How a Kellogg alumna is shaping the ethics of artificial intelligence
When Nikki Pope ’86 MBA left her comfortable law professor position for tech firm NVIDIA, her family was incredulous — because they'd never heard of it.
“The only people in my family who had heard of NVIDIA were two of my nephews who are avid gamers because they were familiar with the chips,” Pope chuckles. It was the summer of 2020, she recalls, and the AI frenzy kicked off by OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT was still two years away. Back then, most people associated the phrase “artificial intelligence” with sci-fi novels. High-end graphics processing units — known as GPUs, NVIDIA’s core product — were mostly prized by video game fans like Pope’s nephews or video editors who needed a lot of computing power in their laptops or PCs.
Today, the 31-year-old company is a leading name in tech, with its GPUs crucial for the booming field of generative AI. Because GPUs far surpass the speed and performance of other kinds of computer chips, this hardware has become essential for powering large language models and other generative AI products —including ChatGPT, which was trained and run on NVIDIA GPUs. This new era has launched NVIDIA into the stratosphere, with a frenzied demand for its products. Its stock is up 115% this year alone — surpassing $1,000 per share, compared to around $150 in late 2022 — and revenue in the most recent quarter has tripled from a year earlier.
“I sometimes feel like I'm in this eye in the center of the storm,” says Pope, who was recruited as the company’s first-ever head of AI and legal ethics. “There’s a sort of calm here because we have a plan, we’re staying focused on what we’re doing and we have a product roadmap for our various tools. But every now and then I look up at the world around me and see robots talking to each other and cars driving themselves, and I go, oh wow, this is completely bananas.”
From Kellogg to law to tech
It’s a mission she was uniquely prepared to take on. After graduating from Kellogg and working in corporate marketing roles, she went back to law school and spent nearly a decade as an attorney.
She became captivated by the ethical issues at the intersection of technology and society. That journey took her to Santa Clara University as managing director of its High Tech Law Institute, where she produced academic research about predictive algorithms used in the criminal justice system. It was her experience there that attracted NVIDIA’s attention.
“There are a lot of misunderstandings about what AI is and what AI can do,” she points out. “People also think that because it's a machine, it's not biased. It may be a machine, but people built it. And so, the biases that people have can be built into those algorithms.”
Building an ethical AI framework at a leading tech company
At NVIDIA, Pope started her work by speaking directly with engineers, who make up the majority of the company’s workforce of just under 30,000. “It was really important for me to understand how the company works, how the engineering teams work and what processes they already had in place, and then add in the ethical considerations that will define how we build what we build,” she says.
One of her team’s initiatives has been implementing an intensive beta-testing process. Employees from underrepresented groups can volunteer to serve on a “community resource group” and test out a new chatbot, image model or other product. The process helps uncover instances of unintended bias that engineers then can go back in and correct.
Another key project involves transparency in AI models. Pope’s team has enhanced the standard “model card” — like a nutritional label for AI models — adding detailed subcards for privacy, safety transparency and bias." The project, dubbed Model Card++, has been well-received, Pope says. “We’re taking it on the road and showing it around to get people more comfortable with the idea of disclosing this kind of information. We’re hoping that it becomes standard practice industry-wide to report and disclose on these various ethical principles.”
The Kellogg edge
Even today, Pope still draws on lessons learned during her time at business school. For example, her operations course during her MBA taught her how to inject what she’s doing into systems and processes that already exist, she says. Her business organization course was another highlight.
“Everything at Kellogg revolved around teamwork, but that course was more about cross-functional teamwork,” she says. “It's really helped me to get into meetings with people who are engineers and scientists, not lawyers or marketers like me, and add some value to those conversations.”
She advises MBA students today to get comfortable making a big leap. “Take some risks and make mistakes. I remember a professor at Kellogg who told us that if you don't take any risks and you don't make mistakes, you're not going to learn as much,” Pope says. “You learn an awful lot from doing something wrong and figuring out how to fix it, compared with just having somebody tell you how to do it.”
Finally, she encourages future business leaders to keep a curious mind and never stop speaking up. “If you see something that you don't understand, then ask the question,” she says. “That’s something my professors at Kellogg always encouraged. Keep asking until you get the explanation that helps you understand. You never know where that's going to take you.”
Even with NVIDIA’s rapid ascent and the breakneck pace of change in the tech world today, Pope’s dedication to ethical AI remains as unwavering as it was during her first day on the job. “To me, the stakes are as high as they ever were,” she says. “What I do is try to guide the development of products that our customers can trust and believe in. And that hasn’t changed.”