So how was that transition? How did you manage that?

Well, I had had some experience because Jim Clark brought me into his company when he spun out Silicon Graphics, since I had done some work on the geometry engine, built a key part of the software that helped build that chip.

So I had been a consultant for them for a while.

I understood something about the Valley.

But I was a reluctant entrepreneur.

When we published our papers, we thought, these results are so compelling.

Four graduate students built something that is several times better than a chip that Intel just finished with 400 engineers.

And so start with that and tell us about how on earth did you maintain a marriage while building this incredible career?

Professor Hennessy, you've spoken a lot about how we need to start having more of a conversation about what makes AI different to humans, right? So in 2026, how would you design a new Turing test?

That's a great question.

You know, the crisp thing about the Turing test was it was relatively simple, and people agreed that if, if this machine in a black box could act like a human and converse like a human, we would regard it as being intelligent.

What we don't have is a Turing test for what I would call reasoning.

The original Turing test is really language.

It's nothing more than that.

It's not reasoning.

You know, how should this, this industry be regulated? Should it be self-regulated? Should it be government regulated? Should it be internationally regulated? Where do you stand on regulation?

Was there that kind of perception there that car brands still couldn't work or the car wasn't going to make market? And like, was it really difficult to convince people it was a real thing?

Well, for sure.

When, you know, we had the idea, the crazy idea of the Venom GT and that was just kind of a whim.

And now all of a sudden, I told somebody on social media or the internet about it, and then somebody wanted to order a car.

Anyway, that's his own separate podcast.

But anyway, we built eight cars and didn't manage to not go out of business in the process of doing it.

And at some point, one of our cars ran 270 miles an hour and beat Bugatti for fastest car in one direction at the time.

What are you asking those boys? What are you laughing about? That's a good

Speaking of pushing the limits, John, the f5 is uh it's built for 300 miles an hour it's crazy

yeah it's uh it's been a journey um i think trying to build a car uh from the ground up that'll not only break 300 miles an hour but maybe eventually be the something that goes over 500 kilometers or 310.7 is by far the most challenging thing that i've ever done or company's ever done so It's a bit of a work in progress.

Thankfully, we've got customers that believe in us and that didn't necessarily buy the car to go 300 miles per hour.

But that's something that we're deeply pursuing.

And with our next car, with the Blackbird that we just unveiled a little while ago, it's not a numbers car.

So it's more about just the pure driving experience.

But the journey on trying to push 300 miles an hour or even 500 kilometers an hour, it's made our team better.

And a lot of people want to come and visit and still get to see it and be a part of it.

If we were looking back 10 years from now, what would have to happen for people to say AI has truly changed the world?

I think we've already achieved sort of the first hurdle in what we think of as intelligent behavior, which is a long-standing test invented by Alan Turing called the Turing test.

And what the Turing test says is, if you're carrying on a conversation across the internet, let's say, and you can't tell if you're talking to a computer or a person, you've reached that level of intelligence.

So that was Turing's original test.

This is done.

You cannot tell that you're talking to an LLM versus a real person right now.

But they still don't have broad intelligence across a variety of fields.

[laughs] So suppose we do cross that line of reasoning to artificial general intelligence, what becomes possible that simply isn't possible today?