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Be Human First: Navigating Tech, Leadership, and AI with Sam Clarvit
41 Plays2 months ago
In this episode of Infoversity, host Mike Fudge sits down with Sam Clarvit—iSchool alum, tech investor, and 2025 convocation speaker—for a wide-ranging conversation about the future of AI, leadership in a tech-driven world, and why empathy and adaptability matter more than ever. From his early days fixing VCRs to guiding startups and investing in innovation, Sam shares personal stories, career insights, and a powerful message for students: “Always keep learning—and always be human first."
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Introduction
00:00:03
Speaker
Hello and welcome to another episode of Infoversity coming at you live from the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University. Our guest today is Sam Klervit. Hi Sam, how are you? Hi Mike, how doing?
Sam Klervit's Background
00:00:15
Speaker
He's managing director of CCFO Investments and CEO of Klervit Venture and Technology Advisors.
00:00:23
Speaker
A 2010 graduate, which he was a student of mine way back when, so we've been having a great rapport before this started. at this At the iSchool Syracuse University, Sam has built a cross-industry career spanning finance, technology, and venture leadership.
00:00:39
Speaker
He had early roles at JPMorgan Chase and AT Gecko. Sam moved into executive and advisory positions where he helps guide companies through growth, innovation, and strategic investment.
00:00:52
Speaker
Sounds really important. We'll get into that for sure. We'll get into it. Through his work, Sam brings a unique blend of tech fluency, financial insight, and entrepreneurial vision to everything that he does.
Leadership Philosophy: Human-First in Tech
00:01:04
Speaker
He's passionate about his role and empathy in human-centered leadership in today's tech-driven and AI-driven world, a theme in which he will explore in the 2025 convocation speaker role that he has coming up tomorrow. Yeah, tomorrow.
00:01:22
Speaker
His message to the next generation of innovators is be human first. Okay, let's talk about that first. yeah What do you mean by be human first? At the end of the day, humans aren't code, right? We think we've distilled that down using AI to a little bit of code, but we're not code. We're people at the end of the day. And when you work with other people, you're bringing your diverse backgrounds, your diverse thoughts, different schooling, different educational backgrounds, whether it's at the iSchool or if it's the School of Architecture or the School of Engineering, what have you.
00:01:53
Speaker
Everybody brings that to their table. and everybody has to work with other people. So at the end of the day, the human first aspect is, if you wanna be a leader in any of these organizations, you have to be the human first. yeah We're not code.
00:02:05
Speaker
That's the key message is really what I'm trying to bring. that's That's so smart. so You know, you've been around a while now because yeah you were a student and like, you know, 2010 is a long time ago now. It's 15 years. yeah And so you've seen like technology advance, yeah right? Yeah, yeah, really throw the wave. You've always been a tinkerer. yep And I remember you coming here and meeting your dad. Yes, yeah. And um you've now that you've seen like how technology has progressed,
00:02:33
Speaker
you see how it advances and improves society, you also see how it can take things away,
AI's Impact on Society and Leadership
00:02:37
Speaker
right? AI is no different. No question. So I think your message is like really important because ai is is a little different than everything we've seen before because it does supplant a lot of human activity, right? At rapid rate, right? Like this happened almost overnight, it seems like, right?
00:02:52
Speaker
These last five years, which is, or last four and a half years or so, have been blisteringly fast. way more than like the smartphone era 2007, which we were going through while I was a student. Yeah, um everybody had one. Yeah, I bought the first iPad in the city of Syracuse, and I bought it because of my iSchool Capstone program. How long did you wait in line for that thing? i was I did go wait overnight. i waited in the Syracuse mall, I waited overnight, and I got it. um First one. And I brought it for my Capstone project because i we were presenting what ways could we help reduce the the computer load we have in the building. yeah And our suggestion was give every student an iPad. yeah
00:03:30
Speaker
And this was before the iPad had even really come out. So it's amazing to see how much that shifted where nowadays, K through 12, a lot of schools do give kids iPads. So it's amazing. We were a little ahead of the game on that one.
00:03:41
Speaker
um But now you think about AI, it's amazing how fast all these things are changing. right I could develop a website in five minutes where it would have taken me months or weeks or however many days, who knows?
00:03:52
Speaker
So it really is amazing to see the pace of change. And you you and I will talk about that more. but Yes. We'll stick to some of the script here. Yes, of course.
Leadership Styles in Different Organizations
00:04:00
Speaker
You work for large corporations and startups. What's one thing you've learned about leadership that sort of transcends all the different settings?
00:04:08
Speaker
Yeah. It's very different, right? the The large organization versus the small startup where the small startup, you're doing everything. Your job is, yes, you might have a job title, but your job title is ultimately meaningless because you're doing whatever needs to get done to get the job, like to get the company moving forward.
00:04:25
Speaker
When you're at a large organization, it's a lot different. You're being managed from the top down, and really the most commonality that you'll find between them is the culture. Ultimately,
00:04:38
Speaker
a startup culture and a large corporation culture, it's all being driven down from the top, but if people don't believe in the culture, they won't want to work for you. right And that's true for both. um And it's also true for leadership styles. right and And that's ultimately the question is, what's the leadership style and how how does that differ? and i think Because when you're working for a startup, you're doing everything, you are the leader, right? You have to just take ownership for things and just get things done.
00:05:05
Speaker
There's not really asking for permission, it's asking for forgiveness in some cases. yeah But for a large organization, it's the opposite of that. You can't really ask for forgiveness, because in certain cases, especially when I was at JPMorgan Chase, you can't really make those kinds of choices. There's regulations. Yeah, exactly. We'll get dinged a lot of ways, so um and I don't want to lose my job. So there's a lot of a lot of differences, but there's a lot of commonality.
Cultural Fit vs. Technical Skills
00:05:28
Speaker
right The culture is really the the main thing. And I think that one thing that a lot of students don't remember when they're going for their interview is you're ultimately interviewing for a culture fit.
00:05:38
Speaker
yeah Do you fit in with the other people that this manager is building the team around? If you don't, then you're not getting the job, right? That's why I'm ultimately going back to the human first message.
00:05:48
Speaker
Because that's really what you're getting hired for. The skills, most of those skills you're going to have to learn on the job. no matter what, because every job is unique. So the tools you'll use at one company could be very different from the tools you'll use at another.
00:06:02
Speaker
I can't expect you to know that, right? yeah ah I'm hiring you to see how well you'll work with us. That's the goal. And so that's um that's the consistent message between all of them, is the cultural fit.
Sam's Early Tech Journey
00:06:14
Speaker
So I have a little follow-up question that. Please. If I were going to interview you for a job and I asked you like the token question, like what's your leadership style? What do you think, how would you respond to what your leadership style is?
00:06:25
Speaker
Yeah, I'm definitely not what I'd call the hard ass, right? I'm not i'm not the stickler. I'm i'm a more of a hands-off side of manager, um but I'm a people person too, right? I like engaging with other people. and i The trick is in those scenarios, you've got to manage up and you've got to manage down.
00:06:39
Speaker
Yeah. um And I think that's also very different from startup culture for versus the large corporation cultures. Large corporations, you really do have to manage up and manage down. For startups, you're managing kind of everywhere, right? You have to manage everything.
00:06:55
Speaker
because nobody else is gonna do it, only you. So yeah, it's ah it's fun, it's fun. I'm i'm definitely more of a hands-off though, more of a fund manager style, I think. Yeah, and I think that's important when, you know, we're hoping that a lot of recent graduates are listening to this podcast. yeah And you know you and I were having a talk offline about,
00:07:15
Speaker
you go to university and get some skills that will get you that first job, yes but you're also getting these life skills, right? That will help you succeed in your career as the skills are as the skills become obsolete yeah and the new skills arrive and emerge, um being able to adapt. yes And being adaptable is like it like so important yeah in today's world, especially if you're gonna get a degree,
00:07:39
Speaker
from the iSchool. For sure. Because so much of our world is being transformed by technology every day. And it's so important, as you say, to keep the people involved involved in that technology.
00:07:51
Speaker
So i really like I really like your message, and I'm really looking forward to hearing what you have to say tomorrow, for sure. Hope you like it. I'm going to ask you this question because this is the one I really want to ask. So it says,
00:08:02
Speaker
You said your journey started as neighborhood tech whiz. And it says, what sparked your early interest? But I want to know, what is a neighborhood whiz? What is the tech whiz? Well, I will get into this in my speech. I promise I will. I will. um When I was eight, I was going around in my neighborhood. I wasn't walking the dog. I was i was going around and like fixing dial-up internet connections. Oh, gosh. That's great. you know I was fixing like people's computer monitors. And they didn't know what they were doing for some of these things. My favorite, though, and I'm going to cover this in the speech, and none of the students are going to recognize recognize this one. but The VCRs, do you remember the VCR, what it would be famous for? It was flashing the clock midnight because it was so hard to set the clock. They didn't put a battery in it. Well, they're you know, in their defense, a battery requires an an RTC and then you need a battery and an RTC and now it becomes a little more expensive. So cheap out, you have a clock that, you know, whatever.
00:08:50
Speaker
But nobody never set them, right? Nobody would set them. So that was my thing going around the neighborhood as I would go and set all the clocks.
iSchool's Role in Sam's Career
00:08:56
Speaker
Can you set my microwave? Because that's always flashing. I can do that too. I that to my family too, don't worry. But yes, that was actually like the original start was realizing I could fix all these problems. Was this like a paid gig for you? Like you went around like people just like mowing lawns? Yeah. I should have gotten paid. In retrospect, I think I did this wrong, right?
00:09:11
Speaker
Yeah, I think you did. plowed the snow. you know I was shoveling snow ah the snow away for people for money, so why was I not getting paid for the the dial-up connections? You're right. Oh, man. Missed opportunity. Were you of the generation? You were probably on the tail end of the bulletin board? BBS systems? Because you were probably coming out when the internet was pretty prevalent over dial-up, right? But before that, remember the BBS. And there was a lot of great communities that were built around BBSs.
00:09:37
Speaker
And that's one of the things that the internet has always done is given us a sense of community. For sure. people I was listening to one of the previous podcasts where you interviewed Jenny Stormer-Galley and you mentioned useNet, right? And people still use useNet, right?
00:09:49
Speaker
It is kind of wild that... We develop all these new technologies, but they're still foundationally similar to what we've already been doing in the past. And that's because of people. I think it's because of people, right? Yes. It's like we had Usenet as a way, you know, I'm interested in the Dallas Cowboys, so I can go on a Usenet group.
00:10:08
Speaker
Right. Now we have a subreddit. Correct. You know, and it's like these things don't change. And that's what's great about getting old. is that you see the recurring patterns and trends and like and then you can distill them down to its human nature right you want to be connected by people that we have um similar interests with whether it's photography or hiking or the dallas cowboys or whatever right right right so that's that's great so as a tech whiz you'd fix um you'd uh fix clocks and stuff but what sparked your interest in being the tech whiz yeah it's just like an inherent thing or you just like
00:10:40
Speaker
Yeah, little it was a little bit of all of it, right? like I realized early on that, you know first of all, fixing those clocks, I found that so easy. But I was so shocked that everybody else found that so difficult. And so a lot of it was just like, oh, this comes to me more naturally than other people. OK, maybe there's something more I can do with that.
00:10:57
Speaker
um And I think really was when i got a chance to meet Rayvon Dren, the former iSchool dean, ah the late iSchool dean, who really explained to me like how I could take my love and passion for technology and apply it. right And that's ultimately what we do here at the iSchool, is apply your technology skills. And I think that was really the turning point for me, was realizing, wait, I have all these skills, but I don't know what to do with that. right is there a job I don't want to fix dial-up for the rest of my life, but is there a job that you know I could take those skills and transfer it to? And the answer was yes, in many different ways.
00:11:31
Speaker
Thanks to the iSchool, absolutely. Yeah, that's great. And... Yeah, that's that's so true. i don't want to get off on too many tangents. I'll come back to that. Please. um And I'm going to go through our script here and answer some questions.
00:11:44
Speaker
But I do have another dial-up question that maybe helped the younger folks with the transition from dial-up to broadband. Yes. Because you probably remember when you got your first broadband, right? my Lord, yeah. Well, maybe let's just dive into it now because yeah I gave it away.
00:11:57
Speaker
So do you remember when you got your first broadband connection? Yes, I do. So for those of you listening, the old folks on the internet, you had no internet. And then what you did was you made your phone that was connected to the wall in your kitchen. yep Talk, you made your commute your computer use that to connect to the internet. And then when you did that, your sister got mad at you because yel she couldn't call her boyfriend up.
00:12:19
Speaker
Because that's basically the way communications work back then. yep And then eventually the cable companies started to sell what we now know as home internet. Everybody has that now, but this was like new and innovative. So you remember when that when you first got that? For sure. Well, first it was changing the coaxial to just be from TV to now also include modem, right? That was a big that was a big shift.
00:12:40
Speaker
um Yeah, I still remember the T1 lines, the T3 lines, and we were getting like, how fast, oh my god, you can get 50 megabytes per second? Oh my lord, what are you gonna do with all that speed? it was the latency that really got me, right? Because it was like, you weren't able to do anything quickly, but the response time between requests went down because the um the digital to analog conversion of the telephone modem yeah was was what really slowed it down. There was always gonna be a cap and a limit as to how fast did you go.
00:13:06
Speaker
And once I got my first broadband, the first thing I noticed was how how quickly that was because it was all a digital, mostly a digital signal at that point. And it was like, wow, that this is a big difference. Even though the speed wasn't much better. No. It was just the fact that you weren't waiting as long for the translation to occur. remember waiting how long it took for the AOL? You'd hear that for so long.
00:13:25
Speaker
I mean, the irony is that the InfoVersity, it the intro music, is the dial-up internet connection. It's connected. AOL dial-up connection, right? But that, for me, used to take 15 minutes of hearing that sound before I would actually get online versus this is two seconds of ah of audio. But yeah, God, switching to broadband, you're right. It was it just instantaneous.
00:13:43
Speaker
house like I would wait forever for a picture to load, right? It would load one little bit at a time. and 20 minutes later you finally got the photo and you realized it wasn't the photo you were looking for, you gotta go start all over again.
00:13:54
Speaker
Now take that draw a parallel to not having, cause you were of the first smartphone generation, right? So now draw that parallel, right? Because we went from, hmm, I need to plan my day to go out on the internet, yep right? Here's the tasks I'm gonna do when I finally get connected to the internet. And then think to how the smartphone completely transformed how we communicate and how we work, right? It was like, I need to go to a computer to talk to my friends, and now I can talk to my friends in my pocket. And that was huge transformation. Huge shift. Huge shift.
00:14:29
Speaker
Did you read my speech in advance? I don't know. I did not. And I apologize stealing your thunder. No, you're you're absolutely right. because And I actually liken the advancements of the smartphone to how we are today with AI. It's just amazing to see the shift between the smartphone took...
00:14:44
Speaker
about 10 years for like the massive level of disruption that we're still seeing. yeah But AI is doing that in months. And that's what's so shocking, I think, for everybody. But yeah, growing up through the smartphone generation, I mean, I had a BlackBerry first before I even got an iPhone. Oh yeah, remember those BlackBerrys with the keyboard, right? Yes, with the keyboard and BBM, BlackBerry Messenger. That was like, that was the thing. That was iMessage before iMessage became the thing, right? And it was, oh, you don't have BlackBerry Messenger? How am I going connect with you? I'm never going to text you ever again. Yeah.
00:15:14
Speaker
Now that's not the case at all anymore, right? Look what happened BlackBerry. But um yeah, growing up through that generation, especially having an always connected computer in my pocket with my email whenever I wanted it, was a huge shift. And I was also on campus while some of these shifts were happening. So how does the university handle Wi-Fi at that scale? And how do we ensure that every student can be online in any, whether they're sitting on the quad or in ah in a campus campus?
00:15:38
Speaker
Classroom right or in their dorm room everywhere had to be connected at any moment. But now I have that in my pocket Globally, yeah, and with satellite connections now really it's globally I can get it from anywhere um even if I was in space yeah so good Yeah, so it's amazing to see how that shift has happened But God we we live our entire lives online nowadays.
00:16:00
Speaker
Yeah And the smartphone absolutely helped usher that in. No question about it. Yeah, that's that's incredible. I don't mean to steal from your but no doubt your talk. No, not at all. We're just going somewhere we're ending up in the same place. It's perfect.
00:16:12
Speaker
um so here I guess my speech is still relevant. that That's good. Yeah, that is. That's great. At least for now. I might be obsolete by tomorrow. you'll You'll tell me tomorrow. With the way things are going. Exactly. Let's talk more on the script here. So what advice do you have for students who want to follow a non-traditional or cross-industry career?
00:16:30
Speaker
Yeah, that's that's the the most fascinating and interesting one, right? Because i i started my career in finance and was like, you know what? After eight years, is this really one I want to still do? And i completely upended my life and shifted completely to ah startup that was making batteries.
00:16:46
Speaker
That is absolutely not the same thing, right? So how do you how do you translate those skills? And I think ultimately what I realized is that the technology is still the same. the goals we're all still trying to so achieve are still the same. It's just how we're going about doing it is different.
00:17:02
Speaker
And so i took all my core fundamentals and beliefs that I took from J.P. Morgan to the battery startup I was then working at with daily stand-ups and realizing that like how we write code and how we do software can absolutely be applied to hardware in limited capacities, obviously, because hardware you have to repeat over and over again.
00:17:23
Speaker
and And with batteries, they are a little bit more... susceptible to craziness. um So you have to be a little safer with that. But yeah, it was it was one of those things that I realized that there are so many skills that still do transfer that you would never think transferred.
00:17:38
Speaker
um So it's important for everybody to remember the core fundamentals, right? We learned applying your AI or applying your technology skills here at the iSchool. That is absolutely what you're doing, whether it's finance,
00:17:51
Speaker
batteries, and like any any sector that you're looking to go into, it still applies. we're all still trying yeah We're all still using Jira. We're all still using the same tools to Kanban style. We're all doing the same things. It's just how everybody does it is different.
00:18:05
Speaker
So that's really the shift, was just adapting my skill set to to being a little bit more specific to the new industry I was in. but Remembering that I bring a lot to the table. That was why I was hired in the first place. yeah I'm not supposed to forget all of my skills.
00:18:19
Speaker
Bring with me what I know and transfer them. So um yeah, I think that's the one bit of advice is don't forget that you do bring a lot to the table. There's a reason you were hired, even if it's a new role in a new division or a new sector, there's a reason you were hired. Whether you have that skill or not, they believe in your ability to get to that point and help them succeed.
00:18:40
Speaker
And if not, you'll you'll find what's next, right? yeah But i think that's ultimately what it comes back to is remember your core skills because they're they're they're there. I think that's one of the things we try to do here at the iSchool is get you thinking like organizationally and institutionally, right? And it's like like I said, it's great to have a skill like SQL Yeah.
00:18:59
Speaker
I still use it. Thank you thank you to you. Yeah. We were talking about that earlier. Yeah. And it's like, it's great to have that skill, right? But to be able to just hop into an organization and be able to draw commonalities yeah about how to operate and how to solve problems, I think is like, that's like our school's like secret sauce, right? Absolutely. And and and that's, I think,
00:19:22
Speaker
why the the technology, while important, right, it's just one piece of the bigger picture. For sure. You know, you exemplify that. Yeah. yeah that's like That's so great.
00:19:34
Speaker
I love that. So how did your experience with the iSchool prepare you for the world and how are you still to this day? I mean, let's not talk SQL, but how are you still to to this day applying what you learned?
00:19:48
Speaker
Well, now we use Snowflake instead of we're using relationship databases. It's a little different now. And Snowflake's great. Oh yeah, it's I mean, it's amazing to see how the technology has shifted over the years to just get more efficient, right? That's really ultimately what we're doing is making efficiencies.
00:20:01
Speaker
And that's ultimately what AI is doing too, right? Is making us more efficient. um But to the question of what did the iSchool do for me? God, there's so many. and I could spend an hour talking about that conversation. Maybe more than an hour on that conversation.
00:20:13
Speaker
I think, first and foremost, it gave me the skills that I needed. No doubt about it, it gave me the skills I needed to apply the technology skills that I knew. i I love to tinker. We spoke about that briefly. I bought the first iPad, right?
00:20:25
Speaker
i I love doing that for a reason, but how do you... bring that to the job world? how do you How do you turn that into something that you can make money from? um And I found that, right? Like I found that if I bring my passions to work, I can use that there too, right?
00:20:42
Speaker
i don't have to just keep it all at home, I can bring it to my J-job. And if anything, it's giving me new skills that other people don't necessarily have. I'm teaching myself, like I taught myself Docker, I taught myself all of these different things at home.
00:20:55
Speaker
And I brought all those skills to work. and it made me a better employee. yeah So yeah, I would say just to, I mean, for for for me, the iSchool taught me really like play around, tinker, learn.
00:21:07
Speaker
You can learn a lot on your own and especially with AI, You could create anything nowadays, and you could teach yourself. And I'd argue that's the one thing everyone should do nowadays, especially given AI.
00:21:18
Speaker
Learn something new every day, and then have AI give you a quiz at the end of the day on how you did, right? And see how you actually learned. um Why not? It's so easy and free. You stole my idea, by the way. because that was one of the things, I'm a really big proponent of using ai in healthy and constructive ways. yes as a As a teacher, why would I not?
00:21:38
Speaker
And one of my you know ideas for Vibe Coding this summer was to build a platform where you can feed it content like videos and then it will make quizzes for you. That's awesome. Because ultimately, you know it's important to self-assess, to learn, right? And this is this is basically how I learn things is you know when I want to learn Docker, I read about it, play with it, and then I ask myself some questions like, what is this doing?
00:22:02
Speaker
Right, and why? What is this called? Is it an image or a container? What is it right now? and And why do I need it this way versus that way? How do I convert it from that to that? What are the environment variables? Why do I need these? What are these going to all do for me?
00:22:16
Speaker
What is an environment variable? And then why why do i use it? Right. Right? I mean, those ah those are the things that we always need to be asking ourselves. and Because like we said, the technology is going to change. The calculator is just going to get better and better and better. And we have to learn the new ways to interface with it.
00:22:31
Speaker
Well, I was taught when I was in elementary school that I was not going to always have a calculator in my pocket. So I had to learn something. And so how wrong they were about that, right? Oh, yeah. and You mentioned like, you know, iPads and iPads in schools and stuff like that. And my my son, who just recently graduated from high school, all he spent his whole nine years typing on an iPad. That was the computer that his school gave him.
00:22:52
Speaker
That's amazing. was they He used an iPad. I watched him use this thing and I'm like, this is awful. And so like, he doesn't know how to write anymore because he's been typing on an iPad for four And that is actually, that is a fear, right? Like, does anyone know how to sign their name anymore? does anybody Are they even a teaching script?
00:23:08
Speaker
I don't think they teach that anymore. I don't know. So how how are people going to write a check? or There's a font that you could use for that, right? DocuSign does do that, right? you don't even have to sign your name, you just type it out and it gives you a version of your signature. Yeah, absolutely.
00:23:21
Speaker
Yeah, that's another problem that somebody needs to solve at some at some point. Some federated digital signing, right? It seems like another really cool, ah interesting idea for someone in the audience. Did you not just invent blockchain? Is that... Yeah, no. Well, no, I'm thinking about digital signatures over blockchain, right? Yes. yeah Something like that. You know, that would be really kind of a cool thing so that I can trust something that was signed. Right.
00:23:44
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, the smart contracts idea, right? is that That's kind of the whole premise is if this piece checks out and this piece checks out, um but like Unlock the contract. That's right. But yeah, we we have to get better at digital trust. You're absolutely right. I think there's so many methods and ways that we can do with that. I mean, we're we're getting rid of passwords and going to pass keys. We're we're trying a lot of different methods. i think going to be fascinating the agentic AI era, how do we get around that? Because you can ask an AI to do anything. It'll just keep attacking the problem until it it solves it. Yeah.
00:24:14
Speaker
what happens in a cybersecurity sense, right? Like if you could just train an AI to keep attacking the same thing over and over again, that's a cybersecurity disaster. it's amazing. And then the other side of it too, like the person that writes writes the code with AI, we've seen this already. There have been a couple of people that built their whole startup around vibe coding an AI solution yeah and there's zero security checkpoints in this stuff and then they get all upset when their stuff gets hacked and it's like, well, what did you expect? i mean There's no solid engineering principles behind this. You made a prototype, which is great, but it's not a product. Right, right. No, I think that's why it's so great here at the iSchool, right? It's like we teach the fundamentals so when you look at code, you may not necessarily write all the code yourself.
00:24:55
Speaker
Vibe coding is ah an amazing thing for a reason now, but you understand the fundamentals and why things should be structured the way that they are, so that when you do look at code, you can be like, wait a second, something doesn't look right here.
00:25:07
Speaker
Maybe you don't know exactly what it is, but you know something is wrong. yeah That's a key important lesson too, right? So take all of your iSchool learnings and apply it, because that's really where the magic lies.
00:25:18
Speaker
Yeah. I think that's fundamentally like with security, with cybersecurity, lot of cybersecurity
AI in Cybersecurity
00:25:24
Speaker
is lateral thinking. Yes. So much of it is... okay, get out of my lane of thought and move into these other lanes of thoughts and think like someone who's gonna do something bad. Like if you look at something simple like SQL injection, right? It's like no one who's honest would ever think of taking a box and putting in code so that code gets executed. The box is for putting your name in or your phone number, not code.
00:25:51
Speaker
And so you have to think like, differently and AI can help with that, right? sure. And so like you can ask the AI and say like, all right, if I was like gonna do something nefarious, what are the potential things? And that's one of the really creative ways I think to use AI. For sure. Is to help you get out of your own like sort of group think zone. Yeah.
00:26:09
Speaker
And like... Code for the edge cases, right? Because that's the thing. Most people don't think of all the edge cases, right? When you code, you're writing in the negative and the positive, right? You have to think about if I do this, then this has to happen. But if I don't do that, then this must happen.
00:26:23
Speaker
And that's not a typical way of thinking, right? we think We tend to think more logically than that. And while that is logic, you're also thinking in the inverse, and people don't think that way. So it is very interesting. That's why I agree with you. AI is going to make that so much easier, because you're right.
00:26:38
Speaker
It knows all of the edge cases, code for the edge cases, right? And it will do so. Does it know every edge case per se? Maybe not, right? There are gonna be new ones every day. So I think it's gonna be fascinating as we get more and more into the agentic AI future that we're heading towards that we have to be cautious on that.
00:26:54
Speaker
Yeah, so there's a question here about like ah takeaways and stuff like that, but I wanna go back to our agentic AI. Oh boy. What do you think like, if you're if you're a recent grad or you're a freshman,
00:27:06
Speaker
yeah what What kind of AI skills do you think are necessary for someone who comes in as a freshman or someone who's a recent grad? I mean, you played around with a lot of this stuff. I played around with this stuff. We probably have our thoughts. I want to hear your thoughts.
00:27:19
Speaker
Yeah, that's a tough question to answer too, right? Because I think whatever I tell a freshman now will be completely obsolete by the end of their freshman year. I don't even know, right? like Oh, yeah. There's definitely that. Yeah. So it's it's hard to give a definitive answer per se, but I think...
00:27:34
Speaker
Oh man, I think the thing I would suggest more is is learn what the power of these tools are. Learn the the use cases and how to apply it the right way. Because we were speaking a little bit before this, but prompting an AI the proper way and adding the right variables and giving it examples, you're gonna get a way better output and a more consistent output than if you just ask things willy-nilly. And so I think that's something I would probably trust a freshman with learning first is like how to use these tools to start.
00:28:05
Speaker
And then as you go through your career here at the school, how do you learn and advance those skills and apply them better? um and And learn, right? Ultimately, like, adapt those skills and change them over time because AI is going to keep shifting, right? um I think in the agentic world, we're talking about, like, computer use AI. Oh, yeah.
00:28:24
Speaker
And that's designing an AI to use a computer like a human would. But... What if that isn't the future? right we're We might not have to build some of these systems for people to use. We're building them for AI to use.
00:28:38
Speaker
What does that look like? So I guess I'd also challenge freshmen to think differently in that sense too. right What could that future be? They would have that answer probably better than any of us would. yep they're thinking in a very new fashion than we wouldn't be thinking about. So yeah. like Think of a, you know, let's have a conversation about email.
00:28:56
Speaker
Yeah. All right. So email, like when I'm a Gen X, so email for me, get it pop eight there was there was literally regular mail. Yes. And one of my first jobs before the company had email was someone would write a memo.
00:29:10
Speaker
Yes. And I would shove it into mailboxes because I was low on the IT t support totem pole. So not only did I have to take all the,
00:29:19
Speaker
reports that were print out, I would have to put the memos in there as well. And so like when we got email, it was a huge innovation because now you can just type a memo up and disperse it to the whole company, make an announcement. Instantly.
00:29:31
Speaker
you know And you didn't have to print out 75 copies of where the picnic was going to be. You could just tell people. And so like now we're in a world where we can use... Well, let's go to your level. So like what was... When you used email, yeah what was it like?
00:29:45
Speaker
For the record, we also had the mail room still too. but Yeah, you were on the tail that. Yeah, I was on the tail end of that. I remember watching the mail room slowly die out. But yeah, it it is amazing that like, yes, you can send out to everybody in instant. And also the abuse of that in the beginning too was was wild and rampant and how we have to develop new do rules around that.
00:30:04
Speaker
And that's also something that's gonna be happening with AI. We're in the early days of all that, but we haven't built the wrappers and the rules around what that looks like. And I think that Sam Altman and a few other people were in Congress yesterday talking about how, yes, you need to regulate us, but don't regulate us too much, right?
00:30:18
Speaker
right Because we need to compete. That was like the early days of the internet. They're like, we don't regulate us too much, right? yeah let Let the wild, wild west go for a bit so we see where the you know where're the norms establish, right? I think that's one big thing with AI is like, we're still figuring out the norms. Like there's the old meme, like,
00:30:34
Speaker
you send me an AI email and then I use AI to read your email. I'm like, where'd the human go? Right. And so like, I think we're still just trying to figure out where the norms are because it's so new and early.
00:30:44
Speaker
Yeah. And that's, that's going to be very interesting because we may see a situation where traditional ways of communication have are going to change. And that's one thing that I think you mean when we talk about freshmen.
00:30:56
Speaker
It's like, think of these new innovations and how we can transform and fundamentally shift the way we've always done things. Because we shouldn't always do it that way because we've done it that way. We did it that way for a reason. It was the only way we could do it.
00:31:11
Speaker
And so now that there's new ways, are there different ways to do it? I see a future where like, Once one AI knows that another AI is on the on the other end of the communications AI, they now talk ai language. Right.
00:31:22
Speaker
You know, they they send... They'll just send JSON packets back and forth to each other, right? like why why Why do they need to, like, use English or, you know, Chinese or whatever anymore? They don't need to. Right. They could just talk in ones and zeros or audio signals or whatever, just like they did in the Matrix.
00:31:37
Speaker
That was one of the other reasons I wanted to come to the ice school. like I wanted to be Neo when I was growing up, right? So it was like, hell yeah. I still can't fly like he can, but you know I'm trying.
00:31:48
Speaker
So speaking of of flying, like you've got that thing on your chest. Is that like for Tony Stark or something? What's that thing do? Yeah, talking about AI, this is... ah We got more microphones here than I need, but this actually is recording all of my in-person conversations and transcribing it for me so that I can answer with AI, what did i what do I need to remember from today?
00:32:07
Speaker
Because most things you lose in the conversation. How many of your students are sitting in your class not taking enough notes, and they come back to their test and they realize they didn't remember everything because they didn't take all the notes they needed? yeah I was really bad with that. Maybe you don't remember that as my time as a student.
00:32:21
Speaker
I still did okay. But... It's been really hard for me. I had surgery on my hand a few months ago, and so writing has been very difficult. So instead, I've been relying entirely on this to take almost all of my notes for me during my day.
00:32:34
Speaker
And at the end of every day, I get a notice that says, here's everything you need to know from today. And I can ask it more questions. But yeah, I do feel a little bit like Tony Stark, although it's not the the heart beating yeah element to it. but But yeah, and this one is actually, speaking of Sal Maltman, he backed this company, Alexis Ohanian, we mentioned Reddit. yeah He backed this company.
00:32:53
Speaker
And A16Z, which is Andreessen Horowitz, also backed this one so yeah So hopefully, we got some backing room knock on wood, it sticks around for a little while, but for me it's been it's been truly helpful. What's the battery life on that thing? 24 hours. gonna wear it out, I'm sorry. Yeah, please, 24 hours, it lasts the whole day.
00:33:09
Speaker
Okay, and then how long take to recharge? better Like overnight or something? Yeah, I do it overnight, but you could probably do it 15 to 20 put it on like your nightstand or whatever, and then next morning you're ready to go again. Yeah, it's fantastic. I think something like that would be incredibly useful.
00:33:23
Speaker
I see applications of that for people that like I have older relatives that are developing like dementia Alzheimer's. And I've been thinking long and hard about ways that I can improve their lives through technology.
00:33:36
Speaker
I mean, i'm I'm using this for the exact reason you mentioned. I'm going for physical therapy. I never remember all the instructions that I get that I need to do, right? Yeah. you go to Like when you go to the doctor's office, like there's ah there's a whole psychology of people that go to the doctor's office and they're so, they're riddled with so much anxiety that they don't hear a word right that their physician tells them. Or the physician says something in...
00:33:59
Speaker
what they think is a different language, but it's medical terminology, they just don't understand what that means, and they've forgotten all about it. or they did they didn't They can't read it out because it's written in Latin, and they don't know what that means, but I'm getting that live as we're speaking, and for me, like I went to the doctor while wearing this, as a matter of fact, and he's transcribing his own notes into the computer.
00:34:20
Speaker
And it's missing half of the things he's trying to say. Oh, because it's going in real time. Real time, but it's so slow because it's technology from the 90s. Talk about advancements that we've gotten now. And my pin picked that up.
00:34:32
Speaker
All of what he was saying instantaneously and accurately. Better than even his computer system was getting it. Yeah. So it's amazing. And now I know exactly what issues I was having and where I need to go follow up with. Have you had anybody that, like,
00:34:47
Speaker
doesn't want you to to have that thing on yeah or around you. They're like, um no, please turn that off. What is that thing on your chest? I don't want you to record me. You're absolutely right. we We have to now think about privacy laws and it's state by state, right? So like in New York state, it's a single party requirement, which means as long as I consent to recording, that's all that's required. yeah But if I were to call someone from California and that's a two-party state, I have to let them know I'm recording first and they have to agree to that.
00:35:14
Speaker
um So they actually do tell you when they write when you wear this, you should inform people that you're doing so. And I don't want to be disingenuous, I want to make sure that they know it's happening, but I also am using this for my personal benefit and hopefully people don't take any issue with that.
00:35:27
Speaker
But I can always stop the recordings and it's not listening when you go to the bathroom and it's not, there's certain things that you definitely make sure you don't want it to listen to, of course. But ah yeah, if you're talking badly about someone behind their back, it's going to capture all that too, right? So you got to make sure you know what you're doing.
00:35:42
Speaker
Can it quantify the number of ums and uhs I say and in a day, you know? For me, it says don't even count anymore. It's too much. Yeah. I love it. i think it's a great I think it's a great concept. Yeah, to augment, right? like I'm using it to augment ability. And I think that's really we've got to talk about is like the fact that we're using technology to augment our lives, not replace it. 100%. I mean, I think that's that's the message that...
00:36:08
Speaker
I'm sure is in your speech tomorrow. Yeah, and and you and I both know this is this is where AI has the real benefits again We're in that early phase where we're still figuring out norms Yeah, and we are doing a lot of supplanting of thinking of AI which has me concerned But I do think there will be a leveling off at some point because people are people and humans are humans and and ultimately while we're figuring it out, you know, higher ed has to change.
AI and Educational Shifts
00:36:35
Speaker
yes Student behaviors have to change.
00:36:37
Speaker
Workplaces have to change. We all have to adapt to this. I think one of the things that's been discouraging is, I'll see like, for example, in schools where they want to ban it. yes And it's like, um you can't ban, so you can't put the genie, as i we say, back in the bottle. exactlys There's no banning at this point. There's only figuring out how to adapt and and then move on.
00:36:58
Speaker
And we have examples of this in the past, right? When I was a student, we couldn't reference Wikipedia. Oh yeah, yeah. that was That was like a cardinal sin. Right. If you use Wikipedia, that was like, you know, you get that was AI. Like if if you brought up on academic integrity AI. Right. Academic integrity problems, you use Wikipedia.
00:37:16
Speaker
you know It was okay to use an encyclopedia. Right. Same thing though. Because you had to use your feet. Right. use an encyclopedia. But you can't use Wikipedia because it's incredibly convenient. Right. for you to do it. you know it's like yeah yeah it was It was a wild time, but now you see it referenced in a papers being submitted for scholarly work all over the place, right? For medical papers, you're seeing it all over the place.
00:37:37
Speaker
and And we're gonna see that shift with AI eventually too, but you're right. I'm always concerned about the schools that ban AI for the exact reason you mentioned, but also these students are gonna have to use it one day anyway. We weren't banned from using a calculator in math class, right?
00:37:50
Speaker
You shouldn't be thin. was, but you know. Well, I was in the beginning. You're right. yeah But over time you weren't, right? Because they realized the calculator is not going away. no, no it's not. You have to use the tools that are at your disposal. And yes, you're right. The thought of replacing your knowledge or enriching your knowledge is definitely the dichotomy we've worked through. But like you need to use it to enrich your knowledge, not replace it. And that's what we need to keep.
00:38:14
Speaker
emphasizing more than anything else. umm I'm excited about how it has the potential to move everybody, all of society up the thought stack. Yes. Right? Because like, I'll give you a great example, like with physical labor.
00:38:26
Speaker
Like at one point, we didn't have like, Steam engines or diesel engines. So like people just dug holes. Yeah, right? Hundreds of people dug holes and then we had like a steam shovel and that would dig holes and it's like oh that was great, but it wasn't very reliable then we had like hydraulic excavators and diesel equipment and that seems to be like the pinnacle of digging holes, right?
00:38:48
Speaker
But we created new jobs by doing that, right? You got it, right? And we we also, because of our ability to trivialize digging holes, we have we've advanced in so many ways, right?
00:38:59
Speaker
And I think this that's what we're seeing with technology, right? This is just changing the norm so that nobody has to focus on a for loop anymore. It's like, you know, or or like, you know, things like stacks and queues, conceptually, those ideas, while they why they're while they're understanding yeah important.
00:39:17
Speaker
knowing how they're built is not necessarily relevant anymore. Right. But back to the idea of job titles being ultimately arbitrary is the fact that we used to have, we called them quants.
00:39:30
Speaker
Yeah. We call them data scientists. Yeah. The job function didn't change. Nope. What we called them did, but it goes back to like, you got to learn the skills and the skills will apply. I'm ah i'm a managing director. What does that ultimately mean? means I i manage and I direct, right? but But what does that really mean? and if It could be anything, right? So yeah, it's really, you got to just do whatever the job is at the end of the day, and whatever your skills, you you bring your skills to the table but to push the company forward. And that's what you're there for. yeah So yeah, I think you're you're absolutely right. we've We've shifted over time and technology has helped us shift that over time. And yeah, we're not digging holes by hand anymore now, right? Now we have machines that can help us do that. And we have a person who has to service the machine.
00:40:09
Speaker
That was a job that didn't exist before. it did not. right And we're going to have the same thing in the AI future, right? It's like, who's going to service the systems that work for AI, right? Not that we want to get into this Skynet discussion of, are we helping the robots are the robots helping us? But I think it's very much both, right? Like, we're we're trying to learn almost from each other.
00:40:30
Speaker
It's almost like another animal that we're learning from, right? It really is very different. And you're right, they're speaking a different language in some cases. Do they need to speak English? I don't know. Maybe they won't in the future. maybe there's mayor There's probably a more efficient way of doing it.
00:40:41
Speaker
There must be. We're not very efficient otherwise. I know. It's it's interesting where we've where we've evolved AI because when when way back when I was in college, we learned about neural nets. And yeah the one thing the professor said to me is that these are great, but we have no practical use because we don't have the...
00:41:02
Speaker
the the computational capability to do anything useful with them other than to build like 12 neurons and say, okay, look, there's weights and neurons, but we can never connect enough of them to to garner general intelligence right or simulate the general intelligence on the neural net. And you're almost doing that down on your phone nowadays, right? Which is amazing.
00:41:23
Speaker
Yeah, and that yeah, there's there's so many so many things that... have just because technology has gotten smaller and faster and better have become more capable than it just existed so long ago and we just said, okay, well we can't really use this today and then now is today.
00:41:39
Speaker
Right. When we finally got to the memory bandwidth you can handle. Sure, yeah. GPUs can process significantly faster than a CPU and so we needed all those advancements to kind of happen and fall into place before the dominoes could fall to that point, right?
00:41:52
Speaker
So it is amazing. I think we were learning, you mentioned COBOL earlier. We still have that. We still have systems that run on that, which is amazing. We still use date like mainframe systems today. ye And we won't ever change that for certain reasons, right? Like JP Morgan famously has a lot of them because if you swipe your credit card and it doesn't process it two second time span, you're losing your mind.
00:42:13
Speaker
yeah That can only happen with a mainframe to that level of scale. But who knows, with AI, we might be shifting a lot of things. It's gonna be very interesting. Yeah, it's definitely going to be interesting. i want to ask you a question on please on this.
00:42:26
Speaker
So
00:42:29
Speaker
we know we know that AI is really good. It's a very good, like I like to say, it's a very good librarian. It's an information retriever. It has a knowledge store. It knows a lot of things, right?
00:42:41
Speaker
And we know that you have to rein it in, right? And stuff like that. Do you see like a future where AI can help in in certain careers more than others? Do you have an opinion on which careers those might be?
00:42:53
Speaker
Yeah, it's ah it's a great question. And and you're kind of tacking into like tackling into what I do for a living, which is like trying to predict the future, right? I'm ultimately looking for companies to invest in that are advancing society into the future that we want it to be.
00:43:07
Speaker
And so, yeah it's the greatest question. i I think there's so many technologies that we're still building, right? We're still learning how they work.
00:43:18
Speaker
And AI is one of those great examples. And so I think it's gonna be interesting. I don't know if there's an exact job where it's gonna be completely supplanted yet by AI. I mean, there there'll be aspects of jobs that are supplanted, but I don't think a entirety of jobs are supplanted. And that's back to the human element side of things, right? is you got to still work with other people and people build companies, not AI. yeah um AI can help you build your company, but you are the one building it.
00:43:44
Speaker
um And so I think there's tasks that will get shifted, right? Like, especially from a startup perspective, you're doing everything. You're the CEO and you're the lawyer and you're the finance person and you're the IT guy all in one.
00:43:58
Speaker
but you don't always have all those skills, right? So AI is gonna help that front, right? Like, oh, i can read I can have it read the legal contract for me and point out all the holes that I should avoid, right? yeah I could help some of the the IT backlog that I have going on so I could focus on my day-to-day work.
00:44:14
Speaker
It's the little pieces like that, I think, more than anything that are gonna shift. we're still too early in the process to know how significant I think job changes are gonna be. yeah But I do know that we're gonna new types of jobs that we didn't have before.
00:44:29
Speaker
We didn't have the title of Uber driver before no for smartphone era, right? like And that's a great example of another company that couldn't have existed before the smartphone. We don't know what the the new companies of the future that exist because of AI.
00:44:42
Speaker
We haven't gotten to that point yet. We're still too early in that process. So that's what I'm excited to see. And then we'll see what the jobs look like after that. No, that's totally fair. And I didn't mean to put you on the spot. not at all.
00:44:53
Speaker
But I fundamentally agree with you. I think that this will usher in ah like another, like we had the internet boom. Yep. Right. And then we had the smartphone boom. Yep. We're in the AI revolution now. is going to be the the next big boom, right? And we're going to see a lot of new industries arrive. Yeah.
00:45:11
Speaker
And a lot of different ways that humans will work because this. And hopefully it takes some of the more unpleasant work that people do out of their hands. Because yeah if we go back to digging the the holes, it's like that could not have been a fun job. No.
00:45:26
Speaker
But I'll tell you what. Running an excavator is a pretty fun job. Oh, yeah. you know So, I mean, hopefully we see more of things like that come out. And I think there will be a transformation of the of the workforce. Yeah. And there'll be a new set of knowledge that needs to be learned, of course.
00:45:41
Speaker
um But it's going to be exciting, I think. I think it's... I think, like I said, once we get through the whole... you know, what are the norms, right? And we accept what those norms are. yeah And we say, no, that is not the right way to do this.
00:45:55
Speaker
I think once we get through that, I think, you know, yeah we'll be in pretty good place. I agree.
Ethical AI Development
00:46:00
Speaker
I mean, AI and all of these tools are as fallible as humans are, right? Because we're the ones making it. yeah So you're absolutely right, right? It's like, we're we're going to be the ones defining what that future looks like.
00:46:11
Speaker
But it's all the more important that we get it right now, because especially in the AI era, garbage in, garbage out. I know you hear that every day. Right? And it's very true with AI too. It's amplified. That's why it hallucinates, right? Right. Well, we ask it to emit a response and it doesn't know anything. Therefore, it hallucinates. Right. People hallucinate all the time, right?
00:46:30
Speaker
Yeah. ask my brother-in-law. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. No comment. um And I won't. But no, you're absolutely right. It's not about your brother-in-law, but I get about other things. it's ah No, it's it's going to be interesting, though.
00:46:43
Speaker
It's definitely it's whatever we make it to. So if we put in bad data, it's going to amplify that bad data tenfold out. And so we definitely need to make sure we get it right now.
00:46:54
Speaker
That's why I think it's so important that we teach it the right way here as well. And that's, I think, a great... future skill set for especially iSchool students, right, is um evaluating AI, right, yeah and assessing its capabilities and areas, measurements, ah cape and and forming um help forming benchmarks yeah for various tasks, right? And there's a lot of benchmarks that are out there now, but they're very baseline benchmarks. how well does it code and things like that. And they've kind of been fighting back and forth about also if they've been gaming the system to degree either, right? There's a little bit of that going on. It's okay, so like that happens in academic work when they try to do benchmarking. It's like, okay, well, now all of a sudden there's a new model and it blows your benchmark of the water. It's like, well, of course it does because there's a published paper that it could use.
00:47:42
Speaker
Corporate world too, right? It's exactly the same. We benchmark constantly on everything, but there's no historicals on this, right? How do we benchmark on something entirely new? And so you're right. It's it's going to be very interesting. I think ah using the right tool, and this has always been the case, right? It's like you find the right tool for the problem you're trying to solve.
00:48:01
Speaker
And it's the same for these AI models, right? You've got to find the right model from the right provider to fit the solution and the problem you're trying to solve. yeah And so that's why it's so important. we We have a chance to play with everything. I mean, it's great that so many of them are free to start because it gives you that opportunity to do it. And that's obviously why it's free to start. Yeah, I know. but so But still, it's it's it's great that you, especially students, get the opportunity because it's that's the the most crucial time to learn it is when you're actively learning so many things. You're not distracted by the day-to-day that you have to do in your work life.
00:48:32
Speaker
ah Embrace that. Learn as much as you can, especially while you're here, right? like Learn as much as you can because you're not going to get the same types of opportunities when you're working in the day-to-day.
00:48:44
Speaker
You got a job to do. Yeah, exactly. Doesn't mean you're not using and you're not still learning every day. It's just different, yeah right? And so it's important you get a chance to do it the way that you can now while you're a student. So yeah. so but One of the blessings of being a student is you get to fail gracefully, right? Yes.
00:48:58
Speaker
Right? That's kind of the whole point is we want you I mean, i'm not talking about failing class. No, no, no, no. I'm talking about you do something and you do it wrong and you learn from that. Right. And nothing there's no real major impacts. Right. Right?
00:49:12
Speaker
That's what being at a university is all about. For sure. you're You're freeing yourself up from the dangers of making the biggest mistake in a corporate world that you cannot You got it. right There are real implications to that. But when you're a student, you're absolutely right. The implications can kind of minimize or almost go away entirely. And so, yeah, as long as you're not blowing up the university network with ah but traffic and you're not anything you're not supposed to be doing here,
00:49:35
Speaker
you can almost scot-free learn a lot, right? So yeah, it's pretty impressive. It does make me wonder about like the universities of the future that embrace, well, of the very recent future that are going to embrace AI. Like we're pretty AI friendly here at SU. Very much yeah. But being able to provide that AI to students so that people aren't paying out of pocket,
00:49:59
Speaker
And you know not i would not just like pop committing to one model, right? right right Because as you you and I both know, like all these models have different capabilities. yeah And so that that I think is gonna be a very interesting challenge just for universities going forward that are gonna be friendly with AI, not just from a, here I want you to use it to help write a better paper or something or and or maybe research you know your sources, but also from a iSchool perspective where where we want to build and tune models that do certain tasks, and we want to be able to evaluate those tasks against different stock models.
00:50:35
Speaker
right Right. And that's that's something that I think is going to be a unique challenge for schools like our school going forward with AI, is we need to be able to provide that for our students. And especially here at Syracuse, where we have a diverse population of students who are doing and learning a lot of different things, you need a different AI model to study chemistry.
00:50:50
Speaker
than you would to do coding, right? They have different purposes and different functions and are trained on very different models. So, and data data sets entirely, and and I could go into different companies I've seen that are training different data sets and how they're doing it, and some of them are doing it very interestingly, and some that are doing it sometimes entirely wrong, and you're like, oh my god, what are you doing? And why are you doing it that way?
00:51:10
Speaker
um We saw a company that was trying to detect cancer, and the way that they were doing it was they were training the model to use, like they've trained it on cancer ah pictures, but every time they trained it, like the picture had a ruler.
00:51:24
Speaker
on it to show how big the cancerous cell was. yeah And so when they started feeding the the AI cancer, but with no ruler on there, it just said, yeah, it's not cancerous. Because basically what they created was a ruler detector. yeah And that's not a good way to train a model, right? You got to think about the data you're putting into it. And so absolutely here at the university where it is going to be unique per even school, right?
00:51:49
Speaker
The iSchool is going have a very different need than communications, than Whitman, than chemistry and biology, they all are going to be different and they're going to need different models that are focused more towards what they need.
00:52:00
Speaker
And so you're right, it's going to be a very interesting problem for a lot of these companies to solve, right? Because everybody's going to come at this differently. yeah And so when I look for an investment in technology and an AI, for example, I look for those special cases because they have...
00:52:15
Speaker
the They own the data set. Nobody else owns the data set more than they do. They have all of the highest quality training data. Nobody else will be able to compete with them. That's what I'm looking for.
00:52:26
Speaker
I'm looking for ones that have access to unique opportunities that nobody else can touch. yeah And especially in the AI world, that's the only way you can, especially from my point of view, invest in and AI. Sure, yeah. Because, um sure, I can invest in open AI.
00:52:39
Speaker
yeah Maybe not the greatest valuation now. I wouldn't make a ton of money off that now. But... It's not the same feeling I would get versus investing in a company that's gonna be at the forefront of some major breakthrough using their AI model.
00:52:53
Speaker
That's what I'm excited about. So yeah, it's gonna be a ah crazy and wild future, but you're right, I think it's gonna be interesting to see how the universities tackle all that
Investment in AI Companies
00:53:00
Speaker
too. That's an interesting point that you brought up that I wanna reiterate and and frame for students, and that is,
00:53:08
Speaker
what's probably not investable in the future with AI is I built some awesome thing that uses open AI. That's not going to move doesn't it's not an advance things forward. right That's merely an application. and And in many ways, we already talked about, you could probably vibe code lot of that. for sure And so that that's not where you're looking to the future.
00:53:28
Speaker
Right. It's not going to start the next billion dollar business for you, right? It might help you get to an MVP. Sure. Right? You you need to start with a minimum viable product to start any business. Maybe it'll get you there, but it's not how you're gonna build the business. You need to start somewhere and then take it from there. so And with that MVP, to be clear to students, we're not trying to stifle innovation, but no with that with that MVP, you can say, here's a concept.
00:53:52
Speaker
And now to to really make this thing sing, i need to build my own model. Right. I've proven that this is a ah real need. Somebody's using it to solve the problem. Right. right That's what you're trying to prove is I have something that people want.
00:54:07
Speaker
And that's what's exciting about AI is it gets people with ideas in their head to investable much faster than it ever has. yeah And that that I think is, a me as someone who's traditionally been a programmer, I'm going to be threatened by that, but I'm not threatened at all. no I'm actually excited to see what the future holds when i can get things out of, when people can get things out of their head and show the world what that looks like.
00:54:33
Speaker
Sure. sure You know, that's going to be a great world. And as a programmer, you probably got a chance to learn and teach yourself new languages using AI, right? There's yeah so many applications and things like, I'm not as good at Swift as I am at Python, so I'm teaching myself Swift using AI, right? Like, that's it's amazing that you could do something like that and transfer the skill.
00:54:53
Speaker
Whereas, yeah, you probably used to have to spend months and months and months learning some of these things or building some of these things, and now you can do it in seconds. So it is kind of wild. What's neat on that is when you learn to code, like for example, I i know i could write JavaScript, but it takes me forever. Yeah.
00:55:11
Speaker
Because I just don't do it all the time. So when I need something in JavaScript, I go to AI and I know exactly what I want. Yep. And I can give it an example in Java or... Python or whatever and say this is exactly what I want right it writes it for me in JavaScript and that's fantastic and it's a it's a wonderful way to pick up other languages and other other idioms that yeah From the languages or from the task you're doing but that goes back to having ah skill that isn't necessarily Programming the way we knew it but understanding which concepts are necessary to compile and put things together, right?
00:55:46
Speaker
So it's like and you're no longer extruding out Lego pieces. Those are there for you. You're just assembling the toy out of the Legos, right? um so it's pretty neat. I like that you use Legos and not IKEA furniture, by the way. So thank you.
00:55:59
Speaker
That's so funny. its Yeah, that is very true. We've got to get close to wrapping up. So I want to ask you this little final question. says, what's the one thing you hope graduates walk away from as you give your speech tomorrow?
00:56:11
Speaker
Yes, yeah, absolutely. i mean, I'm i'm going to hammer the point home, I think, beyond belief tomorrow. But really, the human first element is the key message, right? That's what I'm trying to remind people of is that... we all are stuck behind our phones or we're stuck behind a computer screen all day.
00:56:25
Speaker
That's not how you're going to advance in your company. That's not how you're going to advance your company, right? Either advancing in or advancing your company. um You need to be human. You need to work with others. And I think we learned after the pandemic that we've like we were all remote and how much that changed how we interacted with others versus when we finally came back.
00:56:47
Speaker
right And I think the students now, and especially the graduates now, are have felt that more than anyone. They graduated from high school during the pandemic and came to to university where they had to meet all these new people in person. And they hadn't spoken to people in person in over a year. right So that was a huge shift.
00:57:05
Speaker
And I think that's the important thing I want to remind the graduates of is that you're going to go work for a corporation and you're getting to you're joining because of that cultural fit. And that cultural fit is how you work with others.
00:57:18
Speaker
they're going to teach you the skills you need. Because youre know you learned a lot here at the iSchool, but you didn't learn everything I need you to know to do the job I want you to do at the end of the day. So I'm gonna teach you that, that's the point, that's why I'm hiring you now, right, is to teach you the skills i need you know so I can then move on with my job and you can keep doing what you're doing, right?
00:57:36
Speaker
um But being human first and remembering that you gotta relate to others and and that's the only way you're gonna ever advance your career, it's not always about the skills you know, it's who you know and how you use that too. um Managing up, managing down, and unfortunately,
00:57:50
Speaker
Getting to play a little bit of the office politics, and that's a skill that a lot of people have to develop over time, is an important skill to learn too, and that's relating once again to people. You don't do that with technology. So yeah, the the human element, especially here at the iSchool, is the important part of the message.
Advice for Graduates
00:58:06
Speaker
um But I think the other thing is really try to learn something new every day, right? we We explained that earlier, how easy it is with AI to keep teaching yourself a new skill, and and you should. I mean, you're going to bring those skills to any future job, or even the current job you're going to be taking. it it could be simple as simple were talking about with Docker and understanding containerization and how all of that works.
00:58:25
Speaker
You're gonna probably use that in the corporate world nowadays, whereas 10 years ago you weren't, right? So it is amazing to see how that shifts, but if you're playing around at home for free wherever you can, you're gonna learn that and you can take that skill into into your career as well. So always learn something new and remember to be the human person at the end of the day. that that's That's the key message.
00:58:44
Speaker
Sam, that's a great message and I thank you for your time. This was great. Yeah, it really was, Mike. Thank you so much for doing this. and ah Thank you for not giving me a quiz on my old IST459 material that I still managed to find. my gosh, that's funny. Thank you for not asking me any SQL questions because I'll have to break out the AI again to help me with that. That's right. But Mike, thank you so much for the time. I appreciate it.