Most conversations about AI today are only a few years deep. Dr. George Tzanetakis has been building machine learning systems since before ”AI” was a term anyone wanted attached to their work, through an AI winter, the rise of deep learning, and now the era of large language models.

George, a University of Victoria computer science professor, researcher, and RingStone's AI subject matter expert, sits down to talk through three decades inside the field: early genre-classification work in the '90s, a demo he once gave Jeff Bezos, and the years nobody wanted to call their work AI.

Where AI goes from here isn't just a technology question. It's about which companies can survive the shift once today's pricing stops being subsidized, and whether the smaller, specialized models chasing frontier AI can close the gap.