Arms Race

Everyone is talking about AI today. But this generative AI boom didn’t happen overnight. In this episode, co-hosts Pete Housley and Unbounce Vice President of Growth Marketing Alex Nazarevich welcome special guest Harold Price Professor of Entrepreneurship and Technology at NYU’s Stern School of Business, Arun Sundararajan. Together, they’re exploring the history of the secret arms race that’s been raging in Silicon Valley for the past decade—and what might come next. Is there an end goal? What effect will deepfakes and other AI-generated content have on the coming election? How should marketers be adjusting their workflow to rise to the AI occasion? We’re answering these questions and more on this episode of Unprompted. So tune in to get caught up on the history of AI, and to prepare for what’s on the horizon.

Meet The Unprompted Crew

Pete Housley is host extraordinaire and CMO at Unbounce. His co-host this episode is Unbounce’s Vice President of Growth Marketing Alex Nazarevich. This episode also features Harold Price Professor of Entrepreneurship and Technology at NYU’s Stern School of Business, Arun Sundararajan. Arun’s best-selling and award-winning book, “The Sharing Economy,” was published by the MIT Press in 2016. His research studies how digital technologies transform business, government and civil society. His current focus is on the future of capitalism, artificial intelligence and platform-enabled change, antitrust policy in tech, and the digital future of work. Arun has been a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Councils on Technology, Values and Policy and the New Economic Agenda. He is an advisor to numerous organizations and works with tech companies on issues of strategy, litigation and regulation.

Key Quotes

*”Yes, [AI is] technologically fascinating, but there's a very important need for human beings to pay attention to what has been created because it's not like it's coming from some preexisting source. It is actually being created on the fly.” - Arun Sundararajan

*”We are fundamentally changing through generative AI how we as humans get information…Generative AI is taking us into this uncharted territory where you have an expert on demand who is working it out for you on the fly and giving you that information. It's not like a search engine where it's giving you someone else's pre-created information. It's almost like a third form of getting information in a very fundamental way.” - Arun Sundararajan

*”People who are looking for [AI] to give you the exact answer are using it wrong. What we should be doing, at least in part with ChatGPT and with other large language model-based systems, is using them to come up with things that we might not have thought of, and then bring the humans into the loop to take the good ideas to completion.” - Arun Sundararajan

*“Today, we are not sharing music. We're sharing musicians. We're not downloading art, we're downloading artists. And so it's sort of a scary moment where we have to decide as human beings how much of our intelligence do we wanna claim for ourselves, and how much of it do we wanna just cede to this collective intelligence that is generative AI.” - Arun Sundararajan

*”Part of the reason why there's a lot of conversation around the need to slow down AI research and the risks of AI is that the race is happening without a clear objective…We don't know what the eventual use of these AI systems will be. Once there's a demonstration that the successor to generative AI can actually make a dent in curing incurable diseases, in developing new drugs, in addressing climate change, that's when the value of the innovation is going to become clearer.” - Arun Sundararajan

Time Stamps

[2:34] Introducing co-host Alex Nazare