- Three AI chief executives discussed how they think about building their companies and their technology at Fortune’s Brainstorm AI.
The promise and potential of AI is spurring a new wave of businesses. But what are the executives helming artificial intelligence companies actually thinking about when it comes to the technology?
A group of AI executives shared their perspectives and approaches this week at Fortune’s Brainstorm AI conference in San Francisco, in a wide-ranging conversation that touched on everything from “ethically-built” AI models to data quality.
“Just because data is public, it doesn’t mean it’s free,” said Daniela Braga, founder and chief executive of Defined.ai. Braga’s company serves as a broker for AI data, vetting the data, applying a price, and finding a buyer.
Braga stressed the importance of building AI with broad sets of data since, she argued, “everything that is on the internet is biased by definition. It’s mostly white, male generated. It’s English language generated.” What’s more, she said, a lot of the data-related work that ultimately goes into AI products come from what she called “digital sweatshops, the exploitation of people in developing and third world countries to very, very low paid jobs and very harsh conditions.”
Benjamin Plummer, chief executive of Invisible Technologies, explained there are two broad areas he’s thinking about: evaluating and understanding how models are performing in the real world to see where they’re strong or weak, and creating really high quality data that can be used to retain models and close gaps.
“There’s a really symbiotic relationship between those two things, and the faster you can crank that flywheel, the faster you can drive model performance and improvement,” Plummer said. Additionally, to Braga’s point, Plummer explained that to get the highest quality data, you need “really happy and engaged people.” That means paying them well-above living wages, for one.
For Jonathan Ross, founder and chief executive of Groq, the main focus is on approaching the market holistically and being prepared to scale.
Groq, which makes AI chips, spent six months on a software compiler before they actually started designing the chip. “AI is a scale game, and if you can’t get to scale, there’s no point,” Ross said. For his company that means working with partners, such as Aramco Digital. “They’re covering our cost to deploy, and then we split the profits of that,” he said. “It’s a very beneficial arrangement.”
To round out the conversation, conference co-chair, Rana el Kaliouby, asked each panelist for a one word answer to what’ll make AI faster, smarter, more impactful, and equitable? Plummer said humans, Ross said commitment, and Braga said more equitable investment.
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