x.AI Founder Dennis Mortensen

EPISODE SUMMARY

Today’s guest, Dennis Mortensen, is a serial entrepreneur whose most recent venture (x.ai) focuses on teaching machines to schedule meetings. He shares with us what this challenging (and rewarding) journey looked like, and the valuable (and sometimes surprising) lessons he and his team learned. We also discuss giving empathy to machines, expectations, and how we can get more comfortable with imperfect progress.

EPISODE NOTES

Whether you’re building AI for self-driving cars or for scheduling meetings, it’s all about prediction! In this episode, we’re going to explore the complexity of teaching the human power of prediction to machines.

Key Points From This Episode:

• Dennis shares an overview of what he has spent his career focusing on.
• How Dennis defines an intelligent agent.
• The role of prediction in the AI space.
• Dennis explains the mission that drove his most recent entrepreneurial venture, x.ai (acquired by Bizzabo).
• Challenges of transferring humans’ capacity for prediction and empathy to machines.
• Some of Dennis’s key learnings from his time working on the technology for x.ai.
• Unrealistic expectations that humans have of machines.
• How we can teach humans to have empathy for machines.
• Dennis’s hope for the next generation in terms of their approach to AI.
• A lesson Dennis learned from his daughter about AI and about human nature.
• What Dennis is most excited about in the AI space.

Tweetables:“The whole umbrella of AI is really just one big prediction engine.” — @DennisMortensen “Language is not a solved science.” — @DennisMortensen “The expectation of a machine response is different to that of a human response to the same question.” — @DennisMortensen Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:Dennis Mortensen on LinkedInBizzabo