Co-author (with Vivek Wadhwa) of The Driver in the Driverless Car, Alex Salkever explains how current technology trends in AI, machine learning, and computing will impact business, society, and the world we live in.
Alex Salkever is a leading expert in exploring the intersection of technology, business and society, with over two decades of experience covering cutting-edge advancements in a wide assortment of fields such as AI (and ChatGPT), green energy, genetic engineering, cloud computing, virtual reality, and self-driving cars. As a former editor of BusinessWeek and award-winning co-author (with Vivek Wadhwa) of The Driver in the Driverless Car, Alex has a unique perspective on the ways in which technology impacts our lives and well-being.
Based in the heart of Silicon Valley, Alex has firsthand access to emerging technologies at the forefront of development and adoption. He engages with researchers and innovators working on over-the-horizon ideas that will shape the future, and regularly contributes to leading publications and media such as Fortune, Marketwatch, CNBC, Foreign Affairs, and many others.
- AI and the Future of Technology Infrastructure: It’s All Going to Change
- The runaway success of ChatGPT, Stabile Diffusion, Midjourney and other generative AI systems has taken the new technology genre mainstream at lightspeed. But even though generative AI might seem like magic, there is a lot that has to happen behind the curtain for the Wizard to work. Already, the ChatGPT busy message is a common occurrence. Generative AI is incredibly compute intensive and combines heavy requirements for both massive data crunching in the cloud and localized, specialized data for specific contexts and use cases. Increasingly, as it becomes a part of every application — which is clearly the intent of Microsoft, the part owner of OpenAI — answers will need to be delivered quickly and crisply — as if we were actually talking to another person. To make this possible, we will need a total overhaul of our technology infrastructure. This talk will cover how the insatiable demand for AI will impact data centers, wireless networks, servers, devices, cloud computing, networking, and many other related aspects of infrastructure.
- The AI Cheat Code: How ChatGPT (and AI Tools) Will (and Won’t) Forever Alter Human Work
- In 2022, AI finally broke through to the mainstream and began to impact in obvious and meaningful ways our work. ChatGPT took the world by storm and upended the status quo. High school students used it to write college essays. Respected news publications tried it out for original articles. Executives began to use it to draft emails. Marketers started using it to write blogs and social media posts. Its output was astonishingly convincing. Except when it was factually incorrect, unoriginal and formulaic. ChatGPT will make us far more efficient for many tasks. But it will not replace humans and usually will become an extension of their wisdom. And that’s the key to understanding AI writ large, and its role for the next five years — the cheat code. AI can give humans superpowers but you have to understand its limitations to unlock its true magic. This talk will trace the origins of AI, the incredible breakthroughs of Deep Learning and modern AI, cover the limitations of current AI and provide guidance and insight on how AI will change human work in the near and long-term — and what that might mean for you.
- Will AI Make Us Stupid? And Other Relevant Questions to Ask Before We Buy In
- With the rise of generative artificial intelligence, many creative tasks are now being outsourced to deep learning systems. Companies are rushing to embed AI into all manner of tasks. Some are low-value, such as responding to emails and analyzing customer sentiment or writing short abstracts. But we are also seeing people experiment with AI as a wholesale replacement for writing blogs, creating charts and graphics, and building powerpoint presentations. Is this healthy or good? What are the secondary and tertiary benefits of the creative process that make us better thinkers and more creative people — and will AI atrophy this muscle in catastrophic ways? What are the potential longer term impacts of AI on our brains?