All right. People have been looking forward to this panel. I just wanted to let you know. So, I don't want to add pressure, but people have been looking forward to this. Okay. How are you doing?
Fantastic. And you're doing well. Fantastic. So, between you, you've worked at some of the most leading companies. Some of you have founded a bunch of leading companies. So well done there. There's no shortage of craziness going on in the industry. So we're looking forward to hearing a little bit about your insights. I think what's super important is to just level set for everyone. So before I say anything else, you co-founded a little company called Cloudera. Is that correct?
And that went public, correct?
And then you went to work at Google and then you have now founded Vectara. Is that correct? How does it feel to feel so unaccomplished? How are you dealing with all of this failure?
There's still a lot more to do.
Okay, with that, let me hand it over to you to take it away. Nita, go ahead. Thanks.
Thank you. Hi everyone. Welcome. I think we stand between this conversation and a drink or sweets for you. So, we'll try to make this fun. I am honored to be on stage with Amr, a man who was educated at Cairo University where I had the pleasure of attending a class once upon a time. I can tell you more about it later. PhD from Stanford, also my alma mater, although mine is a lot easier to get into and do and takes a lot less years. Repeat entrepreneur, multiple successes already alluded to, Cloudera being one of the most recent ones. And then I was most curious about how from Cloudera you went to Google and took a dev relations job, which I'm sure was a critical role for Google Cloud. And then now an entrepreneur again.
Well, I can answer your question because people ask me that, like why did you not start another company right away after Cloudera? And the honest answer is it's because I need to rest. Starting companies is really, really stressful. It's not the hard part. Like I work really hard at Google, I also had to work very hard as well. It was a very hard job, but the stress level is very different when you are a founder of the company. You have this weight on your shoulders and this obligation to make it successful for your employees working for you, for your investors betting on you, for the partners you're working with, the customers that you're trying to make successful. And that weight on your shoulders can be very, very heavy and will be taxing on you. So you need to be ready for it. If you're not ready for it, you're not going to be able to persevere through the journey. So the honest answer is I wanted to rest for a bit.
Next time I see Sundar, I'll make sure. No, but seriously, with this illustrious background, given all the roles you've had and all the successes that you've had, tell us a little bit about Vectara and what brought you to this point and then how you see the world evolving given your background.
Yeah. So while I was working at Google, I joined Google in 2019 in Google Cloud, and at that time they actually had the very first version of this new technology that we all now know as LLMs or large language models. It was an amazing chatbot for the time called Mina, short for meaning. It comes from the word meaning. But I was thinking Mina for people that know Egyptian history. He's a very important person that unified upper and lower Egypt. But I learned later that was not the reason why they picked that name. It was because of the meaning and association. And that chatbot was just as good as ChatGPT that came out two years later. So Google literally had ChatGPT within their company two years before OpenAI. But they were very cautious about launching it for good reason. And that was the anchor that I latched on. So when I was trying to link Mina back to all of my experience working with big companies during Cloudera, the importance of accuracy and security was paramount. And it was very clear that these systems, while they are on average very good and very accurate, every now and then can make a really bad mistake that can end up killing somebody or creating unnecessary damage. That was number one. And number two, they are susceptible to security attacks. You can very easily fool them to reveal information to you. If you're good at what's called prompt engineering and doing prompt attacks or document injection attacks, you can get these things to give you information that you should not be privy to. And that became the light bulb that went on: if this technology is really going to be successful within enterprises, then these enterprises will need to have an agent operating system that can run these agents, orchestrate them, govern them, and make sure they are accurate and secure. And this is really what Vectara is about.
Fantastic. We know a little bit about how you got here. I'm curious to know how you think about where we are today, especially when it relates to AI and ethics. What do you see your role and Vectara's role in that conversation? And curious to know also who has influenced you most in the way that you think about AI and ethics.
I mean, we're still learning about AI ethics. So it's hard to pick a person that influenced me the most, but I'd say the person that influenced me the most in the world is Einstein. I think he influenced many of my generation to have somebody that will have that level of intellect and IQ that thinks just beyond outside of the box compared to anybody else living at the time. That gravity is not a force that's pulling things in like what Newton thought when he saw the apple falling. No, gravity is space-time itself bending. Like that is insane. How did he do that? How could his mind even go there? So that hunger for seeking the next level of understanding of things beyond what we think is the normal way of doing things is very inspirational to me, and that's where I drive a lot of what I try to work on and what I try to do. When it comes to AI and ethics, one of the key things is that ethics is in the eye of the beholder. We all have different ethical standards. Different countries have different ethical standards. Different religions have different ethical standards. Different companies have different ethical standards. So what we need to provide them is governance, meaning tools that control the AI in a way that aligns with the standards that they agree on. And they can choose the standard because the AI should not be the one picking the standard. It should be whoever is running it. They pick the standard that they think is the best for them. So at Vectara, as we work with different organizations deploying our agent operating system platform, that is one of the key capabilities that we provide to them: this governance layer that aligns the ethics and the bias and the way that the AI operates to what they consider to be the process that they want to deploy.
And as you talk to these different enterprises, do you find that they are concerned about ethics? How are they thinking about it? What has jumped out at you?
That's also a very good question. So, in general, humans, do we care about ethics or not? Some of us that have been raised well, we do, but many of us... I would say actually not the most. I think some, not most. That's my experience at least. And the way that you get most of us to align with ethics is to govern them in the same way that you govern the AI systems. So you need to have laws that say, 'Hey, if you drive your car beyond 65 on 101, we're going to give you a ticket. If you don't put your seat belt on, we're going to give you a ticket. If you drive without insurance, we're going to penalize you.' And that's how we get to align the humans to what the ethical standards that the community agreed on. It's the law. The law is how we really communicate that ethics because left to our own devices, unfortunately, we as humans are very fallible and we will go outside the boundaries that have been drawn for us whenever we think it's the right thing for ourselves.
Yeah. And especially in the race that we are in for AI and frankly how enterprises feel very nervous about whether they're doing enough, whether they are capable enough, whether they're falling behind or not. I was curious to know where ethics ranked in terms of their priorities.
