MAICON Archives

The Human Side of AI: Inside the Leading Labs [MAICON 25]

Cath Anderson
Duration: 45 minutes
Date Released: October 2025
Course Level: Beginner to Intermediate
Behind every breakthrough in artificial intelligence are deeply human stories—of curiosity, care, and commitment to building technology that serves people.

In this powerful session, go beyond the headlines and into the hearts and minds of product and design leaders at today’s top AI labs. Through candid conversations, you’ll gain rare insight into the principles and practices guiding the development of advanced AI models and applications.

Hear how teams are wrestling with the real-world implications of their work, balancing speed with responsibility, and making intentional, thoughtful choices around user experiences. These are the humans shaping the future—embedding values into code, striving to anticipate unintended consequences, and pushing for progress while staying grounded in the needs of people.

Watch this session for an inspiring look at how thoughtful, mission-driven creators are designing AI with humanity, for humanity.
Meet Your Instructor

Cath Anderson

Cath Anderson is Chief Communications Officer at Akido Labs, where she drives brand and communications strategy. With 20 years of experience, she has helped organizations navigate growth, transformation, and trust-building — from early-stage startups to global consumer brands. She previously held leadership roles at Anthropic, Cityblock Health, Apple, Meta, and Google. Across these organizations, she has built narratives that demystify complex technologies and strengthen public trust. Anderson believes highly strategic, clear, and credible storytelling is essential to lasting business impact.

Chief Communications Officer, Akido Labs
Meet Your Instructor

Xiao Ma

Xiao Ma is a software engineer at Google Deepmind (2024 - present), working on instruction following in Gemini post-training. Most recently, Ma co-led horizontal scaling of the combination of human and critic feedback (RL*F) for Gemini 2.5. The methodology was widely adopted by 500+ engineers across 50+ launches of major capabilities.

Software Engineer, Google DeepMind
Meet Your Instructor

Angela Pham

Angela Pham is a lead content design manager at Meta on the Gen AI team. She's been at Meta for over 7 years, shaping content strategies for billions of users across Facebook, Instagram and the new standalone Meta AI app, which she led the UX content for. She also founded Meta's Socioeconomic Diversity employee group. Previously she was head of content design at DoorDash and in editorial at PwC. She's based in Manhattan, born in Texas, raised in the Midwest and has also fled the Bay Area. She enjoys dogs, friends, dive bars and non-fiction.

UX Content Design Lead Manager, Gen AI, Meta