Artificial Intelligence Series Summary
The Most Influential AI Thought-Leaders and Practitioners
Series by Peter High, President of Metis Strategy
Interviews originally published 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.
- Sebastian Thrun — Co-Founder and CEO of Udacity
- Mike Rhodin — SVP of Watson Business Development at IBM
- Scott Phoenix — Co-Founder of Vicarious
- Antoine Blondeau — CEO of Sentient Technologies
- Greg Brockman — Co-Founder of Open AI
- Oren Etzioni — CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence
- Neil Jacobstein — Artificial Intelligence Chair at Singularity University
- Geoff Hinton — Professor at the University of Toronto and Researcher at Google
- Nick Bostrom — Director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University
- Jeff Dean — Google Senior Fellow in the Systems and Infrastructure Group and Head of Google Brain
- Mike Schroepfer — Chief Technology Officer of Facebook
- Daniela Rus — Director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
- Maran Nelson — Co-Founder and CEO of Clara Labs
Maran Nelson — Co-Founder and CEO of Clara Labs
I first learned of Clara Labs co-founder and CEO Maran Nelson when she was among those noted as a Forbes 30 Under 30 Pioneering Woman:Forbes 30 under 30 Pioneering Woman. When a member of her extended communications team named Justin suggested I meet her, I told him that I would be in San Francisco — where Clara Labs is based — on a certain date. The next email I received was from Clara, herself. The message read,
I wrote Clara back thanking her for her help, confirming the time slot at one of the locations, while working out some other details. It took me a moment to remember that Clara is the AI. Our back and forth, which included further confirmation of details was remarkably lifelike.
Clara Labs was a Y Combinator company that now boasts the likes of Sequoia Capital as investors.
There is a lot written about the paucity of women founders of Silicon Valley companies, for good reason. I was interested in learning more about what drew Nelson to entrepreneurship, why she focused on a digital personal assistant platform, and how she sees the offering evolving. We covered all of that in more in this interview.
Daniela Rus — Director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory is the largest on-campus laboratory as measured by research scope and membership. More than 250 companies have been hatched through CSAIL, including Akamai, iRobot, 3Com, and Meraki. CSAIL’s research activities are divided into seven areas of emphasis:
- Artificial intelligence
- Computational biology
- Graphics and vision
- Language and learning
- Theory of computation
- Robotics
- Systems
CSAIL’s Director is Daniela Rus, the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and a 2002 MacArthur Fellow. She is the first female head of CSAIL, a distinction she has used to help inspire other women to follow in her footsteps into the fields emphasized by the laboratory. From her post, she has been able to witness and influence a number of rising trends in technology that are driving the current digital revolution, all of which we cover in this interview.
Mike Schroepfer — Cheif Technology Officer of Facebook
Earlier this year at Facebook’s F8 conference, the company revealed three innovation pillars that make up the company’s ten-year vision: connectivity, artificial intelligence (AI), and virtual reality (VR). Facebook’s Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer is responsible for leading each of them. Despite the fact that the vision is ten-years in duration, the company has made significant progress in each.
Facebook’s progress in AI can been seen in everything from the company’s news feed to the way in which people are tagged. The virtual reality innovations are best demonstrated through the Oculus Rift, which I demo’d last Thursday. More recently, the company made a great flight forward on the connectivity pillar as Acquila, a long-endurance plane that will fly above commercial aircraft and the weather, took flight in Arizona. The goal is for this v-shaped aircraft that has a wingspan longer than a Boeing 737, but weighs under 1,000 pounds to bring basic internet access to the developing world.
I met with Schroepfer at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, and we discussed these three pillars and a variety of other topics, including the company’s recruiting methods, how the company maintains its innovative edge, and the logic behind its headquarters — one of the largest open-space offices in the world.
Jeff Dean — Google Senior Fellow in the Systems and Infrastructure Group and Head of Google Brain
Jeff Dean was one of the earliest employees of the company, having joined in 1999 after receiving his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington three years earlier. He has been a prominent figure in the company’s growth, having designed and implemented much of the distributed computing infrastructure that supports most of Google’s products.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai has said that Google will become an artificial intelligence company primarily, and as the Senior Fellow in the Systems and Infrastructure Group, Dean and his team are essential to making that happen. In this far-ranging interview, Dean describes his various roles across the Google, the company’s AI vision, his thoughts on how Google has maintained an entrepreneurial spirit despite being a technology giant, as well as a variety of other topics.
Nick Bostrom — Director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University
There has been a lot written about the transformational power of artificial intelligence. If you are a regular reader of this column, you have gained the perspectives of eight of the leading thinkers on the topic. (See links to each below.) Nick Bostrom is perhaps the most influential thinker on safety concerns associated with the march toward artificial intelligence. He calls artificial intelligence “the single most important and daunting challenge that humanity has ever faced.”
Bostrom is an extraordinary polymath, having earned degrees in physics, philosophy, mathematical logic, and neuroscience. In many ways, he personifies the need for thinkers to collaborate at the intersection of disciplines in order to fully understand the opportunities and challenges represented by artificial intelligence. In his bestselling book, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, the Oxford University professor and the founding Director of the Future of Humanity Institute highlights that just as the fate of gorillas depends on the actions of humans rather than on gorillas themselves, the fate of humanity may come to depend on superintelligent machines. He points out that we have the advantage in that we are the authors of this fate, unlike our primate relatives. He worries that we are not taking full advantage, however.
His work has profoundly influenced leading thinkers such as Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Stephen Hawking. In this wide ranging interview, Bostrom explains his concerns with artificial intelligence, providing thoughts on what we might do to avoid them.
Geoff Hinton — Professor at the University of Toronto and Researcher at Google
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a white hot topic today as judged by the amount of capital being put behind it, the number of smart people who are choosing it as an area of emphasis, and the number of leading technology companies that are making AI the central nervous system of their strategic plans. Witness Google’s CEO’s plan to put AI “everywhere.”
There are some estimates that five percent of all AI talent within the private sector are currently employed by Google. Perhaps no on among that rich talent pool has as deep a set of perspectives as Geoff Hinton. He has been involved in AI research since the early 1970s, which means he got involved before the field was really defined. He also did so before the confluence of talent, capital, bandwidth, and unstructured data in need of structuring came together to put AI at the center of the innovation roadmap in Silicon Valley and beyond.
A British born academic, Hinton is considered a pioneer in the branch of machine learning referred to as deep learning. As he mentions in my extended interview with him, we are on the cusp of some transformative innovation in the field of AI, and as someone who splits his time between Google and his post a the University of Toronto, he personifies the value at the intersection between the research and theory and the practice of AI.
Neil Jacobstein, AI Chair at Singularity University
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.
Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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.
Greg Brockman, Co-Founder of OpenAI
Greg Brockman is co-founder and CTO at OpenAI, a non-profit artificial intelligence research company that also includes Elon Musk and Y-Combinator’s Sam Altman among other Silicon Valley luminaries as co-founders. OpenAI was founded to ensure that artificial intelligence benefits humanity as a whole, which has defined its non-profit status and long-term perspective. When I asked Brockman who influenced him, he listed Alan Kay of Xerox PARC among others, and highlighted the he hopes to foster a comparable idea lab to PARC. We also discussed how the organization’s bold mission and unique structure acts as a magnet for world-class talent, the trend of open sourcing AI development, how AI may impact jobs and society more broadly, and the promise versus the peril of AI, among other topics.
Prior to OpenAI, Greg was the CTO of Stipe, a FinTech company that builds tools enabling web commerce. Greg was the fourth employee at Stripe, a company that now has a valuation of over $5 billion.
Antoiune Blondeau, CEO of Sentient Technologies
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.
Scott Phoenix, Co-Founder of Vicarious
Vicarious has the mission to “build the next generation of artificial intelligence algorithms.” That said, its objectives are longer-term in nature. Vicarious has assembled a who’s who of technology legends as investors, including Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Mark Zuckerberg. Co-founder, Scott Phoenix is clear that the biggest value Vicarious can contribute will be in the long-term, in the form of artificial general intelligence (AGI), or human-like intelligence. There will be plenty of value created in the interim in the form of what Phoenix refers to as the “exhaust” of the process.
Phoenix is a veteran entrepreneur, having served as CEO of Frogmetrics, which was a Y Combinator company in the class of 2008. He was also the Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Founders Fund, among other roles he has played. In this interview, Phoenix describes the goals of his 30 person organization, how he weighs the risks versus the rewards of artificial general intelligence, how AI may replace more jobs than it creates, new economic and social constructs that could ease the societal shift, Vicarious’s decision to prioritize social good over investor returns, and why more companies should do the same.
Mike Rhodin, SVP of Waston Business Development at IBM
Perhaps nothing signaled the arrival of artificial intelligence quite like January 14, 2011, when IBM Watson defeated two legendary Jeopardy! champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. At last, the computers were smarter than us. Since then, Watson has developed into a growth engine for IBM.
For just over two years, Michael Rhodin has led IBM Watson, having come to that role after a four year stint as the head of the Software Solutions Group at the company. IBM has already found applications for Watson across seventeen industries in over thirty five countries, but as Rhodin notes in this interview, the company is just getting started.
Sebastian Thrun, Co-Founder and CEO of Udacity
There are few entrepreneurs who can compete with Sebastian Thrun in terms of creativity and breadth of innovation. He led the development of Stanley, a robotic vehicle on the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. He was a founder of the Google X Lab, and parlayed his earlier success with Stanley into the Google driverless car system. He also was among the leaders who developed Google Glass. All the while he was a professor first at Carnegie Mellon and then at Stanford.
In early 2012, based on inspiration from Salman Khan of Khan Academy, he co-founded Udacity, a for-profit education company offering massive open online courses, or MOOCs. Thrun’s Stanford course “CS 373: Programming a Robotic Car” was among the first couple of courses offered through Udacity, and it attracted 160,000 students in 190 countries. The youngest was ten and the oldest was 70. Moreover, none of the top-400 students were Stanford students. He was so excited about what he learned, that he gave up his post at Stanford to focus on Udacity full-time.
Originally published at www.metisstrategy.com.
