The Potential Transformation of Customer Service with AI-enabled Co-pilots • AI-enabled co-pilots can make customer support more efficient and pleasant for users who want their issues handled quickly. • Implementing AI-enabled co-pilots can reshape internal processes of organizations and open up new opportunities. • Using AI technology has the potential to transform various aspects of society such as improving supply chains, enhancing education, and providing affordable healthcare. • The speaker is optimistic about the positive impact AI technology can have on humanity.
Chris Young
You know, you so often like you call a company, you’ve got a problem, and it takes a lot of energy and effort to get the, particularly if it’s a thorny problem, to get it fixed because people Are searching through different systems. They might hand you off to three or four different reps, and then you got to re-explain your issue. Like in a world where you have co-pilots that are AI enabled, I think you can make it far more efficient and pleasant for the user who’s calling in, the customer who’s calling in, who just Wants to get whatever experience it is or product it is or issue it is handled quickly, painlessly, so they can move on with their lives. And I think that’s going to be completely transformed. Like for the user, it’s going to allow you to get on with your life. And that’s going to reshape some things inside of organizations, but it’s going to, I think, also open up a lot of different opportunities. You know, there’s so much that we still have to go do in our society. For example, you know, we’ve got to electrify vehicles. We’ve got to, you know, we’ve got to make supply chains more efficient. We need to educate our students in ways where we’ve got shortages of teachers. We need to provide health care in a much more broad-based fashion at a cheaper cost basis. And I think AI has potential to change things in a way that’s good for humanity is something I get very excited about when I think about the future.The case for being on the front lines of AI adoption: once AI handles the inefficient parts, the meaningful problems — the ones that require human judgment and connection — become the real work.Hard and Soft Factors in Fine-tuning AI Models and its Implications on Middle Managers • Technical skills are important in running AI models efficiently. • Soft skills, including intuition, play a significant role in fine-tuning models. • Eyeballing results and judgment calls are often used to determine when a model is sufficiently trained. • Generative AI may impact the role of middle managers in the future organizational chart.
Andy Wu
But what it does entail is, I would say, some hard factors and some soft factors. So in terms of hard factors, there are technical skills about how to run the model and to in particular run the model efficiently when you’re training it. I’ve heard stories of companies in Silicon Valley where some engineer made a very human mistake of typing a bracket instead of a Kotlin or something. And then in the process of running the training, they literally just lit $500,000 of electricity and hardware on fire. Like, because they just started the process with the typo. And then now we’ve got a completely wasted training cycle. Now, I think the soft factors here are also important when you’re fine tuning. And this is something that I was really surprised about to see engineers doing this. But But a lot of this training process is based on feel and intuition. And so what happens is that they will take data and then introduce it to the model to help reweight the parameters of an existing, say, open source model. And there isn’t an obvious point where you want to stop the APOX or iteration process. And so what they’re doing is they’re feeling it out and eyeballing it and running some, there’s some mathematical tests, but they’re also just eyeballing the results that are coming Out and then making a judgment call of, okay, have we trained this model enough? Do we have enough data to do what we want? Interesting.
Adi Ignatius
So when you think about the org chart of the future, you know, what does AI, what does generative AI do to middleThe Rise of AI Platforms and the Future of Computing • The speaker sees generative AI as a new computing platform that allows for more human-like computing. • Many in Silicon Valley were surprised chatbot GPT models resonated with people, but it speaks to the broader mission of artificial generative intelligence. • Senior leaders should make investments in AI with a sense of urgency but not just for the short term, they should be playing for the next 10 years.
Andy Wu
I like to think of this as a new type of computing platform. And so when I teach about technology, we teach students about the past in terms of the rise of operating systems and web browsers. And in terms of the current age, you know, platform technologies like, you know, metaverse, virtual reality, telecommunications enhancement through 5G, as well as a variety of other Computing interfaces like voice. These are all platforms. This is a new kind of platform that allows us to do a much more human-like form of computing. And I would say that many observers in Silicon Valley I think were surprised by this type of chat GPT model being the thing that really resonated with people. And that part, you know, I’m still surprised by, but I think it speaks to the broader mission of artificial generative intelligence in terms of reaching sort of the singularity and Sort of replicating a human. That really does speak to people, quite literally. All right.
Adi Ignatius
So what’s your basic message to senior leaders who, you know, want to lead their organizations into the future with a generative AI solution?
Andy Wu
So for leaders that are trying to lead their organizations in the future, my core message would be you need to chill out and panic at the same time. And so when you’re thinking about making investments in AI today, I want you to do it with a sense of urgency, but I don’t want you to play for the next two years. You’re playing for the next 10 years.AI training on copyrighted data: legal debates and potential impact on the open internet • There is a gray area regarding the use of copyrighted data in AI training, which has sparked ongoing debates and lawsuits. • Stringent protections may be needed to prevent companies from using others’ copyrighted data. • If no changes are made, companies may have to make their data harder to access, which could challenge the notion of an open internet. • Techno optimists and technopessimists have different views on the impact of AI on society. • The speaker leans towards pessimism given the impact of digitization and automation on productivity and employment in recent years.
Andy Wu
Right. It’s definitely a gray area right now. There’s a number of ongoing lawsuits and a lot of legal scholars have been really debating exactly what we should do here. Some have argued that we need to have more stringent protections to prevent people from training AI on some other person’s copyrighted data. And if we don’t make any change, then we are in the tough situation that, like, companies will probably have to pull their data off or make it harder to access the general public. In which case, our notion of an open Internet is going to be much more challenged. The Internet could be much less open than we would imagine in the past.
Adi Ignatius
So with any of these big technological developments, there’s sort of a split between techno-optimists and techno-pessimists. And they’re usually the same arguments, you know, that, well, this is going to improve efficiency and let us do new things and free up humans to do more creative things. The pessimists tend to be, well, yeah, one or two humans will be able to do creative things, but all the other humans will lose their jobs. Where do you come down in terms of optimism versus pessimism in terms of this technology?
Andy Wu
You know, Adi, that’s a super tough question. But I guess I would probably come down on the pessimistic side right now in terms of the broader impacts. And again, I’m not of the opinion there’s any real way to stop the current process that we’re undergoing in society. But the pessimism from my perspective comes from what we’ve seen already with the digitization of society in the last 20 years. And on the productivity side, on the employment side, automation has already had a tremendous impact on at least the American
