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by Peter High, published on Forbes

4-18-2016

Greg Brockman is co-founder and CTO at OpenAI, a non-profit artificial intelligence research company that also includes Elon Musk and Y-Combinator’s Sam Altman among other Silicon Valley luminaries as co-founders. OpenAI was founded to ensure that artificial intelligence benefits humanity as a whole, which has defined its non-profit status and long-term perspective. When I asked Brockman who influenced him, he listed Alan Kay of Xerox PARC among others, and highlighted the he hopes to foster a comparable idea lab to PARC. We also discussed how the organization’s bold mission and unique structure acts as a magnet for world-class talent, the trend of open sourcing AI development, how AI may impact jobs and society more broadly, and the promise versus the peril of AI, among other topics.

Prior to OpenAI, Greg was the CTO of Stipe, a FinTech company that builds tools enabling web commerce. Greg was the fourth employee at Stripe, a company that now has a valuation of over $5 billion.

(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link. This is the fourth interview in my artificial intelligence series. Please visit these links to interviews with Mike Rhodin of IBM Watson, Sebastian Thrun of Udacity, Scott Phoenix of Vicarious, and Antoine Blondeau of Sentient Technologies. To read future articles in the series, including with Neil Jacobstein of Singularity University, Oren Etzioni of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and Nick Bostrom of Oxford University, please click the “Follow” link above.)

Peter High: The stated goal of OpenAI is to advance digital intelligence in a way that is likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. What advances in digital intelligence are most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, in your mind?

Greg Brockman: I think there is something special going on right now in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) where, for the first time, systems that are based on deep learning and statistical methods suddenly start to have extremely good performance, and you are able to start building computer vision systems, for example, that can classify objects in a certain sense much better than humans can. Rather than having humans spend time understanding “how do I write down the code to specifically solve this problem?”, you build this general architecture, and the architecture learns from the data. We are getting better at writing these algorithms that are able to learn, to understand the world, and operate within it. At the same time, I do not think the world has changed in a significant way as a result yet.  It has only been a short period of time that these algorithms started to be best in class – it dates back to a 2012 paper that showed that if you scale up this neural network architecture in the right way, the system starts to perform significantly better in a wide variety of domains. I think we are going to see these techniques mature and start to be baked into a wide variety of products, both at big companies and at new companies, and in a variety of applications.

We are already starting to get a sense of this if you think about self-driving cars. They are basically here. There is a lot of engineering left to do and lot of hard work and a lot of societal questions to answer, but it is a just a question of when; it is not a question of if. I think that is the tip of the iceberg. Robotics, I think, is poised to start working. Imagine you have a robot in your house that can clean things. A couple of years ago that was not something on the horizon. Now it is not even extrapolation anymore to say that it is going to start having an impact.

To read the full article, please visit Forbes

by Peter High, published on Forbes

4-11-2016

Vicarious has the mission to “build the next generation of artificial intelligence algorithms.” That said, its objectives are longer-term in nature. Vicarious has assembled a who’s who of technology legends as investors, including Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Mark Zuckerberg. Co-founder, Scott Phoenix is clear that the biggest value Vicarious can contribute will be in the long-term, in the form of artificial general intelligence (AGI), or human-like intelligence. There will be plenty of value created in the interim in the form of what Phoenix refers to as the “exhaust” of the process.

Phoenix is a veteran entrepreneur, having served as CEO of Frogmetrics, which was a Y Combinator company in the class of 2008. He was also the Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Founders Fund, among other roles he has played. In this interview, Phoenix describes the goals of his 30 person organization, how he weighs the risks versus the rewards of artificial general intelligence, how AI may replace more jobs than it creates, new economic and social constructs that could ease the societal shift, Vicarious’s decision to prioritize social good over investor returns, and why more companies should do the same.

(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link. This is the fourth interview in my artificial intelligence series. Please visit these links to interviews with Mike Rhodin of IBM Watson, Sebastian Thrun of Udacity, and Antoine Blondeau of Sentient Technologies. To read future articles in the series, including with Greg Brockman of OpenAI, Neil Jacobstein of Singularity University, Oren Etzioni of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and Nick Bostrom of Oxford University, please click the “Follow” link above.)

Peter High: You are the co-founder of Vicarious, a company that is within the artificial intelligence (AI) realm. I thought we could begin with a definition of AI. It is a term that is thrown around in a variety of ways and I would like to take have you unbundle it a little bit.

Scott Phoenix: Artificial intelligence is a really funny thing for a couple of reasons. One is the “moving goal posts phenomena,” which is as soon as something that was formerly called artificial intelligence is solved, it is no longer included the umbra of what is AI. Since it is such a funny term, you can apply it to almost any business or product or company that is developing anything. You could have a consumer gadget that has AI for making sure your windows are clean, or AI in your spam filter.

At Vicarious, we have a particular and specific definition of what we mean when we say AI, which is artificial general intelligence, or human-like intelligence. To put an even more specific frame around it, we say, “given the same sensory experiences that a human being has from birth to adulthood, we are trying to write a program that learns the same concepts and has the same abilities.” That is a specific thing, whereas artificial narrow intelligence (AI as it is commonly used today) can mean just a computer that does some stuff that is useful.

High: As we have machines that are able to do a lot of the processing that humans do today is there any worry that there are aspects of the way that we think or work that are going to change profoundly?

To read the full article, please visit Forbes

by Peter High, published on Forbes

3-15-2016

Flex is a $26 billion provider of global supply chain solutions. Flex has long been in the business of designing, building, shipping, and serving packaged electronic products for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). Flex works in collaboration with companies large and small, and the company’s CIO Gus Shahin’s team has been an integral player in creating the tools and the environment to allow innovation to sprout.

Under Shahin’s guidance, the company ahs developed what it refers to as a Pulse Center, which allows the company to monitor its incredibly complex supply chain, and make better decisions based on up-to-the moment data. This work has led to better inventory management, which is a source of tremendous value for a company like Flex.

Shahin has also helped develop an innovation lab “to allow people in the Bay Area who have ideas, to help them bring those ideas to reality as quickly as possible, as cheaply as possible, and in an effective way,” as he notes in this interview. The combination of these creative outlets have lent insights back to Shahin and his team to ensure that the company remains on the cutting edge.

(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link.  To read future interviews like this one, please click the “Follow” link above.)

Peter High: Gus, please take a moment to describe the Pulse Center at your offices in Milpitas, California?

Gus Shahin: Flex is a supply chain sketch to scale company, and basically everything we do is around supply chain. The only way we can make money is if we manage supply chains for customers effectively and in a efficient way. The pulse center is basically flex digitizing, if you will, the supply chain globally. We have about one hundred factories in forty countries. We manufacture products for companies, from the largest OEMs, like Cisco and others, to startups. And we not only built the products for them but we also manage their entire supply chain: we procure on their behalf, we manufacture, we distribute, we repair, and so on. The Pulse Center gives us a real-time view of our supply chain at any given point in time, in real-time, and it tells us all kinds of information. We get alerts immediately – geopolitical alerts, updates from factories, weather alerts, anything that is happening around the world that could potentially disrupt the supply chain or disrupt the material flowing in the supply chain that could affect our – and just by looking at the screens, we see what is going on in real-time and can alter things and move things around so that we do not disrupt the supply chain for our customers. That is basically the description in a nutshell, but there is a lot in there.

High: One of the fascinating things about digital, generally speaking, is the extent to which it requires cross functional collaboration in ways that are new and more substantial than in the past. There is a new kind of collaboration emerging. Can you talk about the role that IT plays in collaborating across the enterprise?

To read the full article, please visit Forbes

by Peter High, published on Forbes

2-29-2016

Sentient Technologies has patented evolutionary and perceptual capabilities that provide customers with highly sophisticated solutions, powered by the largest compute grid dedicated to distributed artificial intelligence. The company also has a war chest of $143 million in venture investment, the most of any artificial intelligence company. Antoine Blondeau founded Sentient Technologies nearly nine years ago, though it was in stealth mode for the majority of that period.

After stints at Salesforce.com and Good Technology was looking for the next challenge. He had been involved in artificial intelligence for 15 years, making him an early pioneer in the field, and already had hit a home run by being involved in developing the technology that would become Siri, of iPhone fame.

Blondeau claims we are still in the very early days of artificial intelligence’s evolution, but his vision is to create technology that will mimic the human interaction. One of the first uses of the technology is in retail, replicating the experience of having a sophisticated advisory helping to curate your shopping experience. In this interview, Blondeau provides his vision for the company, his thoughts about the future of AI, the balance between AI innovation and AI safety, as well as a variety of other topics.

(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link. This is the fourth article in a series on leaders in artificial intelligence, which includes interviews with Mike Rhodin of IBM Watson and Sebastian Thrun of Udacity. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)

High: Artificial intelligence seems to be gaining tremendous momentum, whether it is venture capital, media coverage, or simply progress that is obvious in the world.  There are clearly a couple of trends that have made this possible in recent years: the emergence of relatively low-cost available computing power and the vast, growing abundance of data that companies in every industry are collecting. I think I have heard you say that we are in the first inning here of the game, as so much innovation is ahead of us. As somebody who got into this 15 to 20 years ago, long before this boom, where do you see things now, and how do you think things are evolving?

Blondeau: You are right on the money when you talk about what has happened over the past five or seven years that is making this possible. Some of the team members and I worked on the precursor to what became Siri. At the time, we were thinking of an algorithm running on one machine or a few machines. What has happened over the past few years is that you have the data, it is broadly available, and one of the things that we foresaw was not only that data would explode but the dimensionality of data would explode. It will connect a lot of types of data that had not been connected before. That is a big help.

The second thing is that we have moved from thinking of the machine being the compute to the network being the compute, which means that we can harness an enormous amount of compute cycles. In our case, that means running our system on up to two million CPU cores. We also have a few thousand GPU cores. It is a massive system. When we thought of this company seven years ago, we had the vision forward, but could not quite imagine how we could get there. I think now we can.

The last thing is that when you begin to think about the scale, you can begin to address problems that you had not thought were solvable previously. The ambitious nature of what you do can go up significantly. You can tackle dimensionality, you can tackle complex decision making. Effectively, you are looking at comprehensively including every step of decision making in the machine, or in this giant network machine, which previously was not something thought of as possible. That is the high level.

High: I would like to dive a bit further into the details of how this becomes reality, and how that has impacted the way in which you have thought about entering different markets. I have heard you speak about the applications in some of the primary industries where there are tremendous amounts of data and where there are particularly big problems to solve, like financial services and healthcare. I found it interesting that one of your first areas to apply Sentient Technologies is in retail and online shopping. I would love to understand further how you have chosen where to focus.

Blondeau: One of the things we did was building a powerful platform, but you never succeed by building a platform. You need to apply it to know that it is working and scales to multiple industries. So, we decided to monetize it to address trading, aspects of e-commerce, and the online content discovery experience, as well as, at the research level, institutions like MIT, University of Toronto, and Oxford to work on less immediately monetizable problems, but world problems nonetheless. I am talking here about genomics and patients in an ICU context.

In each case, the common denominator is a few things. One, can you try to solve a problem that has not been solved before? The complexity of the decision making process is key here. The second thing is can you encapsulate the whole decision making process within the machine?

To read the full article, please visit Forbes

CTO David Fike discusses security issues at Marsh & McLennan, including automation, the policing aspect of security and the importance of tracking metrics.

by Peter High, published on CIOInsight.com

12-13-2012

IN SUMMARY:

WHO: David Fike, Chief Technology Officer, Marsh & McLennan Companies, Inc.

WHAT: Sharing his perspectives on how best to secure corporate networks

WHERE: New York, NY

WHY: To provide CIOs and other IT leaders with actionable advice and insights about how best to secure the corporate network during increasingly complex times

David Fike, Chief Technology Officer of Marsh & McLennan Companies, Inc., shares his perspectives on the steps he has taken to secure his company’s corporate network and the methods he uses to stay a step ahead of those who would try to compromise his corporate systems. Upon arrival as CTO at Marsh & McLennan in 2006, Fike formed MMC Global Technology Infrastructure, which was the first significant attempt to centralize infrastructure across the company. Among other reasons, part of Fike’s logic in so doing was to develop a more secure corporate network.

Describe your approach to securing the corporate network at Marsh & McLennan Companies.

The most important thing to realize is that our security posture and what we’re defending against changes rapidly and in real time. The biggest challenge is that what you do today to protect your network isn’t going to protect you tomorrow.

The security landscape and types of threats are changing faster than ever. The bad guys are getting smarter and their “time to market” is getting shorter. As I think back to the security challenges we faced in 2006, it is like we are living in a completely different world today.

The starting point is building a strong, knowledgeable team. It is important to hire a seasoned chief information security officer to lead the change and ultimately take responsibility for security. You can spend all the money in the world, but if you have the wrong people it won’t matter, so people are really essential.

As your program evolves, a natural conflict will arise between colleagues wanting to access new technologies and services and your need to mitigate the security risks behind those new things. Some examples include:

Additional topics covered in this article include:

To read the full article, please visit CIO Insight.

Rarely have IT and HR been led by the same individual. But similarities between these departments, combined with the need to think creatively about each, has caused some progressive companies to consider this combined role. Sheleen Quish is, perhaps, the most prominent example of this. After leading IT departments at Unitrin and U.S. Can, she joined Ameristar Casinos as CIO in early 2007 and soon took added responsibility for the HR department.

Here’s what she learned about managing this dual role.

by Peter High in CIO Insight

Human Resources and Information Technology executives often suffer from the same issues: They are relegated to running support organizations within the corporate structure. These are shared services that are leveraged by all parts of the company, but despite this ubiquity, team members in these divisions, and even their leaders, are often considered second-class citizens of the corporation. Yet, what is more important to your organization than recruiting and grooming great people? Likewise, the expectations of those team members, as well as those of your customers, demand that your technology be elegant and efficient.

The people who make up these two departments traditionally have been very different. Most IT professionals are engineers who are very analytical and who speak a language that is very different from the language used by the rest of the corporation. IT also tends to be male dominated. HR departments are typically made up of people with liberal arts and organizational design backgrounds. HR has tended to be progressive in hiring female leaders. Given these differences, rarely have IT and HR been led by the same individual. Discovering similarities between these departments, combined with the need to think creatively about each, has caused some progressive companies to consider this combined role.

To read the remainder of the article, please visit CIO Insight.

To listen to Sheleen’s podcast interview with us, please visit Metis Strategy’s Forum on World Class IT.

Peter High

3-14-2011

Excerpt from the Article:

If you believe what many economists are now saying, we have emerged from a prolonged economic malaise and the United States is poised for growth. Good news surely, but IT leaders have suffered right along with other executives in the corporate suite during these bad old days. The recent downturn cost a lot of talented IT leaders their jobs.It seems, then, to be an appropriate time to ask: “What can IT leaders do today to prepare for the next downturn?”

Having worked with a great number of CIOs on the principles of World Class IT (introduced in my book, World Class IT: Why Businesses Succeed When IT Triumphs), I have learned that the most successful executives focus their organization’s efforts to ensure that they plan for the proverbial “rainy day,” while simultaneously encouraging innovation. There are four main areas on which these leading executives typically focus:

It is critically important to develop and maintain a skills inventory of the people in your department. First and foremost, this requires defining taxonomy relative to those skills. Then, it’s essential to have all employees document the skills they currently possess. This skills inventory should be refreshed whenever there is a new hire, and through each evaluation cycle, providing an “as is” picture of the skills of your staff.

Develop a workforce plan reflecting the skills the IT department will need in the future based on where the company is headed, business and IT strategy, and so forth. This is the “to be” state of the staff’s skills. The gulf between the “as is” picture and the “to be” state should then be evaluated; this will drive your training, recruiting and vendor-engagement strategies.

To read the full article, please visit CIO Insight

Peter High

2-15-2011

Excerpt from the Article:

When Mike Capone became ADP’s first corporate-wide CIO in July 2008, he worked from the outset to be sure that IT was considered a strategic weapon within the arsenal of the corporation.

As someone who grew up on the business-side of ADP (prior to taking on his current role, he had been general manager global HR/payroll outsourcing ), Capone had been a user of IT. He knew he could speak with his new partners outside of IT with a degree of understanding and empathy that a traditional CIO might lack. Only a few months into his post, the economy was decimated. Based on Capone’s moves, IT was not the cost cutting target that it became in many other organizations, where IT was viewed as a mere support organization.

Like many CIOs, Capone focused his team’s attention on optimizing costs during the economic downturn, to ensure that his department was doing its part when the company needed it to run lean. That said, he was wary not to have the entire team focused exclusively on cost-saving activities. Early in 2009, Capone identified a group of his best performers and future department leaders, and had them focus on new innovations.

Admittedly, there was a dearth of market data on mobile platforms in the payroll space. Most of the solutions that had been developed to date were small offerings by small competitors. Once the decision was made to invest in a mobile payroll platform, there were two options to potentially pursue: a “me-too” solution that mimicked competitors, or a quantum leap forward. Working closely with the product group, the team elected to go for the latter, developing a full-featured mobile application to run payroll.

To read the full article, please visit CIO Insight