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this podcast is brought to you by knowled of [Music] warten the Wharton School is leveling up
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its teaching and its research in the areas of artificial intelligence and data science the school has launched the
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warden Ai and analytics initiative it's an interdisiplinary collaborative effort
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to shape how generative AI will be used for business Innovation and Beyond welcome to knowledge at Wharton I'm
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Angie basuni with me today is Eric bradow he's a longtime faculty member in our marketing department and he's an
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applied statistician and many of you probably know him from his Moneyball podcast on
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SiriusXM Eric thanks for being with me oh it's great to be here Angie and always happy to talk about our new
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acronym w a AI oh goodness well you've been named as the new Vice Dean for this
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initiative so you're giving us a little bit of time today to pick your brain
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about it I want to start with ask asking you to explain just a quick overview of
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the initiative and why the school is launching it right now yeah I mean it's
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really as our Dean Erica James says it's really one of those meet the- moment
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types of opportunities for the Wharton School um actually we've been in the analytics business if you'd like for 20
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years uh a colleague of mine Pete fader and I started the first ever data science center if you'd like at any
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business school in the world 20 years ago now and so we always believe that data science basically using empiricism
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using high-powered statistical models was going to be a big part of the future of business because of technology and
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new data streams that emerge but what's happened of course in the last almost
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two years now is generative AI now fortunately at Wharton we've had a center called AI at Wharton for almost
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seven years now we knew this future was coming we didn't know how fast and how
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if you like ubiquitous it was going to be but the goals of our Center are actually quite simple there are four
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major goals first we want to be thought of as the number one knowledge creators of Business Schools in the world number
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two we want to impact students now broadly defined not just students at the Wharton School or even the University of
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Pennsylvania but we want to democratize Ai and business education throughout the
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world third we want to have an impact on the SE Suite we're a business school and
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so what I always say is we're training people to be the leaders in Ai and data
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science but not data scientists we're training people ble to lead companies through Ai and data science and last but
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not least I've always called it analytics for good but how about we do some good in the world through data
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science so those are our four if you'd like populations of interest if you'd
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like researchers students companies and the community and Now's the Time to have
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that impact I love that let's talk about a couple of those buckets let's start
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with number two which you mentioned students now this initiative you've got this really unique collaboration with
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open AI most of us know that name by now because they're the makers of chat gbt
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so starting in the fall our MBA students are going to have these creative Enterprise licenses with chat PT what do
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those licenses do what are they going to create with them what's the end result
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yeah so first let me just say why I think this is crucially important and let me just say as you can imagine
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there's more sensitivities on younger adults meaning the undergraduate population but that's coming by the way
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there will be a time where Wharton will be able to present enter priz licenses to the entire population but of course
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the undergraduate is as part of the University of Pennsylvania so there's some technicalities there but we're
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working through them the the answer is Andrew you learn AI by doing it right so that's the only way to get people to do
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it every warden for now MBA every faculty member every PhD student will have access to if you'd like the newest
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versions as they come of chat GPT right on their desktop or pH they can actually
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experiment with it see what it can do to enhance their education we don't view it
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as replacing us as faculty we view it as enhancing their education and at the end
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of the day this is what it's going to be expected of all of our students when
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they go into the workforce they're going to be expected to know so how do I create video using artificial
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intelligence how do I do the proper prompt engineering so that I can get the right answers out of these large
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language model engines like chat GPT and the only way to do it is to experience it and that's what these licens are
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going to provide and the good news about the Enterprise version is the data is secure what I mean by that is if Eric
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bradow myself Professor bradow uploads his course materials and creates a localized version of chat GPT it's not
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being sucked up into the Corpus that they're using to train the model so people around the world do not have
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access to my information and let's be honest Angie that's the business model
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because chat GPT for most people is free forget the Enterprise it's free it's
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like Google Google searches free to you and me but it's not free to companies
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that want to advertise on it chat jpt is free to you and me but it's not free to
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Amazon that wants to create a localized version of it so that's the way it's
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going to work we Wharton have invested money and resources and an Enterprise license so we can educate our students
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on how to be leaders through using artificial intelligence I hope one of them comes up with the next big idea
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we'll stay tuned about that I do too well there's so much research that's
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coming out of Wharton about AI uh can you give us like a quick touch on some of the areas that have already been
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impacted by our research and then what you find to be the most promising yeah I think research comes in a few different
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buckets so one of the buckets are there are people even though we're business
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school there are people at Wharton that are statisticians and computer scientists like myself who we do work on
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the actual let's call it the mathematical models that underly artificial intelligence and just so all
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of our listeners know ai's been around for about 60 years so as a PhD student I
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learned about artificial intelligence now large language models which is taking a big Corpus of information
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training them in real time at scale and providing generative AI That's new but
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the problem of predicting the next word or token that's going to be used that's
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that's not a new problem but number one there's academics who are in my narrow
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slice who are what we call methodologists that will work on the methods the larger bucket the much
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larger bucket for researchers are people that are going to apply AI so for example how do you use P patient records
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I'm in the Healthcare Management Department here at the Wharton School I partner with pen medicine I see doctors
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writing handwritten notes on patient records well those used to have to be human coded now they don't I'm in the
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management department Department I want to know how AI is going to affect teamwork and how it's going to affect
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like if I can just ask a chat agent and not my colleague well what does that do to camaraderie and building
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relationships with your team and so there's researchers many of us that also
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work on applications of artificial intelligence and then of course there's the student piece which is you know how
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do I get my job done how do I get my job as a student done using artificial intelligence so I view US almost like as
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a three prong at least three prong lab laboratory which is the methods part the applications part and the how do I get
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it done part with artificial intelligence you know I have been learning so much about AI just from
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coverage at Wharton and there really is no area that it doesn't touch it really
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isn't and I think one of the things that's really um great about the school
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is that our professors are always trying to pursue relevant research research that has a business case a use case can
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you tell me uh what the companies are asking us for right now what is it that they want in terms of AI research yeah
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there's there's a lot of it so let me just give you a couple of specific use
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cases so obviously one big area is in customer service so for example can AI be used for chatbots and what's people's
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reaction to the use of AI generated chatbots can AI be used to coordinate or collect you know let's call it audio
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recordings and video recordings make them searchable indexable so that in some sense we don't need humans taking
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notes the AI engine can do it the third part is what most companies are interested in is they have data all over
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the company and I say data I don't mean just numeric data which is historically
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how we thought about it but I have physical reports I have online reports I've got Excel spreadsheets I've got
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PowerPoint decks I've got a SQL database I've got a big data Lake sitting
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somewhere how do I bring all of that information together so Angie sitting at her desk doesn't need to be a programmer
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to query this database can just use the English language or even a foreign language to just query this database and
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say what do we know about the following topic if we were to make an investment in X what does our data say about this
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or Angie has a data set you're not a you don't know python but you want to do
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some analysis well you can now do that analysis so I think of it as are there jobs that will be replaced absolutely
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are there but that's not to me the large part the large part is how does each
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person use AI in their job as my colleague Stephano ponton says and my colleague Ethan mik say it's Ai and the
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workforce not AI or the workforce right so that's what I see as the biggest most
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exciting use cases and that's something I you know I think is really important
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to touch on too because AI has been described as everything from society salvation to its Doom right it just sort
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of depends on where you sit on the Spectrum as a Communications person I think I lean more towards the Doom part
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tell me tell me where you said you know what what gives you optimism about Ai and what do you worry about yeah so um I
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actually given we have a political election here in the US in 2024 my worries are more on a personal level
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which is around disinformation and you know if you like creating fake content which is almost
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indistinguishable if not totally IND distinguishable from real content I'm worried about um I was actually at a
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conference just yesterday in San Francisco or two days ago I took a red eye back um and this was someone from
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one of the large security companies in the world and says imagine the following imagine you create a million fake
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articles and load them into chat GPT well it's going to train on those fake articles and then to anybody using chat
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GPT it's going to seem like the truth so the disinformation and the fact is sometimes
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as you know they call them fakes it just makes stuff up it will give you an answer so that
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concerns me in a society that's got some polarization in it and a society where
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we're relying on these engines to provide us answers and my view is relying is the wrong word we shouldn't
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be relying on them they should be decision support tools but I can promise you I'm not betting my company's future
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or my academic future or my teaching future or my research future on what an AI engine says because I know I test it
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all the time some of it stuff it says is just wrong it seems right but it's actually wrong so my concerns are around
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disinformation I've look I everybody I love action movies I've seen every
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Schwarzenegger Terminator movie I'm not worried about AI cyber whatever they
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called it cyber whatever the name of the thing was in in The Terminator movies I'm not worried about AI taking over all
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of that about replacement yeah I'm not I'm not worried about that but I do
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think and I'll tell you what else I'm worried about I'm worried about people
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I'm not worried about the young people today because they always get trained in
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the best of technology and we have to democratize that we need to do better job of making access available I'm
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worried about the 50 plus year old I'm pointing it myself same who need be training because of what AI can do and
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where do they go so I'm worried that the people whose jobs will be displaced many
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of them don't have the training or won't receive the training to make AI an asset
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for them it'll be seen as taking over their job so those if you ask me my areas of concern it's I'll call it
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disinformation and it's also that um in some sense the people that are going to
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benefit the most from it are the people that are the young people who are going to get training but what about the 40 50
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60 70 plus year olds in the workforce that will need this type of training where are they going to go to get it
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right and they already face a certain degree of age discrimin in general so this might further set them back in the
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workforce well let's not end on a on a tough note let's end on a positive note
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what gives you optimism about AI for the future and about this initiative well I I think I hope this is
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what everybody does and my my colleague Ethan mik says this the best just go on and start using it like think about all
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the things you do so I'll give you an example I'll just take an example matter
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of fact our our interim president Larry Jameson asked me to speak on this to a group of uh if you'd like alum I maybe
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about two weeks ago the role of AI and education and I said okay so I used to need I still do I could use them but I
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don't need them physical Tas in the classroom to sit there and record class participation well I don't need that I
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have audio data well I needed people to help me do grading it's not obvious I
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need that anymore um well every year oh God I gotta create an exam no I don't
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chat GPT can create an exam for me oh I need to create a simulation for the class
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well actually um the generative AI lab that Ethan and his wife lck mik are starting can generate a simulation for
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me so the way I view it is Wharton should be thrilled Eric bradow gets to spend more time on Research he gets to
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spend more time teaching in a pedagogically interesting way he gets to spend more time mentoring our students
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but all this stuff that now can be his time can be alleviated because he can get the generative AI engine to do it he
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doesn't have to spend his time on anymore so to me I think this is I think everybody this is my fatherly advice to
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everybody here think about the tasks that you do and just do it before you do the tasks in the humanlike manner you've
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been doing them till now try doing them in a generative AI engine a large language mod engine see the results you
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get and step by step you'll notice in yourself like I did replacing the things
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that used to take me a ton of time for weren't what I call the heavy brain human CPU stuff I'd like to spend my
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time on that's what gets me excited yeah that's something I have heard our
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professors uh repeat quite often which is think of think of it as a tool that can free you up from the banal so that
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you can do the more exciting aspects of the job that you love so it sounds sounds good to me well it sounds good to
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me too and as I said as you said at the beginning um Morton Ai and analytics initiative you know uh were
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extraordinarily ambitious we want to impact the world we want to impact Society businesses researchers students
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and we're going to do it and and then real magic to it is through Partnerships
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so we partner with schools to deliver education we partner with nonprofits to teach nonprofits how to use them
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obviously we partner with Scholars around the world we partner with companies in the sea suite and so this
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as a matter of fact this is a time where the Ivory Tower better not be the Ivory
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Tower because we desperately need the application and the corporate Partners to actually bring what we're doing to
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life so again I've never been more excited and I I'm honored that our Dean
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asked me to lead this initiative congratulations to you and thank you for your time today I appreciate it Eric
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bradow is the new Vice dean of Wharton's Ai and analytics initiative you can
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learn more about the initiative sign up for updates insights at their website which is aien Analytics won. up.edu
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I'm G to say that one more time aien analytics won. up.edu for knowledge at Wharton I'm Angie Bas thanks for joining
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us for more insight from knowledge at Wharton please visit knowledge. won. up.edu
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