Transcript

How AI adds to human potential: (LIVE) with Scale AI’s Alex Wang and Intel’s Lama Nachman

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Join us at masters of scale dot com slash apply twenty six. That's mastersofscom slash apply. Twenty six. Hi, it's Jeff Berman, your host for Masters of Scale. There's so much talk about artificial intelligence taking things away from people, but on stage recently, I had the opportunity to speak with two leaders in the field about how AI can increase human potential.

Lowering barriers to entry for fields like content creation. How do you design human AI systems that can actually get you The essence of what human creativity is and how do we think about what Пиплні то брин креатив, ю акші демократизін. A lot of this technology so now you're enabling

А мач вдер спектрим в пило то бриативні то табо. It's a huge boon for storytellers. The question for us isn't if we looked at the stories or the the movies or the short films that are being done today, how efficiently could this be done in the future. That's Alex Wang, co-founder of the company Scale AI. And before him you heard Lema Nachman. Intel's director of human and AI systems research.

I joined them in conversation at an event called Intel Vision in early April. The event brought together business leaders focused on the challenges and opportunities presented by artificial intelligence. As AI advances at a blistering pace, it's a growing part of every business, in addition to being an industry sector all its own. I took the stage with Lemma and Alex to record this episode of Masters of Scale in front of a live audience of active stakeholders. Yeah, that's amazing.

Take a seat. You gotta have incredible talent at every position. Huge push. There are fires burning when you're going out. Such an idiot. And then you go back to this is totally gonna be amazing. There are so many easy ways. Sorry, we made a mistake. But you have to time it right. Not ball ten years later and be like, well that's just how you do it. We haven't made it just how you do it. This

is masters of scale. One of the most breathtaking advances in AI came just a few weeks ago when Open AI announced a new tool. Called Sora. It generates. AI video from a text prompt.

You type in details of a scene. The characters, the setting, the actions they're taking, and Sora creates a video from just those words. It's expected to be released to the public later this year, but Masters of Scale was granted access to experiment with its beta release. Now it doesn't do dialogue yet. And of course, you can't see a video on this audio podcast, but I had to start the show with a Sora demo.

And last night some of you may have been harassed by me asking for some prompts for some ideas. And I met Kathy and Sarah. I don't know if Kathy and Sarah are in the room today, but they gave me a great prompt. Which if we can roll the next video. We got last night. And within an hour we turn this around.

Saren Cathy said, Show me a French bulldog wearing a red fedora in Paris. Eating a croissant. So what pops up on the screen is a realistic, adorable dog in this chic Parisian setting, chomping a delicious. Who doesn't like French Bulldogs wearing fodoras eating croissants? So you can see how quickly the pace is going.

That's just one ambient scene. But recently Sora released an entire short film with multiple locations, voiceover, character development, and real pathos. It looked a lot. Like an Oscar nominated short. All this is shaking up Hollywood.

Big time. Tyler Perry stopped work on an eight hundred million dollar studio expansion because he just doesn't know what AI is going to do to film and TV production. Jeffrey Katzenberg, one of the legends of the industry, said 90% of animation jobs are likely to disappear in the next few years. So I started there. With scale AI's Alex Wang and Intel fellow Lemma Achman.

And I asked. Is this the end of Hollywood as we know it? So that's an interesting question. What we have seen as more capabilities have come up is much more interesting innovation that actually came out. So and it's really I mean it's a choice that we make, right? Because you

Every time there is an interesting technology that has the ability to automate, you can go the path of automation, or you can go and figure out how do you design human AI systems that can actually get you The essence of what human creativity is, it's like the complementarity between AI and humans. Of course

That will only happen if we design systems with that in mind. So it could go that way. I love that optimism and I feel that en'et. Alex, are you as optimistic about this or or do you feel like we're entering kind of this interregnum where the old king is dead but the new king is not yet born? It is something like a

Like an interagnum. I think it's a huge unlock for what film could be or what films can be. One way to think about this is a lot of films now have tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollar visual effects. Budgets. It's true they won't have to spend that much on visual effects going forward. The original advent of animation, advanced three D animation, uh as Pixar sort of introduced originally was this huge change. There were these kinds of movies that you could create that you could have never made before that were somehow significantly more relatable to children and much more meaningful to children created a new canvas. I really think about as an evolution in that vein, which is

We're continuing to create more engaging, imaginative and powerful platforms for creative content and Hollywood as a business is going to have to get on board with that. Do you think job displacement is coming in a meaningful way before these kind of new industries are created, new jobs are created? The pattern that we see over and over again is something like this. There is a very talented team or group of people within the company, whether it be engineers and coders, or lawyers, or consultants, who maybe 20 percent of their job requires very high ingenuity and capability and all of their training and all of their brilliance.

But sixty percent of the job is relatively rote or is something that that fundamentally does not actually require all of their training and brilliance and capabilities. The pattern we see over and over again is how do you build copilots that are able to help them do the 60 percent of other work and then maximize their time so they can spend most of it doing the stuff that actually requires their ingenuity and their capability. That's what we've seen with coding, where What the coding assistants and co-pilots do is they help not do all the boilerplate code or all the simple fixes or catch bugs more easily, stuff like that. Or the legal assistants help you just draft the entire document, but like all the sort of important legal decision making is still left to the lawyer. This is like the pattern of the future. Which I think is a pretty optimistic one because This does not

in itself results in labor displacement because most of these jobs that we're talking about, there's a shortage of them in the economy. We need more doctors, we need more engineers, we need more of them in the in the world. And I think this goes towards What I see is the longer term trend, frankly, which is you know, I think I think that the AI systems are moving towards being a Superhuman in some ways, but meaningfully subhuman in others.

Already GPT-4 is a much better writer than I am, just in terms of not making grammar mistakes and being able to structure very flowing prose and being able to write very beautifully, but it's much worse than me at reasoning, it's much worse than me at thinking in sort of like uh very long forms, it's much worse than me at getting factuality. Correct. It's much worse than being in some other ways. And so the the direction of the future is going to be these hybrids between human capability and some superhum AI capabilities to Achieve better outcomes. Lemma, I hear Alex, and I want to be all in with Alex on this, and yet

I have a friend who runs a small law firm. And because of the productivity gains they've been able to make using AI They've been able to reduce the number of paralegals they need. Right. It's logical. So that that efficiency game, the ability to focus on higher level work makes a ton of sense in thinking of AI as a copilot, right? Microsoft did a great job branding their product there. Why logically, why shouldn't companies then say, well We we can reduce costs by forty percent at the same time.

Yeah, and they can and that will happen. The question is is this creating an economy where the demand of all the new things that can happen will end up You know, resulting in a overall More opportunities for jobs. There's no question that There will be a lot of jobs also that will be displaced, right? Making us more efficient will mean less of us will be required for that same amount of work. But the assumption here is that

It is that same amount of work. All of that is really starting from this notion that it's a zero sum game, I think that's actually kind of the missing piece of that puzzle, right? Because I think it's We're in such a generative world where opportunity and and you know new things that we haven't even dreamt of doing will be made. And

That will impact certain jobs that you know, we're limited or unneeded in a certain way. Right. It's it's an opportunity as well to continue to innovate and differently from previous innovation. The reason I'm actually optimistic is that If we build AI systems in ways that can support and amplify human

Capability. then in in some sense it's like Yeah, and that capability is helping the human continue to evolve. Do you think there will be that gap? Do you think that we'll see massive job loss over the next few years before new jobs come up or you more optimistically.

Guess whether the ability to transition to different types of jobs, being enabled with these AI capabilities, if that's going to help people bridge that gap or not? Being an optimist, I see this as a place where We can train people very quickly. with new types of skills because of the fact that AI can actually be a support system.

But I would be shocked if there was no like dip in some certain areas and fields, for sure. Alex, do you agree? I think it's certainly a possibility, and I think that the The key I think for us as a society is that AI Fundamentally should not just be

A cost cutter. It should be a tool that creates new business models, it should be a tool that creates a lot of economic growth, it should be something that that really spurs a huge amount of like new products, new business models, new direction and new capabilities outside of just Displacement of human labor. Massive changes are surely coming to the labor market because of AI. And Alex and Lemma have very different views of the field.

Influenced in no small part by where they are in their careers. Alex is a twenty seven year old founder of an AI startup who dropped out of MIT to go into business. Lema is a researcher with decades of experience in studying technology. I ask them. What business opportunities and jobs they see coming thanks to AI?

We've just so much uncertainty in the world today, and this feels like it's yet yet another layer of it. I'm curious, Alex, you you you dropped out of MIT, right? Um called Shop Out Made Good. Um Lem and I were talking before we came on stage. We both have seventeen year olds um who are who are anticipating going on to college in in a year and change. What are the skills that you think uh young people need to develop today for the economy that's coming? I think prompt engineering is a very important skill. The knowing how to interface with AI systems is an incredibly critical capability that is I think is very akin to software engineering over the past few decades. But if you take a big step back, what are these algorithms

really good at. They're good at things that are present in their data set. And most of them are trained off of the entirety of the Internet. One thing that's not present on basically any of the Internet or very sparse in all of the data that these models are trained on is very consistent and thoughtful long form thinking.

So let's say you're given a very tough problem. at work or in school and it takes like You know You have to try one thing and it doesn't work, and you have to try another thing and it doesn't work and you know, it takes like maybe like thirty or forty steps to really work through it. And I think for for most of us in our jobs, most of the hard things that we do

are akin to this. You know, if you have to organize a very complex project There's a lot of trial and error that goes into it. Oftentimes in the field we call this uh agentic behavior or agent behavior. So how can the model actually be able to deal with new information and make choices and kind of like think through many, many steps. Um one thing you'll notice is the models today are pretty bad at this. They're very bad at thinking multiple steps. They usually make a mistake on the third or fourth or fifth sort of like

what's called a reasoning step or chain of thought. I think this is something that humans will always be differentiated in because we're very good at long form reasoning and very good at like thinking over very long time horizons. Models are not good at that. Fundamentally. Predicting the next token. Thinking over a very long time period.

I again want to be with Alex on this and yet I I I look at the evolution just of AI video, for example, in the pace It's unbelievable. Do you agree that the model is going to take a long time to get there on the long form? Or is this actually just one breakthrough away from the street. There is no question that that's where AI struggles. And a lot of people come to me and say, Oh, what do you think people should study? The one thing that I would say is really Critical.

Right, is really critical thinking and reasoning. Right. Especially Given the fact that You can't even trust for an AI system. will even generate, right? That's part of my concern a around a lot of the

state of where AI systems are today. Even though we think about it as an equalizer and it improves equity and democratization, all of that. In reality People who are experts. can take what they want out of it and know what to ignore. And it's really people who don't have that capacity.

are probably more vulnerable to the mistakes that these systems actually make. This is where what you and Alex are saying dovetail uh dovetails really nicely because prompt engineering and critical thinking reasoning actually go very much hand in hand. I want to I wanna just give a quick personal example and and and segue into really personal AI Seven weeks ago, my fourteen year old and I were having lunch and we were planning a a spring break ski trip. We went on ChatGPT and we asked it to compare this year's weather data using Bing to the past ten years of weather and snowpack data. We included a few other variables to avoid altitude sickness, ease of travel, et cetera. It sped out a suggestion, ended up being a terrific trip.

What I'm imagining is the next step, the integration with my calendar, the integration with my purchase history, my credit card, my bank account, et cetera, and the leap from asking that one question through that one prompt to Surfacing Flights, car rental. Hotel uh restaurant reservations, etc. feels quite

Short. Алекс, а клосто? Do you think we are? I think that like what I'll call L two level That's already basically here. So I'm I'm on the Board of Expedia. Expedia is launched a Gender VAI travel system. Plenty of customers use it. They find it very uh very helpful and useful. As part of that, Expedia built models that were sort of fine tuned and customized to be really good at these travel workflows and sort of these like travel agent like

questions and answers. And so I think that's more or less here, and I think the key onlock is actually the consumer experience. on how to make that really natural and easy and flow into all the other All the other behaviors. What I'm f excited about and I think is actually Closer than we think.

is the next unlock that we're talking about, where it's like actually autopilot true autopilot for everything, and that reliability boost in the models, I think could come here Faster than we expect. I think There's a question about

What type of an interaction and engagement one wants, right? I love the example of autopilot. So I have a Tesla. And I've tried self driving. And it drove me crazy. And I was thinking about this like I use self driving ride share a way more.

In San Francisco all the time. I don't have a problem with that. But I'm sitting in the back seat, but I'm not trying to control its behavior, right? I That's all I want. If I'm sitting behind

The steering wheel interaction, right? I am wanting to control that experience. I am wanting it not to change lanes when I don't want it like why are you changing lanes? That makes no sense. Because I'm trying to map map it into my own control level and thinking of what I want done, right? So it's really a big part of whether

You know, that We're ready for what experience has a lot to do with What type of interaction we're actually enabling with these systems. Exactly. I'm actually I'm hearing two different things, right? One is um humans are notoriously bad self-reporters, right? We're really bad witnesses even about ourselves. And so we say we want this, but really we kinda want that much of the time, right? So there's a version where we say I'm headed to Phoenix for the Intelvision Summit and I'm looking for flights in this time frame and whatever. And uh okay, great. There's also a version where it's got access to my calendar, it's got access to my email, it's got access to my flight history, and it's able to say, Jeff, it looks like you need to go to Phoenix for the Intelvision Summit.

I'm based on your past history, here are the three flights I'm recommending for you. AI personal utopia state of it it inferring with ninety nine point several nine's accuracy what I'm likely to want. Sounds beautiful, but like Should we be scared about the privacy components? We should absolutely be scared. Where do you see this going and where where should it go on the privacy front? Clearly the privacy issue has been around for quite some time, even before Gen AI, right? I think Clearly the need for massive amount of data to train these systems has made the problem much worse, right?

That in some sense is a little bit different than The Does it know everything about me so that it can hyper personalise? Whether you're talking about a consumer or

The reality is these systems are being trained on our data to be able to actually get to that level of intelligence, right? Irrespective of whether it's actually personalizing our needs. So I think that that can only be solved by regulation. Right. Yes, an open market is something that

will bring privacy as a value proposition and people can always give up whatever they they don't care about. And that's true. But there needs to be regulation to ensure that actually the privacy uh constraints that people are claiming are actually true. Right? I think it should absolutely be up to people. It's your data, you should be able to say I want to give it up or not give it up. Like I think the reason

People have not Taken care of privacy in that way. They need that data. Right, it's not because it's impossible to make these systems private. You can build systems that can do that and not have your data being taken away and used to train other systems. But today the reason it's not happening is because

That's not advancing the state of AI more generally. The need for more and more data to advance AI bumps up against the need for government regulation. We'll hear more on that from Intel's Lemon Achman and Scale AI's Alex Wang. After the break. When you've built substantial wealth through your business, it's often tied up in a single equity position.

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Hey listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show because every Friday we release a second Rapid Response exclusively in the Rapid Response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely. From Ford CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from The Devil Wears Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find, just search rapid response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode. I hope to see you there. Humans will never be more intelligent than AI. Those were great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't. How do we build a future?

That is human centered. I'm Rana El Calyubi. And on my podcast Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone. Every week, I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future. And we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives.

Find pioneers of AI wherever you tune in. I'm Jeff Berman. And this is Masters of Scale. You can find videos from our interview catalog over at the Masters of Scale YouTube channel. Here's more now of our live taping at the Intel Vision Summit on the dizzying pace of AI.

And the consequences for business leaders. Alex, I spent four years early in my career as chief counsel to member of the Senate leadership. Which I feel makes me especially well qualified to say how spectacularly unqualified Washington is to regulate AI at this stage. You're spending a lot of time in DC. What are you seeing from Capitol Hill and the administration? Are and are you bullish on the path toward regulation or are you bearish?

Well we've seen Over the past year. recently ever since the launch of Chat GPT has been An incredible amount of engagement from All of DC, I would say, Capitol Hill, from folks in the White House, from folks across many of the departments, in really understanding

What the risks are and What are the what risks do we need to be very concerned about, such as deepfakes, what are all of the various risk factors that the technology holds, as well as what are the opportunities with the technology. If in the United States, we're going to have private enterprises investing you know, tens of billions, potentially hundreds of billions of dollars in the future to build very powerful AI systems. We need the proper guard rails and safeguards in place to ensure these technologies serve the needs of humanity and don't have major risks associated with them. And and the risks are Massive. I mean uh you know we got social media spectacularly wrong, right? I mean th every bit of data says so.

And yet if we regulate badly or overregulate early, we're gonna stifle competition, we're gonna fall behind the rest of the world. Like we we we can't have that. Here's the fear I have. We've already seen deepfakes. We've already seen a deep fake robo call of President Biden in New Hampshire. The consumer platforms are Best going to be a half step behind. Right what do we do about that?

there are very different risks, and the solutions for these different risks are very different. Right. Maybe one simple way of thinking about it is thinking about People who are actually trying to do the right thing. But

These systems are so complex. That It's very hard to control. Then there is the other bucket, which is People who actually want to blow up the world and they're actually utilizing AI in ways you know, these are like the catastrophic events, the

Terrorist threats, things like that. And there are a lot of those people out there. Let's talk about deepfakes specifically, right? Because I think deepfakes to me, you know, I hear all of these stories about like how robots will destroy the world and all of the Hollywood narratives. I think the most likely thing to happen is that When people start to mistrust everything that they see.

And they don't know what's real and what's not. There That's what worries me the most, right? Because then you can manipulate people to do anything. You don't need to have robots blow up the world. You can make people do that. Propaganda is a powerful drug. Exactly. So so you have to invest quite a bit into fixing the issue of detecting these systems, right? Detecting deepfakes, you know, looking in every possible way that you can look at of that data and say, okay, the likelihood that this is actually deep fakes. Okay, so uh Alex should meta and YouTube and TikTok and Snap be investing

Literally probably the billions required right now. To protect us? Is that is that the answer? I think so. But it is a very difficult technical problem.

all of the potential AI generated content that's out there, which To me, lends to a question of like should we be funding a lot more research in this area? And research in that direction is not something that's sufficiently funded today. I'm a born optimist. Um I can see all of the AI dystopian scenarios playing out. And I I lean into the ones that are more encouraging. Um uh as we

Bring the conversation to a close. What do you think we're looking at a year from now we're going, Wow. That's incredible. For me I think if we Make roadways into

Climate change? And material discovery, those are two areas AI can really transform. the way we actually do this work and if we're able to make any dent there that would have a huge impact. uh on society. I think unfortunately knowing how governments run

the regulatory side and where that might change fundamentally in terms of the responsible AI piece of that puzzle. I think that would take longer. To me, progress in pharmaceuticals in particular is an area where I think we'll see very rapid progress. There's been incredible advancements in the biological foundation models unrelated to AI, but there's been huge advancements in synthetic biology, which I think will lead to just a dramatic ability for us to help people who are sick. And I think that that

You know, there's probably no nobler mission than that. Phenomenal. Lemma, Alex, thank you for joining us for this live taping of Masters of Scale. Appreciate you both. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. My conversation with these two leaders in AI makes me both hopeful. And concerned.

Intel fellow Lemma Nachman S's a future where AI is embraced as a tool to further human creativity. Not just replace human tasks with automated ones. But AI systems will only augment work and further ingenuity if they're designed to do so. On the privacy and safety front. Alex Wang of Scale AI notes that it's a big business opportunity.

And he's right. Tools that safeguard personal data for AI users or successfully detect deep fakes will add enormous value to the market. But the tech industry doesn't exactly have a great track record when it comes to protecting privacy and ensuring security. And we'll need market incentives to stay ahead of the safety risks. We know for sure that government regulation alone will not be enough.

AI will be even more transformational than social media, and it's likely better framed as bigger than the industrial revolution. It's developing much faster than any sweeping change we've seen before. The founders and leaders who stay mindful and run ahead of these risks. Are those who stand to best serve their customers and our nation. Through this time of massive change.

I'm Jeff Berman. Thank you for listening. Masters of Scale is a Wait What original. Our executive producer is Eve Tro. The production team includes Chris Gautier, Tucker Vagerski, Masha Makutanina, and Brandon Klein.

Mixing and Mastering by Erin Vasconelli. Original music by Ryan Holland. Our head of podcasts is Letal Mulan. Visit mastersofscale.com to find the transcript for this episode and to subscribe to our email newsletter.