Lecture: Shaping AI’s Impact on Billions of Lives

Abstract: Co-authors Dave Patterson and Andy Konwinski (also joined by Pete Sonsini) discuss themes from "Shaping AI's Impact on Billions of Lives" (https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.02730). They will present a summary of the paper’s view, namely that we are still in the early days of practical AI, and that focused efforts by practitioners, policymakers, and other stakeholders can still maximize the upsides of AI and minimize its downsides. 

Bios: Andy Konwinski is a co-founder of Databricks, Perplexity, and Laude Ventures. His work stands at the intersection of research and real-world impact in artificial intelligence, data, and software infrastructure. At Databricks he ran AI Product and he continues to serve as President of Perplexity. He got his PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley, where he contributed to Apache Hadoop and co-created Apache Mesos and Apache Spark. He co-teaches the PhD seminar on “Research to Startups” at Berkeley.

Pete Sonsini is a venture capitalist, technologist, and co-founder of Laude Ventures. He partners with deeply technical founders at the earliest stages, with an investment portfolio that includes multiple pre-revenue startups that have since evolved into multi-billion dollar companies. He was previously a general partner at NEA, where he steered the firm’s software team for nearly two decades, leading early investments in Databricks, Anyscale, Instabase, Upstart, and Perplexity. He currently sits on multiple boards, including Databricks, Anyscale, and Perplexity.

Dave Patterson is a UC Berkeley Professor Emeritus, past president of ACM, past chair of CRA, and Google Distinguished Engineer. He shared the ACM A.M. Turing Award and the NAE Charles Draper Prize with John Hennessy.