Campbell Brown, Senior Advisor, TollBit
Fei-Fei Li, Sequoia Professor, Computer Science Department; Co-director, Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, Stanford University 
Moderator: Mallun Yen, Founder and CEO, Operator Collective; Co-chair, Fortune MPW Summit 

Most Powerful Women Summit 2024: The Future Of (Ethical) AI

Conferences

Campbell Brown, Senior Advisor, TollBit, Fei-Fei Li, Sequoia Professor, Computer Science Department; Co-director, Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, Stanford University, Mallun Yen, Founder and CEO, Operator Collective

Campbell Brown, TollBit, Fei-Fei Li, Computer Science Department; Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, Stanford University, Mallun Yen, Operator Collective

So welcome Fei Fei and Campbell. It's great to have you here today. So thank you for being here with us. So before I start, I wanted to let the audience know that we are going to try to take, we probably only have time for one question or so. So if you do have a question, please flag down the person with mics and we will try to get to you. So um great to see you guys. It's good to be here. OK. We're going to start with a question. How many people in the room think that A I will be a net positive to humanity. Bye, great. Um Ain't that negative? See, very cute. Now, does that surprise you? It does, I didn't realize how many people think it's a net positive. II I actually think we've come a long way in terms of just over the last three years, partly because people like Fife who have taken, who have given me a framework for how to think about it. And I think have taken a much more measured approach to talking about what it means, the both the positives and the negatives as opposed to some of the other people who are very visible around A I and have been at the forefront of it, who have been somewhat hyperbolic, perhaps about the positive and negatives. And so I, I think you're seeing people become more comfortable with more uh people, like they say, sort of taking center stage. Thank you. II I, it's true. I do believe it's true. II, I think you're absolutely right. Um So you two both raised your hand and I also know that you are both excited about A I and in fact, this year, you both transitioned into the A I start up world. So um Campbell, you started out as an NBC news correspondent for the White House. You were anchor, you joined meta to lead partnerships there. And then very quickly, you found yourself right in the midst of content in A I. And um we actually met through um Tol Bitt, um which we mentioned, which is, you know, for a fair disclosure. Um operator collective is an investor in Tol Bitt and which is content licensing. And so now you're working on another stealth A I start up. So what led you to leave, leave meta and enter into this realm? Yeah, when I was at meta, the two things I was focused on were um content and business models and helping people mostly news try to make money on our platforms and then misinformation on the meta platforms. And so I think going back to when Chat G BT was first released. Um It was very clear to me, I think a lot of us that this was gonna really disrupt the sort of information ecosystem in a way that we had never seen before, even with social media becoming so disruptive. And I wanted to try to get ahead of it and I see everything right now through the lens of my two teenagers and how they consume information. And so a big driver for me was trying to figure out how we ensure that there is accurate, reliable information, that's part of the LLM training process. And you know, we're not there yet. I was on Chat GPT last night and asking a question, it gave me an answer that was just completely false and so authoritatively false. And, and you recognize that there's still a lot of work that has to be done on that front. And I um you know, part of what the start up that uh Mullen and I are both involved in is doing is trying to create a marketplace to ensure that creators of content, um reliable uh you know, uh content, um timely content are, are being compensated by the tech companies who are building these models, right? Thank you. You are the godmother of A I. So this has been your life's work. You began working on image net in 2006. And when you did, you were repeatedly told this was a go nowhere project that it was. Yeah, your phd students were never going to, you know, get their phd S. And at the time, most A I research was focused on model and algorithms and image net was focused on expanding and improving the data of the available to train the algorithms which we now know has been crucial to the development of A I. So what prompted the move this year from years and years in academia to found your own start up? Yeah. OK. How many hours do we have? I'll try to be quick. First of all, I, I have lived in the A I technology ecosystem for more than two decades and especially privileged to be working at Stanford. So I I always felt that the world I live in is a very porous world between academia, technology industry entrepreneurship. So it didn't feel like I was abandoning a particular part of my world. Uh So uh you're right that uh my own life journey has been seen the transition and the coming of age of uh of A I starting from um you know, the image that project which is seeing that the critical element now that we know we have known as the three fundamental elements of A I, the the computing chips, the neural network algorithm and big data. And that was my image that project now fast forward to um to now to 2024. 1 thing that has been always fascinating me and driving me is really unlocking the full capability of the science of intelligence of machine intelligence. And if you look at the evolution of intelligence, Campbell already mentioned, LLM most of you probably know it as large language models. We are starting to realize that we can create machines that unlock the linguistic um um capability of intelligence, whether it's conversation, summarizations, knowledge, uh uh search and and reasoning. But there is a huge part of intelligence that are uh that advanced animals like humans have developed over the course of evolution. And that is everything to do with seeing and interaction with the 3D space which I call spatial intelligence. In fact, evolution took 540 million years to create the capability of perceptual reasoning and understanding and interaction. Whereas language compared to the half a billion years took about a million years ish. So there is a profound capability in the science of it intelligence that is centered around the ability to understand 3d world reason with the 3d world generate 3d world and interact within 3d world. And that's what I'm so excited about that. Um Together with my former students and co-founders, uh we feel this is the moment to bring this capability to the, to the world and unlock so many use cases and business opportunities. It's um it's so fascinating. So, Feve when I called you the godmother of A I, I saw you sort of cringe a little bit. Um, and, and in fact, um, when we were talking last night, you said that when you thought about starting this company, you weren't sure that you should be the CEO and, and then I'm gonna say one more thing that I frankly find just really annoying. Not that you did that, that speaking of media was that, do you guys remember when the New York Times came out with that list in December? That was who's who behind the dawn of the modern A I movement? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And so there were the C OS of open A I Anthropic Microsoft Google. There were some researchers who made tech advances in A I and there were a couple of investors who mostly just invested in the A I companies and didn't really do anything on the tech. So there were 12 women, I mean, sorry, 12 men and no women and most glaringly say that you were not on that list. And even though image net, your work was the foundation that enabled all of those companies, including the research. Yeah. Yeah. So um so uh so I just had to get off that, off my chest, but we're the only one Twitter exploded after that with all the women who are obviously very offended. And I think even some of us spoke to reporters at the New York Times about it because it was such an outrage. And I think they feel like they, I mean, I think they recognize that was a total media failure and they really screwed up. But yeah, so, so when you see the headlines today, they do tend to be dominated by one gender. Um And so would love to hear your reaction to this. Well, thanks me for, yeah, so, so first of all about the godmother of A I title, it came around, I don't know, a year ago I started seeing that I had to take a pause because it really is not my personality to call myself godmother of anything. It um it, it really, I did cringe but I had to, you know, my natural reaction is let's just reject this. I, I don't want this title, but I really had to take a pause and realize in the entire history of science and technology. So many men are called whatever founding fathers, Godfathers. And if women are so readily rejecting that title, where's Our Voice? And I'm, I'm standing here. So I kind of with the cringe. I did not fight back that title. And yes, the New York Times list. II, I actually I'm a pretty shy person but I think I went on social media and called it was just wrong. It was wrong that in 2023 any media will look at the technology that so many people from all walks of life, not just men and women, but people of all backgrounds have contributed and they didn't even try to make a little bit of effort and we do still see that today. And this is why as Campbell was alluding earlier that it's so important for me, no matter how advanced a technology, how fancy advanced and cutting edge and sci fi a technology looks like we have to put humans in the center of it. You know, we have to put human representatives in the center, we have to put human well being in the center and we have to put human values in the center of the development of this technology. It's just so important. So Campbell, when Fe Fe's book first came out, you were one of the first ones to raise your hand and say we got to get this out here. So, so tell us a little bit about that. And by the way, if you haven't gotten this book, um it's a phenomenal book. It was one of the first books I read. That was kind of an introduction and II I highly, highly recommend for just if you're curious about A I and everything, but also um just as an inspiration to young women, um your, your life story and maybe you can give people just the, the, the, you know, thumbnail, even of um being a young girl in New Jersey and growing up with your parents, I think it's pretty incredible. Um And I, there are a lot of young women at meta on our A I or when I was formerly there. But on the A I research team who I heard speak about you as that inspiration. We had a book party when Facebook came out and several of the women were there. So I do think it is not only for getting um a primer if you will on, on what's happening in the history, but also um one of the most inspiring stories um of, of anyone sort of overcoming odds in this country. Thank you, Campbell. You, you're the one of the first people who threw a book party for me. I was, I was so grateful overseeing New Jersey from your New York home. Um But it's true. I wrote the book. Um I wanted to tell the A I story, my personal coming of age and A I's coming of age is so intertwined, so many ways, including how my work was involved in this. But it was also, I was deeply encouraged by my friends and colleagues at Stanford to tell the story so that the young women, the immigrants, the people of all walks of life will find a voice in A I because today's A I, like um you said, it's so hyperbolic. It's so, um you know, we hear words like global scale, infinite productivity, billions of whatever, but at the end of the day, um whoever makes A I changes the world and it's so important people from all backgrounds feel they have a, they have a role, either it's in development of A I or in creating products and business of A I or doing interdisciplinary research of A I or using A I to, to um uh to create something they care about or in the governance of A I, everyone who cares has a role. And I, that was the reason I, I wrote this book. Um The, so you uh so both of you actually worked at have, have worked with social media sites. You were meta for seven years and you were on the board of Twitter for two years until it was dismantled. So it's widely understood that LL MS are trained, you used a very interesting word. OK. Um The uh anyways widely understand that LL MS are trained on all the content that's out there. And then some reports suggest that 90% of the information on the internet will be A I generated within a few years. So we've talked about the lack of women in A I the social media news sources, Campbell, any words of I ought, I mean, the one thing that does worry me right now especially um is the, the misinformation. I mean, I don't know how closely people are following it, but the, these tools are incredible and it's almost impossible to tell. I mean, it is impossible to tell what's real and what's not. And we haven't developed tools yet to help us do that, whether it's water marking for things that were created by A I or, or things that weren't or identifying what is, isn't. And you know, you've seen examples, the hurricane recently, there was so much misinformation flying around to a point where it was literally endangering people who were, who FEMA was trying to help. And you've seen numerous examples. I don't think anything has, has sort of shocked us to the point that we're ready to address it in a regulatory way or anything yet. But I am very worried about how we think about this and keep track of it. The one thing I would say that that I think is meaningful for people in this room is that brand, I think becomes increasingly important to be able to know that this is a trusted brand. I'm familiar with when you see something, whether it's a news organization or a company um in a world where we're just being flooded with information and you cannot identify the source looking to trusted brands, seems like it's going to matter again and it's worth investing in. Um Thank you so much Campbell and Fe Fe for joining us today. Thank you.