Last month, Greg Whalen officially joined Casper Labs as CTO. With two-plus decades of experience working at the vanguard of both the distributed computing and artificial intelligence fields – his experience is pivotal to our efforts to bring Prove AI to market as a leading AI governance solution.
Previously, Greg was CTO at Xendit, a fintech firm that he helped scale to a > $1 billion valuation. He has also held leadership roles at Amazon Web Services, Pivotal, and Experian. His deep expertise in financial services, enterprise solutions, and AI uniquely positions him to tackle one of the biggest challenges that organizations face today: how to innovate with AI without compromising on security and regulatory compliance.
Read on as Whalen discusses the dynamic interplay between AI innovation and blockchain technology, providing a comprehensive look at the future direction of Casper Labs.
As you step into the role of CTO, what are your primary goals for the coming year?
Greg Whalen: The most immediate and critical goal for me and the team is the successful launch of Prove AI, our first-of-its kind tool that provides a critical layer of insight into and robust control over generative AI systems. To date, enterprise AI adoption has been stymied due to risks—perceived and real—around a lack of transparency and auditability. Prove AI will help enterprises tap into the benefits of AI while reducing these risks.
As we approach the launch of Prove AI, we’re focused on ensuring our initial design partners, our early adopters, achieve measurable success with the software. It really comes down to demonstrating real, tangible utility and value across use cases to showcase the impact of Prove AI for organizations across industries.
Casper’s blockchain capabilities that will be essential to Prove AI’s success. Tell us a bit about how that works.
Greg Whalen: One of the standout features is using the blockchain as a public source of truth. This is vital for questions about model integrity. Our blockchain's instant finality and hybrid public-private nature also set us apart—instant finality ensures that transactions are committed without delay, which is not a given with all blockchains. This reliability is crucial for compliance and governance applications, where the ability to share immutable records with third parties is critical.
And it's not just about compliance; it's about providing real utility to both developers and compliance teams. Ideally, Prove AI should allow teams to focus on their core tasks without constantly worrying about regulatory issues. Effective usage, seamless compliance, and the ability to produce verifiable logs and evidence of compliance are key metrics. Prove AI should reduce the time, cost, and complexity of managing compliance, while enhancing accuracy.
With AI development moving rapidly, how do you see the balance of governance and innovation shaping the future?
Greg Whalen: It's a complex dynamic. Compliance and trust are both crucial, but they shouldn't be seen as disparate forces. Compliance is an enabler of trust, not an opposing priority. Historically, regulatory pressures have driven companies to rethink and improve their processes, much like GDPR did for data privacy. For AI, the goal is to create a development environment where compliance is built-in, not an afterthought. Prove AI aims to offer a solution that seamlessly integrates compliance into the AI development workflow, ensuring that trust and innovation go hand-in-hand.
How do you and the team ensure that Prove AI stays up-to-date with evolving regulations and compliance standards?
Greg Whalen: Initially, we'll work closely with our launch partners, offering active advisory roles to navigate the early stages of compliance. As regulations stabilize and precedents are set, our advice will evolve into more productized features within Prove AI. This ongoing dialogue and advisory approach will help our customers stay agile and compliant in a rapidly changing regulatory landscape.
It’s important to remember that businesses will have to navigate various regulations and compliance requirements differently. The size of the company, the use cases in which they’ll leverage AI, the different applications and solutions they offer, will all shape their compliance journey. There are no one-size-fits-all solutions. Our team understands that, and is focused on delivering a tailored service for early Prove AI partners and customers.
With a strong focus on Prove AI, Whalen is set to lead CasperLabs into a new era of blockchain and AI integration.
