Casey Corvino Of Lavender On The Future Of Artificial Intelligence
An Interview With David Leichner
Bias and discrimination: AI systems can perpetuate existing biases and discrimination when trained on biased data or when designed without considering ethical and social implications. Although OpenAI has built bias detection into the product, this is still prevalent and does occur.
As a part of our series about the future of Artificial Intelligence, I had the pleasure of interviewing Casey Corvino.
Casey is the CTO and co-founder of Lavender, where he is responsible for product and engineering. Lavender is an AI-powered sales email coaching platform with over 20k+ active users, including customers like Twilio, Sendoso, Clari, Sharebite, and thousands more.
An early adopter of large language models (like OpenAI’s Chat GPT), Casey takes a practical approach to applying newer and more trusted AI models to solving costly communication problems.
Before joining his cofounders, Casey was the CTO of an early-stage fashion PR automation startup after graduating from New York University in three years.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Can you share with us the ‘backstory” of how you decided to pursue this career path in AI?
I’m not an AI engineer. I’m a very product-focused engineer. That’s the beauty of where we are now, anyone can leverage the power of AI.
We’re at the point where the large language models (LLM) are so powerful that the business value isn’t from the underlying technology but from the application layer. The underlying technology has become a commodity.
What lessons can others learn from your story?
Just do it. With the democratization of LLMs really anyone can build amazing AI products.
In Lavender, for example, a lot of our generative AI roadblocks — sentence transformers and email generation, for example — no longer exist. It’s really enabled us to move a lot faster and focus on the core of our business — communication intelligence — all while having a very sophisticated suite of generative AI products.
Can you tell our readers about the most interesting projects you are working on now?
100% focused on Lavender — that’s my baby. We have some really cool projects we are working on at Lavender, really exciting ways we are going to leverage LLMs here, don’t want to give too much away.
But we’re really focused, as we have always been, on intelligence first. What that really means to us is maximizing outcomes. How can we most intelligently use generative AI to maximize outcomes for our users.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
Having my co-founders Will Allred and William Ballance in my corner has been amazing. I was coming straight from college, they took a chance on me, and I like to think that’s paid off. We’ve gotten pretty far together, and even though it’s felt like a long journey, it has really just begun.
I remember we were sitting in the NYU entrepreneur lab as Covid was starting to hit the world. It was having massive effects on the business we were building at the time. We knew we had to adapt or die and that’s what we did.
We all defaulted to action. We pivoted the business, then and there, together. Even then, we knew that we were building something with the potential to be massive and that giving up wasn’t an option. It was a big learning experience about perseverance, determination, and doing.
What are the 5 things that most excite you about the AI industry? Why?
I really want to focus on one: democratization. Because anyone can now build powerful AI applications, we are going to see so many amazing products come up. Every single industry will apply generative AI in some capacity — it is inevitable.
The democratization of AI opens new opportunities for innovation and growth. With the availability of AI tools and platforms, anyone with an idea and some coding skills can develop powerful AI applications that can transform their industry. This democratization is going to result in an explosion of amazing AI products that can solve a wide range of problems in different domains.
Generative AI, in particular, has a lot of potential to impact every sector, as it can produce realistic and complex outputs such as images, music, and text. With the help of generative AI, companies can automate tasks, optimize processes, and even create entirely new products and services that were previously impossible to imagine. We are already seeing examples of generative AI being used in industries such as finance, healthcare, and entertainment.
For instance, in the pharmaceutical industry, generative AI is being used to predict which drugs will work best for certain symptoms or diseases, improving patient outcomes and literally saving lives. In finance, generative AI is being used to analyze and predict market trends, helping investors make better decisions. In entertainment, generative AI is being used to generate music and art, creating new forms of content that were previously impossible.
Overall, the democratization of AI and the application of generative AI is transforming the world as we know it. It is inevitable that we will continue to see more and more amazing applications of AI in every sector, and it will change our lives in profound ways.
What are the 2 things that concern you about the AI industry? Why?
- Over trust: There is an inherent bias to trust the AI models. They lie a lot. Even on basic questions like “Who is the CEO of whatever company” it will confidently respond with the wrong person. Not only will it be wrong, but it will convince the user that it is right.
- Bias and discrimination: AI systems can perpetuate existing biases and discrimination when trained on biased data or when designed without considering ethical and social implications. Although OpenAI has built bias detection into the product, this is still prevalent and does occur.
- Job automation: With the increasing adoption of automation and AI, many jobs could become automated, which could lead to job displacement and economic disruption. This is why at Lavender we lean into a human-in-the-loop approach.
- Risk of misuse: AI systems could be misused for malicious purposes, such as spreading misinformation or conducting targeted attacks, posing a significant threat to our society. There have already been reports of hackers using GAI for phishing attacks.
- Relevancy: The leading LLMs take a long time to train and are based on data from over a year ago. The world changes fast and the data serviced by these LLMs is often outdated. This can very easily lead to misinformation.
As you know, there is an ongoing debate between prominent scientists, (personified as a debate between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg,) about whether advanced AI has the future potential to pose a danger to humanity. What is your position about this?
AI of course has that potential, but I think the industry as a whole has proven it doesn’t have to go in that direction. Specifically looking at Open AI, it can take the route of automating the human — or the route of assisting the human.
Our stance at Lavender has always been to create an awesome AI assistant. We don’t view generative AI as a tool to automate the human’s job, for reasons I’ve already discussed. And at its current state, generative AI is still really far from that.
My favorite example is simple arithmetic. Asking GPT4 “What is 1212.4 x 2.2132 + 3 -12371 * 92?” it returned -1134266.89632, and it even showed its work and broke out the problem. The correct answer is -1135445.71632. It’s close but it’s off by 1178.82.
Obviously, this will get better, but the immediate, six month, threat is not quite there.
What can be done to prevent such concerns from materializing? And what can be done to assure the public that there is nothing to be concerned about?
Again, I think Open AI is a good case study. They’ve really branded ChatGPT as an assistant as opposed to the competition.
They’ve also introduced AI text classifiers — which say whether or not a block of text was written by AI or not with really high accuracy. Taking steps like this shows they understand the public’s concern. Now it is up to companies to adopt this and put it into their products.
How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world? Can you share a story?
It’s been really amazing to see the positive impact Lavender has had on so many people. We’ve helped countless people become top performers, get promotions, save their job, or even get a new job.
We’ve always had a give-first mentality. Specifically, Lavender is always free for job seekers. We’ve found this especially necessary since looking for a job is a unique time when someone needs to write a lot of important emails but doesn’t usually write emails to search for work. Someone like an engineer who was just laid off and is now doing cold outbound to find their next job. This is a person that really doesn’t know what kind of emails are best, so we try and help as much as possible by providing our product for free.
As you know, there are not that many women in your industry. Can you advise what is needed to engage more women into the AI industry?
It’s been more important than ever to have women in the AI industry. Especially with the explosion of AI, women decision-makers are needed to identify and remediate gender biases in the models.
It’s been shown that having diverse perspectives and experiences on a team can help identify and correct these biases. Women, who are often underrepresented in the AI industry, can bring unique insights and perspectives to the table. By hiring more women decision-makers in the industry, we can increase the chances of identifying and remedying any gender biases that may exist in AI models.
However, simply hiring more women is not enough. It’s important to also create a culture of inclusivity and openness where everyone feels comfortable acknowledging and addressing biases. This can include regular training on unconscious bias, creating diverse teams, and encouraging open communication and collaboration.
What is your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share a story of how that had relevance to your own life?
“It’s not about how you fall; it’s about how you get back up.”
A bit of a generic one, but it’s a classic for a reason.
It’s been a long journey. A lot of highs and a lot of lows. We had to pivot our company during Covid, which ended up being the best thing that happened to us.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
I think we’re doing it. Baby steps, but the greater goal is to really make everyone more empathetic. Everyone is human, with their own experiences, both direct and indirect, that have made that person who they are. It’s really easy to forget that when you’re stuffed in a tiny subway car with a hundred people.
We really want to understand everyone’s story.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
My Linkedin is really the only place I’m active. You can also follow our company online at www.lavender.ai, on LinkedIn or @lavenderhq on Twitter.
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
About The Interviewer: David Leichner is a veteran of the Israeli high-tech industry with significant experience in the areas of cyber and security, enterprise software and communications. At Cybellum, a leading provider of Product Security Lifecycle Management, David is responsible for creating and executing the marketing strategy and managing the global marketing team that forms the foundation for Cybellum’s product and market penetration. Prior to Cybellum, David was CMO at SQream and VP Sales and Marketing at endpoint protection vendor, Cynet. David is the Chairman of the Friends of Israel and Member of the Board of Trustees of the Jerusalem Technology College. He holds a BA in Information Systems Management and an MBA in International Business from the City University of New York.