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Workera's CEO Was Mentored By Andrew Ng. Now He Wants An AI Agent To ...

Kian Katanforoosh has one of the best mentors in the AI world: renowned researcher Andrew Ng, who also served as his graduate school advisor at Stanford. The two went on to create Stanford's deep learning program, and now Ng serves as chairman of Katanforoosh's startup, Workera. Ng has been a meaningful guide in Katanforoosh's career, but now the Workera CEO is trying to break down what it means to be a good mentor, and automate it through a new AI agent, Sage.

"I trust Andrew because I understand his background and expertise, but how many Andrews are there in the world? Not that many," said Katanforoosh in an interview. "So automating this mentorship aspect was critical."

On Tuesday, Workera announced Sage, an AI agent you can talk with that's designed to assess an employee's skill level, goals, and needs. After taking some short tests, Workera claims Sage will accurately gauge how proficient someone is at a certain skill. Then, Sage can recommend the appropriate online courses through Coursera, Workday, or other learning platform partners. Through chatting with Sage, Workera is designed to meet employees where they are, testing their skills in writing, machine learning, or math, and giving them a path to improve.

A screenshot of Sage.

To be clear, Workera's definition of "mentor" is a hyper-specific one; Katanforoosh acknowledges that Sage will not do everything Ng did for him. Encouragement, career guidance, and networking are hard to automate. But Sage can somewhat objectively assess an employee's skillset, and recommend the right courses to help achieve their goals. While that's not a perfect mentor, it's better than some have access to.

As the son of Iranian immigrants, Katanforoosh's parents were forced to flee their home country during the unstable 1970s, abandoning their studies in the process. His father left a science degree behind and ended up selling clothes in France to make a living. While today's Workera largely serves Fortune 500 employees, Katanforoosh believes that making assessment skills more available could one day help people in his parents' situation.

People are craving mentorship today more than ever. In the era of remote work, young employees receive less face time with experienced colleagues, meaning less chances to catch some nuggets of wisdom by the water cooler. The CEO of Workera thinks the company's new AI agent is up to the task.

Sage will roll out to early access customers as of November 2024, including defense technology provider Booz Allen. Other Workera customers, including the U.S. Air Force and Accenture, will get general access to Sage in March 2025.

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Workera has raised more than $44 million to administer AI-generated tests for enterprise employees, offering employers a way to gauge their employees' skillsets. Employees typically don't jump at the chance to be compared to their coworkers, but Workera tries to offer a way for businesses to invest in their employees as well.

An employers perspective using Sage.

Sage does the same thing, but offers a more conversational experience that ties together the Workera platform more neatly. The flexibility of OpenAI's multimodal models, which Workera uses, also offers a flexible interface that's capable of scaling to drastically more tasks in various mediums. Indeed, 95% of Sage's interactions are

With Sage, Workera is claiming to become a mentor for workers, instead of just an administer of skill assessments. A human mentor offers emotional support, encouragement, and connections that an AI chatbot likely never could. However, in some aspects of mentorships, Katanforoosh thinks Sage can be better.

Sage provides benchmarks to mark progress on various skills.

"A good mentor needs to assess properly, because unless the mentor can assess accurately, it cannot help you... That's one that can be automated," said Katanforoosh. "In fact, I'm pretty confident measurement systems we have today are better than most people; I would trust the Workera system much more than I trust myself at measuring someone's machine learning skills."

Another aspect to this is that humans are biased and highly influenced by superficial traits, so they may not always make accurate assessments of someone's talent. AI systems are not perfect either, for the record, and contain many of the same biases as the humans that created them. After all, AI models are mostly based on human-generated data.

But the biases of AI models may have a more promising solution than that of humans. Katanforoosh teaches a course at Stanford which covers bias mitigation methods in AI. He firmly believes there are ways to reduce bias underlying an AI model's data with algorithms. These can weight gender, race, or other considerations in a different way, making the outputs of AI models more equitable.

"I actually feel very confident that AI is already much less biased, but will be even less biased than humans in the coming years," said Workera's CEO.

By automating these tasks, Katanforoosh says managers can be freed up to manage the human aspects of mentorship that AI can't automate. Human managers still need to encourage and guide their employees, among other things that AI mentors are still limited in doing.

One thing Sage does not do yet is teach long-form content. For that, Workera relies on partners in the online learning space. However, Sage will identify skills you might be able to learn quickly, and generate a brief scenario and question to test your understanding.

I would argue Workera is stretching the word "mentor" here, and somewhat is using its own definition. That said, Sage may be a useful agent that managers can add to their tool belt to help assess and invest in their workforce.

Amazon Adds Andrew Ng, A Leading Voice In Artificial ... - News4JAX

Amazon is adding artificial intelligence visionary Andrew Ng to its board of directors, a move that comes amid intense AI competition among startups and big technology companies.

The Seattle company said Thursday that Ng, a managing director at the Palo Alto, California-based AI Fund, will replace a seat vacated by Judy McGrath, a former CEO of MTV who told Amazon she won't run for reelection.

Ng's AI Fund, which he founded in 2017, invests in entrepreneurs building artificial intelligence companies. Previously, he led AI teams at the Chinese tech company Baidu and Google, where the team he oversaw taught a computer system to recognize cats in YouTube videos without ever being taught what a cat was.

Ng's addition to the board comes as Amazon, like other tech companies, makes massive investments in generative artificial intelligence. The company has invested $4 billion in the San Francisco-based startup Anthropic, which is partnering with Amazon to develop so-called foundation models that underpin generative AI technologies. In the past year, Amazon also rolled out a chatbot for businesses called Q and a generative-AI powered shopping assistant named Rufus.

In an annual shareholder letter released Thursday, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy suggested generative AI could be the next big pillar of Amazon's business, joining the company's prominent online marketplace, Prime subscription program and its cloud computing unit, AWS. Jassy wrote that generative AI may be the largest technological transformation since cloud computing, and "perhaps since the internet."

Meanwhile, other Amazon innovations have encountered some hiccups. The company said last week it was pulling its Just Walk Out technology from Amazon Fresh stores in the U.S. After receiving some customer feedback. Amazon said it was replacing the technology, which allows customers to skip the checkout line, with smart carts that would allow them still to do that but also see their spending in real time.

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Want To Learn Vibe Coding? Andrew Ng Has A Course For That.

Andrew Ng has a new course on vibe coding.ANTHONY WALLACE/AFP via Getty Images

Andrew Ng has launched a course teaching vibe coding, the latest Silicon Valley craze.

The Stanford professor has introduced a "vibe coding 101" course with AI company Replit.

Ng said that asking AI tools to do "everything in one shot usually does not work."

Want to get into vibe coding? There's a course now that teaches you how.

Andrew Ng, the Stanford professor and former Google Brain scientist, has launched a "Vibe Coding 101" short course for newbies who want to learn how to use generative AI tools to write and manage code.

Vibe coding, a term coined in February by OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy, describes how software development is being increasingly automated by AI agents that are given prompts by humans.

Seasoned software engineers are using AI to speed up their work, but it's also attracting people without much coding experience.

Ng, a computer science veteran, wrote on X that while he believes coding agents are "changing how we write code," making vibe coding work in practice takes a bit of work.

"Contrary to popular belief, effectively coding this way isn't done by just prompting, accepting all recommendations, and hoping for the best," he wrote, noting that using AI to write effective code requires a more refined process.

He said that he codes "frequently" using large language models, or LLMs, adding that "asking an LLM to do everything in one shot usually does not work."

It's why Ng's course — a 94-minute video series built in collaboration with AI agent company Replit — aims to give participants a beginner's look at how AI tools can be used most effectively to vibe code.

Ng said the course, taught by Replit president Michele Catasta and the head of its developer relations, Matt Palmer, would teach aspiring vibe coders how to build and deploy web applications with an AI agent.

Ng added that key principles would be taught to accomplish this, such as "giving agents one task at a time, making prompts specific," and offering a clear sense of how to approach debugging — the process developers go through to identify mistakes in their code.

Other course elements include teaching participants how an AI tool like Replit can be used to automate key portions of the software development process, such as building a prototype of an app or tool.

"By the end of this course, you'll have a solid foundation in building with coding agents, and a process you can use to keep vibe coding effectively," Ng said.

Read the original article on Business Insider

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