Faire

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Jeremy Kahn, AI Editor, FORTUNE Moderator: Maiwen ZHANG, Executive Director, Executive Editor, FORTUNE China, Co-chair, Fortune Brainstorm AI Singapore


Brainstorm AI Singapore 2024: A Survival Guide to our Superpowered Future

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So Jeremy, your book offers very dramatic predictions of A I's impact over the next decade. Suppose we can really travel through time uh to the year 2034 as a writer and thinker, what do you think will be the most underestimated change brought about by A I? Yeah. So I think there's several things, but I think we're vastly underestimating the extent to which this is going to change the way we kind of interact with the internet in a way that, you know, Google kind of changed the way we all search for information. I think the sort of A I chatbots and actually more agentic A I that's coming along is really going to change the way we interact with digital information in a way that's kind of very profound. It really is like the next platform shift. And I think we're in the future, not really going to do a lot of this searching ourselves. We're going to have these A I agents that kind of go out into the world and do our research for us, do our shopping for us, plan our trips. And I think that's going to sort of profoundly change the way companies potentially interact with customers and the way we all interact with each other in ways we haven't really grappled with. And I think a lot of companies aren't really grappling with. So I think that's one of the biggest changes if you project for decade, uh, that we'll see. I also think in all of us who are sort of knowledge workers, um, there's going to be kind of a copilot that works alongside us in our job and that's going to change sort of how we function in our, in our, in our daily jobs. And I think a lot of people aren't also sort of thinking too hard about that at the moment. I, uh, you also remind me that one of the, uh, feminists I listened to mention the topic called General Computer Control, which sounds harmless. But, uh, think about it, this could be a shortcut to a G I that A, I can understand what's on the screen, can, can take actions, interact with the cyberspace through a PC. So, if not properly regulated, this could be followed by things like feeding the public with disinformation, fake news, et cetera. So, is this like opening a new Pandora's Box? Yeah. Right. I do think so. That's the kind of agentic A I that I was talking about that. I do think it's coming. Um, but I think some of the risks you have to sort of look at, at how much of an additional risk you have from the technology. So if you talk about disinformation, for instance, we already have quite a lot of human generated disinformation out there. The question is if you have an agentic system, is it that much easier to produce something at scale and then also put it out into the world and kind of create a whole strategy for a whole disinformation campaign. I think what I worry about most with the sort of digital agents is actually there are some interesting issues about control. I worry actually about sort of scams and crime and this sort of thing because I think right now there's already systems where you can, you can tell chat GPT like what's the way I can make $10,000 in an hour and it'll tell you some ideas for doing that, but you have to then go ahead and implement that idea yourself. And so far when people have done these experiments, mostly Chat GPD recommends you run some sort of marketing thing where you're, you're then paid to market somebody else's product on the internet T shirts or something like that. But it could very well in the future be that, oh, you know, go make me $10,000 you know, in the next few hours and don't tell me, you know, I don't want to know how going to do it. I think you could very well get a system that says, oh, well, a great way to do that would be to run a phishing campaign for instance. And we'll just send a bunch of scam letters to people and tell them to transmit money to your bank account. And the question is if your, if your system goes off and does that like, first of all, who's liable for that, but also that's a risk that we really want to try to avoid. So I think the guardrails we have around agentic systems are going to be really important. So as who wrote, if we can try to govern A I, like what would, what we did with uh uh nuclear power, for example, uh what do you think our government and the international society can do now to prevent, you know, all this from happening? Yeah. Well, I do talk in the book a little bit about different analogies for governance including nuclear power. And I do think we need different levels of regulation. I think we should do some stuff at the international level that puts some basic limits on what this technology can do. I'm not as if you read the book, you'll see that I'm not super worried about the sort of existence risk scenario, but I'm worried enough that I think we should take some action to head that off. I think it makes sense to do that. I don't think that that should sort of crowd out what we're doing to deal with more near term risks. Such as disinformation, such as bias in A I systems. I think we need other regulations to deal with that and that could actually be done more at the national level. I do think every country is going to need a regulator that actually understands the technology has the power to kind of look at what technology companies are actually building and have some meaningful control over that and, and that we need some standards around what these controls should be. Um I do think there, there are risks here and we need to have a regulatory regime. I don't think you can just have a completely laissez Faire system. I think your book mentioned a lot of things actually are working. One of them is called uh constitutional. Yeah. Yeah, which is adopted by Amazon's uh large, large language model uh which is to give A I model written principles, a constitution to follow. So, so what it should be or maybe it's already written in this constitution. Yeah. Well, this is an interesting constitutional A I for those who don't know is something that was invented by the folks at Anthropic, which is one of the sort of leading uh LLM companies um founded by a group that, that broke off from open A I. Um And their idea was to give an A I system, a written set of principles that they, it should check every answer it's giving against and see if it conforms with these principles. This does seem to produce more robust guardrails than some other kinds of ways of trying to create guardrails. However, it's not foolproof, there are still ways around this. So I think we still need more research, but I think it's not a bad idea. Then the question becomes well, who principles are in this constitution? And that's a very fraught issue. And I think anthropic has done some interesting work on trying to survey the public on what do they think should be in this constitution? And they found, you know, two thirds of the people kind of agree on what should be in the constitution. The problem is that the other third vehemently disagree with the two thirds. So I think that's still, you know, we're going to have to come up with a way of resolving this. And I think it's, that's one of the reasons I think it's gonna be, there's gonna be geographic diversity among, uh, you know, chat bots. Um I think because we're going to need different guardrails for different places and different societies will think certain things are more appropriate than others, but they will be common area. Yeah, I think there will be commonalities and that's one of the things we could try to do at the international level is come up with, what are those commonalities? But is it, uh you know, uh constant intuitively, is it correct to say that maybe we need more powerful A I models in order to, uh, make sure that they, they will be safer because we, we simply need them to be that sophisticated to make it happen. Well, yeah, this is again an idea that the folks at Anthropic D Amede, who's the ceo of anthropic has this idea that you have to build 90% of the unsafe thing in order to do the research on how to make the system safe. I think that's a little bit dangerous way of thinking, but I do think there's a little bit something to it that we need to advance the system to a certain degree test, you know how we could control them. But it's also one of the reasons I think you need a regulator there sort of looking over the shoulder of the company saying, OK, well, at what point are we reaching a limit at which we shouldn't go any further? I also think there's some interesting research on if you built something that's relatively powerful, how do you distill the learnings from a large model down to a smaller model? And I think there's some interesting research has come out on that and I think some we may end up through building these larger models, create and more powerful models, create smaller models that are actually more controllable. But it will be because we've done the work on the large models. And the last shepherd, uh the, the, the very last ending of the book, uh actually brought me things some further last week, my kids uh and I visited the Mogao Grottos located in Northwest China. So uh sending interest from the Asian murals, mostly colorful paintings, religious writings on the wall. In the case, I was actually profoundly shaken by the fact that this is created. This was created by the very same human beings more than 1000 years ago. But think about that when our descendants saw writings, paintings, even music sheets, uh will they still be amazed knowing that this could actually be cations of machines? So with this fact, discouraged today's artists and writers, I hope not, I think it is a potential risk that people will stop appreciating, you know, human created objects and art. But I actually don't think it's a huge risk. I think there's plenty of room here still for human creativity. And if you look at sort of the most profound contributions, particularly, it's advancing the edge of any art, it's still going to be done by humans. It may be done at in collaboration with A I and using A I as a tool. But I think ultimately that to try to predict if you look at how a lot of these A I systems are trained, they're trained on past human works. And if you're trying to advance where art is going, it's very hard for these systems to actually make an advance on that goes beyond their training data. In fact, they really can't, in many cases do that. But a human can a human can potentially prompt, you know, use what the A I but then put a human touch on top of that, that does really advance the art form. And in the book, I talked to a number of artists who are trying to do this. There's a photographer I talked to who takes these big monumental of canvases panoramic photography. And then he applies an A I layer that provides some interesting visual effects. But then he does traditional photo editing. On top of that. I also talked to a writer who kind of takes the most bizarre outputs of systems and incorporates that into her writing and uses a kind of a foil for things she writes. So she has the A I in kind of conversation with her, which I think is interesting also as a way to think about how artists can still create human, written and human advanced art. So just as you wrote, we need co pilots, not autopilots. Yeah, that's right. I have to say we need co pilots and not auto. Yeah. So again, you wrote, I quote A I is actually bendable. So let's hope we can, we can uh skew the odds in favor of those more positive outcomes, not the other way around. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Manish Chandra, CEO, Poshmark
Max Rhodes, CEO, Faire 
Additional speakers to be announced
Moderator: Phil Wahba, FORTUNE


Brainstorm Tech 2022: Retail Reimagined (Again)

well, good afternoon everyone and maximum welcome. So why don't we start with before we get into the details of your business models and all that? Let's talk about, uh, the retail environment at the moment, both of you of course, look at it from a different lens, but tell us how inflation, you know, pessimism around, pessimism around the economy is reflected in how businesses going on. Your maybe we can start with you, maybe just in a sentence, explain to people what fair is. Yeah, So there is a wholesale market place, we connect independent brands with independent retailers, kind of like an online trade show or wholesale version of amazon and the, the impact that inflation is having on our business. I mean, we can, we can see it in our data, we can see that Brands are raising prices. I think prices are up about 6% year over year. So it's not like it's not happening, but in terms of the impact that it's actually having our retailers, we haven't seen it yet, their sales are actually up year over year and they were up year over year over the prior year. Um, I think one of the things that's interesting about independent retail is that The retailers that have survived over the course of the last 50 years aren't doing so by competing on price. They're doing so by competing on curation on experience on community and, you know, they've figured out how to live in a world where they don't have the lowest prices and as a result, I think they're proving to be more resilient in a time when, you know, some retailers that I think their consumer is much much more price conscious is struggling. I think independent retail at least continues to surprise, you know, me in terms of how resilient it is through the through the pandemic, through this inflationary cycle, um it just continues to impress me how resilient these these businesses are and how creative they are in ways of of of continuing to survive and thrive. Does that apply to outside the U. S. As well? You guys are in some international markets as well? Right. Yeah, we, the data that we have on how our stores are doing outside of the U. S. And we have, you know, tens of thousands of retailers in europe at this point, it's not as robust um but nothing in the data that we have suggests that that there are the stories any different overseas Manisha body, what are you saying? You know, if you think of cash, Mark, you know, we really enable everyone to take their closet and put it online for sale. So in inflation at a fundamental level, everything if it becomes more expensive, then the asset you have, which is your clothing also becomes more expensive, so suddenly everything you own is actually more valuable. So in a way our consumers can tap into the closet really recirculate so without getting into specifics were not quite as, you know Phil uh just the broader thing I would say is that inflation combined with sustainability, are actually two high dimension forces which are propelling resale into the center of retail as we are seeing broadly brands retailers, everyone adopting resale as a core paradigm. And I think inflation is going to only accelerate it further, sorry for the digression, but I can't help notice your amazing shoes, what's the story behind them? Your shoes, everything, everything is from bosch marks, I I you know, I'm 100% Mark customer. Okay, well, they're fabulous. I have not seen another cool pair of shoes like that in this whole conference. So, um, so let's talk a little bit about supply chain, it might be a little bit different from you since your resale site, but you know, does that have any impact on posh mark? Right, Two things, I think every time that there is disruption in the economy, it does affect the business in the entire retail ecosystem, whether it's posh Mark or others. So, supply chain disruptions initially were an accelerator of our growth because what you see in supply chain disruptions is people have to tap into supply that's already available today. What's happening is that supply chain is actually creating price arbitrage opportunities. And so so many of our resellers are tapping into that to offer that inventory at a discounted price, into the marketplace. So that's sort of, I think in a, in a way, supply chain, the flip side of supply chain, is that what you see in terms of fashion and, and and it's changing a little bit as we are sort of coming into, I don't know whether it's post covid or whatever transitionary covid world, but people were forced to restyle stuff because it was not a whole lot of new fashion coming out as you look into the future, people still mixing and matching. And so this whole world of evolving fashion is accelerating in a very different way, tapping into pieces you have and tapping into pieces you're buying and when you start to think of supply chain disruptions, that also gives an opportunity for recycling and reuse, combined with new stuff to create new means for fashion. And then we look at a platform like Tiktok where each of these fashion trends can get viral and suddenly you can run out of small lot inventory. Then posh mark as a platform offers alternatives for either getting that same item or similar items that people can use for their styling. How about you max? What do you think? Yeah, we're hearing about it, some from our retailers, you know, particularly in the apparel segment. Um, but I think the story that you're hearing from big box stores and from larger retailers, I think the situation there is much more dire because they're buying so much more of their product from china where, you know, the supply chain issues are really starting and they're having to buy so far in advance in such large quantities. Independent retailers are just much more nimble and you know, I talked about the fact that they figured out how to survive in a world where they don't have the lowest price is part of the way that they do. That is by sourcing products that are made in the United States, that are more unique, um you know, that are less likely to be made in china and therefore, I think they they've been a little bit more resilient to the supply chain challenges. I think we've also seen, you know, our retailers turning to fair um as a way to help solve some of the supply chain issues that they're running into because we have, you know, 70,000 brands on our platform, some of them manufacture in china, some of them are having supply chain issues, but we allow retailers to get visibility into the availability of the products and to source from products and brands that don't manufacture in china that aren't having supply chain issues and enable them to be a lot more nimble and respond, you know, in real time to the challenges to make sure that they have the products in stock that their customers want. I'm glad you talked about big box retailers because I'm gonna skip a couple of questions go back to them, but what can big box retail retailers learn from each of your companies, Do you think they will start with you max since you brought them up? Yeah, I think that the big challenge that big box retailers have is their core value proposition is assortment and price. And the truth is that the internet just does that better. Uh And on top of that, the internet has, you know, the ability to deliver things directly to your house. It has the ability to recommend products to you based on your prior search history. And I think that puts big box retailers in in a pretty difficult position. Um I think the reason why independent retailers Have proven to be resilient over the course of the last 10 years over the course, really, the last 20 years, but especially the last 10 years, the number of independent bookstores in the United States is actually more than doubled over the course of the last decade, which always shocks a lot of people, but I think we're seeing it across almost every category. Independent retail is really thriving despite the rise of e commerce. And the reason for that is because independent retailers have figured out how to compete on experience curation. You know, they build a presence in their community and to be totally honest, I think it's a lot harder for big box retailers to to reinvent themselves and to do that. It's harder for them to change course, it's harder for them to offer some of the things that independent retailers offer, but to the degree to which, you know, they're trying, I think it's figuring out how to, you know, tap into the power of the internet. Um, it's figuring out how to offer better experiences. You're not gonna be able to rely on just having low prices, large assortments. You really have to figure out, you know, how to how to offer a compelling experience in store. And, you know, I think the big box retailers that are doing better are, you know, the folks like Best buy or Home Depot that have really figured out compelling reasons why, you know, people need to come into store, whether it's the expert advice for the experience. Um, and I think that that's something that they can learn from the independent retailers that buy unfair. What do you think? I think um when you think of any, any large big box retailer, they are aggregating audiences as well, so they have a massive audience of shoppers and I think when you start to match the audience of shoppers into the different kinds of supply that are available, the thing that can learn from posh mark is really the power of community and sort of nation. If you look at the online presence, almost every big box retailer is becoming a marketplace, Right? So there's hardly any big box retailer that's not a marketplace. The marketplace is the new retail architecture is, in a sense, we're running different forms of retail out there. Uh, if you can start to map it into physical retail and really empower the local community is very powerful, You know, I I used to often talk about the fact that you go into a big fashion store day when you go, it's a little overwhelming. There's so much selection Day three, you go, nothing has changed. It's the same thing, right? It is when you look at Posh mark, you go in, you open up the app, you go an hour later, it's a small facet personalized to you. You see something new, something new pop up. So how can use the power of community and community merchandizing to completely create a retail experience without having to disrupt anything except the facade of these stores. So I think some people are trying to do that. There's some, some innovation stuff happening. But I see that that partnership with the local, with the global and then aggregating audiences and supply can be quite powerful as people transform, especially when you start to connect it back to digital haven't followed. I will open it up for questions. So in in a moment, so start put your thinking caps on. And then if you have a question, we'll we'll take it. I'm glad you talked about community and that's actually one of posh Mark secret sauce is right like you because otherwise, you know, it's just a site with a lot of product, um how has that evolved? You know, this, this, you know, creating communities online and how do you keep fresh and how do you make sure that the approach still works? Yeah. So you know, community is something which was definitely a thesis we had when we started the company but the formation the scale and the passion of it organically happened over time but there's a few artifacts that we created. So one of the things that bash mark has a social sharing where you can curate products, you can curate products from your own store and closet. You can also curate product from other people that creates what I would call. We were using this term in the previous panel agency which gives people power and empowerment to engage. Probably the only few platforms where sellers and participants have enough power without having to spend direct money, no advertising, nothing is needed. So that creates a level of flow and connection. Then we mapped it into physical events. So we have tons of physical events and again in the early days we did it by necessity because there was no mobile marketing dollars, there was no way to market. And um so we had to go out and do physical events. But over time they became their physical events fed into virtual events. Virtual events fed into physical events. And that created a sense of hyper local communities where you could sort of have these local communities and then people could throw hyper local events where you have events happening in small towns etcetera and that form other communities. And then communities were initially very seller centric, then they became seller in style centric. And the power of it is manifested in many different ways. So for example, you know, you hear amazing human stories where people are getting supported, so you have people pulling money together, pulling inventory together when somebody has gone through a divorce and shipping them inventory so they can make a living. You have people funding cancer treatment with in a pool sort of process. You have people taking trips together, road ships together, uh, physical trips together. So the power of community then starts to become very much a fabric. That's part of the platform. And ultimately what it does is it creates enormous loyalty to the brand without actually being about the brand because you have loyalty to each other on the platform. Do you do in person events? You just started, we just started. So we had them. The funny story is that in 2020 when pandemic just first started, we were about to launch 400 simultaneous events across the country, physically in coffee houses, we have to put that on a hold and now we're just starting. I think people are feeling their way to attend larger physical events. You know, it's fun to see everyone here, we have our passports coming up, we'll see how many people attend. But, you know, I think it'll take another year or so to kind of get that machinery going now, your your company sort of, you know, is a compliment or replacement for trade shows. I mean, can you do it? Do you do anything in the physical world for two to match your, the people in your marketplace? Can you? Yeah, we, it's actually around trade shows. Uh, we we tend to do, um, you know, get together and meet up. So it's something that we've we've explored doing um, in, in cities, not around trade shows, there definitely is a strong sense of community among the brands and retailers that are on fair. I think one of the things that's interesting about our platform is it's not like your typical consumer marketplace and it sounds like posh mark may be different, but a lot of consumer marketplaces, it's just super transactional where I'm buying from the brand. I have no relationship with the brand. I don't even want to necessarily have a relationship with the brand. And on our marketplace, there's a much, much stronger sense of connection between the brands and retailers. They really view each other as partners um, in, you know, trying to help each other be successful. We have small businesses on both sides of, of our marketplace and they really, I think empathize with one another and recognize that they're both out there trying to do the best that they can. And I think that really lends itself to, to building a sense of community and we have started to explore different ways of trying to create that um, online as well as offline. So I want to ask you both about technology since this is a tech conference and not a retail one. Um, you know, what's the technology you use to know what's trending, know what you should be promoting or making the users of your respective sites aware of and how has that changed for us. Our philosophy has been to experiment with technology and then see what really starts to hit the click in terms of actual product market fit. So for example, in the very early days when Apple Watch was coming out, Apple Watch apps were there, we created an Apple Watch app and you know, sort of experimented with that. We were the first to go to market. So we do that in some cases, you know, we haven't been able to be as aggressive and we are catching up like streaming, etcetera. But the goal is to make the technology work for the customer as opposed to customers sort of have to work for the technology and, and that requires some experimentation and when it starts to get some sort of a fit, then we scale it up. We started with betting on a technology that was pretty novel when we started the company, which was, we built an end to end marketplace on iphone which was considered sort of crazy at that time, like who would bet their entire future an iphone in 2010, every VC wanted me to do a website. And I said, no, it's just going to be an iphone app which was considered extremely risky in 2010 max. And he thought, yeah, I mean part of our core thesis when starting the company was trade shows, do a really poor job of sorting brands and retailers and matching them. It's basically, you know, you end up buying the products that you walk by um, and you end up seeing the products that you're able to see in a day, you know, depending on how much ground you want to cover and the decisions that retailers are making, particularly independent retailers, they're kind of guessing what's going to sell. Um, and what's not going to sell. And it's really difficult for them to make good decisions. And part of the core thesis was fair was by pulling hundreds of thousands of retailers together, seeing what's being reordered, what's being returned. You know, understanding who's buying, what we would be able to bring. You know, a much more data driven approach to buying for retailers, something that larger retailers have had for a long time. They have teams of buyers poring over data. They have tons of historical data. They can look at what's selling in austin texas and compare that to what's selling in Portland. Um, we bring that power of data and scale to independent retailers and we now have machine learning algorithms, they're looking at hundreds of different signals, determining what we should recommend to every retailer and ultimately helping them be more successful as a result. Well, on that note, I'm going to thank for joining us and check out their site figure.

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