Great summary…
Sat in today on Malcolm Gladwell's interview of IBM's SVP of Software and Chief Commercial Officer Rob Thomas and listened as they discussed AI and the productivity paradox. Whether you’re a recent grad or are on teams, like mine, who are either using (or building tools on top of) products like OpenAI and other large language models– these takeaways may be useful to you. 📣 Rob spends his time thinking about people, innovation, and risk– in that order. People = do we have the right skill sets on the team? The people they hire right out of undergrad tend to wow clients the most (awesome news). Innovation = are we looking ahead? There are macro trends we need to nail to stay on track. Risk = are we taking enough risks to enable growth? Without risk there is no growth. 📣 Stay relevant! Always force yourself to use the latest technology. Rob deleted his Google mobile search app and replaced it with Perplexity. 📣 ‘AI Time’ is real. Models improve in a matter of hours– no longer years or even months. A model can sometimes be better in the afternoon than in the morning. 📣 ‘Open source’ as a practice is very important to the way AI is evolving. It guarantees transparency for users and ensures that more than just a handful of companies determine the future of the technology. 📣 GDP growth is determined by productivity, population growth, and debt growth. We are experiencing a decline in population growth and a rise in interest rates. Increasing productivity– with AI– may be the only chance of GDP growth. Pushkin Industries Axios iHeartMedia #nyctechweek
Nice! Congratulations Rob.
Chief Commercial Officer, Mayfield | Empowering Entrepreneurs to Scale Successful Ventures | Accelerating Product-Market Fit and Early Customer Adoption | Connecting CIOs, CTOs, and CXOs to Drive Corporate Innovation
1moRob, this was a great and insightful interview in and of itself, but the fact that you had Malcolm Gladwell conduct it is amazing. Super fun and interesting stuff-- thanks for sharing.