Bell Lin (3:13)

Now those sound like challenges that all founders face, so they're just encountering them earlier on. What are some examples of the successes that these teenage founders are having?

Katie Bindley (3:24)

So Nick, who has the financial research platform, he has tens of thousands of monthly users. And then some of the companies that have had reports generated about them have ended up putting out press releases touting the strength of the analysis. So he's gotten some attention for that. And then one of them was already accepted into Y Combinator, which is a pretty big achievement and something a lot of founders would love to be a part of. And he was just 16 when he was accepted. And then Alby, the young man from C Sydney, he actually created a video. It was like a video application for Y Combinator and he posted it to X and it had millions of views. So he got a lot of attention on social media for his application.

Bell Lin (4:09)

And I also wonder, you know, when you spoke with investors who think about when and how to invest in young people, that some of them expressed hesitancy in investing in teenage founders, what makes them stop short a little bit?

Katie Bindley (4:23)

Yeah, this was actually one of the most interesting things, was chatting with the VCs about some of the things that sort of need to be kept in mind. One guy I spoke with talked about how high school is not going to be a great place to find co founders or employees and whatnot. And that traditionally college, even if young founders have dropped out of college, they've still been able to like build a network traditionally of people who are really smart, as smart as them, maybe smarter, who go on to work for them. And that's a lot of times where they've built their earliest teams. And then someone else just mentioned the whole really emotional component and maturity component. And he had met with three young founders and one of them was 17. And he started to think about, okay, if we're going to invest in this firm, I probably need to talk to the 17 year old's parents and have a conversation about is he emotionally prepared for some of the struggles that are going to be likely to come into his life as a result of pursuing this at such a young age.

Bell Lin (5:18)

That was WSJ reporter Katie Bindley. What do you think about teens and startups and how young is too young to start a tech company. If you're a listener on Spotify, be sure to let us know in this episode's poll or leave us a comment. Coming up, There is tech out there that could help save lives by reducing drunken driving. We dig into how it works and why it's not yet widespread. That's after the break.

Varen Maria (5:52)

As AI models grow, physical constraints are becoming a key limiting factor. Here's Varen Maria, senior partner at McKinsey, on what's creating the bottleneck.

Veren Marja (6:01)

Model complexity is doubling every three and a half months and as a result of the compute power that's needed, the physical systems just can't keep up. Power, cooling, mineral supply and factory throughput are really holding up the ability to invest. A lot of our clients and companies are thinking about what strategies they can put in place for efficiency, workload scheduling and energy storage in order to meet the needs that they.

Bell Lin (6:27)

There's no shortage of innovative technologies in the world that could help reduce drunken driving. Car makers and other public private entities have been working on them for years, but you're not likely to see them in new vehicles quite yet. WSJ reporter Ryan Felton joins our Katie Dayton to discuss what some of these technologies are and why they have yet to reach our cars.

Ryan Felton (6:53)

Can you describe some of the newer in car systems and technologies that are being tested at the moment?

Katy Dayton (6:58)

The two biggest ones are something that's currently being used is a driver monitoring system that nowadays is more commonly associated with automated driving technology that's equipped on some cars, particularly on highways, to control speed and steering. Some companies will put cameras in and other things to monitor your driving behavior. Oftentimes until now it's been used for, you know, ensuring you're looking ahead at the road. But other companies are starting to think about how they could adapt that technology to detect other forms of impairment, be it alcohol, a medical episode, that sort of thing. So that's one aspect and quite frankly might be like a lower hanging fruit to pick off because it doesn't involve actually measuring blood alcohol content. It's using current technology to look at how you're driving at any given moment. The one that's more advanced is a breath based system where it's basically as soon as you get in the car there's sensors and other things that are detecting the air inside once you sit down and attempting to calculate blood alcohol content to see if it's above illegal levels. That again has just been the trickier challenge.

Ryan Felton (8:11)

And with both of those systems, do they literally shut down the car if they detect a driver might be drunk or is there any other kind of mechanism that might prevent them from driving?

Katy Dayton (8:23)

Yeah, the part about the actual measuring of someone's blood alcohol content. Since that tech isn't in place yet, no one really has a thought yet as to what the outcome should be. So there's proposed regulations to require this technology. I think the common held belief is it should be up to that regulation to dictate what the outcome should be. There's the fear that the car won't start. And that's been a prevailing theme in a lot of the pushback to this idea. But one of the main organizations involved in developing this tech, they said their test vehicles will turn on and then look to see if you're drunk or not. So that way at least you could stay in the car and if it's warm, put your AC on, or if it's cold, put your heat on. But you wouldn't be able to drive until your levels were at something deemed safe and within the bounds of the law.

Ryan Felton (9:12)

And up until now, I mean, this technology has sort of been discussed for a while. Why haven't we been seeing it employed in cars everywhere?

Katy Dayton (9:20)

That's a question I ask a ton of people. Just because there's technologies that get put into cars that people aren't asking for. One example is what's called the on off button, where if you're driving, your car shuts off effectively. And at a red light, it's an emissions related thing. You would stop at a red light and it would click back on once you had the gas pedal. A lot of people hate that. And that's not a mandated technology. So there are examples of companies putting stuff in that people didn't necessarily ask for. In this case, the prevailing concern that I kept hearing was just the idea of a false positive is so concerning. One person who had worked on this tech said you can't even have like a 1% false positive rate because think about how many times someone turns on their car every single day. It could be three, four times against every car in the U.S. that's hundreds of millions turning on and off several times a day. One percent ends up being a ton of false positives.

Ryan Felton (10:19)

And from all you've learned about this so far, and especially all of the criticism, how likely do you think it is that we'll see this technology widely adopted in the near future?

Katy Dayton (10:29)

It's a known problem. There's over 10,000 people who die in alcohol related crashes every year and there's no one who disagrees that something needs to be done. It's just a question of how this technology is going to be dialed in to not produce so many negative consequences that people just end up asking for it to be disabled or, I don't know, sorts of scenarios where people are just like totally turned off by it. And I bring that up because in the past, seat belts and airbags were not widely accepted. Airbags in particular drew a lot of controversy when they were first mandated because they were so forceful that they caused very serious injuries and deaths. And seatbelts, a lot of people just weren't using seatbelts for a long period of time. So there is this sort of like ingrained fear in the industry of consumers overall, just like rejecting these sorts of safety devices. It's probably going to happen in some fashion, but it's likelier. That's going to be some sort of cautious approach that gives people some outs in some way, but still trying to be effective in clamping down on what's obviously a big problem.

Bell Lin (11:36)

That was WSJ reporter Ryan Felton speaking with Katy Dayton. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. If you're a listener on Spotify, be sure to take this episode's poll or leave us a comment. Today's show was produced by Julie Chang, with supervising producer Katie Ferguson and Deputy Editor Chris Sinsley logging off. I'm Bell Lin for the Wall Street Journal. We'll be back later this morning with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.

Varen Maria (12:10)

The energy demands of AI are staggering and they're only growing. Here's Veren Marja of McKinsey again on what it will take to power the AI revolution.

Veren Marja (12:18)

Our research shows that AI data center power could rise by 160% by 2030. And if you just put that within the US context, the US has increased grid capacity by 1 to 2% and the need to do that at a rate of 3 to 5% is what's going to be needed. And that is just an absolutely massive undertaking given we haven't done it in the last 20 years. Companies that will be successful will treat AI scale as both a technology challenge and a system level challenge. You're going to have to invest in efficiency across compute, thermal, networking and power. And CES is a fantastic forum where companies can get together and really try and solve some of these toughest challenges.

Varen Maria (12:53)

Discover how McKinsey is redefining AI transformation at CES and driving innovation and impact across industries@McKinsey.com CES custom content from WSJ.

Katy Dayton (13:03)

Is a unit of the Wall Street.

Bell Lin (13:05)

Journal Advertising department The Wall Street Journal news organization was not involved in the creation of this content.