The Joseph Wharton Scholars program hosted a conversation on generative artificial intelligence between Wharton School professor Stefano Puntoni and 1992 Wharton graduate and Chief Investment Officer of Public Investing at Goldman Sachs Asset Management Ashish Shah on Sept. 27.
More than 200 people attended the event, which was held at Huntsman Hall, including current students and 20 alumni. It was followed by an exclusive dinner for Joseph Wharton Scholars, the guest speaker, and faculty.
Wharton senior Xavier Hill, co-president of the Joseph Wharton Scholars Program, described the event as the outcome of long-term efforts.
“We were finally able to generate the popular momentum to get a speaker event like this to happen on a major scale, not in a little Huntsman classroom, but in the big auditorium, and promote that to the undergrads,” Hill said.
Hill and his co-president, Wharton senior José Álvarez Stefanoni, told The Daily Pennsylvanian that the event was organized in honor of Bill Whitney, who founded the Joseph Wharton Scholars program in 1988 to add a liberal arts emphasis to Wharton coursework.
“[Under JWS], it’s encouraged to take interesting classes that you wouldn’t normally take, reinforcing liberal arts education and interdisciplinary focus into a business education,” Hill said. “That’s really what Dr. Whitney was after, and the program’s continuing that legacy.”
The first half of the event consisted of a lecture by Puntoni, who showcased recent findings from the Human AI-Research Initiative. Puntoni’s presentation revolved around two main ideas: how AI adoption is a human capital challenge as much as a technology challenge, and how generative AI can impact human well-being.
In an interview with the DP, Puntoni further explained these ideas.
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“This is a technology you’ve never had. It’s basically thinking, but it’s not thinking,” Puntoni said to the DP. “And so to leverage this technology and to capitalize on human expertise, it takes a lot of thought within the leadership of a firm to understand what this thing can do.”
Some of the presented research has not yet been published. Puntoni said the latest findings will be released in about a month.
Shah joined him on stage for a conversation following the lecture. The two touched on topics from evolving applications of AI tools to anecdotes about early Apple phones.
“It’s interesting to have this dichotomy of professionalism,” Álvarez Stefanoni said. “We saw the business professional use of AI: how is it actually going to do what Puntoni finds in his research? How does this actually apply to investments and one of the biggest investment banks companies in the world?”
First-year Wharton MBA student Isabel Shaw was drawn to the event because she worked under Shah at Goldman Sachs earlier this year.
Shaw highlighted the most memorable part of the event was Shah’s reflection that, if he could trade places with the students, he would take full advantage of the opportunities at Wharton and in the evolving world.
“I think that was really inspiring because it’s really easy as a student or as an MBA student to get caught up in the day-to-day grind of school and recruiting,” Shaw said. “And so that reminded me of how privileged we are to be able to just learn.”
