The Pulse of AI

Latest Podcast: Richard Socher is one of the smartest minds in Artificial Intelligence. His pioneering work in neural nets and NLP set the stage for much of what is driving AI today. He has been cited over 100,000 times in the field! Adjunct professor at Stanford, Founder and CEO of MetaMind, Chief Scientist and EVP at Salesforce and now CEO and Founder of You.com his influence and work in AI is truly incredible.  On this podcast we talk about his new venture You.com, a privacy focused search engine, and dig down into other related areas in AI.  I hope you enjoy this podcast as much as I did. 

Anupam Datta, co-founder and Chief Scientist at TruEra and a renowned professor at Carnegie Mellon University, dives deep into the pressing issue of AI bias. He discusses the various forms of bias in AI systems and their implications for businesses. Anupam emphasizes the need for fairness and transparency in AI to foster trust. He also highlights the evolving regulatory landscape and the importance of external audits. With practical examples, he sheds light on how corporations can hold vendors accountable, ensuring a fairer AI-driven future.

This is my latest podcast with one of Cohere’s Co-Founders, Nick Frosst. Cohere is one of the most exciting companies in the NLP space today.  The company recently emerged from stealth mode with $40 million in Series A funding to pursue their mission to build machines that understand the world and to make them safely accessible for all.  In addition to being backed by top flight vc’s other investors in the company include AI luminaries Geoffrey Hinton and Fei-Fei Li.  It is a hot space, they have a great bunch of people on board, they have a desire to advance AI in a very thoughtful way and they are growing fast. In my opinion this is one of the most exciting companies in the space today. We dig down into a wide range of topics including the challenges inherent in NLP, the opportunities it presents to business leaders, how companies should look at implementing and deploying AI in their company, where NLP is going and more.  As usual I ask Nick to give us the “pitch” on why you, my hard to recruit audience, should consider applying for some of their open roles! I hope you enjoy the podcast. 

On today’s podcast I sit down with Founder and CEO of Vyasa Analytics Dr. Chris Bouton. When we talk about life sciences and healthcare it really is the tale of two cities. Life sciences was an early adopter of AI and analytics and the results have been fantastic. But healthcare has been slower to the game for a number of reasons that we will talk about in this podcast.  The reality is that once AI in all of its forms is deployed across the entire healthcare ecosystem we will see lower costs, better patient outcomes and an ability to treat more people at scale. So it is important that those in AI help drive these changes as quickly as possible….for the good of society  I hope you enjoy this podcast as much I did. Let’s get to it!

On this episode of The Pulse of AI podcast I am joined by Steven (“Captain Hoff”) Hoffman to talk about his new book The Five Forces That Change Everything. Steven is an entrepreneur, investor and the founder of Founders Space which is one of the leading start-up accelerators in the world.  The five forces that Steven identifies are mass connectivity, bio convergence, human expansion into space, deep automation and the intelligence explosion (AGI). We talk about the advances in each of these areas that are driving their adoption as well as the potential social, psychological and economic impacts each might (will?) have on us as individuals and on the world writ large.  Steven has some great insights into the coming future. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

Sean Gourley, CEO and Founder of Primer, joins to share his thoughts and insights about the threat disinformation poses to western democracies, as well as how to define it, identify it and combat it. His passion combined with his deep experience in the space, the unique perch that he sits on today which allows him to view the full landscape and the work that Primer has done in the space gives him incredible insights that he shares during this conversation. If you are concerned about how malevolent actors are using the latest technologies to sow discord through disinformation then this podcast is for you. 

LATEST PODCAST: My guest is Sean Gourley, Founder and CEO of Primer AI.  Joining me on this podcast is CEO and Co-Founder of Primer, Sean Gourley.  As you know I cover AI in all of its various forms and for me NLP is and always has been one of the most exciting areas within the field of AI. And over the past several years the advances we have seen in NLP have been phenomenal and yet business leaders are just now beginning to see the potential that NLP represents. But this is quickly changing as companies like Primer begin to release powerful yet easy to use tools that bring NLP out of the research department and place them in the hands of business users. Primer recently released a new product line called Primer Engines. These are pre-trained engines that can be layered over your data allowing you to do the types of things that just a few years ago were plot lines in Hollywood movies.   And just as importantly, or maybe even more so, they are designed so that even non-technical business users can easily use them. What used to take months and a significant amount of investment in terms of people and money can now be done in a day. Literally. As Sean likes to say they are reducing the cost of curiosity. All of this makes his company, in my opinion, one of the most exciting players in the space.  I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.  

This is the first in a four part series exploring how data and AI are set to really disrupt healthcare through conversations with the disruptors themselves including entrepreneurs, founders and AI experts. My goal is to discover exactly how AI and data are being used now, the barriers holding back innovation and what these experts think healthcare will look like in 10 years.  On today’s podcast, the first in the series, I am joined by Andrew Eye who is the founder and CEO of ClosedLoop AI. ClosedLoop describes itself as “Healthcares data science platform”. Purpose build and dedicated to healthcare, ClosedLoop combines an intuitive end to end machine learning platform with a comprehensive library of healthcare specific features and model templates. They have taken a vertical approach and it is really paying off both for them and their customers.

On this podcast I am joined by Braden Hancock who is a co-founder and Head of Technology at Snorkel AI. Snorkel AI is unlocking a better, faster way to build applications With Snorkel Flow, the first truly data-centric AI platform. To date they have raised over $50 million from top VC firms such as Greylock, Lightspeed, GV and others. Snorkel AI is solving a real problem that has been holding back AI adoption by simplifying data labeling and making AI projects look more like software development efforts. Delivering both successfully will encourage companies to more fully embrace AI by removing some of the barriers and hassles that make “doing AI” so difficult.  On this podcast we talk about Braden’s journey to entrepreneurship, the origin story of Snorkel, how their approach to data labeling works and how it helps unlock the power of AI in the enterprise, why SME’s are the key to data labelling and why Snorkel’s approach empowers them, why you should drop what you are doing and immediately send in a resume and much more. I am excited for this conversation because Snorkel AI is solving a real problem in the industry that has been holding back AI adoption and I am just really impressed with their team. In my opinion this is definitely a company to keep an eye on. Let’s get to it!

Online platforms are overwhelmed with speech that is harmful. Companies are trying to get their hands around the problem in order to solve it, because it is driving people off their platforms in droves. But it is a difficult problem to solve. Companies need to establish policies, set up governance committees and protocols, find technical solutions and hire moderators.    Justin Dave, Co-Founder and CEO of Spectrum Systems, founded his company to attack this problem with Contextual AI.  I invited Justin onto the show because I love what Spectrum Labs is doing but I also think that he has great insights into the problem and the range of approaches needed to solve it.  Podcast Transcript: Spectrum Labs elevator pitch (1:29) The professional journey of Justin Davis, Co-Founder/CEO, and why he started Spectrum Labs  (2:32) What is Contextual AI and how does it work? (4:47) Quantifying the size of the negative/violent/hateful/etc that Spectrum Labs is trying to solve (8:50) How does a company work with Spectrum Labs to address this problem?  (12:10) How many companies are taking this problem seriously? (16:42) Who are Spectrum Labs competitors? (20:29)