The job has never really changed.
I go hands-on first. I learn a new technology deeply, figure out where it is headed, and carry what I find to CEOs and boards so they can move before the market does. The technology keeps changing. The discipline does not. Right now that technology is AI, and I am more convinced by it than by anything I have worked on before.
I went to MIT at sixteen to become an astronaut.
Two months into the Navy ROTC flight program, my eyesight washed me out. I was certain my life was over, the way a teenager is certain of things. Then I wandered into an open house at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and I fell in love. I spent the next four years there, teaching and building robots, and eventually earned a PhD in AI.
It took decades for that training to become the center of the story. It finally has. Everything I learned about approximation, computation, and learning machines turned out to be the foundation of the era we are now living through.
I have been in the room for four of these shifts.
I advised Lou Gerstner as IBM bet the company on the internet; that work grew into a $15B business. I was Chief Technology Advisor to Bob Moritz as PwC moved 6,000 partners and 160 territories to the cloud. I founded Google Cloud's Applied AI business and grew it across NASA, healthcare, and genomics into one of Cloud's fastest segments. I scaled Photobucket to 50 million users before it was acquired for $300M. Today, at Alphabet, I work on generative AI, where the same pattern is playing out in content and advertising.
The current chapter.
Today I lead a studio driving down the cost of generative video. Where that leads is the story on the home page, argued in full in the essay, and tracked daily in The Ledger.
Why I count.
All of it points at one thing.
My mother died of cancer at 57. Before she went, she made my brother and me promise to find a better way. He became an oncologist. I became the AI guy. The Approximation Era is how we finally keep the promise.
That promise is why I sit on the tumor board at Stanford Medicine, why I serve on the board of the Lustgarten Foundation for pancreatic cancer research, and why I started the AI Cancer Forum with my mentor Lee Hood.
