With all of the recent advancements in AI assistants, it seemed only logical that deep reasoning, autonomous agents like ChatGPT would have been crawling all over SXSW this year. But what stole the show were Waymo robotaxis on the Uber app hitting the roads in Austin and a tiny gold mouse with the genes of a Woolly Mammoth taking center stage for the keynote.
SXSW has been following Woolly Mouse’s creator Colossal Biosciences for years in its pursuit to revive extinct mammals. In 2024, cofounder and CEO Ben Lamm took the stage in an interview with actor Seth Green (Austin Powers) and this year with actor Joe Manganiello (True Blood, Deal or No Deal Islands) to discuss where the technology is heading. Both actors are investors in the company, along with a star-studded roster that includes Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings), Chris Hemsworth (The Avengers), Paris Hilton, Jim Breyer of Breyer Capital and the Winklevoss twins, who told me in 2021 when the company launched that it’s a moonshot worth taking.
In an interview with Manganiello, he shared his excitement over the prospects of the computational biology platform finding cures for epigenetic diseases, where gene expression becomes altered by generational trauma. His great grandmother who survived the Armenian Genocide gave birth to his grandmother while fighting a host of autoimmune diseases that got passed on.
“One of the purposes of my life is tracking all of that down,” Manganiello said, explaining why he’s planning to take an active role in the company. Although the company’s focus is on de-extinction species preservation, he is hopeful that AI-powered DNA research may lead to eradicating syndromes that continue to baffle doctors.
“I think in the next 15 years we’ll have a cancer vaccine,” said Lamm, “and in the next 20 years, we will achieve longevity.”
With a hat tip to Bryan Johnson, the Don’t Die guru who also was speaking at SXSW, Lamm added, we already look younger than previous generations, explaining that he’s the same age as Wilfird Brimley who was 49 when he played a senior in Cocoon, the 1985 film about retirement home residents who discover the fountain of youth.
Riding the AI boom, the company has raised nearly a half billion dollars and is now valued at more than $10 billion, which sounds like a big number for a moonshot, but a mere drop in the bucket when considering that ChatGPT maker OpenAI just announced the largest private round in history, $40 billion at a $300 billion dollar valuation.
Plus Woolly Mouse just made its debut appearance on Saturday Night Live.
There were other notable AI appearances at SXSW including Rivian, which is on the road to Level 3 autonomy and had a thrilling Electric Joyride where passengers could experience how well the electric car handles tricky terrain and steep curves. Other fun AI-adjacent activations included FX Alien: Earth, Museum of the Future, Paramount Lodge and Escape to Prime Video.
At Baratunde Thurston’s Life With Machines session, there was an AI assistant that participated as a panelist. And there was an entire track, including my session, dedicated to exploring how we’re going to generate enough power to keep up with AI eating the world.
Decidely Not AI
Ben Affleck steered clear of AI in his action thriller, The Accountant 2, in which the head master of a Hogwarts house of hackers guides him as a smiley face on a cell phone, but is not an AI assistant that could have solved the mystery in the first minute of the film.
Poppi founder Allison Ellsworth spoke to me about how their not using AI in their innovation kitchen. The probiotic soda was then acquired by Pepsi for $2 billion immediately following the show.
The main takeaway from SXSW 2025 was that AI is now a big part of consumer life. There are 400 million people walking around with ChatGPT in their pocket, asking it every question they used to ask Google as this Perplexity ad spoofs. By next year, that could well be a billion people and the world is going to start looking a lot different as AI takes center stage.
