#5: Identity Hijacking: The fight against AI fraud - Vijay Balasubramaniyan

We sat down with Vijay Balasubramaniyan, the co-founder and CEO of cybersecurity firm Pindrop. And today, we’re breaking down audio deepfakes and deepfake detection; what levers are in place to indicate whether a piece of audio is real or synthetic, and how those levers technically work. 

Episode Links: 

• Pindrop – https://www.pindrop.com/
• The rise of deepfake fraud – https://www.forbes.com/sites/chriswestfall/2024/11/29/ai-deepfakes-of-elon-musk-on-the-rise-causing-billions-in-fraud-losses/
• Biden robocall – https://www.thestreet.com/technology/how-the-company-that-traced-fake-biden-robocall-identifies-a-synthetic-voice
• The deepfake threat – https://www.thestreet.com/technology/ai-cybersecurity-nonprofit-civai-deepfake-fraud-identity-theft-hijacking
• How LLMs work – https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/07/a-jargon-free-explanation-of-how-ai-large-language-models-work/
• Closed vs. open AI – https://www.americanactionforum.org/insight/open-source-ai-the-debate-that-could-redefine-ai-innovation/
• Deepfake voice cloning – https://consumer.ftc.gov/consumer-alerts/2024/04/fighting-back-against-harmful-voice-cloning

Outline: 
0:00 – Intro 
4:27 – The origins of audio deepfakes
8:25 – The origins of Pindrop
12:45 – The cybersecurity risk of a remote-first world
28:33 – Open vs closed source
31:20 – How Pindrop’s audio deepfake detection works
37:18 – Staying ahead of the threat curve
40:59 – Scaling improvements 
43:24 – Building responsibility into the architecture
47:18 – The importance of AI regulation
52:22 – What can people do to protect themselves in this age of AI deepfakes? 

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Artificial intelligence is a complicated topic, bound by a number of complex threads — technical science, ethics, safety, regulation, neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, investment and — above all — humanity. On The Deep View: Conversations, Ian Krietzberg, host and Editor-in-Chief at The Deep View, breaks it all down, cutting through the hype to make clear what's important and why you should care.