Event Summary
Generative AI has fueled a new boom in the awareness, adoption, and usage of AI due to its impressive capabilities to generate accurate text, realistic images, and even high-quality music and video. Its explosive adoption for personal usage is now complemented by fast growth in professional usage: Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, and many other companies now offer enterprise-grade generative AI tools for workers. However, this has all occurred so rapidly (just over a year) that people are still learning how these tools work, how to use them most effectively to save time and avoid errors and risk, and what the social and legal responsibilities are. Fortunately, this new book by Numa Dhamani and Maggie Engler will address all of these topics and more, and Numa will lead this Austin Forum online discussion to answer any questions you still have so that you can use these tools most effectively and safely in your companies, organizations, and lives. As always, we encourage everyone to obtain and read the book in advance. For this topic, we also encourage you to try out some generative AI tools and to read more about the societal concerns and opportunities being addressed in so many online news and media sources. This is an exciting topic and there is much to think about, discuss, and debate as we all determine the best way to integrate generative AI tools into our work and lives.
Moderators
Numa Dhamani, Principal Machine Learning Engineer, KUNGFU.AI
Numa Dhamani is a natural language processing expert with domain expertise in information warfare, security/privacy, and trust and safety. She has advised startups and nonprofits, served as the Principal Investigator on various DARPA programs, and contributed to multiple international peer-reviewed journals. Currently, Numa is a Principal Machine Learning Engineer at KUNGFU.AI. She has previously worked on mitigating abuses in the online ecosystem at Twitter, on counter disinformation efforts at the Global Disinformation Index, on detecting online extremism and influence operations at Yonder, and on developing cutting-edge machine learning solutions at Accenture's Innovation Hub. Numa holds degrees in Physics and Chemistry from the University of Texas at Austin.
Maggie Engler, Technical Staff, Inflection AI
Maggie Engler is an engineer and researcher currently working on safety for large language models. She focuses on applying data science and machine learning to abuses in the online ecosystem, and is a domain expert in cybersecurity and trust and safety. Maggie has built machine learning systems for malware detection and content moderation, advised start-ups and venture capital firms, and taught as an adjunct instructor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Information.