{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Leadership Sovereignty Podcast: Career Growth and Promotion","title":"He Studied AI in 1996: What Non-Technical Leaders Get Wrong About What AI Can Do","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":1434,"description":"What does someone who was studying artificial intelligence in 1996 see that the rest of us are missing?\nMeet Sai Prakash, CTO and co-founder of MindStaq, six years at Microsoft, and a Master of Science in Mathematics and Computer Science from Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Learning. Host Ralph E. Owens II and co-host Terry Baylor open a series of conversations with him here, starting with his story.\nIt begins in a small, free university in India, in an AI lab that existed only because a grant required it, on machines that would not, in his words, \"hold a candle to your iPhone.\" His class of 24 went on to Intel, Nvidia, Google, and DeepMind. Sai's read on the AI winter that followed: the ideas were sound, the hardware was too expensive, and when hardware finally caught up, software did not. \"We're stuck in these monopolistic definitions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel. I'm like, can we do better?\"\nHe grew up on Isaac Asimov and still carries two things from those books: that people were \"always central to that thesis,\" and a 1970s warning about \"a cult of anti intellectualism in America where one person's ignorance is as good as another's knowledge.\" His concern today: \"we've got this powerful technology, but we're not thinking hard enough about how it's used, how it's positioned.\"\nThat thinking became MindStaq. It started with a question, \"where's the Star Trek computer?\", a scene from The Matrix, and a Sanskrit word for consciousness. How those connect closes this episode and opens the next one.\n******************************\n🎯 WHAT YOU'LL LEARN IN THIS EPISODE\n  What an AI lab in India in 1996 looked like, and why it existed at all\n  Why the AI winter was a hardware and cost problem, not a failure of ideas\n  Where the 24 people in Sai's class ended up, and what that says about latent expertise\n  How Isaac Asimov's fiction shaped a working technologist's view of what AI is for\n  The Asimov warning about expertise that describes most meetings you sit in today\n ...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/HrtAHE3tIaxuHOQdgCfKGWhEfwHl0O5gNGoh7oEDgkY/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS8zNjVi/MDVlODYwMjRlZTZi/ZTk3MzZmNzA1ZmU1/NmEwZC5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}