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1 episodes · 18 quoted claims
Prem Natarajan says Capital One was the first bank, and one of the only major enterprises worldwide, to go all in on a single public cloud.
“It was the first bank, and I think one of the only major enterprises worldwide that is all in on a single public cloud.”
Prem Natarajan says Capital One has more than 100 million customers.
“deliver magical experiences, valuable experiences, everyday conveniences to our 100 million plus customers to help all of those folks.”
Prem Natarajan describes the history of artificial intelligence as alternating 'springs' of optimism and 'winters' of disappointment.
“People like to think of them as AI spring, followed by AI winter, followed by AI spring, followed by AI winter.”
Prem Natarajan says early AI expert systems did not scale because they required too much human input.
“Initially, it was all these expert systems and all of that. And then we said, oh, they don't really scale because they require so much human input.”
Prem Natarajan says probabilistic approaches such as Bayesian models and hidden Markov models later became important in speech and language processing.
“Then the whole probabilistic set of things came in, Bayesian models, then they later became, in some contexts, hidden Markov models and all of that for speech and language processing”
Prem Natarajan says the technical term for generative AI models following prompts and instructions without explicit training for the task is in-context learning.
“And if you become really technical, they'll call it in context learning.”
Prem Natarajan says he is ethnically Tamil and grew up in Maharashtra, India, in a four-language environment.
“My family is ethnically Tamil. Grew up in Maharashtra, where a lot of my immediate friends spoke Marathi.”
Prem Natarajan began his career at BBN Technologies, which he describes as an MIT spin-off with a history tied to ARPANET and pioneering speech and language research.
“And so then I started working at this company called B B N Technologies, yeah, MIT spin-off, ARPANET.”
At the University of Southern California, Prem Natarajan was vice dean of the School of Engineering, a computer science faculty member, and head of the Information Sciences Institute.
“I was vice dean in the School of Engineering. I was a faculty member in computer science, but I also was the head of the Information Sciences Institute.”
Prem Natarajan headed the Alexa AI organization at Amazon before joining Capital One.
“And then I went to Amazon, where I headed the Alexa A I organization.”
Capital One rebuilt its fraud platform from the ground up so that machine learning sits at the center of it.
“We rebuilt this fraud platform from the ground up and basically to use M L at the center of that enterprise.”
Prem Natarajan says Capital One's fraud models must produce a decision in the time it takes a customer to swipe a credit card.
“those models have to kind of activate an outcome in the time it takes our customers to swipe their credit cards.”
Prem Natarajan says Capital One's fraud model updates used to take months and now take days.
“When we first started, it used to take months to update models. We now do it in days.”
Prem Natarajan names retrieval augmented generation as one of the most popular ways generative AI is currently used, including in search tools.
“one of the most popular ways in which these are being used are this retrieval augmented generation style use.”
Prem Natarajan invokes a saying he attributes to Arthur C. Clarke that sufficiently advanced technology feels like magic.
“was it Arthur C. Clarke who said, like, any technology that's sufficiently advanced feels like magic?”
Prem Natarajan calls the idea that artificial general intelligence is imminent the biggest misconception about AI.
“The notion that A G I is around the corner, and I think it's a misconception that works at two levels.”
Prem Natarajan says AI's biggest opportunity is to democratize access to services and resources across society.
“The biggest opportunity for A I is to, in my mind, democratize access to a lot of services, resources, et cetera, across the entire spread of our social spectrum.”
MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group have jointly researched and published on AI since 2017, interviewing hundreds of practitioners and surveying thousands of companies.
“Together, MITSMR and BCG have been researching and publishing on AI since 2017, interviewing hundreds of practitioners and surveying thousands of companies”