The Family History AI Show

This episode is sponsored by the Family History AI Show Academy Beginning October 27, 2026, Mark and Steve are teaching Advanced Family History AI, the Level II course in their Family History AI series. The course is designed for genealogists with several months of experience using artificial intelligence tools who are ready to move beyond basic prompting to new tools and powerful techniques for researching and telling their family's story. Register for Mark and Steve's classes at: https://ti

Description Co-hosts Mark Thompson and Steve Little return from institute season to unpack a summer that reshaped the artificial intelligence landscape, beginning with the new model families from OpenAI and Anthropic and how to choose among them. The hosts then examine desktop artificial intelligence applications, which read and write files directly in a folder on your own computer, followed by Mark’s Tip of the Week on connecting ChatGPT Desktop to Excel to update one of his complex spreadshe

Co-hosts Mark Thompson and Steve Little open with a deep look at MyHeritage's new Scribe AI, a new AI tool that analyzes records, photographs, gravestones, and coats of arms and provides genealogy relevant research suggestions. It even works on your own photographs. This episode features an interview with Dave Vance, General Manager of Family Tree DNA, exploring how the hottest new genetic genealogy tests, provided by next-generation sequencing, deliver 400 times more genomic info than traditio

Co-hosts Mark Thompson and Steve Little examine the major AI model upgrades released over the winter, comparing Anthropic's Opus 4.6, OpenAI's GPT 5.4, and Google's Gemini 3.1 Pro and their benefits for genealogists. In a special interview recorded at RootsTech 2026, they sit down with Diana Elder and Nicole Dyer of Family Locket to explore how the Research Like a Pro methodology integrates with AI tools for transcription, locality research, and DNA analysis. In RapidFire, they cover FamilySea

In the last episode of 2025, Co-hosts Mark Thompson and Steve Little present their predictions for how artificial intelligence will transform genealogy research in 2026. This special episode examines fourteen key trends shaping the future of family history AI. Mark and Steve predict that AI tools will move from enthusiast circles into mainstream genealogy practice, with AI-enhanced apps like NotebookLM becoming more important than the underlying language models that people have focused on for t

Co-hosts Mark Thompson and Steve Little present a special year-end episode, comparing their 2025 AI predictions to what actually unfolded in 2025. This episode is a great review of the top AI advancements in 2025! The hosts examine which predictions hit the mark, including the agentic AI hype cycle, plummeting AI costs driven by DeepSeek, and the dethroning of OpenAI as the top AI model. They also explore predictions that proved partially accurate, such as the shift to local language models and