An Interview with Keen Venture Partners Investor Jack Wang

We spoke to Jack Wang, Investor at Keen Venture Partners ahead of his presentation (19th November 2020) at Inspired AI, the series of 10 cutting-edge and CPD Accredited business, science, tech and networking online events gathering the global AI community and hosted by world-leading AI experts #withoutborders running from September to November 2020.

So Jack, if you could solve any global problem in the world with AI, what would it be?

Fake news!, social media platforms are having a difficult enough time to battle text based fake news which have long term and significant impacts on the world we live in. Image when we have fake audio and visual (deep fake videos) news in mainstream social media. Facebook have a difficult job ahead of them…

Presuming that was solved, what would your second choice be?

Climate change - nothing matters if we don’t have a planet.

What do you see as the 3 most important things for businesses in relation to AI at the moment?

Adoption. Specifically, the willingness, cost and regulations / social impacts around adopting AI in daily operations for businesses. Same with technology advancements in the past, the early adopters are usually those with the biggest deltas i.e. financial services, defence etc. Usually, they are also the least cost sensitive (due to high upside) which in time brings down the cost of adoption of new technology for other lagging industries. Industries are also regulated differently as they make different social impacts e.g. automation of manufacturing, insurance, energy etc. so governments need to understand social-economic impacts during the gradual adoption of AI in businesses. Nevertheless, the process will not be very different than how industries adopted cloud native.

What do you see as the 3 most important things for humanity in relation to AI at the moment?

Firstly, do not fear it – bundles of non-linear regressions are still very far behind general artificial intelligence (and Skynet). Secondly and of the same token, don’t overestimate AI - GTP-3 is powerful but it is still trained on historical data and generates content based on previously (but extensively) trained weights. Lastly, dare to dream – with the consistent improvement in scalable computation power we will be able to train and deploy more complex machine learning models that were not cost effective before.

How do you think AI will make its biggest mark in business/on humanity/the world in the next 5 years? 10 years? 20 years?

Most of the “leap” will be from unsupervised learning. For the most part “AI” we interact with today is based on decisioning for structured data. There are more potential in unsupervised learning where machine learning models trains itself to optimise a certain task e.g. AlphaGo but beyond a strict rule bound game that we would interact with every day, potentially without even knowing.

A lot of the infrastructure over the last decade (big data) and over the next decade (big compute) have / will enable unsupervised learning to go mainstream beyond board games and video games.

What’s the “coolest”/ most “wow-factor" thing you’ve seen so far in with the use of AI in the sector you work in?

Unity and DeepMind does some pretty cool research projects together with unsupervised multi-agent simulations – the videos are also very entertaining

What’s your biggest fear in relation to the application of AI?

“With great power comes great responsibility” – Uncle Ben. Basically, that someone might use it for malicious intents and our law enforcement can’t keep up with the technology for a while.

How do you think AI will cause human contact to change in the future?

Best guess– human to human interaction won’t change, but a lot of non-social daily tasks will be self-service some kind of an interface to AI with voice being the beginning (already happening).

Who do you admire most in the world of AI in terms of their work?

Karl Friston and his free energy principal. From what I understand (nowhere near all of it), I do think it could be the theory that could advance machine learning beyond “trying to mimic neurons”. Also, always a fan of Andrew Ng.

Why did you choose to present at Inspired AI this year?

Great event with the best minds in AI gathering every year, why not?

What are your personal goals from the event?

Learn more and of course find amazing start-ups.

What are you most excited about at Inspired AI ?

Able to listen to all the highly intellectual speakers that I normally would never get to meet!

Join Jack and the global AI community at Inspired AI (Sept-Nov 2020) to tackle head-on the most burning AI issues and set the global AI agenda. inspired-minds.co.uk/inspired-ai

With❤️

Team WSAI @ Inspired AI (Sarah, Vidya, Kate, Claire, Sherrie, Stella, Celine, Fiona, Rux, Saima and Eve)

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