and shared prosperity—especially for the Global South.
Right now, we’re drifting toward the red curve. We need to fight for the green one.
- Alp Uguray1:02:00
Do you think the hope is that apps and models commoditize—and anyone can build alternatives?
- MIT Prof. Ramesh Raskar1:02:15
Models and platforms will commoditize. Applications will commoditize too. But I think there’s a fourth layer: teaming—how you assemble and orchestrate agents into high-performing teams.
In business, teams are the differentiator. That’s why MBA programs matter: not just knowledge, but team formation and execution. The “agent MBA” equivalent will emerge.
- Alp Uguray1:04:10
Let’s talk robotics. How far are we from having robots at home? What are the limitations?
- MIT Prof. Ramesh Raskar1:04:30
Think of human capability progression: brain → brain+eyes → brain+eyes+legs → add hands.
Manipulation is still very hard: degrees of freedom, data collection, training. Navigation has progressed. But general-purpose manipulation is a bigger frontier.
I see phases:
digital agents for knowledge work,
physical agents operating in the real world,
social agents operating across human systems like education and health.
- Alp Uguray1:08:10
Why do we insist robots be humanoid? Could we redesign the world instead?
- MIT Prof. Ramesh Raskar1:08:30
The common argument: the world is built for humans, so machines must fit the human world. But you’re right—it’s also a choice. You could instrument the world to make robotics easier.
Self-driving cars would be easier if every sign and light had RF beacons. But we don’t do that. So we debate: redesign the world, or build more self-contained robots.
- Alp Uguray1:11:25
If you could go back and talk to your younger self—what would you say?
- MIT Prof. Ramesh Raskar1:11:45
Larry Page once told me: whether you work on a simple project or an ambitious one, the effort is similar—so work on the most ambitious things.
Second: as scientists, we love elegant solutions to problems others define. But inventing new problems is often more exciting than inventing solutions. At MIT, the playground is bigger: you can invent fields, not just solutions.
Later in life you should move from point solutions to systemic solutions. That’s what we’re trying to do with the agentic web.
When I was growing up, I saw massive gatherings like Kumbh Mela—tens of millions moving in unison. It taught me something beautiful: decentralized systems can find global optima without greedy individual behavior.
Centralization gives efficiency. Decentralization gives robustness—and creativity.
- Alp Uguray1:19:05
What scares you about the future we’re heading toward—and what are you doing about it?
- MIT Prof. Ramesh Raskar1:19:25
Foundry era is “safe” because centralized models are controlled. But it risks innovation lock-in and walled gardens.
Full decentralization also has risk: scammy agents, untrusted agents, a “dark web” equivalent. We need a Goldilocks zone—not three agent stores, not millions of unregulated ones.
We can’t be centralization maximalists or decentralization maximalists. Even the internet has central pieces—like ICANN and naming.
That’s why we built Project NANDA (Networked AI Agents in Decentralized Architecture):
an ICANN/DNS-like layer for agent naming and identity,
certification and certifiers-of-certifiers,
interoperability,
and continuous attestation (pre-launch testing, live monitoring, post-launch recalls).
The danger is: if agents become too scammy, society will accept walled gardens for safety—like the mobile app store era. With NANDA, we want a false choice to become real: safe and secure agents + an open ecosystem.
- Alp Uguray1:25:41
That’s incredible. I’m excited for that future—an ecosystem anyone can contribute to. Thank you for joining me today. It was a pleasure.
- MIT Prof. Ramesh Raskar1:25:58
Thank you.
Founder, Alp Uguray