Mehrab Momin from aiCTO
Tue Feb 03 2026
AI has been “old news” since the 1950s, but Mehrab Momin of aiCTO Services breaks down why it suddenly feels everywhere, how founders should actually think about AI (data first, buzzwords later), and why Houston’s physical-world industries might be the perfect playground for the next wave, from vision models to humanoid robots.
Click here to watch a video of this episode.
Join the conversation shaping the future of energy.Collide is the community where oil & gas professionals connect, share insights, and solve real-world problems together. No noise. No fluff. Just the discussions that move our industry forward.Apply today at collide.io
Click here to view the episode transcript.
00:00 Show intro and guest setup 01:10 Fractional AI CTO explained 03:10 Early AI work and swarm intelligence 05:10 AI “flavors” from ML to deep learning 07:10 Transformers and the LLM leap 09:10 Where AI shows up in industry 12:00 Language, context, and why LLMs work 18:00 Energy AI applications and examples 19:30 Computer vision basics and VLMs 23:30 Open source models and fine-tuning 26:20 Houston vs Bay Area AI maturity 29:20 Solar, drones, and practical vision AI 31:00 Humanoid robots and physical AI 33:20 Edge computing and model stacks 36:00 Testing, validation, and “AI going rogue” 37:20 Common startup mistakes with AI 40:20 Human intuition vs machine intelligence 48:00 Language preservation and climate tech link 51:20 What’s next for Houston startups 53:50 How to connect and wrap-up https://twitter.com/collide_io
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AI has been “old news” since the 1950s, but Mehrab Momin of aiCTO Services breaks down why it suddenly feels everywhere, how founders should actually think about AI (data first, buzzwords later), and why Houston’s physical-world industries might be the perfect playground for the next wave, from vision models to humanoid robots. Click here to watch a video of this episode. Join the conversation shaping the future of energy.Collide is the community where oil & gas professionals connect, share insights, and solve real-world problems together. No noise. No fluff. Just the discussions that move our industry forward.Apply today at collide.io Click here to view the episode transcript. 00:00 Show intro and guest setup 01:10 Fractional AI CTO explained 03:10 Early AI work and swarm intelligence 05:10 AI “flavors” from ML to deep learning 07:10 Transformers and the LLM leap 09:10 Where AI shows up in industry 12:00 Language, context, and why LLMs work 18:00 Energy AI applications and examples 19:30 Computer vision basics and VLMs 23:30 Open source models and fine-tuning 26:20 Houston vs Bay Area AI maturity 29:20 Solar, drones, and practical vision AI 31:00 Humanoid robots and physical AI 33:20 Edge computing and model stacks 36:00 Testing, validation, and “AI going rogue” 37:20 Common startup mistakes with AI 40:20 Human intuition vs machine intelligence 48:00 Language preservation and climate tech link 51:20 What’s next for Houston startups 53:50 How to connect and wrap-up https://twitter.com/collide_io https://www.tiktok.com/@collide.io https://www.facebook.com/collide.io https://www.instagram.com/collide.io https://www.youtube.com/@collide_io https://bsky.app/profile/digitalwildcatters.bsky.social https://www.linkedin.com/company/collide-digital-wildcatters