The Brave Technologist

Latest Episodes:

The EU's AI Act: Creating Legislation That Will Survive Over Time Feb 14, 2024

Show notes

Gabriele Mazzini, Team Leader - AI Act at the European Commission, discusses the risk-based approach they took when crafting specific rules for the Artificial Intelligence Act (versus simply opposing the technology as a whole). He also discusses the complexities involved in regulating emerging technologies that evolve at a much faster pace than the legislation itself.

Key Takeaways:

Recommendations put forward for regulating emerging technologies within the AI Act
What the process has been like for the development of the AI Act, including the key players
Where regulation in this space can be most helpful despite the complexities involved

Guest Bio: Gabriele Mazzini is the architect and lead author of the proposal on the Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act) by the European Commission, where he has focused on the legal and policy questions raised by new technologies since August 2017. Before joining the European Commission, Gabriele held several positions in the private sector in New York and served in the European Parliament and the EU Court of Justice. He holds a LLM from Harvard Law School, a PhD in Italian and Comparative Criminal Law from the University of Pavia, and a Law Degree from the Catholic University in Milan. He is qualified to practice law in Italy and New York.

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About this Show:

The Brave Technologist is here to shed light on the opportunities and challenges of emerging tech. To make it digestible, less scary, and more approachable for all!

Join us as we embark on a mission to demystify artificial intelligence, challenge the status quo, and empower everyday people to embrace the digital revolution. Whether you're a tech enthusiast, a curious mind, or an industry professional, this podcast invites you to join the conversation and explore the future of AI together.

The Brave Technologist Podcast is hosted by Luke Mulks, VP Business Operations at Brave Software—makers of the privacy-respecting Brave browser and Search engine, and now powering AI everywhere with the Brave Search API.

Music by: Ari Dvorin

Produced by: Sam Laliberte

Blockchains, Bringing Transparency and Democratizing Access to Global Finance Feb 07, 2024

Show notes

Austin Campbell, Managing Partner at Zero Knowledge Consulting, discusses the outdated infrastructure of finance and how blockchain is positioned to solve many of the current challenges. He also tackles the complex issues regulators face, and cultural hesitancy towards harnessing the full potential of innovations like blockchain.

Key takeaways:

The power of self custody, and how emerging technologies can help avoid events like the 2008 financial crisis
The anticipated collaborations between AI and crypto, and why blockchain is poised to combat AI-generated spam
Emerging crypto regulations, especially within Asia
Crypto anonymity myths and what needs to be changed

Guest Bio: Austin Campbell is the founder of Zero Knowledge Consulting and a professor at Columbia Business School. Previously, he ran the stablecoin platform and portfolio management at Paxos, and acted as their chief risk officer. He has also managed fixed income trading desks at JP Morgan and Citi, covering over $100B in cash derivatives.

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About this Show:

The Brave Technologist is here to shed light on the opportunities and challenges of emerging tech. To make it digestible, less scary, and more approachable for all!

Music by: Ari Dvorin

Produced by: Sam Laliberte

What Can We Learn From the Taylor Swift Deep Fakes Scandal? Feb 04, 2024

Show notes

Sexually-explicit AI-generated images of Taylor Swift surfaced last week and went viral on many platforms - particularly X (formerly Twitter) who responded by removing the ability to search the singer-songwriter's name alltogether. In this bonus solo episode with Luke, he discusses what we can learn from this scandal. Key Takeaways: - What are deepfakes and should we be concerned? - Can we expect new legislation to come from this? - Debating how much the government should or shouldn't be involved in regulating - deepfakes - Solutions for verifying the authenticity of public content - How can we mitigate the impact of the future impersonations of public or non-public figures?

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About this Show:

The Brave Technologist is here to shed light on the opportunities and challenges of emerging tech. To make it digestible, less scary, and more approachable for all!

Music by: Ari Dvorin

Produced by: Sam Laliberte

PepsiCo is Bridging the Physical and Digital World with Next Gen D2C Marketing (REVISIT) Jan 17, 2024

Show notes

Kate Brady, Head of Next Gen D2C Consumer Experience & Direct Digital Marketing Capabilities at PepsiCo, shares how mainstream brands and marketers can utilize Web3 technologies. Kate's team is currently testing a number of next gen initiatives as part of PepsiCo's newly established Web3 & Metaverse Center of Enablement.

We also discuss the removal of third-party trackers and moving towards a private internet while still owning the communication with your audience and prioritizing zero first-party data.

Key Takeaways:

Why marketers need to examine the value exchange they're offering their consumers – how to get smarter and more consumer centric.
Ways that mainstream brands like PepsiCo, Starbucks and Walmart are utilizing Web3 technologies like NFTs and the Metaverse to increase loyalty.
Resources for marketers wanting to experiment with Web3 and why this is the best time to get started in the space.
Kate's brave marketing moment: Combining The Walking Dead, Augmented Reality and the Mountain Dew to motivate consumers to tune into advertising commercials despite a cord cutting trend emerging at this time.

Guest Bio: Kate Brady is a seasoned marketing veteran with over 20-years media and marketing experience, 12+ of those years within PepsiCo. Kate now leads Next Gen D2C Consumer Experience and Direct Digital Marketing Capabilities, a newly formed team within PepsiCo's global Strategy and Transformation organization driving growth for PepsiCo through the lens of consumer data and experiences.

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About this Show:

The Brave Technologist is here to shed light on the opportunities and challenges of emerging tech. To make it digestible, less scary, and more approachable for all!

Guest host: Patrick Rice

Music by: Ari Dvorin

Produced by: Sam Laliberte

AI Ethics & Safety: What Could Go Wrong and How to Stop It Dec 27, 2023

Show notes

Nell Watson is a pioneering ethics and machine intelligence researcher, and president of EthicsNet. Here, she discusses different scenarios in which things could go "wrong" with emerging technologies, and lead to AI working against the best interests of humanity instead of for it. She also shares the amazing work that's being done now to prevent this.

Key Takeaways:

Why AI safety and AI ethics teams need to collaborate and work together over their shared goals, and build better bridges
The differences and similarities between AI ethics and safety, along with the various approaches to making AI less problematic or risky
The emergence of "shadow AI," and the increasing need for ethical transparency and accountability
Why the tech industry is not ready or able to self-regulate

Guest Bio: Nell Watson is a pioneering ethics and machine intelligence researcher, and a driving force behind some of the most crucial AI ethics standardization and certification initiatives. She's also the president of EthicsNet.

Nell dedicates her work to protecting human rights and infusing ethics, safety, and values that elevate the human spirit into technologies like artificial intelligence.

Through her public speaking, Nell has inspired audiences to work towards a brighter future at venues such as the World Bank, the United Nations General Assembly, and the Royal Society.

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About this Show:

The Brave Technologist is here to shed light on the opportunities and challenges of emerging tech. To make it digestible, less scary, and more approachable for all!

Music by: Ari Dvorin

Produced by: Sam Laliberte

AI's Impact on Employment, Equal Opportunity and Upholding our Civil Rights Dec 20, 2023

Show notes

Keith Sonderling, Commissioner at the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), discusses how HR companies and employers are using AI, and the implications of this usage on employment law. He stresses the importance of governance and regulation to avoid discrimination, prevent HR biases at scale, and to ultimately uphold our civil rights.

Key takeaways:

How to use machine learning to make HR decisions that were historically done by a human
Examples of how AI and HR tech have already impacted every step in the employee lifecycle
How the use of natural language processing can mitigate against discrimination in the hiring processes
The work the EEOC is doing to ensure HR tech is being developed in a way that helps all employment decisions remain fair and non-discriminatory

Guest bio:

Keith E. Sonderling was confirmed by the U.S. Senate, with a bipartisan vote, to be a Commissioner on the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in 2020. Until January of 2021, he served as the Commission's Vice-Chair.

Since joining the EEOC, one of Commissioner Sonderling's highest priorities is ensuring that artificial intelligence and workplace technologies are designed and deployed in a way that's consistent with long-standing civil rights laws. Commissioner Sonderling has published numerous articles on the benefits and potential harms of using artificial intelligence-based technology in the workplace, and speaks globally on these emerging issues.

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About this Show:

The Brave Technologist is here to shed light on the opportunities and challenges of emerging tech. To make it digestible, less scary, and more approachable for all!

Music by: Ari Dvorin

Produced by: Sam Laliberte

Limitations of Artificial Intelligence and Misaligned User Expectations Dec 13, 2023

Show notes

Gilad Lumbroso, Squad Lead @ AI21 Labs, discusses the various ways we overestimate AI, and the gaps that currently need to be filled in AI capabilities. He also explains the role that natural language will play in the evolution of new AI, and discusses how to apply natural language usability as a key part of product development.

Key Takeaways:

How to deal with hallucinations and misleading information
Prompts for leveraging ChatGPT as a learning tool
Ways that creators can use various AI tools to scale their work and improve efficiencies
How product builders and designers should focus their learning

Guest Bio: Gilad Lumbroso is the Squad Lead at A121 Labs where he's responsible for Wordtune's AI writing features, managing engineering, algorithm, and product teams. Gilad joined AI21 Labs almost 6 years ago as their 6th employee, and has since worked on many generative AI initiatives.

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About this Show:

The Brave Technologist is here to shed light on the opportunities and challenges of emerging tech. To make it digestible, less scary, and more approachable for all!

Music by: Ari Dvorin

Produced by: Sam Laliberte

Building Your Own LLM Dec 06, 2023

Show notes

Greg Diamos, Co-Founder of Lamini, shares how their discovery of the Scaling Laws Recipe led to rapid evolution of language learning models, and inspired Lamini's product offering. He also discusses his message for policy makers, including what we should be worried about, and what pitfalls we should work to avoid.

Key Takeaways:

Why you should build your own LLM
How language learning models have impacted ChatGPT
Why this is the best time for software engineers to enter the space

Guest Bio:

Greg Diamos is a Co-Founder of Lamini, the enterprise LLM platform for building and owning LLMs. He is also a Co-Founder of MLPerf™, the industry standard benchmark for deep learning performance. Greg was a founding engineer at Baidu's Silicon Valley AI Lab (SVAIL), where he co-invented the first deep learning speech and language model (which was deployed in production to billions of users). At Baidu, he discovered Scaling Laws, motivating LLMs. His team members from SVAIL built the most useful LLMs today, including OpenAI's ChatGPT, Llama 2 at Meta, Claude 2 at Anthropic, PALM at Google, and NVIDIA's Megatron. Before Baidu, Greg was a CUDA Architect at NVIDIA. Greg holds a PhD from Georgia Tech focusing on high performance computing.

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About this Show:

The Brave Technologist is here to shed light on the opportunities and challenges of emerging tech. To make it digestible, less scary, and more approachable for all!

Music by: Ari Dvorin

Produced by: Sam Laliberte

Privacy Protecting AI and Building Consumer Trust Nov 22, 2023

Show notes

Kleomenis Katevas, Machine Learning Researcher at Brave Software, discusses how we can build trust in AI with the general public by making data as safe and secure as possible. He also unpacks some of the myths the general public holds about AI, how to debunk these myths, and tangible steps companies can take to reduce privacy concerns with AI.

Key Takeaways:

How Twitter (now known as X) can be a great resource for learning more about AI, along with specific accounts and thought leaders he's following in the space
Exciting ways that healthcare will be vastly improved through artificial intelligence via customized treatment plans and timely diagnosis
Why Brave is taking a privacy-first approach to its AI product suite

Guest Bio: Kleomenis Katevas is a Machine Learning Researcher at Brave Software, where he's focused on designing and building privacy-preserving, ML-based systems. His research interests lie in the areas of Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning, Federated Learning, Mobile Systems, and Human-Computer Interaction.

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About this Show:

The Brave Technologist is here to shed light on the opportunities and challenges of emerging tech.To make it digestible, less scary, and more approachable for all!

The Brave Technologist Podcast is hosted by Luke Mulks, VP Business Operations at Brave Software - makers of the privacy-respecting Brave browser and Search engine, now powering AI with the Brave Search API.

Music by: Ari Dvorin

Produced by: Sam Laliberte

The Golden Age of CFO Technology and the Urgency to Adapt Nov 15, 2023

Show notes

Grant Halloran, CEO of Planful, discusses AI's impact on CFOs and finance leaders, and ways these technologies have changed their role within organizations. He also shares how the financial industry will witness a future where extensive human involvement in routine financial tasks is reduced in favor of focusing on high-value, strategic work.

Key Takeaways:

How AI is making non-financial people more financially savvy, faster
Ways everyday people can better utilize artificial intelligence
Unpacking the skepticism in finance due to the complexity and importance of accuracy with financial data
The need for AI to be user-friendly and provide immediate utility, just like modern consumer technology

Guest Bio: Grant Halloran, CEO of Planful, has been working to bring cutting-edge innovations to enterprise software for over 20 years. He's a champion for advancing how finance and accounting teams work. Specifically, Planful is using AI and machine learning in its market-leading financial performance management solutions to increase speed, reduce errors, spot trends, and more, and Grant is confident CFOs will soon come to rely on AI as a key to reaching peak financial performance.

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About this Show:

The Brave Technologist is here to shed light on the opportunities and challenges of emerging tech. To make it digestible, less scary, and more approachable for all!

Music by: Ari Dvorin

Produced by: Sam Laliberte

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