CPaCE News

Babak Behzad has a passion for technology and its potential to transform industries. As part of the artificial intelligence (AI) team at Mutiny, a start-up tech company focused on helping businesses improve their customer engagement, Babak’s unique experiences made him an ideal person to speak with current students in CSULB’s Saturday Master of Business Administration (SMBA) degree program. The hybrid online/in-person program focuses on how disruptive technologies and innovative sustainability measures can make a significant impact on businesses, and Babak recently presented his own journey to a classroom of enthusiastic learners who hope to blaze their own trail in the world of entrepreneurship. 

“What I enjoyed the most about this experience was the student’s attention to details of my talk and the great questions they were asking,” Babak said, “which implies the quality of the program and the professors.”

In his role at Mutiny, Babak is working on a content generation product that uses advanced Large Language Models like GPT-3 (part of ChatGPT) to assist in writing personalized marketing copy for websites. This type of disruptive technology, which is revolutionizing the way that businesses approach marketing, is a key feature of the SMBA curriculum. 

“An important part of my job is to work with our product and design team and our customers to make sure what we are developing is going to be useful, easy to use, and effective,” Babak explained.

After earning his PhD in Computer Science, Babak worked at two other successful start-ups, Altiscale and Solvvy, the latter of which was eventually acquired by Zoom. While in charge of cloud infrastructure and deep learning models at these companies, he gained vital experience that set him up for Intellipse, a Silicon Valley start-up he founded in 2018 to apply AI and machine learning to digital marketing in e-commerce. After raising more than $8 million in seed funding, Babak oversaw the company’s engineering infrastructure and web applications, watching the field of AI make rapid progress in just a few years. 

“These innovative developments are helping researchers to push the boundaries of what is possible with AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP),” said Babak, who joined Mutiny when that company acquired Intellipse in 2022, “and are leading to new and exciting applications in a wide range of industries.”

Babak described some of the specific new tools that are likely to soon become part of many jobs that SMBA students plan to pursue after graduation. These include:

• Transfer Learning Techniques that enable computer models to learn from a large dataset and then fine-tune on a specific task with a smaller dataset.
• Cloud Computing that helps researchers to train and deploy Large Language Models without requiring significant resources.
• Natural Language Generation tools that generate human-like text from structured data and can be used in chatbots and other customer service features.
• Neural Architecture Search techniques that automate the design of neural networks for specific tasks, significantly reducing the time and effort required.

Facing so much disruptive potential for innovation, what advice did Babak have for the class full of SMBA students who are getting ready to enter this dynamic industry?

“My main advice would be to take risks and start a company,” said Babak, the first in a new series of special guest speakers in the SMBA program. “You will learn a lot more by doing it rather than working at a big company or by reading about start-ups. As [computer programmer and investor] Paul Graham says, ‘the best way to learn how to start a company is to start a company.’”

Click here to learn more about CSULB’s Saturday Master of Business Administration (SMBA) degree program.