David Patterson of UC Berkeley and Google and Andy Konwinski of the Laude Institute (see bios below) are the featured speakers for this event.

This three-part talk summarizes the underlying philosophy and best practices of the Berkeley lab model that led to RISC, RAID, RISC-V, and Spark; a perspective on improving AI’s impact; and a novel funding opportunity for high-impact research starting this Fall.

Senior computer scientists and rising stars in AI developed a balanced perspective on AI’s societal impact informed by interviews with 24 experts including John Jumper, Barack Obama, Susan Rice, and Eric Schmidt (see www.ShapingAI.com). The speakers believe we are in the early days of practical AI, and focused efforts by practitioners, policymakers, and stakeholders can still increase AI’s upsides and reduce its downsides. 

The speakers suggest guidelines for enhancing AI development: i) Human-AI collaboration exceeds capabilities of either AI or people; ii) Focus on productivity improvements that generate more jobs; and iii) Consider that AI impact varies by geography; and iv) Use appropriate tools of measurement.

Rather than simply predict long-term AI impact, they have identified research milestones across seven fields that could improve it. To inspire work on these milestones, they propose:

• Creating $1M+ inducement prizes
• Establishing $10M+ 5-year multidisciplinary research labs

The forthcoming nonprofit Laude Institute will sponsor some of these prizes and research labs using funds raised from those who prospered in the tech industry. 

The link to tune into the talk via live stream is: https://youtube.com/live/x3KB-9O2L9g?feature=share

Bios: 

David Patterson is a UC Berkeley Pardee professor emeritus and a Google distinguished engineer. His most influential Berkeley projects likely were RISC and RAID. His best-known book is Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach. He and his co-author John Hennessy shared the 2017 ACM A.M Turing Award and the 2022 NAE Charles Stark Draper Prize for Engineering. The Turing Award is often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Computing” and the Draper Prize is considered a “Nobel Prize of Engineering.”

Andy Konwinski is a co-founder of Databricks, Perplexity, and Laude Ventures.  His work spans research and real-world impact in AI, data, and software infrastructure. At Databricks he most recently ran AI Product and he continues to serve as President of Perplexity. He got his PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley, where he contributed to Apache Hadoop and co-created Apache Mesos and Apache Spark. He co-teaches a PhD seminar entitled “Research to Startups” at UC Berkeley.