Latest Episode
by Peter High, series on Forbes.com
I would like to introduce a series focused on artificial intelligence. Advances in artificial intelligence are rapidly redefining everything from how we work to how we learn to how we treat diseases. The expertise and background of the individuals interviewed in this series is varied, ranging from startup founders and corporate executives, to academic researchers and leaders of not-for-profit organizations. That said, they share a commonality: they are the world’s foremost leaders in the field of artificial intelligence.
by Peter High, published on Forbes
6-13-2016
Singularity University is part business incubator and part think tank founded by Peter Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil in 2008 in the NASA Research Park in Silicon Valley. Among the topics that have risen in prominence in the curriculum of the University is artificial intelligence.
Neil Jacobstein is a former President of Singularity University, and currently he chairs the Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Track at Singularity University on the NASA Research Park campus in Mountain View California. We recently spoke, and the conversation covered his thoughts on how AI can be used to augment current human capability, strategies technology executives should use to think about AI, the role the government should play in helping mitigate the potential job losses from AI, his perspectives on the dangers of artificial intelligence that have been expressed by major thought leaders, advice on how to train workers to be prepared for the coming wave of AI, and a variety of other topics.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link. This is the sixth interview in my artificial intelligence series. Please visit these links to interviews with Mike Rhodin of IBM Watson, Sebastian Thrun of Udacity, Scott Phoenix of Vicarious, Antoine Blondeau of Sentient Technologies, Greg Brockman of OpenAI, and Oren Etzioni of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence.)
Peter High: Let’s begin with your role at Singularity University, and perhaps a little bit about the University itself. You were president of the University from 2010-2011 and are currently co-chair of the Artificial Intelligence and Robotics track. Can you describe the University, as well as your role in it?
Neil Jacobstein: Singularity University started on the NASA Research Park campus around 2008. We had our first graduate summer program in 2009. The University’s purpose is to help leaders utilize and understand the business, technical and ethical implications of exponential technologies, which are technologies that increase in price performance every eighteen to twenty-four months. Examples include artificial intelligence, robotics, synthetic biology, nanotechnology, and some other technologies that depend on those. Biology, for example, has become an information science and it is now growing in capability on an exponential curve.
We bring in leaders from around the world to attend our executive programs that are given every couple months or so. Usually there are about eighty to one hundred people in those executive programs and they last about five days. We have a nine-week long summer program that we have conducted every summer since 2009 and typically about eighty people attend. Oftentimes, they have won their seat in that program by winning a contest in their country. I am proud that we now have slightly more women in the program than we have men—we have a good ratio now, finally. We have people from forty plus countries represented, and they are absolutely top students, super competitive students. They cannot buy their way in. The program is sponsored by Google and other companies and in other ways. They live on the NASA research park campus here at Moffett Field and they first are exposed to a few weeks of exponential technologies, including AI, robotics, synthetic biology, nanotechnologies and other technologies that depend on those, such as energy, manufacturing, 3D printing, and medicine. They address building next generation businesses with each other and also non-profit entities. They form teams and use principles that include crowd sourcing and being able to build and scale entities rapidly, using the principles of exponential organizations. They then address global grand challenges like climate change, education, poverty, global health, energy, and security. Those kind of challenges really require the scale that exponential technologies can provide. The students in their teams—it might be up to twenty different teams—are coached by a wide variety of faculty and staff during the summer program. They then go on to perhaps join an incubator program that we have on campus if they meet certain thresholds, and we have had several successful businesses spin out every year. We are proud of the program and think we are getting better at it every year.
High: In the book Exponential Organizations by Salim Ismail, it is noted that AI and algorithms could be used to mitigate and compensate for heuristics in human cognition, such as anchoring bias, or ability bias, confirmation bias, cost bias, others like that. As an expert in AI, could you describe that insight, and also the way in which AI, and algorithms more generally speaking, can mitigate those issues?
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
6-6-2016
Over the past decade and a half, Microsoft co-founder, Paul Allen, has created three “Allen Institutes” for Brian Science, Cell Science, and Artificial Intelligence. The Institute for AI was founded in 2013, andits mission is “to contribute to humanity through high-impact AI research and engineering.”
In early 2014, Allen tapped serial entrepreneur, Oren Etzioni, as chief executive officer. Etzioni has a PhD in computer science, has been a professor at the University of Washington, and founded or co-founded a number of companies, including Farecast (sold to Microsoft in 2008) and Decide (sold to eBay in 2013).
The goal of Etzioni’s research is to solve fundamental problems in AI, particularly the automatic learning of knowledge from text. In our far ranging conversation, we discuss the specifics of his goal, the pace of innovation in AI more generally, safety concerns, and how they should be dealt with, the government’s role in mitigating risks of AI, and a variety of other topics.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link. This is the fifth interview in my artificial intelligence series. Please visit these links to interviews with Mike Rhodin of IBM Watson, Sebastian Thrun of Udacity, Scott Phoenix of Vicarious, Antoine Blondeau of Sentient Technologies, and Greg Brockman of OpenAI.)
Peter High: You are the CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence whose mission is to contribute to humanity through high impact AI research and engineering. Can you provide your definition for high impact AI research and engineering?
Oren Etzioni: It starts with Paul Allen, who is a visionary and scientific philanthropist. He won the Carnegie Medal for Philanthropy last year. He has been passionate for decades about AI research and the potential of AI to benefit humanity.
In January 2014, we were launched as a nonprofit research institute in Seattle. We are now fifty people – about half PhDs and half engineers – and the question that we ask ourselves when we get up in the morning is “What can we do using the techniques?” Ultimately, to me, the computer is just a big pencil. What can we sketch using this pencil that makes a positive difference to society, and advances the state of the art, hopefully in an out-sized way? We are small compared to the teams that Google and Facebook and others have, but we want to punch above our weight class.
One of the things we have noticed as we have developed expertise in natural language processing and machine learning is that there are millions of scientific papers published every year – nobody can keep up. Google Scholar came on the scene about a decade ago and indexed all these papers, but there is too much information: You do a simple query and experience overload. What we need are techniques to help people cut through the clutter and hone in on key results. The approach we have taken is to use AI methods to filter irrelevant results—to extract key information like the topic of the paper, the figures that are involved, the citations that are influential, etc., etc.— in order to help people find the papers that they need. We have launched a free service on the internet called SemanticScholar.org, which currently indexes several million computer science papers. Our hypothesis is that if we can make scientists better at their job, then we can help solve some of humanity’s thorniest problems. We are starting with computer scientists, but we want to expand to medical researchers and ultimately doctors. Even a specialist does not have the latest information about your condition– they just cannot keep up. They are diagnosing you and treating you based on, at best, incomplete and potentially erroneous information. We want to help change that.
High: If you were to think about the next decade, what are some of the promising future attributes outcomes that you foresee with the developments that are coming down the pipeline and with regard to AI generally speaking?
Etzioni: AI is becoming pervasive in its use in technology in society. Marc Andreessen famously said that software is eating the world. One might riff on that and say that AI is eating software, in the sense that everywhere where there is a software solution, there is the potential for an AI solution.
Cars are a great example: They have become complex computers. There are more than one hundred fifty computers in the average car. There is the potential now to have a car drive itself using AI. The reason that is exciting is that it could reduce the number of accidents we have on the roads today due to distracted human drivers or humans driving under the influence. Our highways and our roads are underutilized because of the allowances we have to make for human drivers. We could pack the roads a lot more densely and reduce traffic congestion and greenhouse gases and all those things if traffic were more efficient, so that is a great example. But, anywhere you look in society I see the potential for AI to help.
High: I read a paper of yours from a number of months back in which you said, “The popular dystopian vision of AI is wrong for one simple reason: it equates intelligence with autonomy.” I wonder if you could unpack that insight a little bit.
5-16-2016
When one thinks about the companies that laid the foundation of the commercial internet, one thinks of companies like Cisco, AOL, IBM, and Sun Microsystems, among others. Sun was co-founded by Scott McNealy, who did not have a technical background, and yet ran one of the most successful tech-centric companies of ‘80s and ‘90s. The company created Java , Solaris Unix, and the Network File System to name three of many products designed by the company. Oracle purchased Sun Microsystems in 2010 for $7.4 billion, and since then, McNealy has invested in and advised a number of technology companies from his home-base in Silicon Valley.
In 2010, he co-founded Wayin, a social intelligence company that integrates social content into new experiences for consumers and delivers greater value and control for brands. The company recently merged with EngageSciences, a British social media firm that McNealy suggests will give Wayin a dominant position in his space.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 16th article in the IT Influencers series. To read past interviews with Meg Whitman, Walt Mossberg, Jim Goodnight, Sir James Dyson, and former Mexican President Vicente Fox, among others, please visit this link.)
Peter High: Steve Case recently wrote a book called The Third Wave in which he describes the three waves of the internet: the first wave from 1985 to 1999 of building the internet, laying the foundation, and organizations like AOL, Sun Microsystems, Cisco would typify that; the second wave from, 2000 to maybe 2015, which was exemplified by the app economy, the mobile revolution, certain social and e-commerce startups. Leaders of the second wave include Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Now, he defines this third wave as involving the Internet of Everything—this ubiquitous connectivity that allows entrepreneurs to transform major, real world sectors.
I would love your thoughts as someone who has been a leader across each of these “waves.” Case posits that this third wave is going to look a lot more like the first one than the second one. He highlights that the second required people, products and platforms, but the first added to that the need for greater partnership and an understanding of the nuances of policy and working with the government. I am curious about your own perspectives on that analysis, as well as your own thoughts about the evolution of the internet as you see it.
Scott McNealy: We talked about all this stuff back in the ‘80s and the ‘90s—the Internet of Things. I was on the cover of Fortune with a Java ring on, and it might have been back in the ‘80s, early ‘90s, and I always used to talk about how price lists would go away and everything will be a bid ask, and I said eventually people will bid out their time by the hour and that will be the last frontier unless government can regulate us back into the dark ages again. The second our company saw the browser and the web and threw Java on it, we started talking about the Internet of Things. I used to say everything with a digital, electrical or biological heartbeat would get connected to the Internet, and people looked at me like “what are you talking about?” We said the network was the computer in the ‘80s; now we call it the cloud. That is smarter: it is only one word instead of a few. But all of these concepts were out there. And no price list or bid ask system. But the biggest challenge we have is the meddling of government bureaucrats getting paid off by big companies to prevent the new stuff from happening. Have you ever met anybody who got in an Uber and thought it needed to be regulated? I am talking about a basic consumer, not somebody with a vested interest in a cab company or city revenues. And even cabs now are getting better because Uber came along and just destroyed them, so why do we need to regulate that stuff? So my biggest concern for the future of the internet and the written and spoken language of computing is government intervention. There is so much, massive, government scope creep that they are getting involved in everything now, whether it be net neutrality, whether somebody is an employee or not, healthcare, we have ignorant voters because they are being trained by the government. The government is a monopoly. We know monopolies are inefficient, not innovative, and corrupt. We know that. That is why we have anti-trust laws. Well, the government is a monopoly. Why do we let them do healthcare and education, or even get near banking? It is stunning to me.
High: In 2010 you founded Wayin, a real-time digital marketing software company. Can you describe the original inspiration for the idea? Since it was founded relatively soon after Sun’s acquisition by Oracle, was this something that had been in your head for a while, or was it something you began to think about in earnest upon breaking away from the company?
Peter High
5-12-2016
Excerpt from the Article:
Novelis is a leading producer of rolled aluminum, and a global leader in aluminum recycling. The company’s aluminum is used in everything from automobiles to architecture to beverage cans to consumer electronics. Much of the company’s aluminum is re-created from material already in the world today, saving natural resources and allowing for the creation of consumer products that have a lower environmental footprint. Through its recycling leadership, what would have otherwise been discarded becomes the material for new creation.
Despite attaining more than $10 billion in revenue with more than 10,000 employees, the company never had a CIO prior to the incumbent, Karen Renner, who joined nearly five years ago. Renner had been a CIO at multiple units within General Electric, and as such was used to process excellence. What she found at Novelis was an IT department in need of new, standardized processes. As she discusses with CIO Insight contributor, Peter High, the journey has been a fruitful one.
CIO Insight: You are the first CIO in the company’s history. The company grew to a tremendous size before hiring a CIO. Why was that, and what led to the conclusion that one was needed?
Renner: In order to deliver on many of Novelis’ transformation strategies, an overhaul of the information technology and data was required. The information infrastructure was unable to meet the aggressive expansions required to enter and provide the data streams required for the automotive market. We also needed modern technology to support our employees working across geographies and to meet growing demands for mobility and collaboration technologies. In order to develop and execute a global IT strategy taking into account the varying regional requirements, the CIO role was created.
CIO Insight: How would you describe the culture of the IT team when you joined, and what have you done to change it?
Renner: We have an excellent team of IT professionals at Novelis with a great mix of technical business process knowledge and program management skills. We act as one team and trusted advisors to deliver best-fit information technology solutions that people value and enjoy using. The biggest cultural shift was to broaden the reach of the team to think bigger and broader–how technology can influence outside of a local requirement to our regions or globally.
CIO Insight: I imagine there was a good deal of foundational investments that were necessary in the early days. How did you prioritize and what did you prioritize to do first?
Renner: We had three transformation work streams that we started simultaneously: 1. infrastructure, 2. business process automation and simplification and 3. collaboration and workforce mobility.
As many of the programs were interconnected, we built a high level, integrated plan that enabled us to understand the dependencies. The demand for new systems, processes and tools was incredible—our prioritization strategy was completely aligned to the overall Novelis strategy.
To read the full article, please visit CIO Insight
5-9-2016
Like other companies, the IT function at Intuit used to be one that the rest of the company loved to complain about. It was an easy scapegoat for a number of issues. Atticus Tysen has been at Intuit for 14 years, and for the first 11 years of that experience, he was outside of IT and was quite familiar with the complaints. He held roles in Product Management, in Engineering and Operations, and in Enterprise Business Solutions. Rather than pile on as others complained, Tysen elected to do something about it by joining IT as senior vice president and chief information officer three years ago.
Since then, Tysen has revamped the function such that it has more of a product leadership mentality rather than that of the order takers of old. He has also ensured that IT is transparent in its communications so that the value it contributes is more readily understood by the company and its customers. Tysen covered all of the above while also offering advice for CIOs of non-technology centric companies who might wish to emulate some of what he has done in the transformation he has led.
(To listen to an extended audio version of this interview, please click this link.This is the seventh article in the Business CIO series, featuring executives who have emerged from other corporate functions to become CIOs. Read past interviews with the likes of Marriott CIO Bruce Hoffmeister and World Bank CIO Stephanie von Friedeburg. To read future articles in this series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Atticus, yours is an interesting background. You have been with Intuit for about fourteen years and have been CbIO for more than two and one-half of those years. In the interim between the time you started at the company and two and one-half years ago, you held a variety of roles: product development roles; Vice President of Enterprise Business Solutions; and Engineering and Operations roles. As a result, for the majority of your time at Intuit you were a consumer of IT, as opposed to a leader of it. I know from our past conversations that you have said that one of the main reasons you joined IT was that you kept hearing complaints that IT was the source of many problems, so rather than echo the complaints, you decided to join the team. Can you talk a little bit about that insight and the journey from outside IT to leading it?
Atticus Tysen: One of the big things I discovered being part of IT is the hard job of balancing running all of the existing systems while you are trying to build out the new future. Before I got into IT I did not understand that. All I understood was the latest request I was asking for. We have a legacy as a company– we are a little over thirty years old— and our business model has evolved. We have many different layers of technology, as does every company of our age, and that context is important to understand. The IT organization has to operate all of that well, because that is serving customers and different segments of our customers. If any one of those systems is not performing that means we are not performing for some set of customers. So while operating that flawlessly we also have to build out the future, start to move people to SaaS offerings and migrate the company. It is a difficult trade off to accomplish. I think it is hard to appreciate that on a day to day basis until you really get in and understand it from the inside.
High: Obviously Intuit itself is a technology business: what you are selling is, in so many cases, technology. The other roles I suggested outside of IT are technical and you have made the point, as others who are CIOs and technology jobs have made as well, that you are surrounded by people who feel like they could do your job better than you can. I know from our past conversations, Atticus, you have said they are probably right at least in segments of what you do, but probably not for the entire thing. I wonder if you could also explain that rationale.
4-4-2016
Arne Josefsberg has held a number of technology executive positions in his career. He spent 26 years at Microsoft developing the company’s data center and cloud infrastructure, dating back to the original MSN team and continuing up through Office 365 online service. He spent time as the Chief Technology Officer at ServiceNow. A bit more than two years ago, he joined GoDaddy as its chief infrastructure officer and chief information officer — an important role for the company as it expanded from a US-centric domain registrar to a multi-national cloud-services company for small businesses. During his tenure, the company’s revenue has grown nearly 50 percent to $1.6 billion.
This CIO-plus role that Josefsberg has is part “classic IT,” as he calls it, and part driver of the development of a “globally scalable cloud infrastructure that is high performance and secure that delivers services to our small business customers.” Though his mandate and purview is broader than that of the average CIO, the way he thinks about his role offers insights to all CIOs as they strive to add greater levels of value to their company’s and to the company’s customers.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 29th interview in the CIO-plus series. To read the prior 28 with CIO-pluses from the likes of Boeing, Verizon, P&G, and Walgreens, among others, please click this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: I thought we would begin with a background on GoDaddy’s business. I have no doubt a number of people will know it from its provocative Super Bowl commercials, which is certainly the first place that I heard about the organization. It has clearly grown a great deal since its early days. Could you take a moment to provide an overview of the business?
Arne Josefsberg: I joined GoDaddy almost two years ago. GoDaddy is the world’s largest domain registrar. It is what we were known for, and that is where the business started twelve plus years ago. What some people do not understand now is that we have expanded our product suite quite a bit over the years. Domain registry continues to be a big part of our business, but we also do hosting for small businesses – everything from managed WordPress to dedicated hosting – a broad suite of hosting services. We have a website builder that is super easy for the non-technical audience to quickly build a website. We have also started to build various productivity tools for small businesses, search engine optimization tools to make their websites more resonant and visible in the market. We also added a GoDaddy bookkeeping application.
Our vision is to be the enabler for small business. Our focus is exclusively on small business. We count well over thirteen million customers globally and have grown pretty fast. It is an exciting area, and is quite inspiring. Our mission is to help the little guy be successful running and managing the business by providing accessible and cost efficient technology for them to get online. What I found super exciting is that we have thirteen million customers, but if you look at the market globally, we believe that there is in the range of two hundred and twenty million small businesses around the world. Many of them are not even online today, but clearly that is where the world is going. You have to have a website to present your business and interact with your customers.
We also think there is a circular trend from a business world dominated by large enterprises (big conglomerates) and we think that is breaking down to much more entrepreneurial smaller companies. We want to enforce and enhance that trend, and arm the small business with the kind of tools, websites, and domains that can help them get online without having an IT organization. We are about leveling the playing field between the little guy and the larger companies.
3-21-2016
Cars.com is a web 1.0 company, having launched in 1998. It receives roughly thirty million visits per month, and it focuses on the merchandising of new and used vehicles. Kevin Steele leads IT and product for the company, and as such has typical CIO responsibilities, but also is responsible for the Cars.com website, the products the company sells to dealers, the features the company presents to consumers. Therefore, he has an unusually strategic set of responsibilities. Within the past three and a half years, Steele has shepherded in the rise of Cars.com’s mobile presence to reflect the fact that customers increasingly wish to access the site on their smartphones.
In being a customer-centric IT executive, Steele and his team must bear in mind two sets of constituents, both dealers and those who purchase cars. In this interview, Steele describes the methods he uses to stay on top of the needs of each, the sanctity of having a solid strategic planning process, and the need to develop in an agile fashion, among other topics.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. To read more stories like this one, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Kevin, you are the Vice President of Technology at Cars.com, and I wonder if we could begin with a description of Cars.com’s business. I know you are one of the older of the dot com companies, actually having emerged during the internet 1.0 period. This is an organization I would imagine that has gone through a variety of iterations, changes, evolutions, perhaps some pivots through time. I would love to get your high level overview of the business itself as it stands today.
Kevin Steele: Cars.com is essentially a web platform that enables the connection of consumers that are looking to buy vehicles, both new and used, with dealers that are looking to sell vehicles, both new and used. We are a website that gets approximately thirty million visits per month and we focus on the merchandising of new and used vehicles.
High: When you think about the website and your customer you are in between a couple of different parties— both the dealers and the people who are purchasing cars. How do you think about the experience for each of those sets of constituents? And as you are iterating around the development of products, for instance, when you are reaching out to customers does it tend to be a cross-section between those two different sets of constituents?
Steele: Yes, it is. Our objective is to try to strike a balance between the two. Certainly our site is structured and focused on being a consumer-centric site. We look to create features and content and search capabilities that favor the ways that consumers want to engage with vehicle shopping, in particular engage with dealers from a connections standpoint—whether that be viewing a map and how to reach a dealer through a mobile device, or sending a dealer an email and seeking a quote on a vehicle they are interested in. On the dealer side, we look to make sure that we are leveraging our large audience to the best of our abilities to merchandise dealers in a positive light, make sure that they have the largest exposure to consumers for their inventory, and provide them with products to merchandise, attract, and build brand for their dealerships.
3-8-2016
Kim Stevenson has been the CIO of Intel for the past four years. As I have noted in the past, she has dramatically increased the value derived from IT by adopting the practices of the more traditional revenue centers of the company. One of the best examples of this is the development of an IT annual report that mirrors that of the company as a whole. (Check out her latest IT annual report here.) The theme of her latest annual report is “Intel: From the Backroom to the Boardroom.” This refers to IT’s becoming more relevant to the board of the company, but it is also a good summation of her own career in recent years.
Since becoming CIO, Stevenson has been on the boards of multiple companies including her current appointment to the board of Cloudera. Many CIOs wish to join boards these days, and Stevenson offers sage advice on way sin which others might follow in her footsteps. It begins by performing well internally, being transparent, and, if you truly wish to be a board-level CIO, making that known with anyone who might aid you in that process.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 17th interview in the “Board-Level CIO” series. To read past interviews with CIOs from P&G, Biogen, Kroger, Cardinal Health, and the World Bank Group, among others, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: I thought we would talk a bit about some of your priorities in the year ahead, which I know include adoption of Big Data analytics to find opportunities and to solve challenges faster. Could you explain some of the ways in which IT is going to do that, and also some of the other priorities that are on your roadmap for the year ahead?
Kim Stevenson: Analytics is at the top of my pyramid because it is a transformational initiative around Intel. I have shifted from a technology view for 2016 to a leadership problem. We are bringing our entire Intel leadership team forward to think about shifting using Big Data predicative analytics versus traditional statistical methods. The reason I say it is a leadership problem is because often you will find in a predictive model that you will get answers that are inconsistent with your historical experience. We use regression analysis a lot here at Intel. If you look at a regression analysis line, you effectively get a mean and you drive towards that regression line. If you use an isobar analysis, what you get is the personalization of hot spots and you would maybe take three or four different actions than what a regression line would tell you. You get good results with traditional statistics. You can get outstanding results if you switch to the more predictive models. And that takes a shift in a leadership mindset as much as it does a technology mindset. We have been working on that with our most senior leaders at Intel. The receptivity is really high, but the cultural shift is also really difficult.
High: I know you have talked about the need for IT to be an advocate driving this change. What are the methods you are using to communicate this and provide a vision of the value that the organization will garner for this journey?
2-29-2016
Sentient Technologies has patented evolutionary and perceptual capabilities that provide customers with highly sophisticated solutions, powered by the largest compute grid dedicated to distributed artificial intelligence. The company also has a war chest of $143 million in venture investment, the most of any artificial intelligence company. Antoine Blondeau founded Sentient Technologies nearly nine years ago, though it was in stealth mode for the majority of that period.
After stints at Salesforce.com and Good Technology was looking for the next challenge. He had been involved in artificial intelligence for 15 years, making him an early pioneer in the field, and already had hit a home run by being involved in developing the technology that would become Siri, of iPhone fame.
Blondeau claims we are still in the very early days of artificial intelligence’s evolution, but his vision is to create technology that will mimic the human interaction. One of the first uses of the technology is in retail, replicating the experience of having a sophisticated advisory helping to curate your shopping experience. In this interview, Blondeau provides his vision for the company, his thoughts about the future of AI, the balance between AI innovation and AI safety, as well as a variety of other topics.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link. This is the fourth article in a series on leaders in artificial intelligence, which includes interviews with Mike Rhodin of IBM Watson and Sebastian Thrun of Udacity. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
High: Artificial intelligence seems to be gaining tremendous momentum, whether it is venture capital, media coverage, or simply progress that is obvious in the world. There are clearly a couple of trends that have made this possible in recent years: the emergence of relatively low-cost available computing power and the vast, growing abundance of data that companies in every industry are collecting. I think I have heard you say that we are in the first inning here of the game, as so much innovation is ahead of us. As somebody who got into this 15 to 20 years ago, long before this boom, where do you see things now, and how do you think things are evolving?
Blondeau: You are right on the money when you talk about what has happened over the past five or seven years that is making this possible. Some of the team members and I worked on the precursor to what became Siri. At the time, we were thinking of an algorithm running on one machine or a few machines. What has happened over the past few years is that you have the data, it is broadly available, and one of the things that we foresaw was not only that data would explode but the dimensionality of data would explode. It will connect a lot of types of data that had not been connected before. That is a big help.
The second thing is that we have moved from thinking of the machine being the compute to the network being the compute, which means that we can harness an enormous amount of compute cycles. In our case, that means running our system on up to two million CPU cores. We also have a few thousand GPU cores. It is a massive system. When we thought of this company seven years ago, we had the vision forward, but could not quite imagine how we could get there. I think now we can.
The last thing is that when you begin to think about the scale, you can begin to address problems that you had not thought were solvable previously. The ambitious nature of what you do can go up significantly. You can tackle dimensionality, you can tackle complex decision making. Effectively, you are looking at comprehensively including every step of decision making in the machine, or in this giant network machine, which previously was not something thought of as possible. That is the high level.
High: I would like to dive a bit further into the details of how this becomes reality, and how that has impacted the way in which you have thought about entering different markets. I have heard you speak about the applications in some of the primary industries where there are tremendous amounts of data and where there are particularly big problems to solve, like financial services and healthcare. I found it interesting that one of your first areas to apply Sentient Technologies is in retail and online shopping. I would love to understand further how you have chosen where to focus.
Blondeau: One of the things we did was building a powerful platform, but you never succeed by building a platform. You need to apply it to know that it is working and scales to multiple industries. So, we decided to monetize it to address trading, aspects of e-commerce, and the online content discovery experience, as well as, at the research level, institutions like MIT, University of Toronto, and Oxford to work on less immediately monetizable problems, but world problems nonetheless. I am talking here about genomics and patients in an ICU context.
In each case, the common denominator is a few things. One, can you try to solve a problem that has not been solved before? The complexity of the decision making process is key here. The second thing is can you encapsulate the whole decision making process within the machine?
