Today, we have a special episode with Rob Toews, Partner at Radical Ventures, a VC firm focused on AI. He is also a contributor to Forbes, where he writes about the big picture in AI, and recently spoke at the Ted AI conference. Rob is a good friend whom I talk to a lot about the shifting AI landscape. And given how dynamic 2023 has been in the world of AI, I thought it would be a good way to wrap up the year by talking about some of the key trends in 2023 and some predictions for 2024. Enjoy!

On this episode, Rob joins Pauline to discuss trends of AI startup funding, open vs. closed source model companies + their business models, longevity of Transformers architecture, and his predictions for GPU shortage and regulation in 2024.

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Today’s guest on Cross Validated is Tonya Custis, who is the Director of AI Research at Autodesk.  Tonya has over a decade of applied AI research experience at Autodesk, Thomson Reuters, eBay, and Honeywell.  Over 100 million people use Autodesk software to unlock their creativity and solve important design, business and environmental challenges.

On this episode, Tonya joins Pauline to discuss how Autodesk has incorporated generative AI in its broader generative design capabilities, the importance of user testing to personalize where and when to incorporate AI based on different use cases and user personas, and her framework of buying vs. building AI technologies.

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Today’s guest on Cross Validated is Manju Rajashekhar, who is the VP of Engineering at Etsy. Manju has spent over seven years at Etsy, was an early employee at Twitter, and has spent time at VMWare and Microsoft.  Etsy is an ecommerce platform connecting millions of creative buyers and sellers around the world.

On this episode, Manju joins Pauline to discuss the mature use case of search, ads and recommendations on the Etsy platform, framework of deriving value from AI / ML, the ease of prototyping vs. deploying AI today, and his strong belief why open source will win.  

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Today’s guest on Cross Validated is Hui Wang, who is the VP of Data Science and Machine Learning at PayPal. She spent nearly 20 years at PayPal and prior to that got a PhD in Statistics.

On this episode, Hui joins Pauline to discuss the mature use case of fraud detection within PayPal, generative AI opportunity to transform consumer experience and customer service, building AI responsibly including ensuring accurate data at scale, and the importance for AI solutions to scale simultaneously across the technology, compute, and use case discovery.  

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Today’s guest on Cross Validated is Christian Kleinerman, Senior Vice President of Product at Snowflake. Prior to Snowflake, he was a Senior Director of Product Management at YouTube and, prior to that, had spent over a decade at Microsoft in various leadership roles.

On this episode, Christian joins Pauline to discuss why there is no AI strategy without a data strategy, his million model hypothesis, recent announcements at Snowflake Summit, and why data governance, privacy, and security are the most critical barriers to broad and scaled AI deployment.

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Today's guest on Cross Validated is David DeSanto, Chief Product Officer at GitLab. GitLab’s AI-powered DevSecOps platform serves more than 30m registered users and 50% of the Fortune 100.

On this episode, David joins Pauline to discuss how GitLab is embedding AI in every DevSecOps workflow, limitations of deploying AI (including confabulations vs. hallucinations), the value of GitLab’s privacy-first approach to customers’ data, and his reactions to the doomer sentiment of software developers becoming obsolete.

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Today's guest on Cross Validated is Ali Dalloul, a VP of Azure AI at Microsoft. He spent nearly 25 years with Microsoft in various leadership roles, most recently as the VP of Strategy and Commercialization at Azure AI.

On this episode, Ali joins Pauline to discuss the most widespread use cases of generative AI among Microsoft customers, Microsoft’s approach to customers’ data security and privacy, and the importance of change management and leadership sponsorship for organizations transforming with AI.

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Today's guest on Cross Validated is Kim Branson, who is the Senior Vice President and Global Head of AI and ML at GSK. GSK is one of the top 10 largest pharmaceuticals and Fortune 500 company.

On this episode, Kim joins Pauline to discuss both traditional ML and generative AI use cases within GSK, why data and data generation are critical assets to any Fortune 500 company, and how Kim thinks AI should be regulated.

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Today's guest on Cross Validated is Roy Singh, Partner and Global Head of Advanced Analytics at Bain.  Bain announced a partnership with OpenAI recently to identify the value of and implement AI among Bain's Fortune 5000 clients.

On this episode, Roy joins Pauline to discuss the strong pull from enterprise customers to deploy generative AI capabilities, the deployment factors to increase likelihood of success, and disruption archetypes around use cases and industries getting early traction.

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Follow on Twitter: @paulinebhyang

Subscribe for new podcasts and email feedback to [email protected].

Follow on Twitter: @paulinebhyang @danny_lange @_RobToews