Cleo Abram

Cleo Abram is an Emmy-nominated video journalist who cut her teeth producing explainers at Vox — including work on the Netflix series Explained — before going independent in 2022 with Huge If True, a YouTube channel built on a contrarian editorial premise: cover emerging technology by asking what could go right. The bet paid off; the channel grew to millions of subscribers and TIME named her to its 2026 TIME100 Creators list of the world’s most influential digital voices.

Optimism as a method

Abram’s AI coverage is the clearest expression of that method. Her Huge Conversations interview series has landed sit-downs with Sam Altman — who demoed GPT-5 with her in August 2025 — as well as Mark Zuckerberg and other technology leaders, and her explainers walk through how models work, what they might do for health and science, and where the risks are. She describes each video as a several-hundred-hour research and production process, and insists optimism is not naivety: playing a technology’s future out optimistically, she argues, is what reveals its important implications, and her interviews press guests on responsibility and regulation alongside possibility.

In 2026 she published an interview with novelist Andy Weir in which he compared AI to a hammer — a tool whose morality belongs to its user — a framing close to her own. Critics of tech-optimist media argue the genre flatters its powerful subjects; Abram’s answer is that journalism already produces plenty of dystopia, and someone rigorous should map the upside.