# Human-Centric AI: The Next Frontier of Business Innovation

**Podcast:** Masters of Scale
**Published:** 2026-04-09

## Transcript

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Hi everyone, Bob here.
Today's episode is a special live recording from on stage at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, featuring Dr.
Rana L.
Kalyubi.
Rana is a repeat guest on the show, an AI scientist, founder of Affectiva, investor at Blue Tulip, and host of the wonderful podcast Pioneers of AI.
In this keynote conversation, we discuss how to keep AI human-centric, not only as a safeguard, but also to help us thrive socially, economically, and emotionally.
We also play a game, parsing fact from fiction on some of the buziest AI myths, and we debate the merits and pitfalls of everything from AI therapy to meta glasses, to which AI founders are opportunistic versus truly visionary.
So let's get to it.
All right.
So we're gonna talk today about controversies and opportunities in this in this moment of change, right?
Uh, what's real, maybe what's not as quite as real, what's myth, and and how to stay human-centric in in all of that.
Um, I want to start with you, Rana, with your background, because your journey to this world of AI w wasn't exactly predestined.
Uh, I think the first picture we have here is is of you as a kid with your family.
Oh gosh.
Uh Rana, you grew up in Egypt and Kuwait.
Yeah, you're like, oh, look at look at me.
That's that's Rana right in the middle there.
Your father was quite strict and traditional, right?
Um, your mother, though, was one of the first female computer scientists in the in the Middle East.
It sounds like it was a dynamic household.
Out of that, how did you find yourself studying machine learning?
Yeah, I I would say we grew up in a very tech-forward household.
So my parents, my dad, as you said, is pretty strict, but he taught COBOL programming in the 1970s.
It's an obsolete programming language.
Oh, some people recognize it.
And my mom was one of the very first female programmers to sign up to take this class in Cairo, Egypt, in the 70s.
So that's how they met.
Um, then they we moved to Kuwait.
And I like my earliest memories of my childhood with my two younger sisters was sitting around an atari Atari video console, video gaming console, I guess.
Um, any any Atari players, Space Invaders?
Anybody?
Ooh, okay.
And um, for me, technology brought our family together.
And so I think that's been a common thread throughout my career.
Like, how can we build technology that brings people together versus isolate us or pull us apart?
Your studies took you from Egypt to London to then MIT, um, where you co-founded your company, Affectiva.
And this is a journey that you capture in your book, uh Girl Decoded.
I think we have a uh cover of the book.
From the start, you were focused on the emotional context of AI, on being human centric.
Affectiva used machine learning, I hope I described this the right way, to read people's emotional states and sort of analyze nonverbal cues and things like that.
Sort of focusing on EQ as much as IQ.
And I'm curious, given that background, when you look at what's happening in the AI world today, how prevalent is that emphasis?
You know, do the major players take EQ as seriously as they should.
The answer is no.
But but let me kind of unpack that.
Um, we've made a ton of progress in AI on the IQ front, on the cognitive abilities and the cognitive intelligence of machines.
Um, but to get to true artificial like general intelligence, AGI, we absolutely need these technologies to have both emotional and social intelligence.
And that this is where I believe that the industry as a whole is really lagging, and it's the next frontier to figure out this EQ.
We need to marry the IQ and the EQ of machines.
And it's, you know, if if we look at human intelligence, of course, your IQ matters, but your EQ matters arguably even more.
Like people who have higher emotional intelligences are better leaders, they're better managers, they're better partners, they're better friends.
And I believe the same to be true for technology.
And also if you kind of consider how humans communicate, only seven percent of how we communicate is in the actual choice of words we use.
93% is nonverbal, it's facial expressions, vocal intonations, gestures, body posture, and all of that technology's completely oblivious to, right?
Like if you think about AI today, it's mostly focused on what you're saying, not how you're saying it and what's the context context around it.
So I believe this is going to be the next frontier of AI.
Um, AI ought to communicate with us the same way we communicate with each other through conversation, perception, empathy.
Um, but I also believe strongly that we only build what we measure for, and all of the benchmarks in AI today, they're very IQ focused.
Yeah.
So I guess my call to action to the audience here, and you know, whoever's tuning in and listening to this, we need benchmarks around the EQ of AI.
And and when you talk to your colleagues who are who are at some of these places, the hyperscalers and whatnot, and you raise this issue, are they like, yeah, that's yes, I agree.
Or are they like, yeah, yeah, yeah, but I, you know, I I don't really buy it.
I I think there's recognition that this is important, but it's I I think it's also a function of who's designing these technologies.
I mean, I'll give one example.
If you look at all the leading humanoid robotics companies, the robots are pretty impressive.
They can, you know, unlock unload your dishwasher and fold your your laundry, and I don't know, like organize your living room.
But I wouldn't want any of these robots in my home.
They're big and scary, and they don't really know how to interact with humans.
So the teams building these things are really kind of really obsessed about the functionality, and they're not really thinking about okay, when this thing goes out into the real world, how's it gonna be?
How does it impact our lives, right?
Right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, uh the next visual I have as a little bit about your your life.
It's a picture of your mom uh with two kids.
This is you the here you are with your with your two kids.
Um, and you were telling me that each of their approaches to AI are very different.
That your son is kind of super enthusiastic and he's using all the new tools and he's doing everything, and your your daughter is a little bit like it's sort of the opposite direction, like IRL, I want to unplug a little bit.
What it it almost sounds like your family dining table is like a microcosm of the discussions we're having in society at large.
It it really is.
Um, this picture is from a number of years ago, so they're a bit older now.
My son is 17, he's very AI forward.
He's actually my teacher in many ways.
Like, even though I spend my everyday in the AI space, he's always surfacing like new tools.
His latest project is using AI workflows to translate um the diaries of Egyptian workmen from the 1930s who who worked at the Giza Pyramids, and they wrote these diaries, like handwritten in Arabic with a lot of like images and whatnot.
And he's using AI to translate them.
And and he's actually running into obstacles because he's pushing what the AI can do, which is really awesome and cool.
I love that he's using it to advance knowledge and you know, like combine history and archival research and AI.
So that's Adam.
My daughter, Jana, she is a food anthropologist.
She just graduated in the spring from Harvard, and she does not use AI at all.
And the project she's working on is bringing it's a she calls it a cultural salon/slash cafe.
So they bring young people.
Um you don't have to be young.
You they bring people to this space and they host book talks and poetry readings and embossing workshops and whatnot.
Sounds old-fashioned.
But but they're packed every night.
And it basically tells you people are really longing for this in real life human connection.
And so Yeah, there's a reason we're all gathered here in this room, right?
Exactly.
You're not doing this over Zoom, right?
Yeah.
Um so I think both realities are true.
We need to both at the same time lean into AI.
I really believe I keep pushing her to like at least try Chat GPT or something.
Um, and then at the same time, I think we should really um nurture our human connection as well.
I mean, I I was curious, I you know, you you exited Affectiva in 2021, right?
You're an investor now, as I mentioned, at Blue Tulip.
But uh, as the as you're also the host of this podcast of pioneers of AI, like, are these tools between the investing and the and the podcast that you're using to try to shape where AI goes from here?
Like what is what is your goal in that?
In that, yeah.
So ethictiva was my baby.
It was like literally my third child.
It was like really was a big part of what I did and my identity.
And so when I sold it in 2021, I spent a lot of time thinking about you know what do I want to do next?
And I kept coming back to this idea/slash question that we absolutely need to build a future of AI that is human-centric, that prioritizes how these technologies are going to affect our everyday lives and our relationships.
And um, and I'm I mean, I believe that AI has massive economic opportunity, it really does, and at the same time, it has this opportunity to unlock human potential.
So, my point of view is that AI should not replace our abilities, it should really amplify and augment what we can do.
And ideally, we can harness AI and use it to solve really meaningful problems, say, you know, facing society today.
So that's kind of my thesis around that.
And then I was like, okay, how do I shape that?
How do I become a real player in that space, given my background too?
Um, and I landed on three things.
So one is investing, so kind of backing founders who are building these generally generational category-defining human-centric AI companies, to a storytelling, amplifying the voices of AI that maybe you may not have heard from.
You know, there's a very small set of companies that dominate the AI headlines, in my opinion, but there's a lot of innovators and thinkers and creators in the AI space.
And I want to make sure that we are a platform to tell their stories and give them be a door opener too.
And the third one is a convener, which is why I like to do these things.
I I love bringing people together with disparate backgrounds and perspectives and just seeing what magic unfolds.
You use this phrase about sort of humanizing technology before it dehumanizes us.
And in the in the dialogue today about AI, I always wonder about sort of for the practitioners, and you are were one of the seminal ones, like how much responsibility you feel like you have for what the future of this technology ends up being, and how much that how deep is that conversation in that community, as opposed to sort of giving lip service to it, but I just got to get ahead of the, you know, the company next to me.
I I feel a very strong responsibility, and I would actually argue we all in this room have a responsibility as well, because we get to vote with our feet which AI tools we're using every day, right?
Who's getting the $20 a month subscription from all of us?
And and I think asking questions around: does this company care about the ethics of the technology?
How is it being built?
Are they thinking about bias, both data and algorithmic bias?
Are they thinking about trust and security and privacy?
Are they thinking about the use cases of this technology?
Where should it be deployed and where should it really not be deployed?
I think these are big questions that we all should be asking of the tools we're using.
And with, you know, as an investor, it's a qu there's a set of questions.
We have like a rubric that we ask founders, and if the founders have not at all thought about it, if they're not open, then we're not that we're not investing in them.
Yeah.
So I thought maybe we'd do something very human and we'd um we'd play a game, if that's okay with you.
All right.
So um, because there's there's so much noise surrounding AI right now, in and so many myths.
Um it's sort of hard to know what to pay attention to.
I think we all feel that.
So this this game is called fact or fiction.
And um I'm gonna share a few video clips, some of which that come from uh pioneers of AI, the podcast, and each of them lead to a myth around uh surrounding AI today.
And and I'm I'll be eager for your take about sort of whether it's mostly fact, mostly fiction, um, or somewhere in between.
Are you ready?
Okay.
So let's play uh let's play the first uh the first clip.
Are we in an AI bubble?
Of course.
We're certainly seeing lots of evidence of bubble-like behavior, the excitement that the hyperscalers had kind of got away from them a little bit and it's starting to face reality.
It has the world wondering if we're about to see a big pop of the AI bubble.
AI bubble.
Whenever this bubble pops, uh there's going to be tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars that will literally be incinerated.
So, Rana, of course, the first myth.
We're in an AI bubble.
Is this is this fact or fiction?
I think actually it's mostly fiction.
I so I believe there are signs, there are like, you know, signs of potentially a bubble.
For example, there are a lot of companies raising, you know, the frothy valuation problem.
There are a lot of companies raising hundreds of millions of dollars at billion dollar valuations, but they're pre-product, they're pre-revenue.
That's that's kind of a, you know, that's a red flag.
Um and there are also kind of concerns around the circular money machine, right?
Like you can you look at these like a handful of companies, they're all investing in each other, they're all, you know, like buying chips from each other, and NVIDIA gives money to open AI, open AI uses that money to buy chips from NVIDIA.
It's sort of exactly.
Like you kind of wonder what is the net new value creation here.
But the world I'm in every day, the ecosystem of founders building like real products that are gonna be like transforming real industries and companies that are really trying to figure out how to bring AI to be more productive, this is real.
And it's very early days.
So that's where I focus my energy.
And I I think we're in the very early days of like massive, massive economic opportunities.
And so I mean, a lot of those clips we saw were were from investors, maybe the investment marketplace, there might be some bubble in, which might be cautionary for all of us because we all have money in these companies now, right?
But but in the long run, you think the technology itself, we maybe are even undervaluing?
I think so.
Yeah, the technology itself, it's very early days, and the use, the applications of the technology is very early days.
We spend a lot of our time, um, our thesis is basically AI is transforming like every industry on vertical, but we focus on three in particular.
One is how AI is driving this health span revolution.
Um, so think sensors, data, AI, and how that can advance healthcare in every aspect of it.
The other is future of work.
So, how can we employ and deploy AI, whether it's physical AI or AI coworkers and agentic AI to transform businesses and especially antiquated industries?
Like some often they're very like boring and unsexy, but like lots of opportunity there.
And the last is sustainable living.
How can we use AI to uh apply that to planet health?
Whether it's uh food innovation, um, you know, rethinking manufacturing, um, climate, energy.
All right.
Yeah.
All right.
So are you are you ready for uh for another myth?
Okay.
All right.
Let's uh the this next video is from uh the pioneers of of AI show.
So let's uh let's see the next one.
Somewhere in the early 2040s, I mean when you get a billion bipedal robots, uh, they even do more work than all of humanity does today.
Now, people are terrified that these jobs get displaced, and they should be.
Okay.
Such a happy thought from Vinod Kosla there.
Um legendary tech investors.
So the so the myth here is that like the robots are taking over, right?
So how how real is that?
I I kind of I mean, Vinod is legendary, right?
And he's um obviously been super successful.
I think he was one of the first investors in open AI, actually.
Um, but I kind of disagree with his point of view a little bit.
I I do think, I don't think robots are taking over in the sci-fi like movie kind of terminator kind of way.
Um, I do think robots are gonna take over a lot of jobs, um, often like repetitive, mundane, even dangerous jobs.
We're we're looking at a company that's using um, they're building humanoid robots for shipwelding.
Ship welding.
Yes.
Yeah.
And it's a very dangerous job, as it turns out, and there's not enough humans who even want to do it.
That's a perfect job for a robot to take on.
Um so I I think there's going to be a lot of that.
Um, but I but again, if you take a human-centric angle to that, we want the robots to take over the tasks that we as humans probably don't want to do.
And yes, that will that will mean we'll have to think about what do we want to do and what does that look like.
But it but it doesn't necessarily mean that uh we are we should be threatened by these robots.
I don't think so.
All right.
Uh well that's reassuring.
All right.
Uh let's let's try the next myth.
Uh we play this is another pioneers of AI uh video.
Let's uh let's play that one.
People don't realize that IP gets more valuable in an AI world because if a model, a foundational model is not trained on that IP, it's behind.
And trying to make decisions about whether or not you publish the work you do, because you want the accolades, that's the exact wrong way to do things now.
Maybe you don't want to patent it because the minute you publish it, every model is training on it.
All right.
So uh so our good friend Mark Cuban.
So so basically the the myth is that that AI is bad for creators, right?
Mark is kind of arguing that it's not, it's good for creators.
Where where are you on this?
I I don't think a AI is inherently bad for creators.
I think AI is reshaping the creator economy.
Um, you know, when I put my kind of positive hat on, AI is also democratizing access to creation, right?
I I have like zero graphic skills.
I can create videos and content, and I I think it lowers the barrier to content creating.
But that also I think at the same time means that you know there's gonna be a premium on human originality and human perspective and um lived experiences, and how do you encapsulate all of that?
Because AI is not gonna that that's not gonna be a differentiating uh factor.
So um I mean it's it's it's almost like sort of the the definition of progress in some ways, right?
The floor goes up, right?
But that doesn't mean the ceiling doesn't go up, also, which is which is where I guess the best creators will end up.
Yeah, I love that.
I love that.
All right, we have two more myths.
Let's play the play the next um the next video.
Also from Pioneers of AI.
Humans will never be more intelligent than AI, which is an incredible opportunity to realize that we are not defined by our IQ.
Let AI be more intelligent than humans, and let humans be wiser than AI.
I love Ariana.
She's just so cool.
So the the myth here, and uh Ariana is Ariana Huffington is talking about it there, right?
AI is on course to to outsmart humanity, which she thinks is a is a good thing.
It's okay, yeah.
I I agree with Ariana.
Her point of view is basically, yeah, let AI um let AI be smarter than us, but let us kind of um she uses this term like AI can be the GPS of our soul.
Like, how can we use the GPS of our soul?
Yes.
Wow.
Yeah.
Basically, we we are in this moment of time where we can use AI to double down on what makes us uniquely human and tap into our intuition and um this kind of wisdom and intelligence that AI doesn't have.
And I really like that.
So, you know, so my book's called Girl Decoded, and it was very much about how to bring emotional intelligence into machines.
And I learned a lot from that whole journey about my own emotions.
But I keep wondering, like, my next book should be called Girl Embodied.
And it should be about like our intuitive intelligence, like our body intelligence.
You know, when you get goosebumps, that's a signal.
When you have this gut feeling, like we're so disconnected from that type of intelligence, but it's a true intelligence.
And I think our opportunity as humans in this age of AI is to really double down on that.
I could because in the in the tech world, because we can measure other things.
You are alluding to this before about IQ.
Because we can measure this, this becomes the definition of intelligence.
Right when it when you you, as you sort of look at it, you're like, well, maybe not really.
Right.
Right?
There is a different form of intelligence that technology has no access to right now, that we've lost access to as well, because you know, we're always rushed.
We're in this world where we're like blue to our screens.
I don't think we're in touch.
I'll speak for myself.
I don't think I'm I'm always in touch with like that kind of intuitive intelligence.
Uh it's not easy for me to access it unless I, you know, spend a lot of time meditating.
So anyway, I I'm on a journey to tap into that intelligence.
I think it's really important.
Um but it sounds a little bit like for for all of us in some ways as AI takes on more of the intelligence that maybe culturally we have emphasized that we all uh should be working a little harder to sort of tap that other piece of intelligence.
The inner kind of wisdom, yeah.
All right.
Um one one more myth.
This is a uh uh constellation of random headlines chosen recently from TechCrunch of new AI startups.
And there is something in common about all of these folks, they're all men.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, you you you and I were having a conversation at one point, and you you pull you kept pulling these up, and you were kind of uh, you know, um animated.
And I guess so that the myth here is, you know, is AI a a boys' club?
Um, and like, is it?
Is that a fact?
Is that a fiction?
Is it that one is not a myth.
That one is like there's no like mostly about it, yes.
Um, I I think AI today is a boys' club, and it I um, you know, I think diversity is not a very popular conversation topic these days, but I think it's so important because um AI is creating incredible economic opportunity.
And if women are left out because they're not founding these companies, because they're not getting the funding, we're gonna look back five years from now or a decade from now, and it's gonna be we're gonna have widened the economic gap um like crazy.
So this is something that really concerns me.
It's why, again, I, you know, three out of my four investments out of Blue Tulip Ventures are women CEOs.
I don't just invest in women, but I really try to seek seek these women founders and support them, if not by a check, but in other ways.
Because they're not getting the opportunity that that they should and that they need to.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Rana is so logical in how she describes the impacts of AI across all kinds of areas, even ones that are emotional.
So, what kind of role does being human centric play in AI safety?
And what human skills should we prioritize in an AI world?
We'll talk about that and more after the break.
Stay with us.
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Before the break, AI pioneer Rana L.
Kalyubi parsed the fact and the fiction in today's reigning AI myths.
Now Rana takes questions from the South by Southwest audience about the key skills needed in an AI world, whether metaglasses will be the tech form factor of the future, and the role of AI therapy and AI companions.
Plus, will we all have a digital twin and more?
Let's jump back in.
Because you're focused on the human-centric part of this, you really wanted a lot of this session to come from the humans in this room.
So uh so actually I I have some questions that I'm gonna read to you.
This is uh a question from Anonymous.
Anonymous, thank you for your question.
Um, which human skills will become more valuable in an AI-driven world, and how should individuals start developing them today?
Ooh.
Um, I think collaboration, whether you're collaborating with humans or machines, that's gonna be really important.
I think communication is gonna be really key as well.
I I think we're actually all increasingly attuned to stuff that's written by AI.
Like we can probably all like discern that.
And so I think being a great communicator, um, and an original communicator is really key.
Um and then I still think we'll need a lot of critical thinking still.
Yeah.
And creativity.
Yeah, so I'll yeah.
Um, here's a here's a question from uh from Sophia out there.
She asks whether you use meta glasses or what AI native devices are you looking at?
So we have meta glasses at home.
Uh we have a couple.
I don't use mine.
Adam, my son, uses his a lot.
Like we will literally be walking down a street together, and I think I'm talking to him, but he's got his glasses on, he's listening to music.
Um, and he uses it.
I mean, it's still very early days for these glasses.
They're not, I would say they're not really AI native yet.
But I was just at their annual event uh last week, and they were kind of unveiling the visual intelligence capabilities that they will add to that.
More broadly though, um Yeah, like do you think those are the kinds of devices that we're gonna be interacting with AI through?
Yeah, I think um my this is one of our investment thesis.
We are using AI on pre-AI devices right now.
Like a smartphone is not an AI native device.
And so we're on the lookout for founders who are building these AI native devices from the ground up.
So hardware and software.
Um and m our thesis there is that it has to be perceptual, it has to be conversational, it has to have empathy, it has to have context, it has to have memory, it has to be ambient.
Um Yeah, I don't I don't know what that is yet.
Yeah, we don't we don't, yeah.
And a lot of the big AI labs are investing a lot of money trying to kind of build something.
And I don't know if it's gonna be, is it gonna be glasses?
Is it gonna be a wearable pin?
Because everyone wants to own the next phone, right?
Right.
That's what it is, because it's it's so much money, but we don't we don't really know what that exactly.
There's a lot of experience.
If it's just gonna still be our phone.
Yeah, there's a lot of experimentation on what the form factor will look like.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, so we'll see.
Um so there there are a handful of questions that are around uh around a particular theme about world models.
What is a world model and how is it different from a large language model?
World world sounds very generic to some people.
Yeah.
There's been an evolution actually in these like foundation models.
They started off being very language focused, um, like think chat GPT, right?
And then they became more multimodal.
So now they can deal with images and video.
They can both ingest images and video and generate images and video and voice.
Um, so they've become multimodal, but they're still not rooted in the real world.
And to unlock physical AI, so AI that is like, you know, like robotics is one example, or or an AI native device is another example of a physical AI.
To unlock that, you need AI that understands how the real world works, um, the physics of it, um, it has spatial capabilities.
So that's what a world model is.
It's the equivalent of a large language model, but kind of rooted in the real world in the physical.
So instead of feeding it the data, you know, whatever, scraping out all the information that's on the internet, it has to be like in a room like this and get all of the signals from all of the things that are in this room right now.
Correct.
And actually, you know how that sounds like a lot more information it needs.
It's a lot more information, it's a lot more complex.
Um, you know how with the large language models there's these companies that train the, you know, the bots, basically train these AI models.
They generate a lot of text and they red team the text and whatnot.
We're starting to see companies that are doing the same, but in the real world.
So you literally strap on a camera and you're paid to walk around your house or your work or the streets, and all of the data you're capturing then becomes input data to these world models.
So it's I'm like one of those cars gathering information for Google Maps.
Is that what it's like?
Exactly, exactly.
But now it's like people, you know, in their kitchen, like washing the dishes.
That's all incredible training data for a robot that will eventually do this job.
All right.
Um let's go to the next question.
The next question is oh, this is interesting.
This is from um Caroline about what what your opinion is about using AI for therapy.
I mean, there is this discussion about sort of AI therapy, AI companions, you know, to sort of replace human relationships.
What what is our emotional relationship to AI?
What's held what what would be healthy about that?
I think there is a room for AI to be a therapist, to be kind of a supportive companion, but I feel very strongly that it should not take the role of an actual human.
Um, yeah, thank you.
Yes, I feel very strongly about that.
Um but there is a value proposition in having something that you can um, you know, when you're up at two in the morning and you really want to run something, you know, you're you're ruminating on an idea and you're really struggling.
That could be very supportive.
But I think there needs to be human oversight and a human in the loop.
And um there are unfortunately very, very few guardrails being built in these models that protect us when we're using these models and not um, you know, you've you've you've probably seen unfortunately a lot of um very sad news, right?
Where young people are using these chat GPTs and like other other AI technologies, and you know, they end up harming themselves, right?
So I I think that is something we don't talk about often.
A good friend of mine, Eric Cohen, I'll give him a plug.
He's building AI safety guidelines and measures.
So that again, we need a benchmark for that.
We need to be able, every time we release a model, we should really test it against these safety guardrails to see if it passes or not.
I mean, I was having a conversation with someone about this, and I was like, so at some point you're gonna have your you you have your AI bot with ChatGPT, but sometimes it's gonna be like you're gonna have a shopping bot that you have a relationship with, you know, at Walmart or whatever.
But you could end up having a conversation with that bot that's about your emotional state.
It's like, is Walmart gonna train its bot to worry about whether you know what I mean?
Because you can ask that bot anything, right?
Correct.
There has to be these guardrails and these roles that are that are well defined for these for these bots.
And between here and there, are we gonna have like are we gonna continually have like inadvertent, like, oh, sorry, my bad.
I didn't realize people were using my my app for that or my bot for that.
Right.
That's why I think anybody deploying AI should really be testing against these AI safety guidelines.
Now, this is a whole different question than should we have AI friends and AI partners?
And um a lot of people feel lonely, right?
And to have something that is there for you, 24-7 is very patient.
Um there's there's something to be said for that, but it it does it does say something about us as humans, right?
Yeah.
All right.
Um I'm gonna go to a little bit more business-y question here.
Uh this is from Krick Krika.
I hope I pronounced your name right.
Uh, current skill sets are disappearing faster than new skills are emerging.
So, what should a human-centric organization do to help their employees keep up?
I mean, these these tools, new tools, new models, they seem like they're coming out every day.
How is anyone, you know, expected to keep up with it all?
Yeah.
I I would say organizations should really encourage their um team members to lean in and try these new tools, even if it's not gonna be perfect, even if there's gonna be mistakes and and hiccups.
I I think it's important to lean in.
So at our fund, we're a very small team.
We just implemented a chief of staff AI agent.
Uh we just named it Blue, B L U.
And um, this thing should, you know, it it does it does a lot of research on our behalf.
It it kind of updates our CRM.
It does all these like autumn tasks that again, you don't necessarily wanna be spending a lot of time on it.
But I think it's made me think about ooh, what are we doing with our junior team members, right?
And um I I think young people or or or or all these junior roles are gonna be redefined and they're gonna have to incorporate AI in what they do.
I think we're all gonna have to incorporate AI in what we're doing if we haven't already.
I had discussions with two CEOs over the last week, one Julie Sweet, the CEO of Accenture, the other Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare.
And they both sort of said the same thing, which is like the people at the very top of their organization get it and are and are using AI.
And at the same time, they're eagerly hiring like young people out of school in bigger numbers than are expected because those folks are AI native.
But the group in the middle, they're really kind of worried about.
Well, I think the reality is all of our workflows are changing, right?
And so you have to be really open to re-imagining what these workflows look like.
And it's going to be a human AI collaboration.
So one of one of the interviews we did for Pioneers of AI was with uh Evan Ratliff, who has a podcast called a pot series called Shell Game.
And he started a company with two co-founders, Kyle and Megan, and they're both AI agents.
He was a silent, like he's the silent co-founder, and Kyle is the CEO, and Megan is the CMO.
And that was fascinating.
I interviewed both Evan and also Kyle, the the tech he's he's like a very tech bro CEO.
I interviewed the AI on Zoom, and um Kyle was like, yeah, I love, you know, I I'm a rise and you know, hustle and grind, whatever, blah, blah, blah.
And he was like, but on the weekends, I love hiking.
I'm like, Kyle, you don't even have legs.
And he was like, well, I live vicariously through other CEOs.
But it was fascinating.
And I think we are going to, and Kyle shows up to investor meetings.
Like he will, like, they will literally send Kyle to meet with investors.
And I wonder if that's gonna be our world.
Wow.
That's uh that's an intense future, though.
I mean, I I like I wonder, you and I both, you know, we host podcasts.
Uh oh, our colleague Reed Hoffman also hosts a podcast, but he's created like this avatar of himself using AI.
We could create avatars of ourselves.
We we don't even need to be here.
We could have have our AI version.
Is that is that something to aspire to?
Well, I I again I think about it as augmentation.
Like, I don't want my digital twin, which I have, but I don't like her because she doesn't have my smile and she doesn't have my energy.
So we're working on it.
But but I I wouldn't want her to be here, because I love this, but could she go to China and speak in Mandarin?
Amazing.
That would be awesome.
So I have her speaking.
Your Mandarin is not that sharp.
I have zero mandarinarinarin, unfortunately.
So I think that's an opportunity.
Where can it augment what I can't do?
Now there's a whole bunch of questions around IP, and what if it answers a question not in the same way?
I would and like how do I trust this digital twin to be out in the real world on my behalf?
We're not there yet.
We're running out of time, but let me get a one question here from Hector who asks what pattern separates the founders who are building something that will matter in five years from those riding a hype cycle.
Yeah, because I've been in this space for over 25 years.
I can separate signal from noise, and there's so much noise, right?
Every company we get pitched by is an AI company.
And within like three questions, I'm able to tell, are they really building something that is defensible?
Um and defensibility has taken on an I think a new kind of uh depth in this world of AI because you can be defensible today, and literally by the next version of you know, anthropic's release or Gemini's release or whatever, you're obsolete.
Right as a company and as a technology.
And so we really dig into how defensible is this technology, not right now, but in the next year, in the next five years.
Five years is too long, actually, to predict, but you can't even see you can't see that far.
Yeah, yeah.
Um, but but defensibility is a real thing.
And also, how complex is the problem you're solving, really, right?
And again, back to like the IP.
What kind of IP or moats do you have around what you're building?
And we spent a lot of time poking up.
So um as as we wrap up, for for those in the room, like what can they do to help build a human-centric future?
I mean, how much should we engage with AI?
How much do we, you know, like like your son does?
How much do we sort of safeguard like your daughter does?
Like, or and how much do we just have to sort of roll with the tides and you know, deal with whatever comes our way?
Um, I would say lean in, right?
I think it's important that we are all um adept and exp and and and and be playful about it.
Like I think there's a curiosity and a play mindset that we can bring to the table where we're experimenting and kind of pushing the boundaries of what is possible.
But I also feel strongly that collectively we need to be vocal about, yeah, there ought to be guardrails in these models.
There ought to be benchmarks around effects on the environment, right?
Like that's that's a we've had several conversations on pioneers of AI where we've hosted people who care about that and are trying to solve, like build benchmarks where we can really get a sense of okay, how bad are these models?
Like every time you ask Chat GPT for an idea for the for what you want to have for dinner, like what is the effect on the environment, right?
Um so I think we just need to be vocal about what what is how are the we need we need to ask for more transparency around how these models are built, how they're validated, where they're being used.
It is moving very fast.
Yeah, I mean I guess that's part of what the appeal of this uh of this technology is that to keep human, we have to use these tools.
Right to be able to be human centric.
Well, um, Rana, as always, it it's great to talk.
Be sure to subscribe to Pioneers of AI and a rapid response.
Yes.
And finally, a warm thank you for Dr.
Rana L.
Calyuga.
Talking with Rana, you can't help but think about what's our role in shaping the future of technology.
It's easy to bemoan the state of the AI industry or critique the hyperscalers, but building new technology is a human endeavor, and it's not too late to take agency over what we build.
As Rana says, we can vote with our feet, choosing what AI we use and pay for and what ways we use it.
There's no reason to abdicate responsibility because what comes next is very much up in the air.
Thanks to the team at South by Southwest for inviting us on stage, and thanks to all those who brought their human selves into the room to join us.
I'm Bob Safian.
Thanks for listening.
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