Tuesday Nov 07, 2023

017 Nate Yohannes| humanity grounds intelligence

NATE’S BIO

Nate’s journey started in Eritrea, a small country in the Horn of Africa where Tes, Nate’s remarkable dad, became a freedom fighter in the struggle for liberty who one day stepped into a landmine that cost him an eye. The family entered the United States under political asylum as refugees in upstate New York. Tes’ belief in democracy and the values of equality, self-autonomy and hard work were passed onto Nate. I saw this first hand, every day.

By the time the White House had sent me Nate’s profile, a lawyer with Wall Street chops, I had interviewed more than a dozen people for the coveted role I ended up hiring him for: Senior Advisor for programs that oversaw tens of billions in capital for high growth businesses and cutting edge technologies. Early capital from those programs were instrumental to companies like Apple, Intel, Genentech, Tesla, FedEx and Amgen - all tiny little startups early in their trajectories. Nate was certainly at the top of his (younger) game then, and that trajectory carries on at warp speed because what has come after serving our country is a dizzying blaze through the high stakes, high powered, multi-trillion dollar innovation economy at the cutting edge of two iconic American tech giants: Microsoft and Meta.

He is currently the Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (ML) Lead for Instagram creators, driving strategy to commercialize state-of-the-art AI technology for Content Understanding, using Large Language Models (LLM) for Meta's recommendation algorithm. Prior to his current role at Instagram, he was Product Leader for Foundational AI and ML for Facebook. Before that he was Director of AI Product Strategy at Microsoft’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer which among other things made the investment in OpenAI, the strategic partnership with Nvidia and attempted to acquire TikTok. Before that he held various product management roles in AI, Virtual and Augmented Reality, and business development for cloud computing.

He is a member of the Economic Club of New York and Advisory Board Member at NASDAQ’s Entrepreneurial Center.

“Democratizing technology is rooted in humanity”

"Leveraging human ingenuity through artificial intelligence"

EPISODE OUTLINE

(0:00) - Intro

(0:38) - Bio

(02:09) - Political refugee becomes White House appointee

(03:37) - Navigating and shaping AI; from Microsoft to Meta

(06:55) - Generative AI and the creator economy; Instagram, Hollywood, etc

(08:41) - The future of work is now; for knowledge workers and trades

(10:50) - Some thoughts on careers in tech; leadership, confidence, risk taking, empathy

(15:06) - AI to AGI to ASI reflection