Pradeep Menon, CTO at Microsoft’s corporate ventures division, demystifies ChatGPT and lets us in on a secret about AI and jobs

Today’s guest is the author of a popular Medium blog where he has recently been dissecting generative AI for technologists. I read his introduction to the transformer architecture and immediately realized our audience needs to meet him. A bit like great recent guest Ken Wenger, Pradeep makes complicated technology accessible. 

By day, Pradeep Menon is a CTO at Microsoft in the digital natives and corporate ventures division in Singapore. He has had one of the best ground floor views of generative AI since Microsoft first invested in OpenAI in 2019 and then again in March of this year.

Pradeep was previously in similar roles at Alibaba and IBM. He speaks frequently on topics related to emerging tech, data, and AI to global audiences and is a published author.

Listen and learn…

1. What surprises Pradeep most about the capabilities of LLMs 
2. What most people don't understand about how LLMs like GPT are trained 
3. The difference between prompting and fine-tuning 
4. Why ChatGPT performs so well as a coding co-pilot 
5. How RLHF works 
6. How Bing uses grounding to mitigate the impact of LLM hallucinations 
7. How Pradeep uses ChatGPT to improve his own productivity 
8. How we should regulate AI 
9. What new careers AI is creating 

References in this episode…

• Ken Wenger on AI and the Future of Work 
• Pradeep's book Data Lakehouse in Action
• D-ID speaking avatars