Special Edition / Taking an AI-first Approach to Product Development, with Yochai Konig

Yochai Konig, Vice President, Machine Learning & AI at Ada, has worked in product and specialized in AI-enabled capabilities for more than 2 decades. All of a sudden, it seems, the rest of the world is catching on.

Yet despite the recent buzz, many remain confused about how AI truly works. There was a lot of effort to create AI by learning from how humans do things and somehow transferring those methods to a machine, Yochai explains.

“But AI is not about this. AI is not functioning as humans do…. Instead, it’s about ‘let’s make as few assumptions, and insert as least bias, as possible.” In other words, let’s provide the raw data and the objective function and use the best AI in the world to find the best way for AI to do it.

“The purpose of AI is to serve the application,” Yochai Konig says, “meaning you have to set a measurable objective for the use of AI in the product.” It’s a theme that echoes comments from Pendo’s Todd Olson and Trisha Price in our earlier Live from Pendomonium episode, Entering the Age of Intelligence.

Yochai describes the field of AI as emerging – or, more precisely, emergent. But in doing so, he applies a unique approach to the definition. “In its most simplistic form, emergent describes what happens as the model gets to a different scale; and suddenly, new capabilities emerge.”

And that’s where we are with AI, large language models, and the like. As a community, we are making progress to understand this, he adds. “But some of these emergent capabilities just happened, the model developed this concept and has outputted it. Now, we’re trying to reverse engineer and explain how it is doing all of this stuff.”

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