A Personal Recap of NY AI Summit 2023
pioneeringminds.ai
(100% Authentic writing, no AI was exploited in the writing of this piece. Although maybe I should have done that hh).
I spent a couple of hours at the NY AI Summit last week and it was a BLAST! It is amazing to see so many people interested in Artificial Intelligence! We are all part of this effort to create inclusive experiences for fellow AI enthusiasts regardless of who they are and where they are from. Kudos to all those who attended!
Below is a quick recap of some talks I attended. I'm sure there are many more amazing talks, but unfortunately, I have limited time and can only be at one place at any given time… So, if any of you happen to attend the NY AI Summit, please share your experiences (or with me)!
Talk 1:Hot AI products to cool our planet: Building AI For Climate
The talk was given by Manik Suri from Therma. The company aims to leverage AI and tackle climate change through waste reduction in energy, food, and more. Imagine if you can reduce the electricity usage of the heating systems by anticipating the weather changes - something that was brushed away before but is much more feasible today with the increasing power of AI systems. If we have one great thing that comes out of this AI frenzy, a clear path toward solving global warming and climate issues is definitely on the table.
P.S. Personally, among all of these Gen-AI startups, I would be much more curious to see what ‘down-to-earth’ problems we can solve with AI. From security and safety for students and citizens to reduction of screen time of kids (not increasing them for Pete’s sake) and waste/energy usage reduction, all these have the potential to be greatly affected by AI (and they should be).
Talk 2: AI x Human Experience:m Applying a Human-Centered Approach to Establish Trust
In this talk, Laura Shact and Amelia Dunlop from Deloitte gave an interesting view of how we as humans can leverage AI moving forward.
The key message proposed by Amelia and Laura is rather straightforward: we get to make AI tools co-evolve with humans and empower humans with AI tools.
When was the last time you talked to customer service, knew it was AI, and asked for humans instead? I personally prefer the flexibility of humans, and, as many would put it, the magical human touch. Nonetheless, it is important to understand that to build AI tools that are trustworthy, we must put humans at the center. In this fast-changing era of AI, or even AGI, the human was, still is, and will continue to be the most important factor.
Talk 3: Generative AI at Scale: Accelerating Innovation and Productivity
In this talk, Nitzan and Xiaodi from eBay talked about how to deploy AI at scale to boost innovation and productivity across the company. For a company the size of eBay, they were quite nimble and agile in terms of adopting and harnessing the power of AI tools. Given the nature of eBay, they leveraged AI to accelerate both buyer and seller experiences. A fun example given was the AI-generated item description. During the survey, people said they wanted no-assisted tools, but once it’s rolled out, it still received high ratings from sellers across the globe. At any rate, it seems to me the reason eBay was able to move so fast with AI and convert research into production features, was that they have orchestrated an integrated AI organizational framework. Nitzan and Xiaodi described an intertwined framework. AI is no longer a separate unit that needs to be added, it’s part of the natural flow of work and development. Developers were not told what they could do, but rather they uncovered what they could improve and leverage the AI tools they have.
Companies At the Show
There were lots of different companies present at the NY AI Summit. The full list can be found at the NY AI Summit website: https://newyork.theaisummit.com/exhibitor-list
There were lots of awesome companies, most of them were business-facing. BUT, there are still a few that regular folks like us can take a stab at. Here’s a list of top picks with a quick stab at what they offer : D
I have recorded hundreds of meetings myself, as well as tons of voice memos. This has been a great way to keep things on track if I review the content soon after. However, over time I’ve got tons of these recordings and I could not easily index and search what was going on in them.
Pricing: 14 days free with 20 hours of AI Transcription and Zoom Integration
A Rev Transcription. Guess which talk is this? Performance: I asked Rev to transcribe one of the recordings I took during the meeting, with heavy noise, and far from the speaker, and the results are quite nice - NOT word-to-word nice, but still rather accurate
PAAL AI
PAAL AI provides a step-up version of GPTs in certain ways - like taking YouTube videos and storing them in its knowledge base. I must admit it is quite an interesting way to interact.
Content I throw at the bot 
Summary the bot threw back at me : D To use this you can simply create a bot from the website. I created my own ‘ETF Guru’ bot for a test drive and it did quite well in terms of video content summary. Of course, being a web3-oriented platform there are much more functionalities provided by PAAL AI, if you are interested, I suggest taking a look.
Ikigai Labs
Ikigai (生き甲斐) refers to a passion that gives value and joy to life. In Japanese it’s [生きる価値], in plain English, I’d call it [purpose of life]. The Lab was created by MIT Professor Devavrat Shah and based on their proprietary research.
On the surface, Ikigai Labs offered a great interface for playing around with data - simple to use yet flexible. Take housing prediction, for example, one can easily create data using the interface as follows.
Now with this, I can feed the stitched data to a prediction pipeline and get predicted housing prices. Maybe I am using it wrong but the only issue I had is that each pipeline takes a while to finish. For a small dataset, I would expect the whole thing to be complete within seconds if not minutes.
There are many other great companies in this event that I did not cover. I had a great chat with Flavia Marsano from The Agile Monkeys - a company focused on building AI enterprise-ready solutions that are committed to sharing interesting insights from their research in the AI space (their blogs). Graphen Drugomics leverages AI to develop medicine 20X faster and more efficiently than big Pharma. The list goes on.
Again, if you had any fun experiences at the NY AI Summit, please share your experiences (or with me)!