Brylan Donaldson, Northwestern University’s associate director of innovation and new ventures, is on the cutting edge of AI technology and all its possibilities. He was a featured speaker at rolling out’s RIDE Conference in February, but the wisdom of his words lingers on.
He spoke with rolling out managing editor Darryl Maxie about AI’s potential and how we can best position ourselves to take advantage of it.
Darryl Maxie: We have a very special guest with us today; [he] just got off the stage from making a presentation, a young man by the name of Mr. Brylan Donaldson from Northwestern University, where he’s the associate director of innovation and new ventures. And the whole theme about this conference has dealt with AI and its burgeoning importance to us. … Can you speak to that a little bit and talk about why it is so important for us to be a part of this discussion?
A paradigm shift on the way
Brylan Donaldson: Yeah. I think we’re on the verge of a paradigm shift in terms of like, how we’re going to be thinking about our world, and more importantly, what does it even mean to be human in that world? … But for the folks watching, now is the time to just become curious about AI and really remain a skeptic. And what I mean by that is trust that no one has all the answers and that the answers are still to be discovered and you can be one of the people that discovers what this technology can do.
DM: Okay, We’re still kind of in the nascent stages of this. And, to me, it looks like the world of AI is kind of a wild, wild west kind of thing. Let’s go a little deeper into why math is so important.
BD: Yeah. And so, kind of what I alluded to, during my presentation was that we’re moving to a future where if AI can, you know, write copy just as good as a human being, and if AI has the capability of being able to do this complex math just as good as any human being, what does it look like for, you know, human beings to start to engage with computers? And kind of the two things that I hit on was like English and math are going to be the only things that you need. … That just comes back to your ability to really ask really good questions. And so that’s where the English piece comes in.
On the math front, you have to understand essentially what these large language models in AI are built upon is basic statistics. And so, the statistics that you learn in elementary, middle school, high school — mean, median, mode — like that is the underlying math that, literally, these AIs are doing; they’re just doing it at a vast scale on a lot of data and a lot of [computing].
How does a beginner begin?
DM: Now, for somebody who is a complete neophyte, complete beginner in this, and has heard what you said, and it has sparked something within them, but they don’t know where the first step is, what’s the first step? And then furthermore, how can they connect with you or others that might point them in the [right] direction? Who should they be looking at to assist them?
BD: I would say the first step is to feed your curiosity before going anywhere, in like, talking to anyone specific. I’m a big believer that like you need to explore before you exploit. You can’t exploit a land that you haven’t explored and, you know … like formed your own perspective on. And so the first thing I would do if I was a beginner, I would go to Perplexity AI. And the reason why I’m saying Perplexity AI is because it’s literally built to send you down rabbit holes. And it does a great job of even offering like recommended follow-up questions, just based off the questions that you asked. So, like, it may propose something that you didn’t even consider, right? So that’s step one.
From there, start to pick apart, like which pieces of AI start to emerge. So, you might, you know, be like, “Man, I want to go deeper into like the video AI, right, just because I’m a video creator.” Or maybe you want to go deeper into the audio side of things, because you want to see how you can apply that as artists. Choose one of those and just continue to go deeper. Once you do that, you’ll probably start to find a lot of people, products, ideas — those are the three things as you are doing your research, you want to hone in on and start to just kind of map. Once you have that, I think you’ll probably have a good enough perspective. And I’m not going to sit here and say like, you’ll know everything. But you will probably be aware of what you don’t know. That’s where you can reach out to like folks like me.
I don’t have social media. I’m on LinkedIn, though. And it’s Brylan Donaldson. So, B-R-Y-L-A-N-D-O-N-A-L-D-S-O-N. You can find me on LinkedIn. And then also I’ll share my information. So, you can also book time with me, as well. I’m an open book, but those would be the steps that I would take.
