# Shea Brown Shea Brown (CEO of BABL AI and former astrophysics professor) was a guest on AI with Sach, a podcast hosted by Sacha Gucciardo in Montréal. ## Episode 18: Building Trust Through Responsible AI with Shea Brown (BABL AI) (December 2024) Shea Brown of BABL AI explains how independent AI audits work, why companies need them, and where to start with risk assessment. Page: https://aiwithsach.com/episodes/18-building-trust-through-responsible-ai-with-shea-br/ > I think compliance will in most circumstances, slow innovation down. So that, that's, that's my take on it. However, I, I still think it's better to focus on compliance because you can innovate quickly, but you can also increase your risk by innovating too quickly. > — at 24:46 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CPQWXFepOU&t=1486s) > the bottom line is if you want to do business with big companies, they have to trust you. And the only really way to do that is to get an independent third party to somehow verify that you are trustworthy > — at 33:00 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CPQWXFepOU&t=1980s) > Very soon the differentiator is like brand. I trust this brand. And how do you build brand trust? Well, there are lots of different ways, but demonstrating your due diligence and understanding of risks is going to be an important part of that. > — at 35:34 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CPQWXFepOU&t=2134s) > And it could be as simple as just calling a meeting with your friends, your co-founders and saying, Hey, let's sit down in the room for 60 minutes and get a whiteboard out and just try to figure out where could this tool harm people or where could it harm our brand or harm our company and record that and then do something about it. > — at 37:10 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CPQWXFepOU&t=2230s) > a law passed in New York City that required bias audits of automated employment decision tools, but there was no real standard for what that means. So the law had some information about what does it mean to be independent, which is great, although I think a lot of people still were kind of confused about what that means. > — at 13:26 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CPQWXFepOU&t=806s) > And so when we started auditing systems, ChatGPT had not come out yet, or stable diffusion had not come out yet. So generative AI was still something that was just a research exercise that wasn't being used for production systems. And now we're starting to see that many AI systems are built on top of these large language models. And that's a totally different beast to audit. > — at 15:08 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CPQWXFepOU&t=908s) > It's very rare. It depends on the case where it's like, oh, there's this beautiful benchmark. We can just take it and it will tell us what we need to know. Because if that were the case, the client would have probably done it anyway. > — at 16:32 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CPQWXFepOU&t=992s) > And I saw that zip code was a really high, high importance feature. I would automatically tell that that's probably not a great way of categorizing whether somebody should get a loan or not, just because they live in a particular area. And I know it correlates with race, right? At least in the United States. > — at 21:52 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CPQWXFepOU&t=1312s) > But framing it in terms of like innovation versus compliance, I think is potentially the wrong framing. It's really, it's not so much about innovation. It's about innovation that brings value. > — at 25:24 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CPQWXFepOU&t=1524s) > Like Microsoft, for instance, is going to start requiring ISO 42001 audits for their vendors. And so that's a good signal that that's going to be a valuable credential, no matter what a valuable certification. > — at 30:53 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CPQWXFepOU&t=1853s) > So basically what we are seeing in the market right now is the majority of the cases where companies come to us for an audit is because they are having problems getting through the procurement system of enterprise companies. > — at 31:50 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CPQWXFepOU&t=1910s) > Which that is a critical, that is the hub. That's the central point for all of the AI governance. If you can't do that, then you're not doing anything meaningful. > — at 36:53 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CPQWXFepOU&t=2213s) > our preference even though we started out in this field doing a lot of that stuff ourselves like doing the testing ourselves and all of that it's better if the company can do it because most of these regulations are going to require internal capacity to do this kind of monitoring over time > — at 12:51 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CPQWXFepOU&t=771s)