We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Beth Rudden a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Beth, we’re thrilled to have you sharing your thoughts and lessons with our community. So, for folks who are at a stage in their life or career where they are trying to be more resilient, can you share where you get your resilience from?
My resilience comes from 1 – knowing I belong to a community I am a leader in, 2- knowing I have done extraordinary things in my life, and 3- having experience in asking my community to help when needed. I believe that resilience is a lot like how Brene Brown describes hope – as a cognitive function vs an emotion. You have to know where you want to be, a plan to get there, and the agency to do the thing. I have resilience because I fought hard, failed many times, and succeeded because I had a community to rely on – I have people. I never thought I could have people, but now I do because I want to become a leader and build a community by taking accountability for myself and my actions and getting more significant to help pull others into the community. Resilience is a cognitive function that requires humans to face adversity and overcome it by understanding that they can be more than the sum of their parts. I am resilient because I have grown despite the systems and people who have told me I can’t do a thing or that I was not good enough to do the thing.
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
In October 2022, I started Bast AI, a company whose mission is to provide explainable AI to companies engaged in education, healthcare, and economic and workforce mobility. We want teachers, nurses, medics, construction workers, and plumbers—people closest to the problems—to have explainable AI that can be trusted to be used as a partner. Our Bast AI Engine provides AI that explains itself and shows all of its work. Bast has built a revolutionary product that provides businesses with a ready-made toolkit that can be used to develop their own AI for their content and domain. We are so excited to see our AI engine working for the businesses Bast supports, and I am excited to see the narrative around AI change from the black box – it can’t be explained – to Bast’s trusted version of AI that can be used to support the people in need. I wake up every day knowing we are creating AI systems that are accessible and trusted.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
Three skills that have changed my trajectory are 1—insatiable curiosity—I love to learn, I love the process of learning, and I am always asking questions about how people know what they know. 2—problem-solving—I love to think and figure out how to solve problems. I like mental activity and how it helps me better understand people. I was drawn to anthropology and archaeology at a young age, wanting to understand and solve the mystery of people. 3 – generosity – I hit the jackpot with my parents, who taught me how to be generous and how giving is so much more rewarding than receiving. I have been given privileges, talents, and gifts and was taught that giving back is how I receive more. Reciprocity is a force of nature.
Okay, so before we go we always love to ask if you are looking for folks to partner or collaborate with?
I am building a community and starting a movement for transparent, explainable, trusted AI, and I want every human involved. If we are to have a representative sample of the 8 billion humans on earth, we need 1.6 billion people to understand and build AI. I want all humans to understand what it is like to interact with trusted AI that shows and explains its work. I need so much help reaching out and advocating for trusted, explainable AI. I would love to have as many folks as possible to belong to our movement and community. Bast is building software, but we need domain experts and services to expand AI use cases. The more folks who use our software, the more we realize how much more can be done, especially in data sovereignty, where humans can own and monetize their data using AI systems that give full attributing, proving that it is their data.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://bast.ai
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bast.ai/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/bast-ai/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/bast_ai
Image Credits
Kelly Ryan Bailey
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