Kirill: This is FiveMinuteFriday, Perception of AI in Big Companies.
Kirill: Hi everybody. Welcome back to the SuperDataScience podcast. Super excited to have you on this FiveMinuteFriday episode. Today I’ve got Hadelin with me. Hadelin, how you going?
Hadelin: Hi everyone. I’m doing super well.
Kirill: And, today we also are fortunate to be able to bring our genius AI engineer from Bluelife. Marc, welcome to the show.
Marc: Thank you very much.
Kirill: Super excited to have you. We’re all in Switzerland. And just as a quick update for those who don’t know, Bluelife AI provides solutions, artificial intelligence solutions to businesses to create massive revenues at no upfront cost. And here we’re actually doing a project in Switzerland. That’s why we’re all here together and decided to record a few episodes. How are you guys feeling?
Hadelin: Very well. And today we’re going to talk about a very interesting subject.
Kirill: Yeah, yeah. For sure. Maybe let’s start before the subject, let’s start, Marc could you give a brief intro because a lot of our listeners, none of our listeners probably have met you before.
Marc: Sure. So, yes, my name is Marc. I’m from France. I have a background and a very strong background in mathematics. And then I focused in data science and AI. I studied at École Polytechnique in France. And then I had a masters in [00:01:26 inaudible]. And then I had the privilege to intern in Yoshua Bengio’s lab who really got the Alan Turing price for deep learning in 2018. And after my studies I spent a year and a half working as a research scientist in the AI lab of Spotify where I was mostly working on music generation.
Kirill: Fantastic. Thanks. I didn’t even know you worked with Yoshua Bengio. That’s really..
Marc: Yeah, I did, I interned on [crosstalk]. Yeah.
Kirill: Wow. Wow, that’s really cool. So this is a big shift now working in the industry on the, we can’t really disclose the project on the podcast, but it’s a multibillion dollar company and undergoing digital transformation. We’re helping out with, various projects. How do you feel?
Marc: It’s a very exciting, it’s quite different from the, from academia and from like research a very like a theoretical research. Cause here you have a very applied challenges to business encounters and the quality of the data and the pipeline, not just like perfect data that you can find in the academia where you have image, data sets that are made for a research project. While here you have data that are real world data that can be noisy or incomplete or inconsistent and then you have… Basically it’s a bit more challenging because it’s like when you do the theory, it’s like a perfect world and here it’s real world and you have to, you’ll have different problematics.
Kirill: Yeah. And this actually, solely brings us to the topic of today’s episode.
Hadelin: Yes, which is about the perception of artificial intelligence by big companies. Big World organizations. And the first thing I want to say about this is that the common part that I see is that they see AI still as a big black box. And, we have a responsibility as, you know, AI consultants to explain and reassure what’s inside the black box. And so that’s exactly what we’re doing this week. Actually in one hour we are doing a presentation on artificial intelligence in exactly one hour. We’re doing a presentation on artificial intelligence to not only explain what it is, how it works, but also to relieve people that it’s not going to replace jobs but make a good assistant tool. And, also that can bring a lot of added value.
Kirill: Yeah, yeah, that’s true. And, I was actually reading the, to the point of replacing jobs. It’s a big fear, as we’ve noticed, but I was reading a World Economic Forum report from 2018 yesterday, and they predict that by 2022, AI will displaces about 75 million jobs, whilst it will create like 130 new million new jobs.
Hadelin: Exactly. So it’s not going to destroy jobs. It’s going to create them globally.
Kirill: And so the challenge I guess is how do you spread this confidence across your organization? What do you think Marc? How can companies help their employees embrace AI and feel empowered rather than fearful?
Marc: To me the first, like the first reason why people are fearful of AI is because they don’t really know what’s under the hood. And the first thing, like for me, the first mission is an education mission, which is to train the employees to understand what is AI, what does it mean, how can it be used? And basically if you start understanding what’s inside the box, then there is nothing to fear.
Kirill: And you know how to use it to, to make your work easier.
Marc: You use it everyday.
Kirill: Yeah. But I mean like as an employee, you know better how to use it to make your work easier so you know what parts to automate so that you can focus on more creative tasks.
Marc: Exactly. Yes. I think, of course, like automation can replace things that are done manually over and over and over, but it frees time to do more intelligent, like stuff that requires more human intelligence. So I don’t think it’s a bad for an employee to use AI because it actually frees up some time to do more useful and in depth stuff that you just don’t have time to do when you have to do things repetitively.
Kirill: And also some AI helps with creativity as well, right? Like kind of help you invent new things and do things differently. The way I see it is like, you can dig a trench with a spade and you couldn’t keep doing that all your life where you can come with an excavator. Right? It’s a new technology. You’re just directing it where to go.
Marc: It’s funny you mentioned that because a few weeks ago I watched, there is a documentary on Netflix about AlphaGo, the Google AI that learned how to play Go and who defeated the world champion. And during game two, I think, AlphaGo made a move that like all the experts said, there is one out of 10,000 chance to do this move. And the opponent was very impressed and he didn’t understand exactly like what this move was until the end of the game. And then he realized it was super like genius move. And two days later he played again against the AlphaGo and the world champion actually made a move that was highly unexpected, like again, like one out of 10,000 chance that made him defeat the AlphaGo.
Marc: So basically because AlphaGo made a move that was very adventurous two days before it unlocked some patterns, understanding patterns, with the world champion. And he was allowed to do new moves that he wouldn’t have done before actually playing with the AI.
Kirill: That’s crazy. I’ve seen that as well. Really inspiring.
Hadelin: It’s a crazy story. Yes.
Kirill: Yeah. So to wrap up this podcast, make it not too long, Hadelin, what would your recommendation be to people who are listening to this who might be somewhat fearful of AI taking over the jobs or maybe business owners or directors who need to inspire their workforce to embrace a data driven, artificial intelligence driven culture?
Hadelin: Well, it’s trainings. I really recommend to learn about artificial intelligence. Online you can find resources at every level. So I recommend of course, to start at the beginner level where you get a general overview of what is artificial intelligence. But, I think that bringing teams that can teach you and train you about artificial intelligence and explain how it works is even better because you get to interact with them, you get to ask questions and you get to have some answers that you wouldn’t get from online resources. So really, the way I think to be relieved about AI and to transition well into it is to get in touch with some people who know about it and who can explain things so that they don’t see it anymore as a black box.
Kirill: Fantastic, thank you. All right. Thanks guys.
Hadelin: Thank you very much.
Marc: Thank you.
Kirill: Yeah, see you everybody on the next episode.
Marc: Yes.
