Never Too Much AI: Upwork's Andrew Rabinovich

Andrew Rabinovich began his career in technology working on AI applications for cancer detection. He also spent time at Google, working on early iterations of products like Google Glass. Now at Upwork, as vice president and head of AI and machine learning, Rabinovich and his team are working to enhance the digital labor platform’s capabilities with AI solutions to enable more sophisticated matching of resources to projects. On today’s episode, Andrew shares his views on the ways AI could take on more complex projects while using fewer resources. In the way of AI’s rapid progress, however, are slow advancements in hardware. While AI has made huge strides in cognition, he says, hardware struggles to match its capabilities, especially in wearable tech and robotics. Still, Andrew envisions a future with hyper-personalized digital assistants for everyone. Read the episode transcript here.  Guest bio Andrew Rabinovich is vice president and head of AI and machine learning at Upwork. He previously held R&D leadership positions at Google before joining augmented reality company Magic Leap as head of AI in 2015. In 2020, Rabinovich cofounded Headroom, an AI-powered videoconferencing platform that was acquired by Upwork in 2023. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from University of California, San Diego, and has studied machine learning with an emphasis in computer vision and multimodal AI for over 20 years. He has also authored more than 100 peer-reviewed publications and patents. Me, Myself, and AI is a collaborative podcast from MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group and is hosted by Sam Ransbotham and Shervin Khodabandeh. Our engineer is David Lishansky, and the coordinating producers are Allison Ryder and Alanna Hooper. Stay in touch with us by joining our LinkedIn group, AI for Leaders at mitsmr.com/AIforLeaders or by following Me, Myself, and AI on LinkedIn. We encourage you to rate and review our show. Your comments may be used in Me, Myself, and AI materials.