New Beginnings: Open||Source||Data in Transition

Open||Source||Data

This episode features an interview with Charna Parkey, Real-Time AI Product and Strategy Leader at DataStax. Charna has been developing AI and ML products over the last 17 years and has worked with 90 of the Fortune 100 in her various roles. She is also a co-author and inventor on several patents.

In this episode, Sam and Charna discuss handing over the role as host, Sam’s new startup journey, and how their thinking has evolved during the explosion of LLMs.

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“Now, it seems like we have this opportunity where the conversation and the place that society is at is different. Where we want to contribute to the right set of data when we talk open source data. We want to make sure that we have the right data to train this model in order to get the right outcome. We want to provide a lens of, ‘All right, you are this persona. How would you say this thing?’ I do think that from a lot of what the LLMs have today, the outcome of those words are still missing. And we need to solve that. Like, ‘Is this piece of writing actually going to achieve the outcome I want versus am I following legal's guidelines? Am I technically correct? Is my CEO going to like it?’ That doesn't mean you're achieving impact in the world. There's an aspect there where we've given feedback loops, it seems, to be like, ‘Did I like the answer or not?’ But not, ‘Did I take an action?’ As we get to autonomousness, we're going to have to have an outcome or multiple outcomes associated with the reward of the system.” – Charna Parkey

“I personally believe that all cognition is bias. My degree is in cognitive science. One of the things that we trained on is attention. And to pay attention, literally means to selectively choose what data is coming in from the world that you're going to pay attention to and what you're going to discard. Which is also, to me, the definition of bias. All cognition is bias, but what do we care about? Do you trust this thing? What does that mean? Well, do you trust it to do these particular actions to a level of consistency in this particular domain? It doesn't mean that you're going to trust it in all environments. There's a lot more nuance that hopefully will evolve in this strange age of nuanced destruction machines.” – Sam Ramji

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Episode Timestamps:

(01:04): Sam and Charna catch up

(06:05): Sam explains his new company, Sailplane

(14:21): How Charna’s thinking has evolved during the LLM explosion

(25:45): Sam’s thoughts after 5 seasons of Open||Source||Data

(38:52): What Charna is looking forward to in the next season of the podcast

(40:44): A question Sam wishes to be asked

(45:45): Backstage takeaways with executive producer, Audra Montenegro

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Links:

LinkedIn - Connect with Charna

LinkedIn - Connect with Sam

Learn more about Sailplane