3#19 - Yngvar Ugland - Unlocking Innovation: Digital Transformation, AI, and Tech Evolution (Nor)

«Hva er mulig å gjøre med disse teknologiene når de blir 10 ganger så bra som de er idag? / What might be possible to do with these technologies when they become 10 times as good as they are today?»

Can moonshot innovation really be the key to solving challenges that traditional methods fail to address? Today, we're thrilled to welcome Yngvar Ugland from DNB's New Tech Lab, who will unravel the complexities of digital transformation and share his unique insights from both corporate and startup ecosystems. From breaking the mold of the classic "people, process, technology" framework to stressing the importance of customer-centric approaches, Yngvar’s perspective offers a refreshing and profound look into fostering genuine innovation within established enterprises.

Technological innovation isn't always smooth sailing, and Yngvar helps us understand the friction between traditional mindsets and innovative approaches. Balancing high-trust societies against the urgency-driven dynamics of capitalism, we discuss the complex landscape of AI hype and explore technologies like GPT-3 and GPT-4. With an optimistic outlook, Yngvar encourages us to embrace the transformative potential of generative AI, highlighting the unprecedented opportunities that lie ahead. Tune in to gain a deeper understanding of the ever-evolving world of technology and digital transformation.

Here are my key takeaways:

• Yngvar has build and is leading the as he calls it «Moon-shoot unit at DNB».
• What do we need to do to actually implement and adopt to new technology and ways of working?
• How do we think tech for people in tech?
• We can identify three needed dimensions for change: 
  • a data / tech component, 
  • a business component and 
  • a change component.
• There is a difference between necessary and sufficient - just because a change is necessary, doesn’t mean that the proposed solution is sufficient.
• You need to find ways to navigate uncertainty, be active beyond concrete hypothesis testing, or tech-evaluation.
• For organizations to be successful, you need to coordinate both maintenance, improvement and innovation - it’s not one of those, but all there in concert that can ensure success over time.

• Innovation and digital transformation is not a streamlined process.
• Uncertainty offers a space for opportunity.
• We use the term agile without grasping its true meaning - an inspect-and-adapt mindset is key to agile.
• The development from GPT-1 through GPT-2 to GPT-3 is an example for the exponential development of technology.
• The digital infrastructure in Norway, that can utilize data and technology for value creation across public and private sectors is a reason for our success.
• The difference to the US market is that there are large cooperations that take on societal challenges.
• How our society is structure has an influence on how we perceive the need for innovation.
• It is natural to meet resistance in change and innovation.
• To iterate effectively you really need to live a mindset build around FAIL - First Attempt in Learning.
• We overestimate the effect of technology in the short term and significantly underestimate the long term.

Transcript

Innovation and Transformation in Technology

Winfried A. Etzel 0:00

This is Metadama, a holistic podcast about data management in Norway. Hi and welcome. My name is Winfried and thank you for joining me on a new episode of the Dama Norges podcast, where our vision is to give data management in Norway a boost, to show the competence and at least the level of knowledge we have within Fragfeld, and that's why I invite with me Nordic experts in both data management and information management to a talk. Welcome to Metadama, and this is an episode that I look forward to.

Winfried A. Etzel 0:39

Today, I have the honor of talking to Yngva Ygland from DNB, and we're going to talk about people in tech, for people in tech, but we are also going to talk about what it is that needs to be done in a change process. What is it that we really need to get technological innovation implemented in a company? There has been a lot of talk about three dimensions. You need a data component, you need a business component, we need a change component, but then the question arises what about the customer? What about those who actually use the technology? Can we talk about the golden triangle in change management or in technological innovation?

Winfried A. Etzel 1:18

Ppt, people Process, technology Is it really still like this? Is it something we should relate to, and what is it that we need to do to carry out these digital transformation projects in companies? Yngve has done a lot of this. He has a very broad experience from both Microsoft, dnb, from the startup world, and is also very well known through his debates and his chronicles and, not least, linkedin. Welcome, ingvar. Thank you. I tried to keep the introduction very short so you have time to talk a little about who you are, what you do in your job and what you do when you don't work.

Yngvar Ugland 1:57

Yes, so I work at DNB and I have been working there for six to seven years. I started at DNB to build the unit I run now, called New Tech Lab. We are, in a way, the moonshot unit at DNB. Moonshot is a form of innovation, but I call it moonshots to significantly separate it from what is often associated with innovation, which is to hypothesize, to find out how you can improve what you already have. What we do in moonshots is to see how typical new technologies or other changes in circumstances can bring about possibilities that either were not possible without these new technologies or which, in addition, were very difficult to completely overcome without these technologies. And these are technologies that typically would be able to overflout what we are doing today, and that is necessary but not enough. Just like using new technology to improve quality of your products, to optimize the processes you already have, it is necessary, it's good for business, it saves money, but it's not sufficient. And in the same way as improving what you already have, it is necessary and good for business, but it is not sufficient either, because those things improving quality and improve what you have you can live today and half a century tomorrow, but in the future history shows that there will be something else that will take over the way we do things today and what we have in the future, which is a metaphorical thing that future day is closer today than it has ever been before. So the future is closer to us today than it was 10 years ago and much closer than it was 20 years ago, and in many ways, you can say that there has been more change in the last 20 years than in the 150 years before, and that's Moonshot. So that's what we do. It's a space where we don't always know what we don't know, and that means that we can't always do hypothesis testing, because the hypothesis isn't always ready, and when you don't know what you don't know, the best thing you can do then is to do something. Don't say, try to analyze products or services or markets that don't exist, because that's not possible.

Yngvar Ugland 4:25

So this awareness and uncertainty is important in what we do. So we are a lead team. We work as a kind of internal startup. We are self-sufficient in competence and capacity. So we have the tech heads and the programming hands that we have, and that's because we have to self-sufficient and to preserve our autonomy, and it's difficult to ask for funding for projects where you don't know what you don't know, if you have to compete with something that is provably of better quality than the products we already have. The Lidl team can feed us with two pizzas and one kebab. Most of us are from Oslo, so we're two in London and one in San Francisco Silicon Valley area and, as I said, new Tech Lab. So New Tech we define it as it's a floating term, but we it is absolutely taken into use by other established technology groups in the D&B and then we look at the same technologies but used in other ways, typically the methods that are about moonshots, about what is possible that was not possible before. So that's what I do at work.

Yngvar Ugland 5:49

Before that, I worked at Microsoft, both in England and in Norway, where I was converted to a data man from being a mathematician at NTNU in the 90s. And after Microsoft, I worked at a couple of of startup companies and some growth companies. Some of them were spectacular first years and others were some stunning successes. I have not known the whole spectrum of it. Therefore, it feels both extremely exciting and, at the same time, safe to run a startup company in Gråsøgne internally in a large company, because we can take enormous risks but at the same time we are quite confident that we have a long runway with safe but limited funding from Gårdsøgne's investors, which is DNB I have 10,000 questions.

Winfried A. Etzel 6:40

But before we get into them, maybe you can talk a little bit about what you do when you're not at work, when you're off. Selvfølgelig, 10 000 spørsmål, men før vi går inn på det, kanskje du kan snakke litt om hva du gjør når du ikke er på jobb, når du koppler av.

Yngvar Ugland 6:48

Ja, så har vi tre barn det er bare to av de som fortsatt er barn 14 og 16 som bor hjemme. Vi bruker mye tid med dem og på dem. Nå har det vært en lang vinter, så vi bruker. We spend a lot of time skiing together In the summer. Half of the year we are sailing, which is a hobby and a passion of this type.

Yngvar Ugland 7:17

When I'm a beginner and have been in a professional life and have been doing certain things that not many do, then you feel that you're in the elite. It's very refreshing to do things on a hobby basis where you feel like you're a complete noob. If you get 10% better at your job every year, you've made a huge progress. But when you start as a grown-up with things you've never done before, like sailing, you can get that feeling of mastery. That's what gives you energy. So that's that.

Yngvar Ugland 7:57

As a former saxophonist, I try to play a bit on the six, seven, eight saxophones I have. Some of them are hanging on the wall, but everyone is ready to play and I'm very happy with football. I played one season in the fifth division before I left Skåne for Lilla and was coach in the second class and of course I'm very happy to watch football on TV and in reality Liverpool, which is my team. I hope it will be a little bit more than half of the rest of the episodes, but that's how it is. You know, I'm also happy to read books and write. I've been reading some books, both about literature, and then it's always like that one doesn't have time to do as much as one should. But I think I have a couple of books in my head that I should write. When he just gets a little better time, then I'll do it.

Winfried A. Etzel 8:56

Yes, it's weird. It's with time, it's always a little too little. But you said something about the time you had in Microsoft, the form you had from mathematician to technologist. Yes, did you also know that that was the time when the interest in the field of science emerged?

Journey Into Consumer Technology Innovation

Yngvar Ugland 9:10

Yes, or emerged again. I started programming as a 9-10 year old when I was 64, so I got a loan from my uncle and then I obviously used it a lot to play, but I also used it to learn how to program, because I have always been a nerd. I didn't have much to play, but I used it to learn how to program. I've always been a nerd and I thought it was exciting to understand how these things worked. Getting access to the source code was interesting, so that was my way of understanding how to build large games. At the same time, I went to the library, or the book bus as it was called in the country where I grew up, and I borrowed books about basics. So I studied mathematics just because I was good at it, and then I could make decisions about what I was going to do. Mathematics is so much theoretical and, rightly enough, indirectly usable within many areas, but not so directly usable within many areas. At least it wasn't then who would have known that artificial intelligence, which is practically just linear algebra, would become so popular? So halfway into the study of what was called NTH when I started and NTNU when I ended, I started to look at it. I think life as a mathematician is not for me. I became very interested in super computer machines and such, and to translate similar algorithms and theoretical algorithms that we wrote on paper into physical computer architecture. You had to think about what you had to optimize because you had to move. This was Cray as it was called, europe's largest computer with 96 parallel processors. It didn't have a shared memory, so you had to choose how much memory you had to move between processors or you had to write it yourself. And then there were some interesting things there how to optimise a given computer architecture. And then it started to be quite fun to program again. And then I would have been a webmaster for a course at NTNU and I would have learned some HTML. If you could do HTML in the 90s, then be the king, because no one could do that. So I knew that and because I knew something about web, I got a summer job at Accenture and learned to program Java. And then I applied for what I thought was a summer job, but it turned out to be a six-month internship at Microsoft in the UK, so I had to move there before I was done with my studies. I had to go back to the company and finish the assignment. And then the assignment was a more computer science type thing but a use, a mathematical problem, but implemented as a programming assignment. And what that did was, I think then I had learned a little from Microsoft about how to program PCs and such.

Yngvar Ugland 12:10

She grew up on Unix and so I made. I took an old-fashioned solution that I had written for a Cray and wrote it around to a grid of PCs that stood around the student halls and used traditional distributed decom and corba and that type of technology to move data between the processors. And little did I know that Larry Ellison in Oracle was going to popularize the term grid computing a few years later with his Oracle 8G, where the G stands for grid. So that was it. And then I've actually been in the space around software-near technology ever since A long way to tell fortelle hvordan det har vært I dette spesiet.

Winfried A. Etzel 13:06

Jeg synes det var verdt å gå gjennom denne To grunner. Jeg synes det er egentlig veldig fint at du klarer å kopple din egen reise så tett på den der teknologiske reisen. Og det andre er jo historiker per fag, det å se til, looking back in time, looking forward. There is a connection there, especially when we think about NewTek on the one hand and then take a look back and see where it actually came from. Super exciting. But there is another role you have in DNB, or if it is connected, I'm not sure, but the role as a consumer technologist.

Yngvar Ugland 13:38

Yes.

Winfried A. Etzel 13:39

And it has been called Norway's first consumer technologist. It's very exciting, but what is it really?

Yngvar Ugland 13:47

Yes, that's a good question. Dnb has taken a very clear position within consumer economy and this is personified by my colleague, silje Sandmel, who is DNB's consumer economist. She has both a very clear position on social media and so on, but she has also had luxury fountains in her my pocket on sale and TV programs. And then the question was, as we had seen that BAMT became more and more technological about how we can have a corresponding type of role within technology, one or the other kind of talkative, a little sensual type of role, role or speaker post within technology. And then it was natural to think let's do a little copy-paste of what we have done on consumer economics and call it consumer technology. And then my name came up a little naturally there, maybe because it's like the raw opposite of selling a bit of a beauty and the beast. We started in February 2020, and then something happened in March 2020 that we hadn't expected, namely Covid. My team spent days making compensation arrangements for the business. 10,000 companies had gone bankrupt if they hadn't received cash support during the three weeks. That was the deadline we had. So we did that and suddenly we became a bit famous for that, and perhaps not as structured or in relation to a plan, as we might have seen before. We have made a plan to copy the consumer economy model, but it has become a bit organic. So then I have become a person that people call if they have something they are wondering about around technology.

Yngvar Ugland 15:50

Folk ringer hvis de har ett eller annet de lurer på rundt teknologi, og nå fortyr jeg veldig mye kunstig intelligens og sånt, og derfor så sender jeg mye podcast av, som nå, og får skrivet en del kronikker I alt fra Aftenposten og sånt til mer som alle medier, både nasjonalt og internasjonalt.

Yngvar Ugland 16:10

Så er jo, jeg er glad I å tenke, og noen ganger så skriver jeg ned hva jeg tenker eller en sånn kjære dagbokting som heter LinkedIn, og etter hvert så har det blitt sånn 23 000 plus mennesker som følger mig der, og så er det veldig hyggelig og lærerikt, ikke minst fordi det er så. Folk gir så mye back in the comment fields and all sorts of things. Even though we are young, there is a lot of insight, I learn a lot and I can learn to hear what others think about it. So that's how it has become, and then the names are hanging from their origin, but its organic origin is a bit random, but that fits really well, because I work with technology and innovation and there are many more coincidences involved than you might have wanted, but it's part of the nature of the subject and the discipline.

The Innovation Spectrum in Technology

Winfried A. Etzel 17:10

It also fits well with the topic we have discussed today. We are going to talk a little bit about the different factors that make it possible for us to achieve a technological innovation, or what we would call a digital transformation, or what we would call a change process. To put it simply and quite classic, we are talking about PPPP people process technology and then there's a kind of vector on them. An change process is 80% for people, 15% process and 5% technology, and it changes continuously how many percent it actually is or what people think it is. But what do you think about this? Do you think that to get a development in the technological field, how important is it to get more people involved?

Yngvar Ugland 17:58

Yes, how important, yes, very Completely necessary, and then people are the most important. Process has a little bit of that. It's easy to say, yes, it's important, but it's important that you don't think of a process as something you can make a blueprint on and say, let's just follow this process and then it will be fine, because that's not innovation and that's not digital and technological transformation, because there's so much uncertainty, and uncertainty is actually good. I think it's about a possibility. So change is inevitable, change is good, and the biggest changes have not happened yet. That's why it's very difficult to say that we're making a process step by plan, and then you follow it to a certain extent and then if you deviate from the plan, you have to figure out how to get back to the plan, Even if the deviance is caused by some kind of discovery of a frame, condition or some other circumstance that makes the original plan not so good. So that's why it's something with this.

Yngvar Ugland 19:16

We thought that software development was like that until 25 years ago, and then we started with what now is called smooth, but which is a bit of a common term, and the worst I hear is when people in Norwegian call it agile, because then you have just imported the word agile, which is not so common in English daily speech, and then you just import it and call it agile, then in a way, it lets the world take a stand on what it actually means. And for me it's about the difference between making a great plan and executing it well. To inspect and adapt All the time. We think we can do the next step like this, but let's inspect it and see if we did it right, and if we didn't do it right, then we do the adjustment. So it's as simple as that. That's why I'm concerned that if you don't have that point of view around the process, if you're not used to not knowing everything and sometimes, like when I talk about moving shots if you don't feel that you often don't even know what you don't know, then you have a bad audience. That process can't help you at all. So that's important for me.

Yngvar Ugland 20:21

It's not everyone who has it in them and it's not like everyone should have it in them either, because there's a large spectrum here. Like I said, someone has to do with moonshots it's maybe 5% of the population, or investments. If someone has to do with improving what they already have, it's maybe 15% of the investments, and then someone has to ensure quality and make sure that the drift works, and all that and the last thing, then it's fine, then you have control over the circumstances, then you can make a traditional process, make a good plan, make good routines and so on and change the way you think. But when it comes to innovation, you have to have the people who are comfortable with, and all the time they like things they don't know. And that's why I say that the winners, the winners of the morning, are those who practice every day to become the best they have ever been. They work to find out what the morning is. When the morning comes, it becomes the day's thing, and when they go on with other things, it becomes the new morning of the day. So that's why it's a spectrum of it and that's why it's important to have the right people.

Yngvar Ugland 21:36

We say we have the right people on the bus, to use that metaphor. But you must have the right people in the right seats on the bus so that you don't have people who hurt you and can't feel the plane. They must sit down and do something. But that's a process. They lay great premise for people and technology is changing all the time. You have to have people who are able to learn new technologies all the time and who are able to be comfortable with not being in a technology for too long. At least if you want to do what I do and then you look at it, there will be some who will pick up technology and work with the administration of it. It's quite possible and that's fine. There's room for everyone.

Winfried A. Etzel 22:27

Very exciting. I feel that now there are some who share a little of my opinion about the process. I had a presentation a few years ago as a guest lecturer at BI in the course on digital business understanding. I said that the process is not so important. The process is a result more than a prerequisite for development, and that was a shock, especially from people who worked with HSE.

Winfried A. Etzel 22:53

It's about being able to handle the insecurity at this level, and what we have talked a lot about afterwards is that it's perhaps not in and I say this when you work in industry-heavy organizations it's perhaps not a given that you work with insecurity. You have very engineering-heavy environments that want to have ideal answers. You see these problems when you introduce data science environments into companies, where there is a crash of the challenge and uncertainty towards clear yes-no answers that you need from the engineering environment, and then it's very exciting to work with such processes as you have it in a startup setting, perhaps within a large company, and in the last episode we talked a little about that together with Erlend Aune. How can we make this happen? Because the big risk there is that there will be a distance between the innovative startup NewTagLab and the operational part of the company. How can we make these things start to work together?

Yngvar Ugland 24:07

Yes, that's a very good question. It's a difficult question and I think the most important thing is where we start. Both parts, or all three parts, of this, both improving quality and improving what we already have, incremental innovation and more like moonshot innovation all three parts are necessary, but none of them are self-sufficient. Therefore, it becomes what are you going to compare me to football? It's usually those who are closest to the goal and all that. Then I usually bomb them. If we bomb them, then it becomes a back-and-forth goal.

Yngvar Ugland 25:20

Then you can try to think of it as if this is a game of chess, where everything is connected and you have to succeed in every way. To succeed, you have to survive in the short term and succeed in the long term future. So, yes, as long as you are an upstart company and have backing and risk capitalists on Sand Hill Road down in Silicon Valley, which gives you maybe a 10 year runaway, because they know that if you succeed, you will be able to change the world or create completely new categories of products and new markets. So the less you have that, the more you need the whole team.

Yngvar Ugland 25:59

For me, it is important that the research of new technologies and the possibilities around new technologies is not experienced as if we are allowed to be a doctor, because, okay, you can perhaps work like that, but this is to the extent of being a doctor, so it's like being a serial doctor.

Yngvar Ugland 26:17

It's serious play, it's too important not to do it. But if it becomes like that, therefore, you just have to treat it with new technology while we have to do everything else, the important thing, which is that we have income and pay their salaries then you get a kind of contradiction, and it is important that we must be humble about that. We may come up with something that can gradually do what we do today, but it takes a long time and most of what we do will not succeed. Because that's how it is with Moonshots it's maybe from hundreds of ideas that we make some key-tales, proof of concepts and prototypes of what comes from innovations. If you have two, therefore, it is almost on the contrary that we are a team and, in the long run, no one has been able to do without the others. You have to play both the defence midfield and attack at the same time.

Winfried A. Etzel 27:19

What is a bit exciting in such a classic start-up setting is that it is the few who have such a large security net to fall back to. It becomes very raw often and it is about existence, the development you do and you really feel the effect and it's actually a good thing. You push yourself a little bit more to get that innovation. But when you have that startup in a larger company, in a larger frame, in some security put, then it might not be as raw or it's not about. You don't feel that it's about existence as much, but it actually does.

Yngvar Ugland 27:56

So, yes, you're right. And at the same time, there's an element to it that when you run a startup and don't have what's it called, there are very few companies that have secured, let's say, three years of runway. Most of the startup companies have some have in Silicon Valley. If we have three years of runway, most of the companies have some have in Silicon Valley. If we have 90 days of runway, then we have to get more money. That's very good and that's demanding to get money. Some have 18 months. Then you have a long runway If you get external money to get that 18 months of runway. But if you have to look in the back of, we in our internal startup, our entrepreneur company, new Tech Lab, we have had a very small but very safe runway for six and a half years and take bets that don't need to manifest themselves, so we can, on the way in, find out where the edge of the hole is. And that's useful in learning because other larger groups don't have to go all over the hole and we're kind of rigged. So if we go all over the hole, then okay, we can just, I hope, say respawn. So if we are a bit over the top, we can just say respawn and then we're back. So that's a bit of our task to go first through the technological landscape and try to draw a map of the terrain where no one has gone before. So that means that some of our moonshots can be like there's no company that has been funded to do this. We have to practice our skills, because what is a BNB customer? You should never be blind. If you can be a customer and send a bank to say you're sure of it, it's a pretty juicy value proposition. And then it's like how the the world is that going to be possible? No, we know that it's not possible now, but we believe that it can be possible.

Yngvar Ugland 30:18

And when we started talking about this five years ago, we didn't know enough about which technologies that need to be invented for that to be possible. But we believe there is something about one or another form of artificial intelligence we haven't seen yet that can help us be a kind of autopilot that makes you always make the right choices. And at that time we were on GPT-1, which was so bad that it was completely blank. Gpt-2 in 2019 was so bad that no one could use it for anything. It could hardly count to 10, in a political way. Then came GPT-3 and the mind blowing which is the exponentiality in reality and that there are large language models that come from foundation models that were so damn bad three or four years ago.

Yngvar Ugland 31:08

That what makes us again start talking about AGI, that is, general artificial intelligence, human intelligence, level of artificial intelligence. I didn't see that coming, and that's the kind of surprises we just have to get used to after we get it, that type of moonshots which we don't always work actively with. How are we going to be able to ensure that our customers in the future can get the guarantee that they will never be black again? But it's a polar circle that's always like okay, what is it now that we know that makes it more realistic or that makes it possible to adjust within that course?

Yngvar Ugland 31:44

That's the advantage of having the safe runway, that you can do that kind of thing as well, because you don't depend on income from that kind of thing. It depends on the income of such things. It's more research, more research-type ideas than product development. You can't allow that when you're in a company and need to ensure that you get income to get food on the table for your young people. But there are companies that have even more valuable proposals than the ones I mentioned over there in Silicon Valley, that have funding, and that's something that the mindset has over there. It's worth spending some money on, even if it takes 40 years. To take a cliché as an example, it would take 20 years before you succeeded with reusable rockets, but reusable rockets were a prerequisite for lowering costs, for being able to integrate fast enough and develop the rocket technologies that are supposed to be available to humans.

Winfried A. Etzel 32:49

I think there's a lot of exciting stuff here. There are two things that sat a little back here with me. One is that you mentioned Halle in the startup world with a view to a decision for 18 months Like a peephole for many, and that reminded me of the last podcast episode I had with DNB, and that was with Aiden Minard in season 1, so that's a few years ago but he talked about how long it takes to actually get a change process done in a company, and what he talked about this time was that it takes 18 months, and the difference between the USA and Norway was that in the USA it's 18 months where everyone is cheering for the change and after 18 months you see the actual result, but in Norway, everyone is 18 months skeptical and then you get a good result after 18 months. Are you in agreement with this?

Navigating Technology Innovation and Failure

Yngvar Ugland 33:47

Now we've all worked in a big sales company in the US like Aiden has. He came from a San Francisco-based company before he came to DNB and they were two companies that were comparable. A lot of experience from a large American company is Microsoft, but then I work a little more in the pedigree. You can take Aiden's experience for good fishing, but it's not always that the amount is enough, but there's something about that. If I reflect a little on Aiden Weyand a good guy who I've talked about and who has a lot of experience on many continents and backgrounds so there's something about that raw American capitalism. That's a bit about survival, much more than a milder and warmer society we have in Norway, which makes them perhaps a little better at that.

Yngvar Ugland 34:46

We have been a fairly well-functioning society in Norway. We have some well-functioning institutions and we have a very modest digital society with a lot of digital infrastructure that works across both private persons, large companies, authorities and public institutions and such and so on, just like banks. Banks are something you can use both now for private and commercial services, but that's what you can use to log in to everything in the tax authorities, nav and so on. There are other alternatives, but it's just an example of something that is fundamentally more fundamental than in the USA, where you, for many years, are a few decades back in time when it comes to digitalization and digital modernity in society, and that's an advantage for social development. But that means that we don't have so many areas where things are really shit, where it burns on the dust, and that's an advantage. But it also means that we don't, when we don't have those social problems that society is not able to solve, then we don't have those steady growth of large companies that come in and solve problems in our society. So it's like, when things work very well, then it's a very small, small basis for fundamental leadership. It's like, if it works, don't fix it, never change a winning team, while the American society is more like it's more about companies and solving problems in society, and that's something with the cold hard capitalism that makes it possible for the fundamental, for what Aiden describes. So I don't know if 18 months is always enough. There are some things you want to experience, especially if it's like this this is significantly disruptive to what you're doing. Then it can take a very long time, and let's say, let's take bitcoin.

Yngvar Ugland 36:52

It came in 2009,. 15 years ago. It solved a problem that was about trust between partners. In 2009, the trust in banks was at its lowest due to speculative investment forms. That made it possible for us to have a bank crisis and many companies, especially in the US, went broke. And then comes Bitcoin, which is a technology for payment that compensates for trust between parties. In a way, it's a brilliant invention, but it solves a problem that we in Norway largely don't have. We have trust in the banks. In the USA, there is still low trust in the banks. There is low trust in insurance companies. There is low trust in authorities, and those three are the ones you have the least trust in. In Norway, some of them are the most trusted. We trust the public, the banks and insurance companies.

Winfried A. Etzel 37:43

I think this is a very exciting finding. Shall we call it that? It's a society that has a very big impact on how you see the need for development and also the desire to be part of a change process or development. And that is perhaps also something with, especially when we think about the large companies in Norway, like DNB, for example, where, as you say, things are a bit out of place, so it works. Why should I change that?

Winfried A. Etzel 38:13

And then you are in a mindset that when you work with new technology, with new development, with innovation, it is always a bit difficult to break through, and it can happen that it is something about getting people along, which is a bit difficult, and maybe you, as a technology enthusiast, forget that others do not share the same desire for technology. Or if it is something with what is called the will to change in the organization, which is a floating term. We have talked a lot about the will to change in Norwegian organizations for a very long time, and what is is that it is a great opportunity for everyone. Everyone can give their opinion, everyone can improve the change that comes, but it also takes longer to get through and get a pass.

Yngvar Ugland 39:12

Yes, that's right Now. I remember where I was going. But it's high trust stuff and I started with Bitcoin and that's because it solves a problem that we don't have in Norway, but it solves a problem that many other places in the world have, and that's why I took this parallel with high trust societies in Norway versus less trust in the USA. But there are other places in the world where Bitcoin or crypto-wallet is about having a way of including or taking part in the economy, where you might be disconnected from the official economy, and then it's natural, okay, they solve a problem that we don't have. But it's a technology that potentially or in principle overflows the man in the middle role that banks have often had. You can say why should you have a technology that overflows that? If we look 30 years ahead, then I think it's not unreasonable to think that we have taken advantage of that technology just to make it more effective and then it has to go a little carefully. But it's natural that we have taken advantage of that technology just to make it more efficient and then it has to be done carefully. But it's natural that we meet some opponents.

Yngvar Ugland 40:19

When I talk about the moonshot, it's often illustrated that it was never the washing of horses that gave us the locomotive. It was completely new technology developed by completely different people than horse operators. If you had given the steam engine to horse operators then you probably would have used it to heat the stable. It sounds like a locomotive, a very important idea that solves a problem that we don't have and that we don't need, because with horses it can go from A to B. The locomotive can only take you from C to D, and C and D means that there is are railway tracks between them. If you go from A to B by train, you have to go from A to C and then to D, where there are tracks, and then from D to B. So it sounds completely absurd at the moment, but if you travel 30 years forward, it shows that it's a sovereign technology.

Yngvar Ugland 41:12

And it wasn't just the automotive that tried to do it. It tried many things, so you shouldn't be doing. It's a very sovereign technology and it wasn't just the locomotive that tried to do it. It tried many things, so you shouldn't be playing with your wits. Most of the locomotive inventions were dead-born and the horses were better and better, but something came and took over. That's why we call it moonshots and not moonlandings, because most moonshots go in the dust and it's a reference to rockets, when you see how much SpaceX is an example, first and foremost, of daring to fail a lot, because the world they have learned is to fail and, to be honest, with reusable rockets you can try it more often. It's a role model when it comes to trying to fail and learn to iterate quickly, but with moonshots, not with learning, because most of the things you try to fail but in the end you succeed. The idea is to try many times to succeed, to have as many loads as possible in a lottery.

Winfried A. Etzel 42:21

You said you have failed in the debt aspect. Would you call that the magical formula to achieve technological innovation?

Managing AI Hype and Expectations

Yngvar Ugland 42:28

I call it to fail. F-e-i-l it's the abbreviation for the first experiment in the learning process, and when you say the learning process, it's about doing it many times and, as we say, it's really just about practicing. You have to try. That's why we talk about practicing even and beautiful, so it's not just about nine-times practice. But I've learned from my old saxophone mentor practice even and beautiful.

Winfried A. Etzel 43:06

I have one last question for you, and it's a bit about the AI hype we're going through and you've talked a little about it, and it's a lot of the technology that has been there for a while has suddenly come to a level where it has actually seen a day light or the whole society is talking about it, and that has also, in many ways, created some expectations. How do you manage to control these expectations, especially within a company?

Yngvar Ugland 43:31

Yes, I would say that we have to try to zoom out a bit. I expect a marketplace and with a marketplace, I believe that there will come a time where we look back back to November 2022, when the research preview of Jet CPT came, and then we look at the period afterwards and then we say, yes, but look, there were not so many people who lost their jobs. But nevertheless, that technology is not satisfied with what it was allowed to do. We say, look, there weren't many people who lost their jobs. The technology doesn't agree with what it promised, but the technology hasn't promised anything. We have lifted expectations. Wow, look at all it can do. We have used it to write automatic e-posts for us. We have used it to make LinkedIn-instructions that we can't ourselves and we have used it to make nice illustrations and pictures in PowerPoint and all kinds of things. And that gives no significantly increased productivity. Yes, you can. That's a lot of things you can get on individual productivity, but it's not like it's a game-changer. But in the long run, these technologies come to change the world and the work life more than we can imagine, but it takes a little longer than we think and that is, in a way, amara's good old law on Steoridolf, that we overestimate the effects of technology in the short term and then we underestimate it so significantly in the long term.

Yngvar Ugland 44:53

And therefore I would say that, thinking about the horizon, what this will mean in the future, these moonshot things, what it makes possible, perhaps not with today's technology, but remember that GPT-2 could hardly in 2019, could hardly count to 10. Gpt-3, which was in one in Chachepi 10, seemed fantastic. We understood that it hallucinated, which it of course, doesn't do. It's a joke to say that because it's a stochastic model, it's by design. It's badly done to say that it hallucinates. It's a stochastic model. You can't control the outcome.

Yngvar Ugland 45:31

And then we have seen how fantastic development we have had on that, since and I think, to quote Jack Clark, who is one of the co-founders of Anthropix, which is a venture company from OpenAI, which we met in San Francisco before Christmas, he said that I think both we that is, those who are best in the world at this and you, all of us, will be more surprised about the development of the properties in these models than we could have ever imagined, and that's why it will take a long time, but the changes that affect, or the changes that you contribute will be much bigger than we could have imagined in the long run.

Yngvar Ugland 46:13

Put it back a little bit. If you don't both work with quality improvement, optimal engagement, improvement of what you already do and moon shots, then it's at least now that you can think about what is it that you can do that is not possible without these technologies. And then you can think what is it that is possible to do with these technologies when they have become ten times better than they are today, and that ten times is not so far under?

Winfried A. Etzel 46:37

And time flies when you have fun, so we are already well over time. But you get permission to give us a key takeaway or a call to action in the end.

Yngvar Ugland 46:48

Yes, I think where we are today with the development of technology that we are getting to now. We have been talking about exponentiality and exponential development for a long time now. We are familiar with it, and it is the generative AI that drives it. Now it is time to be rare. Change is inevitable. Now it is time to think that change is good because it gives opportunities we did not have before. We didn't have before. I believe that artificial intelligence will make the world a much better place for the most of us. So it's probably a tiny chance that it will go very wrong, but I think we're on the right track to ensure that, and therefore it's perhaps difficult for people to find, but the biggest changes have not yet happened, and that means that the greatest possibilities are in front of us, and that is just to grasp and adapt to a form of innovation with a form of transformative possibilities that we had not had the premises for before, and with that, I think there is a good reason to look forward to the future.

Winfried A. Etzel 47:50

A very optimistic 72. Thank you very much.