Ai4 2024: North America's Largest AI Industry Event
Last week, I survived the brutal desert heat, and was fortunate enough to attend Ai4 2024 in Las Vegas, NV, at the MGM Grand.
With more than 5000 attendees from over 75 countries, Ai4 has become the largest AI industry event in North America. The event takes place over three days and features over 350 speakers and 150 exhibits.
Some notable guests this year were the godfather of AI himself, Geoffrey Hinton, and former Presidential candidate, Andrew Yang.
Geoffrey Hinton's keynote came bright and early on the first full day of the conference, at 8:30 AM. While his speech included a lot of good information, it was disappointing that the "godfather of AI" was present and only given a 20-minute time slot. However, Mr. Hinton made the most of the time available in his session titled "Navigating the Future of AI: Ethics, Alignment, and Responsibility" and covered topics such as:
Due to LLM's generating non-stored memory, hallucinations should be referred to as "confabulations", as human memory works in much the same way. Additionally, digital computation should be considered better than biological computation due to the ability of AI to share data across copies, allowing for greater ability and performance - something that biological beings cannot do.
Massive job losses should be expected, along with political impact, autonomous lethal weapons, and increases in cybersecurity threats with phishing attacks having increased by 1200% in the past year.
AI could become an existential threat.
Other sessions throughout the day aimed to limit concerns over the threat to human existence, but also set expectations that there will be massive job disruption, focusing instead on the mantra that "AI will not take people's jobs, but humans using AI will."
Shortly after Hinton's keynote, former Presidential candidate Andrew Yang was featured in a session on AI's impact on politics.
Andrew Yang highlighted that the highest impact to jobs will be white-collar and repetitive jobs, with up to 2/3 of the global population being impacted. To help combat this, Universal Basic Income will be an option that may need to be explored. Yang also questioned where the value derived by companies from AI will go, and suggested the need to establish a tax mechanism on AI and utilized compute power.
Further, Yang explored the idea that data should provide a return to people since we have become the commodity; especially with people generally not having a positive outlook for the future and the fears around AI.
From here, Ai4 turned into a whirlwind. With over 350 speakers, the schedule was jam-packed with sessions on various topics. This ended up being one of my biggest complaints for the conference; there were so many sessions, that many overlapped and attendees had to make tough decisions on which sessions to attend. The large number of sessions also resulted in many being very short, which hampered the ability of many of the presentations to go far enough into depth on the highlighted topic. However, I didn't waste a single minute and was able to attend the following sessions over the next two days:
Supercharging Generative Tech
Return on AI
Operational Transformation with AI
Generative AI and Enterprise Automation: An Exploration of Successful Use Cases
Finding ROI from Generative AI Initiatives
The AI Regulatory Landscape
AI in Action: Exploring the Use of Large Language Models in Mental Health Crisis Prediction
Standing up an AI Center of Excellence Roundtable - A Strategic Discussion
AI in the US Government Roundtable
What Ethical AI Really Means for Business
Strategy to Execution: 5 Best Practices for AI Implementation
Essential Skills for Building an AI-Focused Team
Harnessing AI Responsibly
AI: From POC to Scale and Value
Exploring AI for Fan Growth
Democratizing LLMs for the People with Open Source
Geopolitics of AI: How Technology is Redefining Great Power Politics
The Future of Humans & Machines - The Economy, Human Well-Being & The World
Minimum Viable Governance: How to Get Started with AI Governance
A Blueprint for Data and AI Excellence: How Asurion Did It
Deepfakes: How Video is About to Become Ubiquitous for Promotion, Education & Entertainment
Cutting Edge Model Architectures & Use Cases
In between sessions, there was a large exhibit hall to explore. With Ai4 being one of the largest AI conferences in the world, I was disappointed that there were not more robotics and demonstrations of what the future of AI may be able to offer, with the hall instead primarily consisting of tables from sponsoring companies to discuss the services they currently have to offer. However, there was a library with copies of books from some of the speakers at the event, so I have another stack of books to work on reviewing!
My biggest takeaway from the conference is that despite the recent advancements in AI capabilities, we are still in the very early stages of this adventure. There are a lot of unknowns, and the "best practices" shared are what is so far working for the companies that have implemented AI within their organization. 5000+ attendees and it was clear that we are learning and figuring out the power of this new technology as we go. We are on the precipice of a global revolution and the acceleration of human evolution. It is exciting and scary at the same time. Conferences like this are valuable, especially having global representation, due to the urgent need for coordination and collaboration in the development and implementation of AI. The world will change, and we are early enough in this process where one bad actor could initiate global impact, or where one country may be able to chart the path forward for the whole planet. There are serious political, ethical, societal, and security concerns and not enough regulation (almost none). It is up to those working in and managing AI programs to take needed action for effective governance.
Just as AI itself encompasses a wide range of specialties and professions, more than a single person can master; Ai4 2024 had much of the same challenge: there is not enough time or bandwidth for one person to experience all of the available content. AI will require a lifelong commitment, filled with rapid change and development, similar to working in IT. But on steroids.
I am looking forward to (hopefully) attending Ai4 2025 next August!
Despite the unknown that comes with the future of AI, one thing is for certain; few better places come to mind for a conference of this size than Las Vegas!
Comments