The Potential of Gen AI with Faizaan Charania from LinkedIn

I’m excited to share this conversation with Faizaan Charania. Faizaan is an AI product lead at LinkedIn. During this conversation, Faizzan discussed the potential of Generative AI and its applications, the importance of keeping GenAI solutions simple, and how to think about trust, transparency, and managing costs as a product manager working in Gen AI.LinksFaizaan On LinkedIn Transcript[00:00:00] Faizaan Charania: I love the analogy with cloud because cloud can make experimentation so easy. And you're just like trying to set up something new. Test it out. See, see if it works. Will I get product market fit? What are my users thinking about this feature? All of these things are also possible with GenAI. So for any PM who's thinking about GenAI, my recommendation would be test it out.  [00:00:24] Hima: I'm, Himakara Pieris. You're listening to smart products. A show where we, recognize, celebrate and learn from industry leaders who are solving real world problems. Using AI.[00:00:34]  [00:00:35] Himakara Pieris: My guest today is Faizan Charania. Faizan, welcome to the show.  [00:00:40] Faizaan Charania: Thank you so much for inviting me, Hima.  [00:00:43] Himakara Pieris: To start things off, could you tell us a bit about your background  [00:00:46] Faizaan Charania: Yes. I am a product manager at LinkedIn. My main focus is around machine learning and artificial intelligence.[00:00:53] Faizaan Charania: And obviously these days I've been looking into gen AI as well. I've been in the machine [00:01:00] learning field for around Eight, over eight years now started on the research side, worked with startups, uh, was a machine learning engineer for a bit. And then I switched to product management.  [00:01:12] Himakara Pieris: There is a lot of attention on generative AI at the moment. Could you tell me a bit about the way you see it? What is generative AI and how it's different from all the various other types of AI that we have seen so far?[00:01:24] Faizaan Charania: Yeah, definitely. There is so much hype around gen AI. Uh, one thing, uh, one code that I've heard multiple times is. Uh, this is like the iPhone moment or this is the desktop to mobile moment of technology again. To answer your second question around, uh, how is it different from all other kinds of AI?[00:01:46] Faizaan Charania: Because it's like so many things that we can qualify as AI, right? So a simple explanation that I try to go with is. Differentiate these two types of AIs, analytical AI and generative AI. [00:02:00] So analytical AI is where you, where you have some specific features or data points or like historical input, and you're trying to make one single decision based on that.[00:02:12] Faizaan Charania: So the decision can be, Hey, is this email spam or not spam, spam classifiers? It can be a ranking decision. So say you log into Facebook or Instagram or like any of these applications and what post should appear first? What should be first? What should be second? What should be third? And this is based on the text in the post, the images.[00:02:35] Faizaan Charania: It's based on what you like, what you don't like. So this is like a ranking problem. So ranking, decision making, all of these are a part of analytical AI and generative AI. As the name says, it's about taking, uh, generating new content. So if it's about post completion and everyone has heard about child GPD, so I'll just like [00:03:00] use that as one of the examples.[00:03:02] Faizaan Charania: Like, Hey, I asked you a question and give me a response in natural language format. So natural language generation is generative AI generating new images, images that did not exist before is generative AI. So like even for images, if you were to classify an image, Hey, is t