YouSaid · the spoken record

Nitesh Banta

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23
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2016-12-30
most recent
2016-12-30
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1
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  1. “Kind of belief is that startups kind of earn their ticket to doing great things by building a product that someone loves and to build a product that someone loves, you start narrow and really define who you're going after and what exactly you're doing. And so all eyes for us are focused on how do we build the best way in the world for individuals to build, manage, and optimize their websites, something that's substantially better than what's out there in the market. As we continue to kind of make more and more progress in doing that, we'll start to use orchestra as an underlying technology to create additional services for businesses. And my dream is that five years from now, you'd have hundreds of thousands or millions of people coming to B12 finding really fulfilling and encouraging work. And we're enabling businesses to get access to the types of services that they could only dream of today.”

    2016-12-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How AI Can Enhance Not Replace Humans? What Will Differentiate Between The Winners & The Losers In AI? Why AGI Is Further Away Than We Think with Nitesh Banta, Founder & CEO @ B12 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “So I think the biggest thing on my mind is we're starting to grow the team at B12. It's how do you really organize people to do their best work possible to motivate them, encourage them, keep them enthusiastic while helping them build balanced and happy lives? And there's just so much complexity around that. I think when you're venture investing, you don't have to think about that day-to-day. It is a little bit more siloed. But being able to organize people and have them be happy, productive, and feel like they're doing the best work in their careers is something I'm fascinated with and hope to continue to get better at.”

    2016-12-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How AI Can Enhance Not Replace Humans? What Will Differentiate Between The Winners & The Losers In AI? Why AGI Is Further Away Than We Think with Nitesh Banta, Founder & CEO @ B12 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Read all the standard tech news outlets like TechCrunch and everything else just to stay on top of news. I feel like Bill Gurley probably creates some of the highest quality individual posts. I'm always curious when he produces something. Not in that, I don't think I'm the most loyal reader in the world. I use Nozzle, Twitter, Medium to find new articles. I have become a big podcast person over the last few months. So check out the Shotan, the A16Z podcast, Recode. There's a bunch of great content out there, but I tend to surface it through networks versus lowly going to any one thing except for the show, of course.”

    2016-12-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How AI Can Enhance Not Replace Humans? What Will Differentiate Between The Winners & The Losers In AI? Why AGI Is Further Away Than We Think with Nitesh Banta, Founder & CEO @ B12 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Yeah, I think in the short term, my biggest concern is that the field over promises and under delivers, just because it's so easy to make that jump. And I think a lot of people make claims that are just hard to substantiate right now. And as a result, a lot of the fantasy and enthusiasm that's brought people into this space starts to fizzle away, which I think would be disappointing given all the opportunity there is here. Longer term, I'm probably most concerned about, are we able to build the right type of humanity into the various AIs that we build? And there's a lot of hard decisions to be made there. And as we start to get more sophisticated in the tooling that we build, can we really make them function and work in a way that aren't just optimizing around results, but optimizing in the human way that all of us like to live and work and operate.”

    2016-12-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How AI Can Enhance Not Replace Humans? What Will Differentiate Between The Winners & The Losers In AI? Why AGI Is Further Away Than We Think with Nitesh Banta, Founder & CEO @ B12 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Yeah, so I'll talk about every person who starts a B12. We give them a book on their first day, which is the Dr. Seuss book, Oh, the Places You'll Go, which is maybe not the most sophisticated literature out there, but I think is a really nice contextual book on the journey is the ups and downs that people face in life. I think very much mimics the ups and downs that people face kind of in their startup journey as well. So I'd love to kind of give that as a contextual way to both celebrate the moment of someone joining our team and also give context that probably be a roller coaster and an opportunity for us to kind of go through the highs and lows together. So that's something that's kind of permeated through the B12 culture as the first thing you see on the first day when you arrive at work.”

    2016-12-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How AI Can Enhance Not Replace Humans? What Will Differentiate Between The Winners & The Losers In AI? Why AGI Is Further Away Than We Think with Nitesh Banta, Founder & CEO @ B12 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I'm not sure if I'm as smart as folks like Ray Kurzwell to give an exact date, but I would guess probably in the most optimistic case in the 2040s or 50s.”

    2016-12-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How AI Can Enhance Not Replace Humans? What Will Differentiate Between The Winners & The Losers In AI? Why AGI Is Further Away Than We Think with Nitesh Banta, Founder & CEO @ B12 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Of software that you need to build something as complex and dynamic as a person. And then I'm firmly a believer in exponential growth and technology. So I feel like once you get to AGI and you're able to have machines that can operate 20%.”

    2016-12-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How AI Can Enhance Not Replace Humans? What Will Differentiate Between The Winners & The Losers In AI? Why AGI Is Further Away Than We Think with Nitesh Banta, Founder & CEO @ B12 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I think you already see instances we're firmly in the ANI phase. You see lots of instances where things are self-sufficient. And I think this is a really exciting phase because there are lots of narrow things like driverless cars as an example or other areas that are going to change the way that we work and live together. So I feel like we're firmly in that space right now. And I think this phase will continue for, in my eyes, decades. So I think there's lots of opportunity for startups to continue building and operating in the space right now. If I were to think about AGI, the most optimistic people, the Ray Kurzwalls of the world and others put a time frame of 2030s, 2040s as being the earliest instances of when that type of technology could exist. I feel like that would be on the very early end. And, you know, we might still be hundreds of years away from ultimately creating machines that are broadly as smart as people. I actually don't think the limitation will be compute power, but the limitation will more be around the time.”

    2016-12-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How AI Can Enhance Not Replace Humans? What Will Differentiate Between The Winners & The Losers In AI? Why AGI Is Further Away Than We Think with Nitesh Banta, Founder & CEO @ B12 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Service like B12, you get access to the expertise in a semi automated way. And so you can have a real digital presence that allows your, enables your business to thrive online in a way that it might have not been able to have done in the past. And in terms of work models, I feel like the traditional nine to five work model is one where a lot of people don't necessarily feel a ton of satisfaction. And the amazing thing around AI and a human assist AI model is that you can take away a lot of the grunt work associated with our day-to-day tasks. I don't think in the near term you're going to have a machine fully replaced the way venture investors work, fully replace the way startup founders work, podcast producers or marketers. There's just too much complexity, but there are lots of things that we do in our day-to-day work that are probably better suited for machine. And if they went away, none of us would really complain about it. And I think those are the interesting opportunities that we look for in B12, which is how do we leverage this type of technology to give people better starting points and automate.”

    2016-12-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How AI Can Enhance Not Replace Humans? What Will Differentiate Between The Winners & The Losers In AI? Why AGI Is Further Away Than We Think with Nitesh Banta, Founder & CEO @ B12 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Yeah, so in our case, we're focused on B2B products and services, and we focus after, we go after the small to mid-sized business segment. So if you're a mid-sized business, there's a lot of things that an average midsize or small business owner probably has a checklist of dozens of things that they would love to get done and they either don't have the personnel to do it. It can be cost prohibitive or it's just too complicated. And by having kind of an easier way to get access to these services or products, we think ultimately they'll be able to do things that might have felt out of reach in the past. And an example of that would be our product with websites. So the average mid-sized business probably doesn't have an online presence or website that's really doing them a lot of favors online. Most businesses don't feel like they're necessarily winning online with their digital presence. Part of it is it can be really hard to find good expertise around the space. It's really time intensive to manage on your own. There's a lot of specialized skill set from design to digital marketing that you have to understand.”

    2016-12-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How AI Can Enhance Not Replace Humans? What Will Differentiate Between The Winners & The Losers In AI? Why AGI Is Further Away Than We Think with Nitesh Banta, Founder & CEO @ B12 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “That just are cost prohibitive in the way that services and products work right now. And so I'm really optimistic that if you have companies with the right sides of values where a fairly value-driven company at B12 or a 1% company, a B-corp, that you can actually use this moment in time when there's a lot of change happening to build a brighter future for the way that people work and the way that people live.”

    2016-12-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How AI Can Enhance Not Replace Humans? What Will Differentiate Between The Winners & The Losers In AI? Why AGI Is Further Away Than We Think with Nitesh Banta, Founder & CEO @ B12 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Yeah, so I think people are very right to be focusing on just the implications of things like AI. And I'm very happy that they're groups like OpenAI. Some of those individuals are investors in our company, thinking about the longer-term implications of general AI and even some of the shorter-term implications when you have things like self-driving cars making decisions that we're used to humans making. I think it's very easy to overstate kind of the implications in the near term, but there's certainly a lot of things happening that are going to alter the way that we work, alter the way that we live, alter the way that we interact with one another. I'm generally bullish for a couple of reasons. The first being you can't really play defense against technology. So whether or not we're scared or gloomy about it, this type of innovation is happening. So we should make the best of it. And second of all, there are lots of things in the world that could be better. People don't necessarily love all aspects of the way that they work right now. There's a lot of services that we would love to make available to a broader set of the population.”

    2016-12-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How AI Can Enhance Not Replace Humans? What Will Differentiate Between The Winners & The Losers In AI? Why AGI Is Further Away Than We Think with Nitesh Banta, Founder & CEO @ B12 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “So, I think the way that we often think about things is before you start out and build out really fancy technology and tooling and algorithms, we want to really make sure we internalize workflows ourselves. So with our first product, the first thing we did is just really understand how exactly the website and web design process worked. We did things on our own and just were able to create very simple rules around how we wanted things to work from a machine output perspective. And then as we start to get more and more scale, we're able to use a network of experts that we have to think about ways to get very specialized data sets specific to web design. And so a lot of it is, I think first just understanding the end output that you're trying to get to and then thinking about how do you collect data from actual human and person usage that can make the experience better.”

    2016-12-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How AI Can Enhance Not Replace Humans? What Will Differentiate Between The Winners & The Losers In AI? Why AGI Is Further Away Than We Think with Nitesh Banta, Founder & CEO @ B12 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “I think it really depends on the particular space or application, but it certainly is true that a lot of the data that bigger companies have captured or will capture may or may not be the types of things that actually create the product experiences that startups build or technology companies build and that consumers ultimately love. So I think there is an ability to do interesting things around creating proprietary and unique data sets that are way more applicable to the types of products that we want to build. In a lot of cases, collecting that data can be quite messy, you know, that you use actual people to train an algorithm or use actual people to collect very unique and specific data and whether you're a big company or a small company that can be challenging and often as a small company it's a little bit easier because you don't have the reputation risk and or the challenges that a bigger company might have around organizing a cohort of people that in their world is very small but in a startup world could be a very important group of people to take care of and treat well.”

    2016-12-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How AI Can Enhance Not Replace Humans? What Will Differentiate Between The Winners & The Losers In AI? Why AGI Is Further Away Than We Think with Nitesh Banta, Founder & CEO @ B12 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Unique data sets that do interesting things on top of some of these machine learning algorithms. And so, for example, with our service at B12, one of the first applications we built on top of Orchestra is a human-assisted AI way to build, manage, and optimize your website. There's a ton of open data around websites that companies like Google and us and others are able to get access to, but we're building kind of very unique data around how people interact with machine output and feeding that back into the way that we build our product. And that's data that historically people wouldn't have had to.”

    2016-12-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How AI Can Enhance Not Replace Humans? What Will Differentiate Between The Winners & The Losers In AI? Why AGI Is Further Away Than We Think with Nitesh Banta, Founder & CEO @ B12 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “So, I think it's certainly true that the big companies have aggregated massive amounts of machine learning and machine learning research capabilities. And one of the really nice things is that a lot of these companies are open sourcing and democratizing these services. So things like TensorFlow from Google. And the result is, you know, when we recruit engineers, I mean, even an out-of-school engineer can do something now that Oly specialists could have done a few years ago. So I feel like there is definitely a democratization happening around some of the specialized machine learning services, which I think is a really great thing for the ecosystem because it enables startups and companies to create real applications. There probably are some startups that will do breakthrough machine learning research and intelligence, but I see a lot of them getting scooped up by big companies right now. And it's, I think, very hard to compete against all the resource and horsepower that these big companies are putting into research. And the fact that they're willing to democratize an open source, these types of tools. One of the areas where I feel like startups can have a distinct advantage is”

    2016-12-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How AI Can Enhance Not Replace Humans? What Will Differentiate Between The Winners & The Losers In AI? Why AGI Is Further Away Than We Think with Nitesh Banta, Founder & CEO @ B12 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Or not put the forefront. And in certain cases, those people aren't going anywhere anytime soon if you want to create the type of experience I think consumers want.”

    2016-12-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How AI Can Enhance Not Replace Humans? What Will Differentiate Between The Winners & The Losers In AI? Why AGI Is Further Away Than We Think with Nitesh Banta, Founder & CEO @ B12 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “I feel like a lot of companies are able to get to 80, 90, 95% automation. But the challenge is most people don't care about, you know, if you could get a driverless car that could drive well 85% of the time, that's not particularly useful because that's still too dangerous or inconsistent experience. I think it's really going from like 90 to 95 to 99 to 100% is where a lot of the work is. And in certain areas where we've bitten off experiences or want to use AI, it's unclear whether you can ultimately get there, which is why at B12 we're going after kind of what we call human assisted AI, where we always think people will be in the loop. And as there's more technology, more capabilities, more compute power, we'll figure out ways in which automation can play a role. But it doesn't necessarily require us to 100% automate the complex workflows that we go after. And I think each startup is different in a lot of cases, there are people behind the machine that are mad.”

    2016-12-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How AI Can Enhance Not Replace Humans? What Will Differentiate Between The Winners & The Losers In AI? Why AGI Is Further Away Than We Think with Nitesh Banta, Founder & CEO @ B12 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “We open source this tool called Orchestra, which is a human machine based workflow system. And it stitches together narrow pieces of AI with people. So you can start to have really dynamic and complex experiences using the technology that we have here or now. And so I think part of it is just like an expectation setting. And then also, I feel like narrow AI or weak AI, as it's called, needs a rebrand because I think the implications will be anything but narrow, but we start to feel like that's limited and so different from what our expectations are. And I'm really excited about the ways in which Narrow AI in the next five to 10 to 20 years will make a massive difference in the way that we work and the way that we live.”

    2016-12-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How AI Can Enhance Not Replace Humans? What Will Differentiate Between The Winners & The Losers In AI? Why AGI Is Further Away Than We Think with Nitesh Banta, Founder & CEO @ B12 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Which ultimately leads to disappointment with users, it's some of the things you see with some of the bots that are emerging right now. And I think realistically, it would be amazing if we got to a point where we were able to create machines that could perform broad human level tasks. But even with narrow AI, which is kind of what we're firmly in right now, where machines can do very narrow things explicitly well, there's a lot of amazing and fantastic things that you can do. For example, if I was creating a narrow AI, I named it Harry and asked it to host a podcast. It would not do as good a job as you would do because there's a lot of things that you do as a person that's multidimensional. Then a machine just can't do right now. And so I think my thought process around it is I'm still obviously very bullish on the AI space. I venture to do something here, but I think part of it is just being realistic and excited about the things that narrow AI can do. For example, self-driving cars are an example of narrow AI and has massive implications. One of the things that we're doing at B12.”

    2016-12-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How AI Can Enhance Not Replace Humans? What Will Differentiate Between The Winners & The Losers In AI? Why AGI Is Further Away Than We Think with Nitesh Banta, Founder & CEO @ B12 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “So, I think one of the really nice things about AI as an industry is that it's so quickly inspires folks because it's very easy to think about the ways in which intelligent machines can do very interesting things for people. And it's been the narrative around sci-fi for decades now. But I think it can also be a little bit dangerous for startups to kind of like sell the dream a little bit too hard. Because if you look at where we are from a technology perspective and even look at the most optimistic individuals in the field, there's still a long way to go before we could get to a point where a machine can do all the things that Bill can do. And so I think a lot of startups often go out or technology companies go out and feign this experience that I'm building this machine or AI that's going to be able to operate just like a person. And I think one of the challenges there is that you start to create an experience that's either unsustainable because you need people to kind of make it true or you set kind of unrealistic expectations with you.”

    2016-12-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How AI Can Enhance Not Replace Humans? What Will Differentiate Between The Winners & The Losers In AI? Why AGI Is Further Away Than We Think with Nitesh Banta, Founder & CEO @ B12 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “I mean, the world was so different even when I graduated from college. And Always had this idea that I would go out. Little bit and I With general catalysts, focus on Business software To Harder you get comfortable, you start to feel like. I was able to”

    2016-12-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How AI Can Enhance Not Replace Humans? What Will Differentiate Between The Winners & The Losers In AI? Why AGI Is Further Away Than We Think with Nitesh Banta, Founder & CEO @ B12 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Grew up in San Francisco, Connecticut. I was very lucky to be one of the first folks from my high school to go to Harvard. I always loved computers and technology, but really was not that exposed to startups and the tech community. I had to think about getting a job. Work and I was lucky to Under Cheryl Sandberg's group. And I just got exposed to startups and tech and the Valley culture. And I just fell in love with it. So when I went back to school my senior year, I started what I at that time called my first company, which is a little bit more for project, which is a website to help teachers find. Exposed to this idea of building something for customers, getting a sense. And I just fell in love with I've just been kind of obsessed with tech and After I graduated, I spent a short amount of Of the first In the valley. It was really”

    2016-12-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How AI Can Enhance Not Replace Humans? What Will Differentiate Between The Winners & The Losers In AI? Why AGI Is Further Away Than We Think with Nitesh Banta, Founder & CEO @ B12 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source