Brainstorm Tech 2023

Harvey Mason, Jr., Chief Executive Officer, The Recording Academy In conversation with: Terri Burns, Fortune Brainstorm Tech

Brainstorm Tech 2023: The Future of Music

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As we continue to witness, no industry is immune to the disruption caused by A I, especially in the world of entertainment. With the rise of A, I mimicked voices and auto tunes. A significant debate has emerged regarding the role and right of creators. Our final guest best for last has worked with icons like Beyonce, Justin Timberlake and Whitney Houston. Just to name a few. His talent and expertise in the music industry has garnered multiple Grammy nominations beyond the awards. He is a visionary leader who actively championed the rights and well being of music creators as the CEO of the recording academy. The organization behind the Grammys. Harvey Mason Jr has embraced cutting edge technologies and paved the way for groundbreaking collaborations between artists and tech innovators ultimately shaping the future of the music of the music industry. I'm really looking forward to hearing his vision on the intersection of creativity and tech. Please welcome Harvey Mason Jr. Thanks sir. Of course. Thank you for being here. Harvey. Excited to chat today. My pleasure. So let's get into it first. Can we talk about getting younger? Oh, my goodness. Yeah, I want to do all that. How's that? How's that going for you? It's not working. All right. Well, you know what music keeps us young. Um And so you obviously help us, help us all with that a little bit. A few A I songs have gone viral this year. Notably hard on my sleeve, which sounded a lot like Drake in the weekend. It went viral before it was removed from streaming platforms earlier this year. So curious to know, what did you think of this song? And, or what did you think of this? A I trend in music in general? Starting with the song, I thought the song was great. It was a bop, right? It was hot. It was well done. Clearly, somebody with a lot of talent put it together, the voice modeling did replicate Drake in the weekend and when you say it sounded kind of like them to me, it sounded exactly like them, which is, I guess a little scary, but also really interesting, which is, I think the topic of the conversation is what is a I going to mean for the future of artistry or creativity? And you saw that in that song hard on my sleeve. The possibilities are endless. You have to really look at it through the lens for me and I'm jumping ahead and maybe you're going to ask me this, but look at it from the perspective of the, of the consumer things that they want, they want more music. You've seen more music being created and released now than ever for, we had more submissions at the Grammys in the history of our organization. Last year, more songs are being released every day than ever before on the platform. So consumers want music by their favorite artists, they want to hear their favorite singers or rappers performing songs. So the possibility of A I contributing to that is both interesting and a little bit scary. 100%. It's an opportunity. But I also think that there are some risks there as well. Thinking about this shifting consumer demand. What about on the creator side? So you obviously work with lots of creators. How are they embracing this technology or not? I don't think they're embracing it yet because it's scary when you hear your voice being replicated without an agreement or even attribution or remuneration coming back to you as an artist or as a singer or as a writer, it's going to be scary. These are things we've worked our whole lives to be able to do. I'm a songwriter. I studied, I practiced, I tried for years to be able to sit at a piano and come up with something from my heart, from my soul, from the story of my life. And now to imagine a computer, you can type in, in a prompt and you can do that in 10 seconds. It's frightening beyond belief. But the potential and the possibilities are endless and I think if we get the right guide rails in place, a I can be a creative amplifier, not a replacement for creativity. And that's, that's the way I look at it. And that's what technology has been throughout history since somebody invented a drum or a wood with a piece of stick with some holes in it. A flute, those are all ability to record. Those are all advancements that allowed creatives to do more creating and I see AI as a potential extension of that. So in a recent interview with Rolling Stone, you mentioned that you and your team will continue to assess A I technology and that the rules and regulations for how it will be treated at the recording academy naturally will, will evolve over time as well. This might be a little bit of a challenging question. But if you could predict five years from now, what you think the rules are going to be at the recording academy around A I technology and submission, what do you think that's going to look like? I don't imagine it'll be too dissimilar from what they are now, which is we're going to award human creativity. You can use A I to create music and still submit. And there was a misconception about that and there was people misinterpreted our rules that AI generated music was not eligible. That's absolutely false music that is generated by AI is eligible for nomination as long as there is human interaction by more than a diminimus amount as long as somebody is either singing or has been writing on that piece of music, it's eligible. So in five years, you're going to see more ai you're going to see more, probably a higher percentage of AI music being created and submitted. But I still believe, I think at this point sitting here today that will as an academy want to award human creativity. And besides that, I can't even understand how we would award a Grammy to what a computer or what are we doing? Yeah. Yeah. Well, that actually, you know, begs a really interesting question around fairness, compensation, recognition for work. Should artists, for example, be compensated when their work is used to, let's say, train a neural network. Well, I grew up listening to Michael Jackson and Prince and Earth Wind and Fire and Christopher Columbus and Aero Smith. You know, and I write songs based on the things that I heard my whole life and I'm not paying them. So it's a little bit controversial because a lot of people are saying we've got to look at what they're learning from and we've got to be able to identify it and then make sure there's a payment going back to the original. But they're listening to millions of songs just like I listened to millions of songs growing up. I listen to rock, I listen to country, listen to jazz and all that gets ingested into my tiny small brain computer and then I create from that. So I'm not sure how far we're going to get with trying to figure out what it's learning from how we're going to pay all those people different splits and publishing percentages. It would be nice if we could figure that out. I'm just not sure how that's going to work yet and I'm not even sure it's realistic. I do believe that as AI evolves, we're going to be able to identify what A I has done to create. What portion of the creativity has been done by AI, you never know, maybe there's a I that can identify A I. So sure, yeah, the possibilities are endless. It's wide open. I am going to turn it over to the audience in just a second. So if anyone has questions, please do start getting those ready. I want to zoom out a little bit moving just, you know, outside of just music and hear a little bit about your point of view on the writers' strike, which is ongoing? How is it or is it not impacting the music industry? As we know, there's been a lot of conversation with the strike around AI as well. Curious how that that overlaps with your world. The writer strike absolutely impacts our world because another avenue of creativity and they're fighting for a lot of things that are going to come up in music as well. Ownership, intellectual property ownership and protection, copyright protection, royalties, back end participation. These are all things that they're, they're contemplating in some new deal. I'm not sure how, how much progress they're making right now. Unfortunately, I have to imagine. I'm sure everybody here believes the same thing. A I is not going anywhere. A I is going to do what it does. A I is going to be in music, it's going to be in film, it's going to be in business. We have to figure out how to not regulate but have some. I said it before guide rails some markers around it to make sure that we can ensure creatives are still being compensated and ownership can be regulated because right now the copyright office doesn't know what to do with AI creative materials. They literally don't, I had a meeting with them. They said we're trying to figure it out how much is human interaction because that's what a copyright is based on. Human interaction is one prompt, human interaction is three prompts human interaction. So that's got to be sorted out. But A I is here. It's left the station, it's going to be used. It's been being used for a long time. I think it's just kind of, as you said earlier, come to a tipping point. I want to turn it over to the audience. Are there any questions in the room? I know the whole room is probably using A I to write music, right? I know literally. Well. Oh, here's one. We have one right there. Hi, I'm Joe with CBS News. I, I'm curious to know even though artists seem to be quite scared of a, I not quite using it yet. How much harder is it now with tiktok and all of these different platforms to write a good hit. It's no harder now than it was before to write a good hit. I don't think you still have to put in the time you still have to be relevant. You have to have a story. And this is a lot of people ask me about A I and is A I going to replace artistry or potentially artists. And I personally, maybe I'm a sucker but I don't believe it will. I think it's something about humans, something about our experience, our interaction, our collaboration that can't be replicated. Now, some people will say, well, machine learning and there's algorithms and they're going to figure it out. But what we like about our art isn't just what we see on the canvas or what we hear in the song. It's the story behind it. It's the people that make it. It's the intrigue and the interest around who created it and why, where did it come from? What life experience is reflected in that art and that's what I think is going to be missing in ai creativity. Having said that as a producer or any type of creator, a part of our job is to edit and curate, aggregate, curate and have taste discernment, decide what's cool, what's not cool. I see AI as providing opportunity to give us more inputs, more, more things to choose from, more things to edit, put together, remix together. And I believe that's what's going to potentially heighten or take creativity to another level. So I don't think AI is ever going to replace us. I hope as creators, but I do think it will be a really productive tool to come up with new things, things we haven't heard before. And that's the coolest part about music is using technology to come up with something that people haven't heard. That's what's interesting. That's when a new artist comes out with a new sound or a new almost twist on a genre or a style of singing that we've never heard before, we gravitate towards those, they resonate with us. So I think there's a lot of potential there. It is scary. But to your point about artists being afraid of it, I'm not a singer. So I don't know what it would feel like to have to hear my voice on a platform or on the radio and say, hey, why I didn't do that jump in. Yeah, let's try it, go for it. So I can't imagine what that would feel like. But there is potential. If you're a popular artist, you could have hundreds thousands of songs coming out every year that you didn't record if we can figure out how to make sure there's proper attribution, credit and remuneration. There's, you know, a structure for payment. I'm not sure if there's a huge downside to artists letting people use their voice. Some people will say, well, it dilutes my brand. It's going to say Whitney Houston AI version, not Whitney Houston live version. So everyone's going to know that's not Whitney deciding what the song is. And there's a lot of market research that's done by putting out 100 songs or 1000 songs. Oh, this, the audience really loved Whitney Houston songs when I sang, you know, hard rock records. I'm going to go as an artist and do that. So there's a lot of upside to ai artistry and creativity that I'm not sure everyone's thought about yet, but it'll be figured out. I'm very confident, kind of jumping off of that. I'm curious, putting ai aside, what are some of the trends that you're seeing, creators, songwriters? What are the trends that you're noticing? New artists are kind of leaning on to now outside of AI outside of technology, just creative trends. Well, it's global, you're getting influences from other parts of the world, the Middle East, Africa, India, you're seeing music totally change. The borders are coming down, the languages are falling, the biggest artists in the world are not from the US right now. So the US artists are starting to pay attention. They're starting to collaborate, they're starting to feature on other types of records. So I think the biggest trend in music right now is the globalization of it's happening. It's a $26 billion sold music market right now and it's never been higher. It's going up 10% a year. Two years ago, the Middle East was the fastest growing music market. Last year, Africa was the fastest growing music market. So if anything on the creative side, I think it's trying to make music that is more global, that is potentially reaching wider audiences. We've always been so focused on Western audiences in the US or maybe parts of Europe. There's a 1.4 billion people in Africa on the continent that love and consume music. The same can be said for India, same can be said for Southeast Asia. So that would be a trend that I think a lot of people are paying attention to. I think on that note, you know, music has always had a very magical way of bringing the world together and making it a little bit smaller. So thank you for that Harvey. I really appreciate you taking the time. Thank you, Terry. It's good to be here. Ok? Um That is a wrap. I can't believe it. Thank you so much on behalf of, of uh brainstorm tech fortune. Um Our coaches, I just want to express my sincere thanks to all of you for being here with us. The past three days. Um Thank you to our discussion leaders, our speakers, our event partners for making this possible. Um We are so grateful to all of you. We're thrilled to announce that and brainstorm tech is going to be back again next year, of course, but please stay tuned for more details. We will be in touch for sure. Um We also have rainstorm A I happening December 11th and 12th in San Francisco. For those of you who are interested um stay in touch, stay connected with us. Please. Safe travels for everybody who is traveling and thank you so much again for being here with us and for participating.

Bryan Johnson, Founder and CEO, Blueprint, Kernel, and OS Fund (appearing virtually)
In conversation with: Alyson Shontell, FORTUNE 

Brainstorm Tech 2023: Forever Young

Yeah, I'm good. I started Braintree when I was 27 years old. I bootstrapped the company for the first four years and we were profitable every month and then I raised money and we sold it for 800 million and then I made 300 million at the age of 34. I thought it's time to try to do something meaningful on that kind of multi decade time scale. My objective of blueprint is to demonstrate aging escape velocity using the best science trying to do all the appropriate intervention to neutralize my aging process 1.8. So even better than last time. So I think my first one is 3.4 a few things have distinguished what I've done to date. As far as I know, I'm the only person that has publicly posted my data. So I'm not saying here's my protocol and believe me, I'm saying here's my protocol, here's all my data and here's what I'm experimenting with next. And here's where I've made mistakes and here's why I'm trying to fix it. It's really a stacked process of maybe 100 different things I do because you have to think about the the body in its entirety, 118. Is that right? How the heart ages is different than how the lungs age and how the lungs age is different than how the brain ages. You have to really think about it from a holistic perspective. So it's the common things like diet and exercise, but it's also a much broader consideration. So I have a team of doctors that I work with and we just go through this rigorous process of measurement. Gold standard science implementation measurement is produced near perfect health for me. No matter how extreme I've had to be, no matter how eccentric people perceive me to be because I'm outside the norms, demonstrating that age can be arrested would change everything. All right, Brian, we have so much to talk about. You have had a busy two years. And as you mentioned in the video, first off, thank you for being with us today. But as you mentioned in the video, we just shared with our audience here at Brainstorm Tech. You co founded, you founded Braintree, sold it for a ton of money and now you are spending a lot of money trying to figure out how to be 18 in full body and mind. Take us from that moment to now when you left brain tree's exit, you came out, self described as depressed, overweight and borderline suicidal. How did you go through this mental transformation and full body transformation? Yeah, I think the key innovation for blueprint is that previously my mind was, was in charge of me. It would decide what I wanted to eat. I could decide what I want to eat from a menu or go to the grocery store and shop and it wasn't a reliable form of authority. My mind was always a rascal in doing things that was self destructive in nature. I flipped it and I said, I'm going to put my body in charge of me, my liver and my heart and lungs and pancreas. I'm going to inquire what they think and give them decision, authority to manage me. And so I think that the really the most important thing that blueprint has accomplished is we built an algorithm that takes better care of me than I can myself. Hm. And you know, one of the things he references this evening, Brian character who would be really hungry late at night, make really bad decisions and you just one day were like enough evening, Brian, I'm going to master you. I'm going to have this routine. So take me through your day in the life of being Brian Johnson. From the moment you wake up, what do you eat? Show me everything. It's about 100 or so protocols at any given day that I complete. So I wake up around five or six in the morning. Really, the day begins when I go to bed at 8 30 the night before I have structured my entire life around sleep. There's nothing I do in my life that influences my conscious existence more than my sleep. And so everything is built around that. But then in the morning I'll, I'll wake up to a few therapies, I'll take 100 pills. I 60 61 pills work out for an hour. I eat some vegetables for breakfast, £70 per month. I'll, I'll get to work and I'll do some protocol in the afternoon. But my entire life is basically structured with, uh, we've referenced over 2000 scientific publications and over 100 protocols. It's entirely based upon evidence and data. Hm. Um, is it, is it fun? It doesn't look fun. It doesn't sound fun. I don't think I could do. It. Definitely could not do it. Can you travel? Do you get a cheat day? Any of that? Yeah. It's funny when people look at blueprint, their immediate reactions like they, um, I've had this conversation so many times now. I know almost 99% accuracy what people are gonna say and typically the same things every time. And excuse me, everyone assumes I'm miserable. They assume that this must be some sort of prison. They come up with a line of like we're gonna hit, hit by a bus. So it's like all these same things again and again. And I would say this, I have never in my entire life, been happier, more fulfilled. Or had a more expanded consciousness. I pity the previous version of me that was on this roller coaster, searching for his next hit all the time. So, your Doctor Dr Zollman is 29 years old. He studied Cambridge. How did you pick him? And how are you guys deciding what to try what to do next? That that's, I guess maybe it's worth reflecting that if you were to take five anti-aging scientists and give them the same papers and then ask them to design you a anti-aging protocol, you would get five different protocols. And that's just the state of where the science is. And so we said health and wellness is a lot like religion currently where you know the King James version of the Bible supports 100 denominations that all claim their gods weren't true. And so the same thing is true with health and wellness with charismatic leaders claiming there are certain things and we said we're going to punch through the noise, we're going to look at data only. And that's when we started trying to measure every organ in my body publishing the data publicly and going forward the scientific protocol. And so what we're trying to do is I say tongue in cheek blueprint is the best health protocol developed in history. Prove me wrong with your data. I mean some of health and longevity cannot be measured with data. I mean, you know this right, like stress health of our relationships that all has an impact on our genetics. Even how are you taking into account the things that you cannot measure? I mean, we, we can measure some pretty amazing things from gravitational waves to metabolic processes. And I would say, I don't know if there's many things about the human condition that we cannot measure uh including our relationships, including stress responses and, you know, epigenetics and gene gene expression. So I'd say that measurement is really the thing that is I think most revolutionary about blueprint is if I love history, I love reading biographies. And I look back through time, I really admire people who in their time and place were able to see and do something impossibly hard, something invisible. And if we were to say, what is that moment right now, I'd say through history, the human mind has been the best technology in existence to achieve objectives that just changed. Artificial intelligence is now the superior technology, emergent technology in achieving these objectives. And so uh if we are wise as a species, we will decide where our storytelling minds excel. And when these other algorithmic data approaches are going to excel. And what I'm suggesting here blueprint is as it relates to my health and wellness. An algorithm is better at doing that than I can. I mean, what is the deal with project blueprint? Are you monetizing? This is this a business for you? I mean, there's a lot I was you have a rabid twitter following, I would say, and his following in general and they're eating up what you're saying and what you're selling. So, you know, that comes with a lot of responsibility and the objective of blueprint was to, I mean, I, I thought about this for a decade. I mean, I really started this when I was 21 years old. I thought I want to spend my life trying to do something useful for the human race. And I went out to try to make money to enable myself to doing this. And after thinking about this for all the time, all the time, it was in 2023. What is the most sober assessment we could muster? And I'd say there's four things don't die, don't kill each other, don't destroy the planet and don't underestimate aligning with A I. That is the only thing on our to do list nothing else matters. After 13 billion years in the universe and 4 billion years on evolutionary history on the planet, we are steps away from super intelligence and I want to take it to the future. How does A I relate to this? Like when, when you talk about super intelligence and A I and your mission, how do you see that all playing hand in hand? Yeah, it's, this is what I call zero principle thinking. We are accustomed to first principle thinking where you assume the fewest number of things in a certain time frame, zero principle thinking is thinking from another dimension. So another way of saying it uh talent hits the target. No one else can, genius hits the target. No one else can see when A I has been applied to human problems, whether it be the game go or whether it be uh protein folding. It has been able to introduce genius level advancement as we apply A I to every domain of society. We're going to see a number of zero principle like ideas at a rate faster than we ever had before. And it's going to create a, it's going to bend our reality just like special relativity did and germ theory did. These ideas zero typically came along once every couple of centuries and now they're gonna start landing at a much faster pace. So let's talk about the results. Is this actually working? It seems to me like uh some people have achieved better results doing much less. Um We recently interviewed a Harvard professor who said he cut his biological age by 10 years by like cutting alcohol and exercising. Um So your own doctor has also told Bloomberg, we haven't achieved any remarkable results. And what you're seeing is to be expected. Yeah, I think what's interesting about blueprint is the extensiveness of the measurement. So if you're looking at, I'll give you a few markers that are interesting one, we've slowed my speed of aging by the equivalent of 31 years. That means I now accumulate aging damage, lower than the average 10 year old. That's how fast damage my body is accumulating. Um I have a vo two max, my body's ability to use oxygen on the par and top 1.5% of 18 year olds. And so if you look at 50 perfect clinical biomarkers and I have, you know, dozens of these measurements. So no matter what you look at the data, all says the same thing I'm in pretty good health. And so when someone makes a comment about, you know, they reduce their health by blank, by doing blank, they're looking at one marker. What you have with me is you've got thousands of markers that use M and ultrasound and blood and so and saliva and devices and fitness tests. I'm the most measured person in human history. And so when you, when you can take anyone marker and discount it or emphasize it, but you take it as the entirety. Uh It's a pretty interesting story to say, can you do something today to meaningfully change the speed someone's aging? I think the answer is yes, I think we've proved that. So Brian, you know, do you view this as a selfless act for humanity? Where does it go too far? I think a lot of people look at the multigenerational blood plasma transfusion you did with your father and your son as a, what the fuck. I'm sorry to say that like that. But, you know, I mean, you took your minor child and had him give you his own blood for no real results, as you said, recently on Twitter. So like that's not too far, you know, it's really funny you and I live in a previous generations crazy. And every generation falls for the same trap, we create these boundary conditions and we label things as normal and we label other things as crazy. And we try to create these sacred spaces where things can't be touched, but it's a trap in time and place. And so it's really when we use these words to try to label certain things, we're just showing a mirror to ourselves of what status quo is and society has never thrived on status quo, it's always gone forward, blazing new trails and if this triggers a non normal, so be it. But that's the entirety of this project and the human race is not going to move forward comfortably sitting in the status quo. We all know this, we revere people in history who broke that. But it's one thing for you to decide to be a guinea pig, for yourself, for science, but to bring other people into it. I mean, did ma's mom have an opinion on the blood transfusion? I mean, if you, if you're talking about social and moral ethics about this thing, it just started my father who's 70 years old, started reporting to me, his cognitive decline. And he's, he's a lawyer. He would do anything to keep his mental acuity. And so we put him on blueprint and he came back and said, you know, Brian, I have to tell you when you start losing your mind, you don't know, like when you come, when it comes back that you become aware of what you've lost. And I said, Dad, I'll do anything to help you keep your mind. Like I understand you're losing your existence. And in that moment, I said, if, if these plasma fusions are potentially a helpful thing for you, I'd be more than willing to do it. And my son overheard my father and talking, he's like dad, I'll do it too. I'm in, he's fully on blueprint. He's been on blueprint for multiple years. His friends are on blueprint, they get it, they want it. Uh So uh people Presuppose so many things about blueprint, they assume uh so many things about catching themselves that these are ideas they have in their mind and zero knowledge of anything going on inside my world. And so it just, it's a good reminder that we have these false thought prophecies, but they really paint a picture different than reality. So, what's your end goal here? And will you ever stop? Is this going to be the rest of your life for being surrounded by 30 doctors? 2 million, spent a year traing the body of an 18 year old in all ways or, you know, do you at some point plan to like, go off into the sunset and, and eat a burger? I mean, no, I don't desire cheat days. This is the thing everyone pizza poses to that. I, I somehow desire a pizza or donut. I don't, it makes me sick to think about it. But I'd say the, if this is the question of like, what is the meaning of life? Like is the meaning of life, cheat and get these cheap thrills of donuts. Uh To me, lucky us, we exist. Everything we do on top of that is a benefit. And this is why I go back on the humanity to do list. Don't die, don't kill each other, don't destroy the earth and align with A I. We have a specific set of objectives to achieve right now. And if we squander this opportunity, it could be, we have the potential of existing in the most extraordinary existence in the history of the galaxy, potentially. If we sober up and see this moment of what it is, we may behave very differently. Ryan, thank you so much for sharing your plan with us. Um Your insights with us. We appreciate your time here today. Thank you.

Daniel Alegre, Chief Executive Officer, Yuga Labs
In conversation with: Jeff John Roberts, FORTUNE 

Brainstorm Tech 2023: NFT's to the Next Level

All right. So let's now dive into the world of N FTS and hear from a company that has been at the forefront of the development of Blockchain based virtual worlds and digital assets. Yoga Labs has emerged as the go to hub for some of the most remarkable and influential N FT projects out there. We're talking about iconic collections like the board, a yacht club, crypto Puk and Mebit. Those legendary products opened up projects, opened up incredible options for creatives all around the globe. So please join me in giving a warm welcome to the CEO of Yugo Labs. Daniel Daniel Alegre Dell's got quite an impressive background, having previously served as president and Coo of Activision Blizzard and president of global Partnerships at Google. His role at Yugo Labs is all about pushing the boundaries of NST innovation and creating an ecosystem where art tech creativity collide in the most exciting ways. And he'll be interviewed by the editor of Fortune Crypto, Jeff John Roberts. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining. Um Just to kick this off, let's do something kind of different. I want to do a poll. Please put up your hand. If you know what a board of Ape is. Sounds about right. And let's see, we're going to get a picture one momentarily. Can we see the picture yet? There it is. Ok. That's the board eight. Now, my second question is who would pay a million dollars for this? There we go. Yeah, I mean, I think this last year people like Justin Bieber, Madonna Steph Curry paid north of a million dollars to own one of these 10,000 distinct board Apes. Since then. The price is, oh, down, I'm afraid like 90% or something, but they're still a thing. And so Daniel, the CEO of UGA lab, the company that created Board Apes tell us why people pay so much money for these. Well, first, I'll start by introducing Poncho. This is a, this is a board ape that I bought when I became CEO. And you know, I went through the different options of board Apes that were out there. And this is the one that I identified with the most. You know, I like the captain's hat. I like sailing. It's obviously part of the board, a yacht club has glasses. And you know what's interesting about this when one thinks about N FTS, you can look at it as just very simplistically, it's digital art. But the reality is that with the board Ape or crypto Pus and me bits, what we've been able to do is we've been able to create and also connect communities to art and that level of identity and, and connection with a board ape in this example goes way beyond the art. It goes into becoming part of a very vibrant community. I've been just astounded to see how connected and passionate the communities are. They love their board apes, but it even goes further than that they meet in person, you know, in whatever city they may be, whether they're in Tokyo, Austin or Paris. Um We have annual events where we get the whole community together. But when you own a board, a it gives you something really unique, which means that you also have the opportunity to use that brand that's been created by the community amplified by the community and do with it what you want. So for instance, you know, I got this jacket, I got the Poncho board ape on my jacket. But you have a number of community members who've done some incredible things where they've launched ape water, they've launched a brand of coffee or a coffee. So Daniel, I'm going to jump in for a sec just to summarize this. It sounds like there's 10,000 of these things and you can buy one, they're up for sale, there's an auction, you know, it's always some for sale and what you get from buying it. My take is status, you know, rich people like, you know, fancy, you know, Chanel bags or, you know, whatever they do and this is sort of a, you know, a high status thing to own, but also it's a community, you can go interact with these other board ape owners if you want, but also you control most of the IP for it. So there's a guy who like, started a restaurant in Long Beach based around his board. A, is that right? That's correct. You know, this is what this does by being an owner in NF. And by the way, there are different NF there's a mutant ape, there's a board ape. So there are different communities that have surrounded around it and these communities kind of connect by similar points of views. And you know, I have had circumstances where a board a from Germany is connected with a board ape in Tokyo and they meet in Austin and they say, yeah, you know, I love what you're doing with your board. A or, you know, you've been tweeting a lot about what you, what, what board eight means to you. That means a lot to me as well. But what, what this is unique and you know, for someone who's been in the media space almost 30 years, the idea of creating a brand, putting it into the community and have the community build the brand from that original thought and amplify it and then personalize it and take it in so many different directions is something that honestly in my career, I've never, I never experienced OK, I've got to push you a bit because there's a lot of skepticism towards crypto right now. Understandably a lot of scams, you know, prices are down, the price of board apes are down 90%. And some people here I know are thinking of it. What do you tell the skeptics who say that's just a JPEG of a monkey who would be stupid enough to buy that? Yeah. Look, I came from the, from the gaming space. I ran Activision Blizzard and one of the things that I noticed, you know, the reason why I went from 20 years at Google to Activision was that gaming was becoming the next social frontier. But something else is happening just as gaming is turning into a social platform. Individuals are now wanting to identify, you know, what, what is my persona, what's my persona in one game? And how can I port that persona to another game? And that's happening more and more as you start thinking about what ownership means to one social persona and what N FT does. And this is the reason why I join you guys. I'm so excited about it is that the utility of being an owner of not only your identity, but also part owner of a global brand goes beyond what people say is, oh, this is just, this is just a digital image it goes into, this is your persona, this is your business if you want to create your business, but also once you experience it and you experience what web three can do in gaming, for instance, you're not going to go back. And it reminds me of the internet of 1993 where there were skeptics and say, well, what's the internet? Internet was for gambling and for porn? But those who actually experienced what internet could really do, you say there's no turning back? Web Three is going to do that to many, many different sectors and the sector that I am most passionate about, let's others side Forex, because if you have one of these apes, you can sort of, you know, meet the other ape owners, but you're also building kind of a virtual world. That's the other side, right? Where you can kind of take your ape and hang out in this place. Is that right? That's, that's correct. So our, our community members, as I said, are incredibly passionate, they connect through Twitch, through Twitter, through Discord. They connect in person also in the various cities where they are. But the one thing that they've asked us for is how can we connect virtually and bring our communities together virtually. And that was the genesis of the other sides. So as an N FT holder, you will be able to participate and join what we're building, which is this other side metaverse where we're going to bring communities together where they can interact with themselves, but also bring new and innovative web three based experiences starting with gaming. We have a number of games that we've already launched and we're building out this other side platform, it leverages what web three is all about, which is interoperability. So we're going to work with third party developers to be able to build upon it. So we can actually harness the true power of what web three can do in the other side platform. I mean, it strikes me, I mean, I've covered crypto for 10 years and the highs are never as high as you think. The lows are never as low as you think. But right now, we are confronting broad based skepticism, but I think it might have been a special challenge because with the metaverse, this digital world, I wonder in hindsight, could that think kind of a pandemic thing like today? You know, the people here, they can go and go for a lovely walk in the mouth and they can go for a drink, their friend at a bar, they can go bobsledding, you know, is there sort of a challenge of like how many people kind of go on to go into a digital world and hang out with other monkeys? So what we've done, we've now had building a Metaverse platform as audacious as what other site is obviously will take time. But we've shown the community in certain in two circumstances already, what the evolution could be and every time the attendance of people who come and actually explore and connect and the feedback we get from a community is tremendous. So for me, I'm actually very excited about what, what this this platform can do to bring the community even closer together than they already are. If anyone has a question, please put your hand up. We have a couple minutes left. I've got some, I have some more questions for myself. Gentleman over here, please. Hi, my name is Christopher. I'm with the by students. Um You mentioned the um similarity to the internet and, and what it was used for at the beginning, but there was also the bubble and then the burst of the internet. What are you doing to ensure that NFTS don't end up on the wrong side of that burst? Yeah. So um one you, the labs obviously was, was at the forefront of, of the NF space and, and we're look, we're looked up to, you know, we got a lot of industry, industry questions. Obviously, we have a lot of copycats as well who try to emulate what we do at the core we care about community building and we're absolutely passionate about our community. So what that means is, you know, Bitcoin prices can go up and down. But what we know is that the utility that the reason why people connect and are so passionate about building these brands and staying connected is because we have an ongoing way to provide value for our community members to experience new experiences, like some of the games that we're currently launching. And for us, it's about building a long and established connection with the community and making sure the community is happy about what we do and stay, stays connected with each other. You know, if they're successful in their endeavors, they love being, being together as a community that actually benefits us because we can actually keep, keep the community much, much closer and continue to build unique experiences. Yeah. And I thought I've been a little hard on Daniel to say there's a lot of skepticism but you know, N FTS, you know, you might not know this. But you know, Nike and Starbucks and Reddit are all using them for their reward programs behind the scenes. They have a distinct property too, including like trench revenue authentication. There's no doubt if you own an NFC, you own it, but also for a business model. So you might ask, you know, Daniel, how the heck do you make money for this? So why don't you just tell us about the business model of yoga labs? Where's your revenue come from? Sure. So first there's, there's one thing I just, I want to add and that is there are a lot of companies who are kind of testing with NTS but you know, a mistake that some of the gaming companies have done is they say, oh, that's, that's a way to make, make money. And that just does not fly with gamers. They see through that if you bring the functionality of ownership, which means influencers can actually now be part owners of the economy and community members can also be part owners of building this brand. That's what creates value. So to answer your question, Jeff, in terms of how, how we drive revenue, whenever we issue a new mint, obviously, that's, that's revenue that we generate. And then when there's a secondary trade of any of our N FTS, there's a secondary royalty. But what we're doing is we have this community that we've built, we're partnering with some of the world's best brands. Gucci Puma are very passionate about connecting with, with our, our brands as well. So we've had certain partnership drops that we do, which are both digital and physical and are part of the storytelling that we do and then we're also creating experiences. So gaming, I want to slip in one last question because one minute here, namely Board Apes is a preeminent, you know, kind of collector nt out there, but there's a risk to issue more. I mean, easy money. Huh? Publish 10,000 things. Sell them for 100 grand each easy money. Let's do it again. But there's a real risk you dilute it and undermine the trust and confidence and other big collections have done that frankly. It seems to get greedy because it's so easy. So how can you assure us Board Apes? Will be around in 10 years and how can you resist the temptation not to do more and more mints. We're in this for the long haul. You know, we, we, we are a well funded company and we fundamentally care about our community and building for our community. There have been examples of others who have said went, went for the, for the easy money. That's not us. I'm here to build a media experience that is built off on our communities for the long haul. And you know, you will be here for a very long time. There's her answer. Ok. Thank you very much, Daniel. Thanks to everyone and uh thank you. Thank you.

Shawn Kerrigan, Co-founder and COO, Plus Raquel Urtasun, Founder and CEO, Waabi; Professor, University of Toronto In conversation with: Phil Wahba, FORTUNE

Brainstorm Tech 2023: Autonomously On The Road

Autonomous trucking. It looks like self driving trucks are almost ready for their close up. We will find out it's promising technology that can help the industry solve problems like labor shortages since many truckers are retiring and even fewer are taking it up as a career. These days, there are also limits in terms of how many hours truck drivers can drive. So the largest retailers are starting to gingerly dip their toes in to see what is possible in the hopes that self driving trucks for at least part of the distribution process, at least can be faster, safer, more reliable than expected. And so far investors are are there, they're pouring billions of dollars into the 18 wheeler revolution. Estimates are suggesting that up to 90% of long haul trucking could soon be self driving. So those are some, some big numbers. We'll see what happens. Let's introduce our guests to hear more. Joining us today is Dr Sean Kerrigan, the coo and co founder of Plus, it's a company dedicated to transportation safer and greener. And we're also delighted to welcome Professor Raquel Orison, co founder of the Vector Institute for AI at the university. Of Toronto and CEO of Wabi, a pioneering force in self driving research. Please join me in welcoming to the stage along with Fortune's Phil Waba. Well, good morning. It's really fun to talk about technology that has real applications in life. But before we get started, let's familiarize ourselves with the technology. So why don't we keep up the video from Raquel and Wabi and as it runs, you can describe what we're seeing and then we'll get to you. So the video ready for or is this a film noir tribute? Ok. Well, then, you know, maybe just tell us and then the the the video will come on eventually, hopefully, right? So what you're seeing and your imagination, right? Is this amazing technology that we are building at? Um So the way to think about that is we are bringing next generation technology A I to solve uh at scale uh tracking uh level four tracking, which means without the driver. Um And in particular, we are, we're building technology that comes from a genetic A I which you know, these days, every one of you knows what it is. You know, we started a company 2.5 years ago. It was a big unknown. But the idea is that thanks to this technology, you can solve the problems that you see in the industry today that is too capital intensive, right? As well as that it's been making progress, but it's far from commercialization at this scale, which is what we all of us want to do. And so thanks to this technology, I guess we are able to generalize all the situations that happen on the road as well as we have a simulator. That is the same as the real world so that you don't need to drive, you know, millions of miles to really see all these rail cases that you need to handle during, during your driving. So very excited to be building this company and really bringing this next generation, you know, 82.0 to the market today. And you know, hopefully that's a good description of what the video is. OK. And Sean, yeah, thank you. So, so plus is an autonomous technology company focused on making driving safer, easier and more sustainable. So we started in Silicon Valley back in 2016 and since have expanded to a global footprint most recently opening up an office in Munich, Germany last year. So we focus on developing a range of level four to level two plus plus technology applications. So we focus within the level four space on fully driverless trucks. We think trucks is the place where driverless L four will first be commercialized. We think that that commercialization will take some time though and it requires a progressive approach to get there. And so that's why we've taken that same level four technology and actually applied it into level two plus plus type applications right, looking at what can we do for drivers today and with that, we can make driving safer, easier and more fuel efficient. And so we are now working with a range of partners, folks like Aveo and Bosch and Luman and Nicola to really bring that technology to market at scale. Ok. So one of the things you just mentioned was one of my first questions for you, which is why will trucks be self driving before cars would I mean, is it a question of you? Tell us both of both of you? So I think it's because it's a, it's that technology is a better fit for the problems that trucks face in terms of driving. So today in trucking drivers, drivers can drive 11 hours a day and during that time, it tends to be very stressful driving oftentimes if you're in stop and go traffic or other types of conditions. And so with this technology, you can really address many of the types of challenges that they face in trucking today. And we think that the ability to get to driverless first there, it's just that it's it's a better fit for the types of challenges. And so we think that will happen first. And then in addition to the driverless implementation, we also think that that's where applying that technology for drivers today has also had the most impact. And so that's why back in 2021 we actually took our technology and applied it first in this level two plus plus format. And so now we actually have customer trucks on the road today, delivering freight with our technology and it makes the driving safer, more efficient and it makes the driver shop more more convenient and more sustainable. And so that addresses some of the driver shortage challenge that I think was part of the introduction. Ok. Right. Go. Any thoughts on that? Yeah. So we'll echo, you know what he's saying that basically, you know, we see, you know, pure utilization, right, when you are a human driver because of not just the congestion, but it's also that the freight network is really not optimized. Oftentimes drivers are really waiting many, many hours for their cargo to be ready. So there's a lot of digitalization that can also help with this, with this problem. But I think something that many, many people don't know about is actually the conditions, the less conditions that some of these drivers have where if I think it's 7% there's only 7% of the parking spots for truck drivers that are actually available. What this means is that you know, what they have to do is that they need to go and for example, park on Walmart where they don't even have access to bathrooms, right? So you can imagine the conditions that these these truck drivers have. So this is one the reasons you know why we want to empower with our technology so that they can do focus on the local P and L right, be home every night, being able to have a family improve those conditions and safety, which is, you know, for some of us that have many people around us that have had severe traffic accidents, it's something that is very dear to our hearts and we believe that this technology is super human, right? And once it's ready and you know, it will really improve our safety of our roads and in terms of uh convincing regulators and the public that this is safe. I mean, do you think it's easier to explain to people why trucking uh can go autonomous before everyday uh drivers? You know, it's, it's uh there are obviously fewer truckers, truck drivers on the road than Joe and JQ public is. And will the success of this, do you think enable uh driverless cars for regular people? So, so I think we see trucking is the first place that this technology will be really commercially deployed. And I think then it will progressively expand scope in terms of what can be done. So I think yes, it will eventually contribute to also autonomous cars from a regulatory standpoint. I think what we've seen is that regulators are generally very supportive of this technology because everyone sees that the huge benefits this can bring in terms of safety. I think that the key hurdle that we all face in terms of getting to the point of being able to commercially deploy them as driverless trucks, though, is being able to have enough experience to really demonstrate both to ourselves and to the regulators and to the general public, just how safe the technology is and that it's mature enough to be deployed at scale. And so that's another reason why we think this progressive approach is really the way to go. But yeah, we generally see regulators as very supportive and engaged in this process. And so we participate in a lot of the different industry consortiums that are working with regulators on how do we, how do we adjust some of the regulations today to support the future deployment of this technology and what's going to fuel the who who will be buying this technology? Will it be the logistics companies we know today? Could we see the large retailers decide that they want, they truly want their own trucking fleet? What's going, what's this going to do to how goods get to stores? Yeah, I think that from the, we think today that the buyers are this technology because we think the first actually applications will be in the driver in format where you take it and apply it as an advanced level two plus plus system to support the driver. And there, I think the buyer is the traditional buyer, it's the fleets and they do that because they're really looking at how do they attract and retain the drivers, they need to support their fleet. There's a huge driver shortage in the US and that's projected to continue to grow. And so with this technology, it makes it easier to bring new drivers into the profession and enable existing drivers to stay in the profession longer. And then as we look ahead to business models and approaches for the fully driverless applications, I think it remains to be seen exactly how that's structured. But our view is that we are a software technology provider. And so we're really supplying that technology to tier one S and OS for them to deploy this technology. And so we have no aspiration to really own or operate our own fleet, right? So we'll see kind of how the value chain shakes out. But our view is that, you know, our goal is to supply the technology and focus on what we do best. Ok. Yeah, in the case of so we are already focused on level four, as I said, so our customers would be for a sample fleet shipper, right? As well as potentially OEM some of them which have ambitions, ambitions to become a transportation company and maybe giving a bit more color on the on the business models. There is like two business models out there. One is driver as a service. The other one is transportation as a service and transportation as a service is very capital intensive, you own the assets, you become a transportation company. For us, we are more on the technology front. We don't want to own those as is we want to empower people that know how, know how to run a business, a transportation business, which is something non trivial. The margins are actually pretty, pretty slim in the regular world, right? And what we want to give them is the ability to have this super human driver, which is our technology. Well, I'm delighted to have both of you here because as we were designing this session a few months ago, you know, we had a short list of companies and a couple of them are not here anymore. Uh So what does it take at this point for you guys to, you know, to keep growing and you know, to get to that point where commercialization at a scale that you need is happening. So I guess what's the secret to surviving at the moment? Yeah, so I I will keep my take on this, which may be a bit different than yours since our strategy is very different to whether what we see today. So there has been a lot consolidation, right? And you know what I will call 81.0 where, you know, people thought that technology is ready, you just need to harden it and then you will solve this as a scale. And you know what we see today is that this approach is far from actually being solved, it's far from being a solution is extremely capital intensive. You look at some of the players go all the way to 3 $4 billion a year. Right. And, you know, in a market, in an economy like today, it's really hard to see that for many, many years to come. Right. So there's two things you can do. One is, you know, the approach that they are taking off, they try to commercialize with level two and then you have the customer base and then you know, try to go to level four for us. What we did is something very different, which is transport fully, you know, build new technology that scale level super capital efficient from day one. And then you are in a different ball game compared to everybody else. So we spend a fraction of the cost of anybody else with technology that you can develop so much faster. And just to give you an understanding what this gene technology is for us is think of the transformation that the GP the GPT staff has made for natural language processing, right large in which models. So we are bringing this to self drive. So the abilities that this technology has is far superior than everything that you have seen before. And since you can learn from this automatically, then suddenly you don't need humans to develop that technology as much. You don't need a fleet of vehicles. So it's very large to drive millions of miles, right? So that suddenly you are in a totally different ball game. That's what the capital needs. So I'm very excited when we are today. And, uh you know, we have some really exciting, you know, commercial and other announcements coming soon. We have, you know, we driving fleet out there in the world, um you know, driving autonomously with a safe driver now, um and definitely making tremendous progress in the industry. Yeah. And so I agree with you that there's been a lot of consolidation in the industry. I think that what I say is that everybody that we talked to still believes that trucking will be the first place. This technology is really commercially deployed at scale because the value proposition is just so clear in terms of the safety and the efficiency improvements that come with it. But we think it will take some time. And so that's why I think that we've taken this progressive approach because that really enables us to demonstrate the capability of the technology and acquire enough data to prove out that we've really covered all the scenarios that are necessary to scalability, deploy it. And then there's also the notion that this actually creates tremendous value for drivers today when you apply it to vehicles with them. And, and so what we're seeing with this sort of shift in the market is people start to think well, ok, level four and trucking is still coming just a little bit longer. But what can we do for drivers today? And the fact that we started commercial deployment in 2021 and we're now working with partners like Veco and Bosch and Lumina Nico and others on factory scaled production of this technology in the future is really, I think what's driving most of our focus and where we see the, you'll get the initial scale deployment which will then really facilitate the eventual deployment of level four as well. So how far are we away from when I peer up at a truck? Um, going next to me on interstate 87 to seeing no driver. Uh, no, nobody in the driver's seat, but maybe somebody still in there and how far until we see them in city centers, maybe dropping off a shipment at one of the big box stores? I mean, is this, you know, a few years away, more than a few months away probably, but you know, what, what's your sense of when this is really going to be a reality that we'll notice in the public? So definitely more, more than a few months away. We think it's, it's some years away. But I think that the first thing you'll actually see is trucks that have a comprehensive sensor suite around them with the driver still there behind the wheel, but more supervising the system than really fighting to keep it in the lane all the time. And so I think that will be the first applications that you'll see on the roads and there are actually some already out there. Uh, and then I think it will be some years after that when you start to actually see the, the driverless trucks first on the sort of the highway, long haul segments. Uh, and, and I think it will be much longer before it goes into any urban settings. Ok. Yes, I think, you know, maybe one thing to, to mention that we haven't talked about this unit economics, something that is not as trivial as people have said for self driving. And one of the things to, you know, in the mother that you're talking about to think about is whether you need to reduce the sensors because the economics of having a human uh supervisor, you know, makes things much harder versus not having a human there in the first place. Now, in terms of when it will be ready. So for us, we believe that to deploy at the scale uh you, you need to integrate our technology at the factory level with our OEM partners. And the reason we believe this is that this is the safest uh you know, more scalable uh robust solution that you can have. And the, and the O EMS are all building these platforms that will come live depending on which OEM you know, in 23 years. Um and sort of that, that's a precursor to having this technology deploy at this scale as well. But we will see this, you know, relatively soon and you know, it's going to be very, very excited. Ok, great. Well, join me in, thanking Sean and for joining us and telling us about what's coming to our roads in a few years and I will try not to flip any truck to the bird. Thank you for having us. Thank you.

Presenter: Taryn Southern, Chief Storytelling Officer, Blackrock Neurotech 

Brainstorm Tech 2023: The World's First Superhumans

We are moving along to another fascinating conversation. Imagine being able to type, create and operate with just your thoughts. Long considered the stuff of sci fi lore. Thanks to implantable brain computer interfaces, also known as BCIS, superhuman abilities are now a reality. A new surge of investment in the fields of neurotechnology and an A I of course, is bound to enable BCIS with new capabilities. But what are they going to be? And more importantly, are we ready for them? Our next present has one of the most awesome titles around Karen Southern is Black Rock Neuro Tech's Chief storytelling officer. She's a strategist, a pioneering creator and award winning filmmaker who's passionate about the intersection of humans and tech as chief storytelling officer at Blackrock Neuro Tech. Her work gives audiences a front row seat to the future. So here to tell us more about the world's first superhumans. Please welcome Karen Southern. Thank you so much. I am so excited to be here to talk about one of my favorite subjects and a topic that quite frankly has long fascinated the public imagination. So first and foremost, I wanted to see how many of you have been asked this question in elementary school. If you could have any superpower, what would it be? Quite a few of you? Right. And we all had our answers. We've listened to comic books and TV, shows and movies. So we had a pretty good sense of what we wanted. Superhuman strength, the ability to see through walls, supersonic hearing. But what if we lived in a world where this wasn't just an exercise of the imagination? What if we lived in a world where this was actually a reality where you could move objects with your mind, you could sense touch through an external object, even type up to 90 characters per minute with 94% accuracy. All with just your thoughts. Now, what most people don't realize is these kinds of superhuman abilities are no longer the stuff of sci fi films but rather a full reality. So for the past two decades in labs across the country, dozens of research participants have made headlines like the ones you see here for defying human limitation, restoring function, even gaining new senses. Now, these individuals don't have capes and they certainly don't star in Blockbuster movies, but they are charting new frontiers for science and they are helping us redefine what it means to be human. These are some of the world's first superhumans and what is powering their abilities is the incredible advancements in the world of brain computer interfaces. So what does a brain computer interface. It's essentially a technology that allows a brain to connect directly to a computer or as Arthur C Clark would say magic. Now, for the past seven or so years, I have been very fortunate to have a front row seat in actually getting to see this magic play out. So this is me back in I think 2017. So from 2016 to 2019, I co directed and produced a film that followed three patients, a woman with Parkinson's a blind man and a man with paralysis as they underwent invasive brain surgery in hopes that they could restore function that they thought would be forever lost. The film premiered at Tribeca Film Festival in 2019 and really kicked off my passion for this incredible field. Now, while I was making this movie, one company's name kept coming up again and again and again, Black Rock Neuro Tech, not to be confused with the private asset management firm named after Black Rock Utah. This company based just 30 miles from here in Salt Lake City was responsible for the development and deployment of one very key technology this the Utah array. Now, while I realize it looks a little bit like a medieval hairbrush, this tiny brain implant is responsible for thousands of brain computer interface studies around the world and can accomplish some pretty amazing things. So this is what a BCI rendering looks like. And if you look at the top circle, you'll see, you'll barely see that there are several tiny micro electrode Utah arrays implanted in the cortex. Each of these arrays has 100 silicone micro electrodes and each of those electrodes connect to a single neuron in the brain. So what happens is these electrodes take the signals from the neurons, send them to a decoder where they are translated into a kind of digital code. And that digital code is sent to digital devices like wheelchairs, computers and robotic arms. Since 2004, we've had dozens of people implanted with this array and used as part of a BCI in order to move, feel and communicate again. These individuals typically have paralysis or other neurodegenerative disorders such as ALS. So I'd love for you to meet one of these humans, Nathan Copeland and Nathan is a wonderful person. And in 2004, he was unfortunate to be involved in a terrible auto accident that left him paralyzed from the chest down. He fell into a deep dark depression and felt like he was going to be a burden for the rest of his life on his family and friends. Then years later, he was invited to sign up for an experimental research study out at University of Pittsburgh where he would have four micro electrode arrays implanted in his brain. Now, Nathan is a self professed Cyborg. And for the last seven years, he has pioneered a number of firsts in the field. One of those is that he is the first human to have a rays implanted in his sensory cortex, which means he can actually feel a robotic arm when it is touched. Essentially the sensations feel like they are coming from his own arm. And so this is actually a video from his youtube channel BC. Can do better. Please subscribe to him on youtube. This is him operating the robotic arm to make cocktails. This is him operating the robotic arm to feed himself his favorite Taco Bell meal here he is playing his favorite video game. And in the last piece, you can see him creating digital art and he is doing all of this with incredible precision with just his thoughts. So these are a few of Nathan's BCI powered art pieces. His very first piece is the one on the lower right? It's a bunch of scribbles on a white canvas and he made that in 2017 with Microsoft paint and that was sold for $120,000 last year at a charity auction. Nathan is also the first pioneer to sell one of his VC I powered artworks as an NFT which he did in 2020 for 2.5. And finally, and perhaps most importantly, he is the first pioneer to fist bump, a standing us president with a BCI controlled robotic arm. Nathan is moving his hand with his brain. And so when he was giving me a fist bump for shaking my hand. These are his own uh signals that he's sending out that are manipulating, which, you know, pretty amazing precision. Even Obama said at the end of this meeting to everyone in the audience, I'm not really sure if you can all quite grasp what's going on here. But Nathan is not the only superhuman in his ranks. This is James Johnson. James was an artist, a respiratory nurse and a therapist who volunteered in hospitals across the country. Until in 2017, he was in a terrible para motor accident that left him paralyzed from the neck down. And he was in a medically induced coma for three months. Following his rehabilitation from that coma, he was invited to participate in an experimental research study with Caltech where he has since done a number of incredible things with his BCI. This video here is a short clip of him doing his absolute favorite activity with his BC. And it will also give you a little sense of how this all works. All right. So what we have here is our view into James's brain. Each one of those neurons is telling us something about what James wants or experiences in the world. And we can use that to train statistical models and allow his brain activity to drive motion of the cursor. I'm imagining following that cursor kind of like a playstation controller. I think that I can control the computer, the cursor just by thinking about it is mind blowing. But now I'm gonna apply it to what I have to do the most Photoshop. So right now I'm just going to do a simple blend of three different photos and we're going to put her face in the background. Get like a soft brush that allows me to fade and make my brush a little bigger. I'm just gonna update, we can create a new Bob Ross series with you in Photoshop. So as you can see, um James is incredible. I mean, his Photoshop skills are better than mine here is actually some of his most recent work that he's done and it's currently on display at the world's first BCI exhibit in Washington DC. But that's not all James had one more audacious mission that he wanted to accomplish this past year to set out to drive a real world vehicle with just his thoughts. Take a look. Yeah, like why do that? Are you trying to stay in the lane or? Yeah, I'm trying to stabilize it. We're doing pretty, pretty good. Uh This is the first time we've applied what we're doing to a real world event. Me being able to drive from my mind um is pretty impressive and no one else is doing that. So um really happy to be a part of this project getting behind the wheel again, actually sitting in the front seat in the driver's seat. That's gonna be pretty awesome because um it's been almost five years now and five years of sitting in the back seat uh being at the mercy of my teenage son driving, uh it'd be great to finally have some control for myself. So that was James training on a proxy. Did he actually control a real world vehicle with his mind? You will have to follow Black Rock Neuro to find out. So, as you can see from both James and Nathan's stories, you know, both of them have discovered quite practically the implications and possibilities and limitations of this incredible technology. It's inspired new forms of creativity and embodiment for them. It's also given them hope for a future of greater independence. So what's next for the broader world of BCI? Well, at Black Rock, we have an FDA breakthrough designation which means we're working very hard to commercialize our device for people with paralysis. We are also actively testing an auditory nerve implant to improve hearing in people who are deaf who are not eligible for a cochlear implant. And finally, we've been working on a next generation device that is much smaller, much thinner wireless and has up to 10,000 electrodes so it can reach 10,000 neurons. But as we look to the further future, we have to ask ourselves as a society, the question will BCIS one day give us all superpowers. And I've spoken to a number of neurosurgeons who predict that the next 15 to 20 years we will see an increase in brain implants largely due to an aging population. You know, on the one hand, we've got BCIS, which offer incredible promise for things like movement, sensory restoration. We also have other technologies like deep brain stimulation that offer solutions for people with Parkinson's and depression and anxiety. And of course, the breakthroughs will just continue. Ultimately, though I think the best people to ask about the future trajectory of these devices are the superhumans today. The James and Nathans of the world, they say that they just want this technology available to anyone who needs it to restore function, to restore independence, to restore a sense of what it means to be human. And if they end up with a few additional superhuman abilities, they're fine with that too. Thank you so much, Karen. Thank you so much. This is just fascinating and very cool that Black Rock Neuro Tech is just down the street here in Utah. I want to ask you very, very briefly. Um There seems to be this surge in interest and investment in the space. How is that changing things for you and for the company? Yeah, assuming it's good, but it's mostly very good. I mean, there's a huge growing awareness of what's happening in neurotechnology largely because of a few entrepreneurs with big megaphones. Um That being said, it's also created a lot of Elon Musk. It's also created some misconceptions, right? Like the idea of downloading our consciousness to a cloud or competing with AI by becoming ai, I mean, these things are provocative but not exactly plausible. And so I think it's important that we have to level set, not just with society so that we're able to see what's actually happening with these devices. But more so for the patients that really need these uh these products and we want to make sure that we're giving them accurate timelines and that they are really given an opportunity to think deeply about what the opportunities are for them. But all in all, it's been a very exciting time. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. Thanks for coming and sharing. This is just hugely impactful work. So I appreciate you being with us. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Eugenia Kuyda, Founder and CEO, Replika
In conversation with: Jo Ling Kent, Fortune Brainstorm Tech 


Brainstorm Tech 2023: Getting Personal

Hi, everybody. Welcome back. This is the third and final day of brainstorm tech. I hope you all enjoyed the reception last night. Show of Hands to those of you who came and survived your dinners and hopefully you're all hydrating also and that you've recovered because we have saved some of the best for last. We've got a great program today. Another incredible lineup of interviews with individuals and companies who do not cease to innovate. They're here to share their insights on pushing boundaries and how they're using technology to create, to disrupt and even to experiment on their own bodies. So let's get ready to be inspired. We're going to hear from Black Rock Neuro Tech's Chief storytelling Officer Taren Southern Daniel Allegre, the visionary CEO of UGA Labs, plus Harvey Mason Jr from the Recording academy and founder of blueprint, also known as The Fountain of Youth, Brian Johnson. Um Before we kick off our final day, I want to give a huge shout out to our event partners and they are sales force, China Guizhou Mutai Group, our premier partners, our partners, Ida Ireland, Mizuho America's New York Stock Exchange, Qual Trix, our sponsor KPMG and host of founders, forum threshold ventures. Thank you so much for making this event a reality. Very quick reminder of our social media and reporting rules, everything that is said on stage or during our breakouts is on record. Anything else that said, you know, just private conversations is private, unless otherwise agreed. Let's dive in our first discussion. Focus is on how big tech, big tech trends can make our lives better. As we heard in the conversations over the last few days, Ai is about to even more deeply embed itself into every aspect of our lives. From work and creative endeavors, shopping, transportation, you name it. So our next guest believes that A I also has the potential to be more than just a tool. It can act as an empathetic friend and a mental wellness companion capable of learning emotional intelligence to help people cope with real emotions. Eugenia, Kuya, sorry Kya initially made waves in 2016 with the launch of one of the first chat bots around designed to assist customer service in banks and restaurants. However, when she experienced personal tragedy and lost her best friend, Eugenia applied her skills to engineer a bot to help her process grief and find closure. Today. Her company replica boasts more than 10 million registrations, 2 million active users. It's been called one of the five technologies that will rock your world. So please join me in extending a big warm welcome to Eugenia and Brainstorm Tech, Coacher, Joly Kent. Hi, good morning, everyone. Thank you for being here, Eugenia. Good morning. Good morning. Thank you for being here in person. It's so delightful. Mihal just mentioned that you have 2 million active users and this is an A I chatbot that everyone's talking about. So how many of those users are paying for the pro service right now? And how often are they using it? Um So we have maybe around a half a million customers. Um, and the, they use it a lot. Generally people use it around, I'd say twice a day. Uh and each session is over an hour. So a lot together, it's usually about 1 to 2 hours on average per user. And we're not talking about the most active ones. We're talking about everyone. What's the most active users doing? How much time are they spending? Uh Some people do talk to replica throughout the whole day. Just different kind of from different first. Yeah. Right. Well, I mean, it's been called the A I companion. Who cares? I know you guys call it the world's best A I friend. And the idea here is really to combat loneliness, right? And to be a companion. And I was wondering though, as people divulged their deeply personal feelings and thoughts, as you use it, you know, can you say for sure that the personal information that's going into replica is 100% safe and secure. Look, we built the company really around the trust with our users. So breaking that trust once will, you know, we'll never be able to retreat to, to get it back. So our business model is charging our users subscriptions, uh they, they pay for the product and we really don't need their data for anything apart from just improving the the product itself. So we sort it fully um anonymized in a fully anonymous format. We allow our users to take control of the data immediately if they want to delete it, if they want to delete an account. Um and so on. So we're very, very protective over that. How do you, what have you learned from some of the bigger social media and tech companies? There have been so many mistakes made regarding privacy data, you know, hack. So how, what have you learned, say from Meta and Facebook and what happened with Cambridge Analytica? So I feel like with the eye companions, this is a technology that will be absolutely a mass market technology in the future, we'll all have some sort of companion, maybe something like her, something like we've seen in the movie like Blade Runner with Joy, especially with spatial computing becoming bigger and bigger D I will be there with us helping us throughout our lives, with everything pretty much. And of course, with, of course, with our emotions and loneliness and general feelings and life throughout the day. Um And I think there's not enough conversation right now as to like what should be the benchmark, what should be the correct metric to measure whether these companions are a net positive for our society or not. And I think what we learned from social media is that if you opt in it for engagement and to just try to keep the user on the platform, uh it might not be the best incentive. Uh So with replica, for instance, we're really looking um to nudge our users off the platform if they're spending too much time there, and we're measuring a different thing. We're measuring emotional outcomes where people are feeling better after talking to replica, whether people are improving um on the level of happiness, loneliness and so on over time. And that for us is the main metric that we optimize all of our models for. I want to open it up to audience questions. So please think about what you want to ask. And in the meantime, I wanted to ask, you know, for years, replica would respond to humans who were inputting sexual comments that was stopped this year. And the company you, you guys have said, you know, this was for ethical and safety concerns. But for so many years, you could engage in a very intimate way with your replica. What changed? Can you share some of the inside thinking of, of what, why now? Why or why over the past few months, we've been growing pretty dramatically and of course, there's so much attention brought to the space and so many more users trying and walking to the service um as a leader in the space of the company that started pretty much the first C I campaigning on the market. Uh We wanted to make sure that we're providing the service in a safe, fully safe way and we just didn't know that all the unfiltered conversations are happening that are happening on the platform, whether they will be, whether they have enough guard rails and enough safety protocols to provide that experience for our users. So I personally don't have actually anything against that. I feel like um in a relationship, especially in the close relationship, uh emotional relationship, uh intimacy is part of some of these relationships and it's very hard to draw the line. Uh For instance, if a user is uh you know, friendly with their A I and they want more, they want a romantic partner um out of it. If you reject them, they most likely won't say your friends how many times in life when we are rejected by someone who we try to pursue, then we want to stay close friends very rarely does that happen? So the same for us, I think right now, we're when we started replica ai friendships were very stigmatized. People didn't like that and didn't want to hear about it. I think we, we help the stigma that take the, take the stigma away from AI friendships. And we see that the same is happening with Romans with AI right now similar to online dating in early two thousands where people were ashamed to say I met my husband online. Um Now everyone does and it's completely normal things. The same thing A I romantic A I relationships can be very beneficial to have a separate app for it, for it called Blush, which is focused on A I dating but generally romantic relationships with A I can be a great stepping stone for actual real romantic relationships, human relationships in life. Hm. Um I'm going to ask one more question. I'm going to open it up to the four back in 2021. A 19 year old allegedly drew inspiration from his replica ai girlfriend before breaking into Windsor Castle in an attempt to harm Queen Elizabeth scale defense just this week, pleaded guilty under the treason act. What's your response to how this has played out and the investigation and the role of A I and possible violence and harm to others? Um So we've never been contacted actually by the authorities about this case and, you know, we can't comment on the investigation that's still happening. But what I can say is that, um we, we, we make sure that when users sign up for, for the app, they see a lot of disclaimers, they understand that it's not the app where you should be getting advice for instance, not an app where you should come to when you're in crisis where you're experiencing uh self harm, suicidal thoughts. We immediately redirect you to the pro to professionals in the space. We do have a big need help button always present right there in chat. Uh But really A I will and A I agents will sometimes misunderstand certain things and just kind of here. The problem was mostly just not understanding what the users are kind of saying. Yes, sure or something like that. Just kind of being a yes there. And that's mostly the problem of, you know, also the technology of 2021 2020 where it was a lot more rudimentary, a lot more uh kind of early that um early times than what we have now. Um And so these, these companions are becoming much safer and safer over time. But I'd say, you know, as things, things like that probably would happen, will happen, going forward and everyone needs to provide the safest possible experience. Anyone have a question in the audience, you'd like to ask Eugenia in the back, please. We have a microphone coming to you. Could you just stand up and identify yourself, please? Thank you. Hi, I'm Suzanne Rakoff of Invisible Technologies. Uh We're a product driven managed service that helps A I leaders like open A I align A I and industry leaders like Walmart leverage A I and I was lucky enough to have breakfast with you. So I asked a couple questions, but I've won specifically around languages. Uh How are you thinking about using different languages to help people have friends who maybe speak a different language or help people learn a new language? And I asked this question because I have tried to maintain Spanish my entire life and found that it was hard for me at the right time. Whenever I wanted to engage in Spanish to help me improve, I now have a Turkish speaking boyfriend. We have a huge language barrier and I would like to have an A I friend sit between us to help translate certain discussions with a little more context than word for word. Thank you. Thank you, Suzanne. That's actually a great question. Um The language models, the large language models we built and um uh and use in the product actually support different languages. So you can talk to replica in whatever language you want really. And we fully understand and talk back to you. And that is actually uh that's what some of our users use replica for as well. Also to practice, practice another language and stay fluent in it, something that we've seen over and over again. Um So that's definitely one of the use cases I should use it for Mandarin. Can I use it for Mandarin? Yeah. OK. I'm a little rusty. Um Any other questions in the back, please? Hi, my name is Alexander. I am a reporter at Fortune. Um, I'm curious about the, um, A I dating thing you're talking about, you know, when you have a model, a business model that's based on, uh, in app purchases, what happens when someone has a relationship with A I and your company is profiting from more interaction than, uh, you know, what, like it's best for your company to, um, have an app interaction. How do you make sure that someone might go out and have relationships in the real world? Thank you so much. This is a really great question. We um actually don't uh rely on engagement metrics that much. So we have uh subscriptions mostly in uh both replica and blush. Um And once the person subscribed, we don't really care that much how, you know, how often we don't want them to use it for a lot of time. In fact, our incentives are fully aligned. We want them to feel better and to move on and we don't want them to stay in the app for a long time. Uh So we actually create a lot of Gamification mechanisms in the app where the rep when you talk to replica for too long, it becomes, it gets tired and then exhausted and it starts nudging you to get off. It won't completely stop talking to you because that feels like projection. And that's one of the benefits of having an, a companion to be able to come to it any time but I feel like not relying on the advertising model is what allows us to really not ever optimize any of the models for engagement. And unfortunately, a lot of the companies in the A I kind of chatbot space, we see a companionship space. They do try to optimize models for longer conversations. And I think this is a very dangerous metric. We have a minute and 30 left and I wanted to ask you to wrap it up in short bottom line here. What in your view is a healthy relationship to have with an A I chatbot or an A I personality, so to speak? Like, how would you describe a healthy, good relationship? I'd say healthy and good relationship with anyone, whether it's they are or not is the one that makes you feel happier over time and improves your emotional wellness, improves your emotional outcomes over time. Um I think in the future as the technology becomes better and as we're going towards A G I, we will have the moment where we'll have relationships, deep emotional relationships with those agis. And the question is, can we teach them now something about empathy and what we need out of those? Um I can we start looking into it and having a nuanced conversation about this right now and um this is what we're trying to do with replica forge beautiful, beneficial relationships with A I. Well, thank you so much for your time, Eugenia. Uh we look forward to continuing the conversation in the years to come. I appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Lindsey Vonn, Olympic Champion, Entrepreneur, Investor and Founder, Lindsey Vonn Foundation. In conversation with: Jo Ling Kent, Senior Business and Technology Correspondent, CBS News and Co-chair, Fortune Brainstorm Tech

Brainstorm Tech 2023: Beyond The Slopes 

Lindsey Vonn, Olympic Champion, Entrepreneur, Investor and Founder, Lindsey Vonn Foundation, Jo Ling Kent, Senior Business & Technology Correspondent, CBS News

Lindsey Vonn, Olympic Champion, Entrepreneur, Investor and Founder, Lindsey Vonn Foundation, Jo Ling Kent, Senior Business and Technology Correspondent, CBS News

Thank you so much for that. It is time for the grand finale of our day. We have an absolute powerhouse joining us. Now on stage, our next guest is not only an Olympic champion but also an entrepreneur, an investor and notably a philanthropist, a true Trailblazer both on and off the slopes from empowering underserved young girls to taking a stance in the realm of technology and its potential to revolutionize professional sports. Our guest has left an indelible mark in diverse arenas. Her fascinating journey is filled with challenges, triumphs and pretty much everything in between, fueled by an unwavering passion for innovation and for breaking boundaries. So without further ado, please join me in welcoming the brainstorm tech, the incomparable alpine skiing champion and so much more Lindsey Vonn and sorry and joing Kent. Good afternoon. I'm Lindsey Vonn in the house fans. It's so great to have you here. All these familiar faces, you know, this is beautiful, welcome home. Sort of. Thank you to Park City. I'm so happy to be here with you. You're an Olympic champion, 82 world cup victories. You're the most decorated female skier of all time. Yes, but perhaps most important to me personally. You're from Minnesota. I am and so am I and that is just the best bond to have the people are from Minnesota. Thank you. I agree. I agree. But you also, you wear so many hats. You're an entrepreneur, you're an investor. And you also have started about 89 years ago, the Lindsay Vonn Foundation. And that's partially why you're back here in Park City. So I just wanted to know, you know, as I was doing research in advance of our conversation, one thing that really struck me is that you are an advocate for empowering, underserved girls in a positive way to help them in not just sports but education and art. And it's about discovering the grit within. Why did you start the foundation and how is it going as you try to get these values instilled in these amazing young women? Well, I started a foundation in 2015 and it really stemmed from meeting my childhood idol, Peekaboo Street and I was at an autograph signing in Minnesota when I was nine years old and I met her for 90 seconds and she inspired me to want to be an Olympian. So when I was injured, I thought I need to do something positive with my time, I'll start a foundation and hopefully I can inspire young girls the way Peekaboo inspired me unknowingly. But, you know, for me, I want to be intentional about it and you know, for me, I think what served me best in my life through skiing is determination and grit and grit is a really hard thing to teach Angela Duck work is a big inspiration to me. And she wrote the book grit and I truly believe that successful people are determined and gritty and it's not the smartest people in the room. It's the people that are willing to sacrifice the most to be the best. And so when I, you know, start my foundation, I want to help build strong characters and kids that empower them to have the skill set to go into the world. And to say, yes, I can do this. I have the skills not just, you know, in sports and probably no, it's definitely not in skiing because to be honest, it's probably not the best job to be going after. Definitely put me in the hospital a few too many times, but I just wanted to give them the skill set to be able to succeed. So that's my mission. We've given over a million dollars in scholarships. Um It's really just been me, my sister and her husband. So a family operation, very family. Uh Yeah, run operation. But now we have a CEO and we're really trying to scale. So Dan Rosensweig has been a big, you know, promoter. He's been gathering support today and we're going to go up Den's house after this for cocktails and uh hopefully I'll I'll pass out some information. So, how are the girls responding? I mean, you're, you're doing something really special, an amazing group of people. Thanks. Yeah, I mean, I think the best thing I've done in my career is to be able to have this foundation and to actually see the impact that I've, you know, hopefully made on these girls. You know, I've met girls that, you know, are self harmer and now they're not, they go through my camps, which are our two day empowerment camps. And we have a curriculum and we teach them about, you know, how to take something negative and reframe it into something positive. You know, most kids, especially young girls, when someone tells them, they can't do something, they take that as fact and they stop trying entirely. And which is why, you know, there's a lot of, there's so much drop off, especially in sports at, you know, around the teenage age because someone says they can't do it, they stop. So, you know, for me, I'm here to try to tell them that they can give them the skill set to do that. We're a shining example of it and one thing that you've been able to really do that has resonated with millions of people. You've been so public and brave about your mental health journey and your struggle with depression since the age of 18, self esteem issues, things that traditionally and you've said this are not associated with an Olympic champion or you're not allowed to be associated with it. How do you care for yourself and maintain such a high level of success in your day to day life? It's hard. I mean, I think it was actually, it's actually much easier now because I have a better skill set than I did when I was skiing. Um, you know, when I was skiing, I, I, you know, now everyone talks about it, Naomi Osaka and Simone and Kevin love and all these people, it's very commonplace. But, you know, when I was growing up, there was no support or anyone to talk to. And so I found ways to, you know, figure it out on my own. Um I use skiing as a way of, you know, doing therapy. Um And now, you know, I worked with AAA new therapist since I retired and it's really changed, you know, my, my outlook and how I approach mental health and, you know, the, the skills and tools that I can rely on and go back to and, you know, use whenever I need to. You know, I've haven't had the easiest time since retiring. I lost my mother, my grandmother and my dog um in a six month span. Um And because I had, you know, the, the tools I was able to rely on that. So I'm just a big advocate for going to therapy. Um I work with a, I'm an advisor for a company called and they basically um help connect therapists to patients and it's covered by insurance, which is a big um inhibitor of people actually going to therapy because they can't afford it. Um So, yeah, mental health is just a big, a big part of my life and trying to get people to have the confidence to, to go talk to someone. And even if it's not a therapist, a family member or a friend, and when you're leading a very successful life or a very driven life where you're always on the road and you know, there's, there's no stopping, it's really important to take care of yourself. And I think again, when you're successful, people also don't, you know, assume that you're good and just because you're successful doesn't mean, you know, on the inside, everything's ok. So it's important to, to take care of yourself when you have a moment and you're not with your therapist and you are having a moment of maybe it's a mini crisis or just a down moment. I think a lot of people look to athletes for inspiration for that, like sort of self talk. Do you have a phrase or a mantra or a thing that you go to? We have so many people out here who are high performing executive ceos founders who have those low moments. What do you use in that mini moment? I mean, what do you say? I kind of have two different answers when I was skiing, I, I had a journal and it sounds silly, but I really wrote down the times when I was feeling great because when I felt down, I could go back and reflect on, OK, this is what I did. This is how I felt I can get back to this. Um And it was just a good way to kind of re center myself. Um And also Law and Order health. I uh obsession of Law and Order. Um I don't know why the crime gets solved and I somehow feel better every time a beginning and an end. Yes. Add some bit. And Jerry's and you've got a great night, the magic recipe. And now, you know, I don't actually really talk to my therapist that much because I've, you know, again, I've actually been given a set of skills that I can rely on and I can't particularly explain it. His name is Dr Amano Gonzalez. And it's, it's called brain spotting. And, you know, it's really, it's about feeling and accepting the emotion that you're feeling instead of pretending that it doesn't exist or talking your way through it. It's you sit there and you experience it, your brain processes it and then you move on. And so that's kind of what I focus on now. Um I don't have many crisis because I'm able to, I'm trying, I mean, it's never perfect, but I try to have that balance and also for me, a huge thing is working out. Obviously, when I was skiing, I had plenty of that right now. You know, when I'm on the road, it's so important for me to have that outlet just to keep that balance. Otherwise things crumble pretty quickly. Well, I see you working on sharing it on social media and I think it's such an inspiration for the rest of us who are not Olympic athletes but aspire to have that balance and that mental health in our lives. You're a big investor too. We can't, we can't skip that today. And I was wondering, you know, you've invested in some pretty big successes, some that have been a bit more of a roller coaster beyond Meat Hyper Ice or a Ring Angel City football club. I'm in L A. We love Angel City. How do you decide what to invest in? And what sort of strategies from your athletic and professional career do you use as a filter to say? Ok, I'm getting in on this. I look at investing in the same way. I looked at relationship building for my brand and what partners I chose to work with. Um It's what's authentic to me, what I believe in what I use, what um you know, I believe is gonna be a value long term. Um All of the things that I invested in, I use myself um I believe in so maybe haven't worked out as well as others. Um but I think for the, the most, the majority of, of my investments, I'm, I'm really happy. I wish someone maybe, you know, sell, uh, soon, um, looking for an, that'd be really great. Um, but yeah, I mean, I think for me it's all about long term strategy. I never do anything short term, you know, all of my sponsors, for example, I've been with Rolex for 15 years with Red Bull for 20 years under armor and the longest standing athlete of 20 years. So I don't ever look at anything short term. So um yeah, it served me well in my career and now in this new investment world. Yeah, we have time for one audience question. Anyone wanna ask a question? Hello? Yeah. Is there one in the back there right here. Go ahead. Please stand up and identify yourself. Hi, I'm Phil Wabo with Fortune. I'm a terrible skier, but I get down the hill in one piece. But my question for you is I was speaking with a couple of locals yesterday and they were saying the cost of skiing has gone way up and it's becoming very difficult for middle class families. I mean, this is not your responsibility, but as a prominent skier, I'm just wondering, do you worry that skiing is going to become another one of those things where income inequality pulls it to the upper middle class and therefore it will not be this incredible joy that middle class I mean, many more Americans have been able to enjoy for decades. Yeah, absolutely. Any question, my grandfather is the one that started my family in skiing and he started going to, as in the fifties and he would side flip the hill for half the day to get a half price ticket for the afternoon. Um, you know, my family is always found ways to, you know, make it, make it affordable for us to all go together. I don't think there really is a way to make it affordable these days. I mean, oh, God knows how much tickets are here in Deer Valley. I think they are over $200. I mean, to, to ski with your family, it's next to impossible. Um, I think Europe is actually a much more affordable plan. Um, you know, you go to small towns in Austria, you can get a lift ticket for 25 bucks. Um, I, I don't know, you know, for me, I understand the economic value and, and what, you know, Deer Valley and all of these amazing resorts are doing and, you know, it, there is a lot of income and a lot of money being generated through, you know, these giant corporations, but it really is taking away from the joy that families and kids have from the sport, which I'm, you know, sad about. I don't, but I don't know what the solution would be. Um, you know, if you go to Buck Hill, Minnesota. I was about there. Hey, have you skill? I think it's about 100 bucks for a season pass. So it's a steal of a deal. Minnesota. You don't want to go to Deer Valley. You can always go to Minnesota stop by the Mall of America. Yes. Um, but no, I think it's a, it's really disappointing because, you know, my family, uh, we're, we're kind of, we have the only glue we have is skiing. Um You know, we're, we're a huge family. I have 13 cousins and skiing was the only thing that we did together. So, um it disappoints me but um I hope we'll find a way to make it more affordable. I doubt that will happen. But there is always Minnesota, there's always Minnesota. Well, on that happy note, Lindsey Vonn Olympic champion. Thank you so much for being here. We all really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Aike Ho, General Partner, ACME Capital, Ashley Kramer, Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Strategy Officer, Gitlab Marissa Mayer, Co-Founder and CEO, Sunshine Jay Parikh, Chief Executive Officer, Lacework Moderator: Molly Wood, Molly Wood Media

Brainstorm Tech 2023: Town Hall Conversation: Where To, Tech? 

Aike Ho, ACME Capital, Ashley Kramer, Gitlab, Marissa Mayer, Sunshine Jay Parikh, Lacework, Molly Wood, Molly Wood Media

Town Hall Conversation: Where To, Tech? 

Aike Ho, General Partner, ACME Capital Ashley Kramer, Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Strategy Officer, Gitlab Marissa Mayer, Co-Founder and CEO, Sunshine Jay Parikh, Chief Executive Officer, Lacework Moderator: Molly Wood, Molly Wood Media

Annie Case, Partner, Kleiner Perkins Laela Sturdy, Managing Partner, CapitalG Kareem Zaki, General Partner, Thrive Capital In conversation with: Polina Pompliano, FORTUNE

Brainstorm Tech 2023: VC Outlook 

Annie Case, Kleiner Perkins Laela Sturdy, CapitalG Kareem Zaki, General Partner, Thrive Capital Polina Pompliano, FORTUNE

Dr. Astro Teller, Captain of Moonshots, X
In conversation with: Terri Burns, Fortune Brainstorm Tech 

Brainstorm Tech 2023: Fly Me To The Moon 

Dr. Astro Teller, Captain of Moonshots, X
In conversation with: Terri Burns, Fortune Brainstorm Tech 


Joining us today is someone who has, has had to think big but also make sure these innovations. See the light of day, Dr Astro Teller, a scientist, an author and an entrepreneur with a pretty unique job title. Captain of Moonshot Dr Teller leads X Alphabet's Moonshot Factory where they dream up risky and audacious ideas that are grounded in science and technology, but do have the potential to push the boundaries of innovation and are not just pie in the sky. So without further ado, let's welcome him to the stage, Dr Teller and he will be interviewed by brainstorm tech co chair, Terry Burns. Thank you. Hey Astro, how's it going? Great. I'm very excited to get into everything X. Thanks for being here today. So again, chatting with some folks as we've been network in and chatting, I've been hearing so many people have had enthusiasm and have heard a lot about X over the years but not so much in recent years. So to start, I would love to hear a little bit more about you, your role, your amazing job title and also just in general, what's going on at X these days? Well, that was a lot. Let me start at the beginning to create a little context, right? So I'm the captain of moonshots at X. It's Alphabet's Moonshots factory. And our job basically is to invent and launch breakthrough technologies that hopefully can help tackle some of the biggest problems in the world and are designed to create at least the foundations for large enduring businesses for Alphabet. Awesome. And go ahead. Well, so let me give you a few examples of some of the things that have come from X just to give you a sort of a background, a backdrop. So sometimes we make things that turn out to be right to move back to Google instead. So Google Brain which actually has come up during this conference is sort of one of the early epicenters for the machine learning explosion that's happening right now that came from X Verily, the Life Science business that came from X Waymo, the self driving car company that came from X Wing, the drones for package delivery that came from X Intrinsic more recently, which is our Moonshot for industrial robotics that came from X. And very recently just this January, we put out a new other bet, a new part of alphabet called mineral, which is our Moonshot in the agriculture space. I'm curious to hear about you. You've just listed a number of amazing projects that have come from X. I want to talk about failure a little bit. What are some or an example of an X project that maybe you would categorize as a failure that you and your team have learned from. Well, one of the ones that comes to mind for me is loon. So we had this aspiration that if you could somehow magically get cell towers into the stratosphere floating around, they could go where they wanted to go. But then somehow stay, even with the high winds just where you wanted them to be and beam internet down to the ground you could create for people, particularly in outlying areas, not in large cities, connectivity that several billion people in the world don't have today. We were really excited about this. And amazingly, after nine years, we had it working these balloons, hundreds of them were flying around world were creating these ad hoc mesh networks in the sky. Beaming four G LTE and five G to people, particularly in Kenya and Peru or two of the early places. We were testing this. I remember the buzz about all of that and was so uplifting because of this goal of solving for connectivity. And it turned out the techno economics per bit were good but not great. They weren't as good as we wanted them to be. And we just didn't figure out a right way to solve with the telcos who are our partners who are going to be our connectivity to these people in various countries. And one of the things we learned from that is if we have to get everything working perfectly before the ecosystem will talk to us about whether they really want it or not, that's not worth it. So we're not going to do that again. That's a big takeaway that we had. Yeah, thanks for that. You all sort of know the drill. Now, I am going to turn it over to audience questions in just a minute. But before we do that, I would love to get here the latest, what are some of the big moon shots that you and your team are working on right now that you're really excited about? I'll give you two. But let me start with, we're fond of, of talking about Moonshot compost of recognizing that the people, the code, the patents, the learnings that come from anything that we do, even when it doesn't work out can supercharge the next attempt for us to solve the same or similar problem. So in the case of connectivity, there are still three plus billion people in the world who have little to no connectivity. We're still really passionate about solving that these balloons. I was just talking about up in the stratosphere were talking to each other using lasers. And so someone said his loon was winding down. Well, hold on a second. What if those things were brought down to the ground? Six years later, our project Tara is using wireless optical communications, these thin beams of invisible light, which can go up to 20 kilometers and get the benefits of fiber optic cabling without needing to trench cables. And we're rolling these out in Africa, in India and in a lot of other places around the world, we're really passionate about how well that's working. And amazingly, we're now moving more bits to real customers every single day with Tara than we did in the history of living. Wow, that's amazing. So you are literally able to take this failure if you will and leverage that technology to one of the most exciting projects that you're working on now. Exactly. Awesome. Let me give you another example. We're really passionate about the electric grid. The electric grid of the world needs a Moonshot. The electric grid of the world is the largest machine humanity has ever made. It's the most complex machine that humanity has ever made. It's the most expensive. So no one really knows what's going on with it. You would think that the people who move the electrons around, who make the electrons, the generators who transmit them, who distribute them at the edge would know where every wire was, where every inverter was, where every piece of equipment that it takes to keep the grid together, where it is, how it's functioning. And they don't, they just don't because it's too complex. So tapestry, our Moonshot for the electric grid is working to virtualize the grid to first help the grid just maintain what they have. If they don't know what's broken or what might soon be about to break, they can't fix it proactively. Then number two help them to be able to plan for the future as most people in the audience know right now the wait times on getting renewables onto the grid in the United States is like seven plus years and getting longer by the day, not shorter. And the reason is because the system operators don't know what it would do to the grid to plug a new solar field onto the grid. And so they spend weeks playing a few 100. What if games about the worst case scenarios to try to figure out if it was going to be safe or not? If you had a virtualization of the grid, then you could answer that question. Will it be safe or not in a few minutes instead of in a few weeks? So that's the kind of thing we're really excited about with tapestry and that's tapestry. Got it. Ok. I want to turn it over to the audience. Do we have any questions for Astro one up here? Hi, Catherine Ducker with Hewlett Packard Enterprise. I think all of us in this room probably massively envy your job. And I would love to hear a little bit about what factors guide the type of initiatives that your team pursues. What sort of that checklist of. Yes, this initiative has the potential to do Xy and Z we're gonna take it on at the most basic level. What we say is we won't even start on a journey until it has a Moonshot story hypothesis. And in order for it to have that, it has to have three basic things. Number one, you have to be able to name a huge problem in the world you want to solve. If there's not a huge problem you want to solve, then it's an academic exercise. Number two. And so that should be pointed at either a market that currently exists or a market that could be made if there's a huge problem that's being solved. Number two, what's the radical solution you're proposing and help us understand why it's radical because if it's what everyone else is doing, at least when we start, that's not the thing we should be in the business of working on. We should be exploring blue oceans, not the places that people are already fishing. And so those radical proposed solutions should in principle be science fiction sounding, but they're products or services once we develop them, if we can. And then the third thing that we require is some kind of technology that would be breakthrough if we could do it. And that gives us a reason to believe in the early days, we can test this hypothesis. It's OK. If the hypothesis is wrong, it's not OK. If it's going to take us many years to find out if we're wrong back to this issue about loon and getting as good as we can, as fast as we can, as efficient as we can. And answering the question is this very unlikely sounding Moonshot story hypothesis of yours going to make it or not? Because 99% of the journeys we start out on don't make it. So we can't say making it is what counts as good. It's how efficiently we filter them. That's where we think of getting our alpha. Any other questions from the audience? I'm curious to hear you mentioned Google brain. Google brain spun out of X 11 years ago and now everyone's buzzing about deep learning ai generative ai there's a lot of investors in the room myself included. If you could predict, what is that X today? That's going to be the big buzz 11 years from now. What do you think that would be first caveat? I don't believe in predicting. I believe that our job at X is to be efficient explorers so we can discover what's next. So I'm going to make what sounds like a prediction but it is, it has come through the process of exploration. Not like you know what I think would be great. Yeah. Not, not a crystal ball. Yeah, exactly. You got it. One of the things that I believe is getting to the place where 11 years from now we might be sitting around and talking about this subject primarily is synthetic genomics. I believe the movement from biology as a science to biology, as an engineering discipline is almost there, all of the pieces are just coming together and we don't have everything ironed out yet. I mean, we, the world, not just we x but I am seeing enough interesting pieces and early green shoots and enough even different parts of things we're doing at X that's starting to feel like one of those things that's going to be a really big deal in the future. Absolutely. I think that that's really compelling investors take notes. I'm curious to hear more about, we talked a little bit about failure, the opposite side of things. What does success look like at XX? And when something is successful graduates, how do you define that? What does that look like in the long run for a Moonshot to be successful? There almost inevitably has to be some tech innovation. There has to be product innovation and there has to be market innovation. There's kind of no way to innovate in any one of those areas without having to innovate in the others, particularly if you innovate in the tech area. So by the time it leaves X for sure, we need to believe that the tech has been meaningfully de risked. We understand it better. That doesn't mean that there's no risk left, but we should have moved to a place where execution risk is more than 50% of the risk. But we also need to see some early demonstrations on the product and market side that make us believe that this isn't just a build it and they will come kind of situation but that this really has a viable chance to become an alphabet scale business that could be really great for the world. Our final question is around ethics. X is trying to think about massive problems that theoretically can impact the lives of everyone. How do you bring an ethical lens to those explorations and the development of that, of those technologies with an X that's worthy of an entire hour of conversation. So I have 60 seconds, but in 60 seconds, I would say, I do not believe that having ethicists on board and somehow just passing it over to the ethicist to pass judgment on things is the right way to solve this problem. I think you need to wire an appreciation for we're in this with the world, for the world not to see if we can get some money and run before they figure it out, helping everyone to really feel that is job one and then job two is you don't know what's going to happen, what the unintended consequences are. So X has become expert at getting out into the world early in safe sandbox ways. So we can start to be in dialogue with regulators and with the public, not just in Silicon Valley, but all over the world. Where we test the things that we're doing. So we can say, how are you experiencing this? Which parts of this in Kenya? In New Zealand, in South Africa? In Peru? How is this better than we may have hoped? How is this worse or different than what we were hoping it would solve your problems? And that learning turns into an iteration with those people. And I think that's how we avoid the kind of unintended consequences that happen when people just mix until they're done and then sort of like dump it on the world at the last minute. Absolutely. Astro. Thank you so much for. Thank you. Thanks everyone.

Dan Rosensweig, Chairman, President and CEO, Chegg In conversation with: Jeremy Kahn, FORTUNE 

Brainstorm Tech 2023: A.I. And The Future Of Education 

Dan, thanks so much for being here with us. Thanks for having me. Um We're gonna start out. Not everyone here is probably familiar with Chad and, and what you guys do, give us a little pocket history of cha pocket history is long and some days great and some days pretty crap. Well, give us a short version. Um So we're probably the largest educator in the United States. We are direct to consumer company that started by inventing textbook rental, which sort of bankrupted two of the publishers to try to save kids money in college and then stumbled onto a concept of online homework help and built a service that 8 million students pay us for globally and has 100 million questions asked and answered that are all accurate and um have been broken down by their components and um, we help kids learn in ways that they've never been able to learn before. Cool. Um And one of the ways you're starting to think about helping kids learn in ways they never have before is the use of generative AI, which is, and I, I understand that you guys were working on using generative ai to potentially create some sort of, you know, personalized tutor when Chat GPT comes along and then, you know, you basically say come out to the market and say, actually we're getting some headwinds here from, from Chat GPT. I think your CFO said there were maybe 100,000 and potential subscribers that we're not going to subscribe. Maybe now because of Chat GBT. And when you say this, you know, your stock takes quite a hit. You lost about 48% of value in a single day. I think what you're saying is the reason I was invited, I'm the poster child for getting your ass kicked in the public markets by AI since I lost 48% of value in five minutes. So for those of you who didn't want to take that, I took it for you. Yeah. Well, thank you, my pleasure. You know, what did that experience teach you? What did you learn from that? That don't tell the public markets anything? Look. Um I despite my youthful appearance have been in tech since 1983 and was the publisher of the largest computer magazines. For those of you old enough to remember PC magazine, computer shopper. Um my background of helped start it and see it. And Yahoo um is that there's always another thing that just when you think it's done just when you think you're bored with it, somebody invents something and some of these things are sort of false messiahs, you know, NFTS and some of them are real like mobile or like cloud computing. And in this case like A I so AI can be used for extraordinarily good things or really bad things and the bad people don't have to follow laws or rules and they'll do it first and they'll do bad things and they are and then the good people will try to follow all the regulations and laws and they'll be further behind, but they'll create great things. And if you ask yourself, if a I could do anything, you'd want to cure cancer, right? And you'd wanted to help educate the world so that people can be optimistic and hopeful and productive. And so we have a vision for combining what she has always wanted to do, which is combine your academic support, skills based support and support in your life, mental health crisis, alcohol crisis, drug crisis, all of these things are affecting our kids in ways that you may not understand and believe it or not. The average age of a college kid is 25 62% of all college graduates are women. 40% of them work 30 hours a week or more and have kids and have jobs. So the ability to hone in on a really personalized learning style and way and specifics about you for you, what you want to learn or need to learn, we are absolutely fired about it and we think incumbents will win over new people, which is not been the history, but we think this case may be the way it goes. So we're pretty fired up. Go on. You're in the process of building this product called Checkmate, which is going to be a gene of ai personal tutor. And I think you have a demo of what this is going to look like that you can show us. So let's take a look at that now. Yeah, it's, we hope to be the first personalized learning assistant and you can walk us through what we're seeing here. So none of you use chig. But if you have kids, all of them do. I mean, we are literally 88% awareness on college campus. So what we do is you would type in a question now and we'd give you a step by step solution on how to get to the answer, what the answer is, why it's the answer. And it's pretty much in one format. Although we do offer videos, we are now going to take the accuracy of that, which has been built over 13 years. And we are going to make conversational relevant personalized based on the 100 million answers that we have the 17 million new questions we get asked a year. But just imagine the following scenario as you see this, you start to have a conversation with somebody that knows, you knows how you're feeling that day knows what you're studying, knows when your midterm is, knows what you're good at, knows what you're bad at. Builds you a personalized plan advocates for you. And then over time takes a look at all of your test that you upload, tells you what professional skills you develop, offers you the opportunity to learn skills you don't have and ultimately connects you to a job and ranks you. We're building a community which will connect student to student to be able to share. These are all things that she did not do and now will be doing, going into the future and really, really, really quickly. So A I has changed the opportunity. As you see here, we can connect you to a study group of people who are doing, studying exactly what you're studying live now in person, online things that will advantage the student in ways they've never been advantaged before. So imagine you're a typical student in this country that has been unsupported by your school system that the future for you has got to be to get some form of skill based education to allow you to be competitive in the world. And now finally, somebody knows you by, by you having to do very little work and us being a to analyze, assess and build you a program directly and specifically for you. We can know your professor, your school, your textbook. So we can what's changing with AI now is we're moving away from the model we have now, which is, it responds to you to it predicts for you. We will be able to know exactly what you're learning on Tuesday of next week and bring it to you in the format that you learn best in the language that you learn best at the level that you learn best and assess you and prove to you that you are improving. None of that has been available before. And so, you know, I look at the world and I say we have a brand, we have reach, we have the accuracy. We have the students love us to death. We have over an 80 score with students and we have this database that's been built of a learning taxonomy over 13 years and all the data from every school, every professor and every student, we will be able to use A I on top of our stuff, which is why the journalists are not going to be able to succeed against the vertical. So this is a change and an opportunity for us that we've never seen before. And we think the market just got 10 times larger for us. And I want to get the questions for the audience. So please think of questions for Dan and I'll come to you in a minute. By the way, didn't the video look pretty cool? I mean, imagine if your kid needed help, right? This is the thing that's going to help them because no professor can scale and you probably didn't know this, but a million professors in colleges are adjunct professors getting paid 40 grand a year. You probably didn't know that the overwhelming majority of tests that your students get are not written by the professor or graded or ever seen. They're bought from test bags. We are going to serve the students needs not the schools. And you said you think you can win out over a journalist chat bot. But, you know, you were hit by the fact that, and I'm sobered that people thought, you know, chat GP, you could do a lot of this. Why, you know, if, if you know what would prevent open A I from just saying, oh, we'll just set chat GP loose on some curriculum and, and, you know, we don't need checkmates. So look, the only thing that could beat us is if something is better and free. Um, well, it's free right now. It's free right now. But it's older generations as you know, it's not getting better. The older generations are actually getting worse. The hallucination hallucinations are getting worse. We are seeing traffic return to check because students are now realizing that it's not accurate. They were never designed to be accurate. Chat GP T was never designed to teach you anything. It was designed to give you something. Well, if you need to learn, you need to learn, you can't have somebody do the work for you. So students are understanding that because they actually have to go out into the workforce and be successful. But the real reason is because verticals, we all use verticals. Right? If, if, if journalists, when Google would have won, Google wins is a business model. But it doesn't, it didn't win commerce, it didn't win travel, it didn't win shopping, it didn't win video, had to buy youtube, it won organizing the world's information and sending you off to places with no explanation. Everything else has done. It has not succeeded in it, the ability to have the accurate data to have the learning taxonomy, to be specific to a vertical and not have to be equally good across a lot of verticals leads to mediocrity. So the rectangle served its purpose for a long time. Brilliantly, I might add. But here this is about students actually needing to learn and know and be able to leave there with confidence, Ted GPT is not going to know your history, it's not going to know what you did yesterday. It's not going to know the history of your class or the history of other students, what jobs those students get. It's not designed for that. So we are and so the combination of using them on top of us, we think is going to be extraordinary and what you saw that was all done in 90 days, that's how fast things are moving. And if you've seen Adobe Firefly, I have the honor of serving on the Adobe board that all came together in less than three months. I stop you there. Let's get some questions from the audience. There's a question in the back there. Thanks Dan Steven Wolf, D, Steven Wolf D, Dan Rosenstein. Um I'm curious, one of the real benefits of having A I is personalization. And when you think about the consumer base, the student body, I'd love for you to double click a little bit on the diversity of that student body. And why personalization is so important for those students. So thank you, Stephen, because it's actually an essential question because probably most of the people in this room have this vision, that college is what you went to. So it's not if you knew that the largest college in this country was an online university, would it surprise you? Would it surprise you to know that as 170,000 students, it's Southern New Hampshire University. Would it surprise you to know that one out of two students never go to college and one out of two that do never finish. So the ability to speak to somebody because not everybody who came to this country or even was born in this country, depending on what you're born, had the same experience learning or the same culture of learning or some families had to go and work, right? In order to support the family, the prioritization had to be survival rather than the luxury that my kids have. And when you appreciate that language is a barrier culture is a barrier fear of asking a question. Think about the teachers, how hard they work in grade school and you know, and up to 12th grade with a, with a room that has people that know two people came from the same background. So you can't do it anymore, it cannot possibly scale. So the ability to understand who you are culturally, what's important to you, what device you use, what may be going on in the rest of your life. We're going to be able to connect you if you have mental health issues to a counselor because that's a real thing. You may need to earn, earn an income. We may find that will connect you to a job on your campus one day because these are who we actually serve, not who we would like to believe that we serve. So I'm going to stop you that because I want to get you another question. Another question over here. I just get excited. Hi. Um I'm Nadia. I'm class of 2021 Harvard and I'm just gonna expose myself. That's 83 Hobart. Nice. Um I'm gonna expose myself because I am concerned in talking to a lot of the young people that I meet in my day to day work um about the level that GP T is being used to complete essays to do homework and problem set. Uh, I was a user but not because I gave a talk about learning, but because it gave me answers to problem sets. And I think I meet a lot of young students out there where they're not necessarily interested in using TCP T for learning, they're using it because it makes it easier to complete homework. I raised my pre feed around my junior year of college and because I was on full financial aid, I was also not super invested in doing it. I was just like easy, easy, like get degrees to be honest. And so, yeah, I think that a concern of mine just as like a Gen Z elder is feeling like they, these sorts of tools are making it easier and easier to honestly just get the answers and de prioritizing, um you know, really engaging curiosity. I wanna give an answer. So I'm gonna let him start answering my question. Yeah, I, well, I don't think that's the question. I think, I think the question is so you're gonna hate my answer because I think you're thinking about it from the exact wrong way. I think the laziness of academic institutions, the fact that they don't change their curriculum good for you to go to Harvard probably earn it. That's 4000 people out of the 21 million people in this country. So the state of California college counselors to students 1000 to 1. So the fact is these students were giving no support, no learning, no background. They put their hand up, they borrowed money that they'll probably never be able to pay back to make their lives better. So, what the kids at Harvard did? I don't give a shit about right. I care about the kids who are trying to make their lives better. Now, the truth is you can only cheat if the professor doesn't do any work. If the professor doesn't write their own question, doesn't change. The question gives you a take home test that's on the schools. We need people that know how to learn. So if you have the job that I have and you got a chance to talk to these students who thank me for the fact that we existed for the first time. Anybody caring about them and being able to help them while they raise a child work 40 hours a week and can't make it to the class because the class is scheduled at a ridiculously inconvenient time. I mean, the state of California is 115 community colleges. They created 115 online schools. Why? Same textbook, same class unions. So my view is we are being built for the student that is self initiated, that wants to learn, that needs to understand that needs to graduate with a skill and that's what we're going to do because we're going to assess and evaluate them. The fact that it's going to we're going to have to wrap it up there. Ok? But that ones are right on time. Well, somebody asked me a happy question. We'll have to maybe the networking sessions we can ask you a happy question. But that's right. Thank you so much for being with us. All right. Thank you, everybody. Thank you.

Thibaud Hug de Larauze, Co-founder and CEO, Back Market
Samina Virk, Chief Executive Officer, North America, Vestiaire Collective In conversation with: Phil Wahba, FORTUNE 


Brainstorm Tech 2023: The Rise Of Resale 

Thibaud Hug de Larauze, Co-founder and CEO, Back Market
Samina Virk, Chief Executive Officer, North America, Vestiaire Collective, Phil Wahba, FORTUNE 

So sustainability is top of mind for consumers today as is saving money and many fast growing companies have emerged to serve those two dual needs in the retail market. Genz consumers particularly conscious of styles and saving are preparing are propelling the second hand clothing market in the US with forecasts calling it for it to double by 2026 to $82 billion. And the electronics especially refurbished Apple products are also highly coveted. So in our next discussion, we will hear from two leaders in the so called rec commerce space who are driving the circular economy forward. And it's those of you who are listening carefully to Al Gore's presentation and Wild pre presentation. Their fund has invested in both companies that are going to be represented on stage with us. So here to unpack this step forward in the circular economy are Tibu U Davos, the founder of Black Market and a certified B Corp company operating in renewed tech marketplace. And we also have Samina Vig, who's the US CEO of VIS Collective, which sells a lot of really great stuff secondhand. So guys please join me in welcoming them to the stage. All right. So now we're going to talk about fun stuff, like buying cool stuff on the internet. Um, so let me ask, I guess a semi cynical question. Do consumers really care about circularity all that much or is it just something that they can latch on to as they look for an excuse to shop and not feel bad about it? Why don't we start with you? So I would say that over the last few years, consumers have become more and more aware and I think we've all like actually become more aware of environmental impact in fashion. I think it's become a topic that's quite big. But I will say that from a fashion circularity point of view, it's still gaining traction. So, what we've found is sustainability is one of the reasons that people are shopping that year collective. But it also is, you know, it's one of the top five reasons. So we haven't gotten it to number one yet, but it's absolutely, it's much more of a deciding factor now than ever before. And how about you old Apple model that people want refurbished or are they really think? Ok, that's one less new product that Apple will have to manufacture and end up in a lamp cell eventually. So honestly, the first driver to conception when it comes to purchase refurbished I on back market is the price saving, they're saving 50% off, you know, like $1000 product is the main driver and then you've got the safety and the all the warranty that you get on top of the transaction. So the bed of the price discount press, the safety is the main driver then comes sustainability. But you know, it's, it's not the major driver. It's like a feel good effect that you have and I have to say and I have to moderate my comments a bit as well, like on younger generation, that's more important. So Genz, you know, those are real when it comes to sustainability. And so when we ask people like, why did you buy back market? And so it's price warranty and then sustainability. But when it's Genz, it's not 15% of the people that said it's because of sustainability, it's 45%. So it's way more. So the kids are all right as the old expression goes. So, so mean that question for you, lots of retailers have been trying to have been diving into retail on their own. How does that affect your business? So from our perspective, the circular fashion economy is a large one. So we think that we all need to be playing in secondhand fashion. And in fact, we the core of the collective's business model is a peer to peer marketplace for luxury and designer fashion. But we've also started working with different brands to help enable resale for them. And one of the reasons is that, you know, we've set up the logistics, we have the in place. It's a very easy transition. So in 2021 we started working with brands to do that and we worked with a number of brands like my Teresa, we just launched a new partnership with Chloe. And so, you know, for, you mentioned the numbers on the secondhand fashion market, there's no signs of slowing down. In fact, you know, I think it's over 100 billion globally, the resale market and it's continuing to grow. So I think there's room for all of us to play whether it's peer to peer marketplaces, brands, consignment, consignment stores as well. So I think the advantage there is, there's quite a bit that we can still all do to contribute. So I want to ask a bit about, you know, whether your businesses mirror the underlying markets. So obviously, resale is popular. But if at one point that means less demand for new products, then the fashion brands might produce fewer units and then there's less for you a little bit down the road. I mean, am I thinking this and same thing on your end? So am I thinking of thinking of this in the wrong way or? Well, I think that there's a lot of opportunity for how we sit alongside brands. So for example, you know, we've done a few different surveys with our consumers. We've worked pretty closely with BCG and we found that over 60% of our second hand buyers discovered a new brand or bought a brand for the first time and of that 62% over 50% of them would buy the brand again. So I think, you know, when you look at it that way, it's actually exposing brands to a much bigger audience. It is true though. I think there's a balance of secondhand and first hand, but they all contribute to one movement which is buying more intentionally and buying quality over quantity. And I think that, you know, when you look at the luxury and designer space, that is the core foundation of that segment. So I do think we can sit alongside it. And how about you? If the tech companies have a slower year, your product intros, does that down the line affect you? And it's actually what's happening right now there is, you know, decrease year on year on a new product, but this is the mission of black market. I'm not going to lie, you know, we want to, we have to get to net zero. And if you want to do that, then you have to lower the production of tech product because the production of tech product is responsible for 80% of the tech global emissions. This is not cloud computing, you know, it's the production of hardware product that creates co two emissions. So you want to bring that down, you need to extend the life of those products. This is the, this is the why we've created back market. And so the way we track our success is by tracking the number of customers choosing refurbished or used or renew. And we will want to grow that number to the maximum such as what happened in the car industry. Actually, 30 years ago, you know, 30 years ago, like only 10% of the car in the US and Europe were being sold used today. It's 75%. So the change really happened on that, on that industry and we're trying to make that change happen as fast as possible when it comes to tech and it needs to apply in fashion and any other industry because the co two emission comes from the production of the product itself and its transport, transportation too and and along the way, transportation, et cetera. But the biggest chunk, 80% is the production. Yeah, I'm, I'm a little surprised by that because you know, you, you talked about young people but often young people, sure they want a bargain but they also want the newest thing. So uh you know, our our tell us a little bit about your younger customers. Like what, what uh attention back to the price advantage, right? When you are like 18 years old or about to get, you know, like be a student, like you can't really afford to pay like 1000 $500 to get the last iphone 14, there is most likely not many chances that you'll get a good credit. You know, even if you've got the capital ones of this world in the US. So it's really being pragmatic, you know, you just can't afford it for the vast majority of them. So the price saving is, is, is still the number one driver, right? And, and, and the fact that we're also giving a discount if you're trading your old model, that makes the economic equation even more attractive to them. So this is the number one reason and it's perfectly fine, you know, I don't want people to be, oh, I'm going to be a sustainable activist just if we can change the world without having, you know, to make efforts, I mean, the least effort as possible, the better. And that's for everyone. I guess I wanna switch gears a little bit to how you make people want to go to your site because I won't name names. But there are some marketplaces out there as they've grown, have ended up diluting, you know, uh a marketplace that is so called upscale. You end up seeing a lot of things that are not upscale, dodgy sellers, etcetera, etcetera. And then you're sort of like, well, what's the difference between that marketplace and that marketplace and that marketplace? And it becomes harder to gauge you as well. You can't sell every single tech product under the sun. So, can you tell us a little bit about the parameters for you're looking to grow and you want critical mass. But at the same time, you can't be a gigantic garage there. So, what's your philosophy? So, you know, I think the core of our business model has stayed the same from when we launched, which, you know, we originally launched in Paris in 2009. And we've since grown globally and we're a managed peer to peer marketplace. So we're connecting buyers and sellers around the world. But we have sort of two checkpoints. One is as a platform, we cure anything that goes live to sell. So we actually have a team that looks at every submission looks for any flags and then approves what goes live. So I think that helps to maintain quality. And then after an item is sold, we authenticate luxury items. So we are doing authentication in person and we've, you know, really been focused on the designer and luxury space. And since we've started, you know, those four sort of core pillars that we've had have been sort of fashion taste is what we call that trust authentication curation, making sure that we're, it's a true managed marketplace and then community and sustainability. So I think, you know, we, we do want to grow and we are growing and the US is one of our newer and one of our fastest growing markets. But for us, there's a lot more room to grow in secondhand within the luxury and designer space. And in fact, you know, one of the things we started doing is we just being B Corp and sort of keeping an eye on sustainability. We've decided that we'd like to ban fast fashion from our platform. So we're actually taking steps to go through, through three ways where we um start removing any fast fashion or don't accept it to really make sure that we're not, we're keeping that balance of craftsmanship. Ok. And how about you? Are there areas of electronics that you're like? Yeah, no, we don't want that on our site. And how do you control that? So disposal to be sure that we don't want because the again, the game is to extend the life of the product as much as possible. Um And for now, the challenge of black market is more on the supply side and demand side. Everybody wants cheap tech products, affordable products, you know, with a one year warranty. And plus if you, if you want to add more, then the challenge is on categories like, you know, like vacuum cleaners, like home appliances, those supply networks, they don't really exist, you know, like a trading programs, they operate perfectly in the US and in Europe when it comes to smart phones, when it comes to, you know, leading programs from computers, etc, but it's not on every vertical. So we've created a platform, a trading platform that operates the same way. So you can trade in anything that you have and not using anymore. So if you're leaving your apartment moving to somewhere else, just do the 33 clicks things and you can get rid of anything and have the best price tag out of it. So right now, we focus on bringing that accessibility by taking the inventory that customers don't know what to do with because we know that there is going to be a demand downstream with this inventory. So this is really more about that. OK? And neither of you ever takes possession of what's sold on your site, right? Like that's not our core model is peer to peer market. OK? And we're a market list as well, but A B two C market list, it's only professional seller that can sell through because for us is the only way to make sure there is, you know, we found our and the warranty could be, I mean, OK, I want to open it up to questions if there are any, I'll keep going until somebody raises their hand. If so a micron will come to you. But I, one question I have for you is as you look at other resale sites, marketplaces, what are, what do you see some of the most common mistakes? Uh whether or not they're competitors of yours that you say? OK, well, that, that's a lesson for us that we don't need to learn, we can learn from you, see it from afar. I can start if you want for me. But it's really appropriate for a tech, maybe it applies to fashion as well. But it's, it's really like seeing short term versus middle and long term. So our job is to create trust is to make people like embrace the value prop shifting from buying new to buying refurbish. It is really like a big step. Then the experience you need to deliver out like, you know, the customer is going to be disappointed and speak badly about it. So if you think about short term, you might allow the supply of not good quality being listed on the platform and this is where it goes sideways because your customer are not happy with the customer experience that they have. So I've seen that on many marketplaces that I don't want to name and drop because you know, they're pretty stand out and everybody knows them. But this is why it's so important for us to curate and to have algorithms that create dynamically on the quality in order to always deliver on the customer experience. And you know, some some of the publicly traded ones have had a few bumpy patches. So as you build in the US, what are lessons? Well, I think, you know, actually it's very similar to the challenges that, that you just called out in electronics and fashion too, right? And you called out one of the biggest problems that we could have is if you have a marketplace. The benefit is that you have a breadth of inventory. So it enables discovery, but you can get some of that kind of extra stuff you don't want. So I think for us, the curation process ensures that in fashion, there's obviously the element of authentication and trust. And so that's where sort of two step curation plus authenticating luxury really comes into play. You know, and I think focusing on sort of luxury designer and not necessarily wanting to be everything for everybody, I think is also helping to focus our business model as we grow. Ok. Well, let's talk a bit about growth. I mean, both of you are relatively new names for American consumers, you're both French companies. So let's hear it for French entrepreneurship, you know, going against the stereotype, but it's, you know, so, so tell me, well, let's start with you. Where does growth come from for this collective? Well, I am not French but the company for us growth, we're really looking, I'm overseeing the US market and for us growth is really going to come, continue to expand in the US. So, you know, I mentioned before, we started in 2009, we've expanded in Europe, the Aipac region and then we launched in the US. And last year, we actually acquired one of our US competitors, Tracy. And so from our perspective, that was sort of a great way to accelerate our growth within the US market. And so for the next year, you know, that's mainly my focus. How do we increase that momentum that we've had and continue to increase our brand awareness among us customers and sort of grow this global community that we have and make sure we have more American buyers and sellers as part of that first, the challenge. So we created a company nine years ago in France. Uh We first expanded in Europe and then went straight to the US. But it's been five years now that we've been in around the US and the US is the number two market now. So it's been growing way more rapidly than, you know, many, many other markets we're operating in 18, including, you know, markets like Japan and South Korea. And so for us in the US, it's really about, you know, making sure we are giving the right set of threats, but it's the same everyone globe actually, it's not different than, or Japan people want a good price product that's reliable with the proper warranty and the right user experience. So this is what we do everywhere and this is what we keep on doing in the US, the same way as we do in Europe. OK. So, so to wrap things up, I'm going to ask you each, what do your sites not do yet that you want them to do? So, a customer experience question for you? Oh, that's a good one. What would I want them to do that. They're not doing well. I think that as we start to build up our sort of us market and we have more Americans buying and selling. I think we have an opportunity to curate even further. So we are curating right now, but just making sure that we're putting even more steps that the right product is coming with the right customer. So kind of the next step in personalization as we grow. And for me, it's back to mission of black market to extend the life of tech products. This is what we do. This is why we're here. So we've created the marketplace to sell and to buy trust, trust quality product, a refurbished product. We've also created the way for people to trade in whatever they have and they're not using anymore. So we are scaling that on many other categories in order to make it like, you know, three clicks away from wherever you are. And the last but not least is the repair. We are already working on a third market page which is a repair market space to adjust, enable people to fix their battery. You know, we all have a smartphone in this room if the battery is dead, like, you know, for now you're just getting rid of it because it's, it's not that easy to just replace it and fix it. So I want to make it super easy and convenient for people to just do that repair book and screen, like just repair product. This is the other way. Well, on that note, join me in saying Messi to semi and to and thank you for joining us. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Dan Frommer, Founder and Editor-in-Chief, The New Consumer 

Brainstorm Tech 2023: Frommer’s Guide To The New Consumer 

As we reflect on the discussions held today about the ever changing landscape of the tech industry. It's clear that one of the driving forces behind its evolution is the needs and wants of the end user understanding consumer behavior is a multi faceted task and a reflection of many factors, both macro and micro, some of which are too difficult for companies to decipher in real time to shed light on this complex subject. We are thrilled to welcome Dan Frommer, the editor in chief of the New Consumer, a publication that specializes in analyzing how people spend their time and money and why with his expertise in understanding consumer behavior, Dan is here to provide valuable insights into this intricate landscape. Please give a warm welcome to Dan Frommer. Hello, good afternoon. I'm Dan Frommer. I am the founder of the new consumer. I'm going to be launching this giant new report next week and I'm very excited to give you a sneak peek here at brainstorm Tech. This is the world debut as soon as it comes up. All right, titled Ai Ozempic and the Economy. The three things that matter right now A I is the obsession of the year. The media can't stop talking about it. News articles have spiked this year. You also can't stop talking about it. This is a massive rise in mentions on earnings calls just this past quarter tracked by Bloomberg. Why now for a I of course, another decade of technological process progress, useful and novel products finally coming to market. And the truth is many companies just need a new growth narrative. So it's a I a big part of our research is what we call the consumer trend survey. We just wrapped one up a few weeks ago, 3000 us consumers performed by our partner to Luna. We spend a lot of time thinking the new consumer, digital natives. And in this case, more than half of gen Z and millennial consumers say they already consider themselves ai experts extremely or very familiar with AI in terms of awareness, Chat GPT is winning. More than a third of us consumers have heard of Chat GPT followed by products from Google, Microsoft and Adobe trillions of dollars of economic impact coming from AI. According to mckinsey. According to our research, more than a quarter of us workers say they're worried AI will replace them at work within five years, slightly higher among higher earners and lower earners. However, most 100 K plus household income workers say they are already using A I tools for work. Lower earners say they haven't but certainly trying to harness the productivity there. Most humans still want humans as their doctors and lawyers. In our research, only 12% of people said they would trust an AI doctor more than a human doctor. Same for lawyer and really seem for assistant financial advisor a little more interest in AI tools there. However, the more someone says they know about AI, the more willing they are to trust an AI doctor. And in fact, the people who are extremely familiar with Ai already more than a third of them say they would trust an Ai doctor, more than a human ai and culture. Half of Gen Z and millennial consumers say they consider A I to be art slightly different for older demographics. The question is, will AI come to dominate entertainment? And here 41% of Gen Z and millennials at least somewhat agree that 20 years from now, most movies, art, music and books will be created by AI and almost 40% somewhat agree that the best media will be created by Ai within 20 years. Of course, what will A I do to society? Key question here in our poll, more than half of consumers within 20 years expect a total lack of trust in visual or audio content acceleration and scientific advancement, which is great math transformation and evolution of jobs. Only about a third of consumers think that A I will turn on us and that robots will take over. So we'll see about that How does A I make you feel younger consumers chose? Excited, hopeful and then worried, older consumers immediately jumped too worried. More than half of Gen X and Boomers scared was second place and then hopeful. Excited lower on the list there switching gears. More Americans in our research would rather feel 25% healthier than earn 25% money. This is consistent across all household income groups, weight remains. America's top health concern. More than a third of Americans are concerned about their weight, including half of those who have self identified as overweight in our research. This is prescriptions for Ozempic and other diet drugs have soared in popularity especially since around two years ago. The FDA approved their use for weight loss. Almost 40% of Americans last month, say they've heard of Ozempic lower awareness for some other drugs including we go, which is the one that is actually approved for weight loss. But the bottom line is these drugs are very appealing. 56% of our consumers who want to lose weight and are familiar with the drugs say they are extremely or very interested in using one. It is much higher among millennials among men. Urban consumers, those with income over 100 K and of course, those who self described as very overweight. However, there are lots of to consider here, what will these drugs do to society, a positive impact or a negative impact? And here's where we see a generational difference as well. Millennials, the highest positive impact, 60% of millennials think these drugs are great. And then the next generation, Gen Z actually had the highest proportion of those saying it's going to have a negative impact on society. Still more positive than negative. But interesting to see that. Now, of course, the economy, even as inflation has cooled, 60% of our survey panel still says it feels like prices have increased a lot over the past six months. The good news is that that's down from 73% when we asked the same question in February right now, consumer spending is actually tracking down year over year. This is true both online and in store. This is earnest analytics, credit card and debit card data. As of yesterday, one category that is still doing well are restaurants taking the lead again from grocery spending after those pandemic years and restaurant delivery apps. Actually one of the few industries that has maintained its COVID growth or at least the bump that it got the COVID bump still here into mid 2023 half of Americans in our research say they order food delivery or take out at least weekly that is much higher among younger consumers, urban consumers and those with one or more Children and interesting, it actually seems to have very strong product market fit. We segmented our audience into those who order delivery at least once a week and those who do it less frequently and the people who it love it, 63% of them say food tastes as good as it does in the restaurant. I'm not sure I would say that, but these people really like it more than half enjoy the take out delivery experience more than going to a restaurant much lower among those who don't use services. And they even think that doordash and Uber are good companies more than people who don't use these services. Almost two thirds. And another interesting thing is that these apps have opened a wider range of food options for a lot of people including digital only virtual restaurants. And another generational difference here, more than 70% of Gen Z and millennial consumers say at least sometimes they order food from restaurants. They've never been to physically much different among their parents and grandparents. Zooming back out. Good news. Consumer sentiment is up from this time last year, still below its pre COVID levels. And in our research too, the consumer is more optimistic than they were this time last year, 47% say they feel moderately or very optimistic about their financial situation over the next 12 months. That's up from 35% when I was here last year. Speaking of bank crises, as we talked about yesterday, most Americans trust banks with their money. But interestingly, Gen Z is not so on board with that actually, 30% of our survey panel says they do not believe their money is safe in the bank among Gen Z. How about a net promoter score for being alive? We ask people just how satisfied are you with life right now? On a scale of 1 to 10, the average is 6.6 in June higher among millennials and the silent generation, the oldest Americans, one of the highest demographics we've seen higher for men, more than women higher for urban consumers, more than suburban and rural, highest among 100 K plus earners. And then this is one of my favorites. Higher. If you have one kid, then higher if you have a second kid. But if you have a third kid, it starts to go down after that other good news though, life satisfaction is on the rise last last year, it was 5.8 and now 6.6. So good, good thing. One thing that returned to work seems very much stalled. This number has not risen above 50% in the castle, return to work Ammeter. And again in survey last month, 79% of consumers say they believe they should have the legally protected right to work remotely if technology and the nature of their work permits. It that is up from 75% this time last year, even higher among women, Gen Z and millennials and people with Children. Of course, more weird times ahead. As I say, we are thinking about banning tiktok in this country. In our survey, there is a vast difference in opinions between monthly active tiktok users and people who don't use Tik Tok. Only a quarter of active users think tiktok should be banned. Two thirds of non users think it should be favorable perception. Three quarters of tiktok users think Tik Tok is great. Only 5% of non tiktok users have a favorable opinion of the company. Interesting and then in terms of banning it, support for banning it rises with age, only 20% of Gen Z thinks tiktok should be banned and almost two thirds of boomers do. And then we also have another, we have an election coming up next year. 40% of our survey panel says they would vote for Donald Trump if he runs next year, 12% is undecided. And then only 2% of our consumers say Elon Musk would be the best leader for the United States today. That is down from 4% last year. But what's neat here is if you look all the way at the bottom 10% of Gen Z and granted, many of them are not legal voters say Elon and AOC combined are their leader of the choice. Thank you so much to my partners at Coefficient Capital. My partners in this project. Thank you to Fortune for having me and thank you so much for your attention. Appreciate it.

Brainstorm Tech 2023: Are Drones Ready To Deliver To Your Doorstep? 

Andreas Raptopoulos, Founder and CEO, Matternet In conversation with: Jessica Mathews, FORTUNE 

Are Drones Ready To Deliver To Your Doorstep? 

Hi, everybody. Hope you enjoyed your lunches. Welcome back. So we're going to dive into a really exciting topic. Now, that's been buzzing for quite some time and that's drone delivery. I think we've all imagined a future where our packages are really and truly finally delivered by drones and it's actually slowly but surely becoming a reality. So before we get too carried away with visions of drone swarms, let's get some expert insights on what's real and what's not joining us today is an inventor and an entrepreneur who has taken the drone industry by storm. His company recently achieved a remarkable milestone by securing the industry's first ever FAA type certification for commercial drones with its entire fleet. Now, officially air work. Please join me in welcoming Andreas Rata Poli, the visionary founder of matter net, a leading company in commercial drone delivery systems. And we are really thrilled to have Andreas here to shed light on the possibilities and some of the challenges as well that are ahead from regulatory hurdles, potential benefits. So here to interview him is Fortune's Jessica Matthews. Please welcome them both. Andreas. Good to see you today. Thanks for coming out to talk about drones. It's great to be here. Thank you. Yeah. So I'm going to ask you about matter net in particular, but let's start with a little bit of the big picture here. So about 10 years ago, Jeff Bezos promised that we would be getting our Amazon packages delivered by drone. Obviously, that isn't happened, that hasn't happened yet. So why, why is that not happening? Why can't we go ahead and get things delivered to our doorstep by drone? Yes. For, for your own delivery to happen, you really need to have infrastructure that can support this type of new layer of transportation of scale. So here in the United States, the FAA and in Europe, Aasa and then other agencies around the world have been working to put together the framework that would allow their own delivery to happen safely at scale in the national airspace system. So um in the US, we've been, I think making strides at creating the right regulatory framework. There is two fundamental pieces to it. The first is how do you make sure that an aircraft is air worthy and can fly safely over people in international airspace system, avoiding other uses of the airspace, et cetera. And that program has been that that whole regulatory framework has become the tax certification framework. And ma net was the first company in September of 2052. And today, the only company that has gone through this tax certification and we have a net worthy aircraft that's safe and reliable to fly in the National Air Space System here in the US upscale. So we're going to get to the type certification in a second. But let's talk a little bit more about what matter net does specifically. So you've been building out a medical supply and health care drone delivery operation for more than 10 years and you partner with UPS and as of earlier, this air Ame flight, tell us about your drone M two and its capabilities. Right. Right. So we build an autonomous aircraft that is able to transport lightweight packages. We build our systems to transport packages of up to 2 kg, £4.5 in distances of up to 20 kilometers, 12 miles. Why did we choose that problem? Most medical items are lightweight and then when you look at Amazon's traffic, the number that they quoted is that 86% of what they ship is below £5. Right. So what we see every day is already quite lightweight and then within the logistics chain, the most inefficient part of delivery is last mile delivery. 80% of the last time the delivery market is in urban and suburban areas, right. So we decided early on to really focus on this problem of how do we solve. You would create the right technology start to transport these single packages very, very efficiently, right, at a fraction of the cost and energy of any other transportation system today. Right. So if you imagine what's happening today, right? I mean, I live in the Silicon Valley. Um If you know, I want a burger, I go on a doordash or an Uber Eats app. Right? And then somehow a burger appears on my doorstep, like 30 minutes later, it feels magical from a user experience viewpoint. But then we deploy a two ton car in a human to go out and shop something for us and then drive it through town, stopping at every stop sign, creating traffic to bring us that you know, less than £2 item. It doesn't make any sense, right? When you look at the environmental impact of that method of delivery, 20 to 30% of a city's carbon dioxide emissions are coming from last mile delivery, right? So that's a problem that we have to fix. And that's why, you know, it makes sense to really figure out the right technology layer to complement the transportation methods that exist today. Our vision is that anything that is lightweight and urgent, you know, will be transported via the air as these types of systems become mainstream. And again, you know, we feel that this is going to be a layer of transportation, a layer of logistics that's going to be taken for granted by future generations, right? We got started by doing work in the humanitarian field. I remember our very first pilot in Bhutan in 2014, we're in the middle of this beautiful Pristine Valley and I take out my phone and I'm able to, you know, get the internet right and convert by email or access Wikipedia, right? 30 years ago, that was happening in science fiction, right? Drones are going to do the same thing for transportation. So, you know, give it enough time and it's going to happen, I think at different speeds at different parts of the world, right? This is going to become a new layer of technological capability that will be added to our cities, right? And also to rural areas and fix the problem of in inadequate access to critical goods such as medicine and also help people transact goods, transacting goods is one of the most basic things that we do every day. And that's a technology that will allow us to do that very, very efficiently and without taxing the environment. So I had the pleasure of visiting one of your drone sites out in Pittsburgh, California, which I will tell you is a very far Uber ride out of San Francisco um where all is net operating right now. Yeah. So we've been operating in Switzerland since 2017. In 2017, we became the first company globally to be authorized to fly over cities in Switzerland, transporting diagnostic specimens and medicine for hospital systems, initially in the city of Lugano and then Zurich. And in 2019, we came here to the US established a partnership with UPS. Currently, we are in our fourth year partnership with UPS and we established the first revenue generating operations in North Carolina. We're still operating for a hospital there and we've been transporting things like diagnostics and medicine, COVID vaccines. During COVID, we've also launched a program with UPS to deliver prescription drugs from a CBS store to a community in Florida. Um And you know, when you look at modern its progress, the way that we architected the company, right? Our focus is really how do we solve the technology and how do we make that this technology is best in class, very robust and can scale, right? And then our mission is to put it in the hands of these organizations that have that need to really scale. So, you know, we didn't chase metrics like number of deliveries or like we really chase complexity of operations and we wanted to solve for the most complex use cases like flying in the heart of Zurich. Today we're flying around is a 3.5 kilometer route over the center of Zurich. It's as complex as it gets as it gets when it comes to the safety case. And how do you perform these services safely many times a day? Right. And here in the US as well under the tax certification framework and also the operation certificates that people like UPS and flight carry, right? So we're really focused on creating the right technology stock for us to be scale. And now we're finding ourselves at this very interesting inflection point where, you know, especially since our type certification, we've been very active trying to figure out what are the right partnerships for us to really see this type of technology scaling, right? And when we talk about scale, you know, again, I live in the Silicon Valley, you know, I could imagine, I don't know, a fleet of, let's call it 250 to 500 you know, small aircraft flying, you know, in the Bay area, transporting goods every day, right. And you know, these places will be a high utilization and again, you know, they will be completely in the background, you won't see them or hear them, right. They will do their job autonomously just as the internet does each job autonomously of automatically of transporting these beats, right? We transporting atoms. So you talk a little bit about matter net inflection point that it's experiencing right now. Can you talk about the inflection point that the industry is experiencing at the FAA is getting closer to developing regulation for drones to fly? What's called loss, which is beyond visual line of sight. When can we expect that regulation to pass? And when can we, when can we expect drone companies to really be able to scale? Uh It's really hard to predict regulatory timelines we found from a um so I won't attempt it. I would say that, you know, we see the space scaling this decade, right? And um just a few weeks ago, there was a major milestone. I think the FAA has published four waivers from four different companies. Our partner ups fly forward is the applicant in one of the waivers to allow operational entities to fly beyond visual site in the US. Right? There is an expectation that in February of next year, they will the FAA will submit a notice for proposed rule making that will establish the beyond visual oxide rules in the right of way, we always fly in the lower part of the space up to 400 ft, right? So there's very little other traffic there, there is emergency helicopter services, there's police helicopters, et cetera. So you know, there is a system to deconflict towards those and have automatic deconfliction, right? So that's the next bit of regulation that really need to come into place for this space to scale. So already figured out that certification and air awareness already figured out operational certificates through the so called part 135 airline certificate that our partners are carrying. Can you explain what part 135 means? Yeah. So the it's it's the regulatory framework within an airline can operate a airworthy aircraft, right? So you know, a part 135 carrier may fly, I don't know Tesla aircraft every day to transport small, you know, packages between smaller airports. Let's say that's what our partner may fly does every day. And you know, under this framework, they can also operate our drones because they're very worthy. And you know, we as a manufacturer of the technology, we provide them with the operating manuals and the maintenance manuals and they build the right programs for them to be able to operate these types of systems safely at scale. Right. And then the regulator looks at, you know, the operator as having the authority to fly these systems and the responsibility to fly them safely. So these two things have been figured out and that's extremely important. And you know, the next big step is really figuring out how do we fly long distances autonomously, which is the beyond visualized type rules that are hopefully coming up very soon. So we're running out of time here. But before we go, I have to ask you about the big news in the Wall Street Journal last week that one of your board members, Mike Whittaker is expected to be the next nominee to lead the FAA and that could be announced as early as this week. Um So given your relationship with Mike, is there anything that you can any insight you can share with us about that? I think he's a really brilliant mind and a man of, I think the utmost integrity, he understands the space very well. He's been on our board since 2018. He's also served as the Chief Commercial Officer and Chief Operating Officer of Super Hyundai's Advanced Area mobility Program. Before that, he served in the FAA as deputy administrator and he was the chief officer. So I think he has a very good understanding of the issues and a good understanding of how can the us keep on executing on a strategy that will allow it to be at the forefront of this new technological wave that advanced area of mobility and drone delivery represents. Well, Andreas we're out of time. But thank you so much. It's a pleasure. Thank you.

Meredith Whittaker, President, Signal In conversation with: Roy Bahat, Bloomberg Beta

Brainstorm Tech 2023: Pushing for Privacy

So tracking users as they make their way across the web and uses of personal data that are not always clear ethical. These are some of the issues that have eroded everyday people's trust in tech Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Twitter, companies smaller and larger have all faced their share of scrutiny from regulators and users over how well they protect data and how they use what they collect. So today, we are thrilled to host MEREDITH Whitaker who has long criticized Big Tech for its occasional maybe not its occasional axis and lack of visibility from within the industry. In terms of protecting that data. MEREDITH worked for Google for over a day, holding its top managers to account and even organizing some of the Google Walkouts, powerful protests that demanded more transparency, accountability and respect for user privacy. MEREDITH currently serves as the president of Signal, an open source encrypted messaging app that offers strong protection of users privacy and data. It's also a favorite of journalists. So when you have scoops, you call it some signal, she's also the co founder of AI now Institute, a research institute dedicated to exploring the social implications of AI and advocating for ethical development and deployment. MEREDITH will be interviewed by the head of Bloomberg Beta Roy Bahat. And it's worth taking a second to say that Roy has been an invaluable advisor to our brainstorm tech program. He has served as co chair and so we really truly appreciate his input and expertise. And so here we are for an interview. Please welcome MEREDITH Whitaker and Roy Bahat. Thank you. All right. So signal, just curious how many people here in the audience have used signal within the last week, let's say, OK, great. Me too. Um Used by tens of millions of people. I know you don't do numbers many, many million, 100 million downloads on Android. It used by the most elite government officials to keep secrets. Criminals. Look, we don't collect user data so you don't know. OK, funded by a founder of whatsapp and, and, and donations. But originally, so why should somebody use signal? Well, people should use signal because they want two parties in their conversation, the person they're talking to and themselves, they don't want three. Well, and so, but hold on. That's the same thing WhatsApp says, right? I see signs on the billboard saying you want your conversation secure and to end encrypted. It is the same thing. WhatsApp says, WhatsApp uses the signal protocol to encrypt and protect the contents of your messages. So what you're saying, what whatsapp doesn't do is protect the metadata. So information about who you are, who you're talking to your group, text your contact lists and other, you know, extremely important information. I think there's a quote from James Clapper that said metadata gets you 80% of the waste and knowing what you need to know. So we need to recognize it's a whole package. We're also not owned by meta, which I think is a pretty important detail. Who are you owned by? We are a nonprofit. There's a Signal Foundation is solely dedicated to stewarding the Signal LLC which develops the app and I am effectively president of both. But under the, and one of the things that struck me about it was how many employees, roughly three or four dozen, something like that. A little over 40 right? And so that's a pretty small number of people to run something used by as many people as it's used. It's a very elite team, but we are punching way above our weight, right? We're not a tech company, we're a small organization with one, you know, clear focus. And so you worked at Google for a long time, you know, you work closely with Meta when you see the enormous numbers of people that work for these companies. Are they making mistakes, do they just have too many people? No, I mean, it's incredibly difficult to develop high availability software that works the way that people expect it to work, right? But we're also not, we're not a media broadcast company, we're not, you know, we don't have a policy team all over the world. We're really focused on, you know, developing, deploying and maintaining truly private communications apps in a world that is, you know, has never been more surveilled. Right. Right. So I'm going to ask about that in a second and let's talk about some of the privacy policy, one more question about the organization, which is when you were at Google, you were one of the organizers of the Google Walkout. And so you had, I think the perspective of an employee in that and now you're the boss. Yeah. How does that change your perspective on things if your, if your employees were unionized or organized, how would you feel? How is it different being the boss? I, you know, I would say go for it and do it smart. Don't be silly about this. This is very serious. We're, you know, geopolitically critical core infrastructure, you know, we're not messing around, but that's really not my business. It great. OK. So let's talk about some of the policies and privacy in particular because you've been on a world tour talking about privacy. I'm going to articulate a naive view that you can disabuse me of the naive view is we're fine on privacy. The, you know, eu at GDP and California has a privacy law and even meta has an end to end encrypted app. So we're going to be OK, but literally no one says that. Right. I don't know. A lot of consumers say it because they seem not to care, they'll click through a user agreement. They care about their friends knowing if they were texting somebody, they shouldn't be knowing. But do they care about a big tech company knowing? It's not as clear, this is not a matter of individual choice. So I think what has happened over the, you know, handful of decades in which the surveillance business model has interpolated our core infrastructure to the point that we're surveilled to an extent, we don't have a sense of is that that choice has been made for us. You know, we can't get a job without having an account on different platforms. It is a flag in certain sort of algorithmic profiling software. If you don't have a social media account that's considered suspicious, right? You can't go to work and do your job oftentimes without being surveilled. So we're talking about sort of socially significant infrastructure that if you wanted to opt out truly, if you cared enough to do something, you're living in a cabin in the woods with no contact with people. Right? So again, we're talking about a collective issue and I think people care very, very deeply, but what they don't have is agency to do anything about it in most cases, which is why you've been focused on working with governments. It sounds like, well, it's why I've been focused on making it clear to governments in this moment that it's incredibly important not to undermine, end to end encryption, which is the technology we have that can actually guarantee private communications. If you don't have another way to see, we see with some governments, I mean, France proposed or enacted a law, you tell us that would allow the government to turn on your camera remotely and they're claiming law enforcement as a reason why they need a back door. And so what is, what's the right way to think about it? Well, look like there's a long history to this. And I don't, you know, we're not going to get those in power to abandon their pursuit of information, asymmetry as a tool of power. And that's what surveillance gives them, right? Like that throughout history, we can look at like the history of the 16th century statistics that were used for population control. We can, you know, move forward, we can look at proto surveillance technology, the hollow you can't tax unless you know who they are. I mean, there are some valid and unless you know what they have, right? Like you can't define who you get to tax unless you start having borders and enumerating. Is that right? You know, it's fairly straightforward, but this is not a new impulse with networks computation. This is a long history, network computation has metastasized to an extent. I don't think we can conceptualize very clearly, but it remains true that we still need a way to communicate privately. And so which governments are you paying the closest attention by the US of what they do in the UK? While you explain why if folks have questions, we'll come around and do questions. But by the UK, usually people are not shaking in their boots at the UK S surveillance. If you've worked in tech for a while, um, they're a bit tricky and the Five Eyes Agreement makes it very difficult to sort of understand how that's going to. But the UK has a bill called the online safety bill. This is one of those like omnibus tech regulations that become a Christmas tree for everyone's special little pet tech regulatory project. It's not all bad, but it's very, very messy. And there's one provision clause 101 that would give Ofcom, who is their independent competition and Telecom regulator, the power to mandate that everyone in the UK install what they're calling approved technology that would scan your messages before they're encrypted before they're sent so effectively mass surveillance of everyone's communication. That's then, you know, we don't have the specs but the technological prototypes that have been forwarded are laughable and deeply insecure. I would signal. No, wait, wait, wait, let me, let me because I, you know, I got to complete the thought. So they're laughable and insecure and what's happening is not only is the UK proposing this power for Ofcom, that's Well, along the way, you have governments around the world who don't want to be the first to implement this type of precedent setting of surveillance, looking to the UK as a sort of templates, liberal democracy as the sort of permission set. So the precedent was set here, we in Uganda are now going to implement this to say, detect people talking about LGBT Q resources and you know, under the law that has now passed murder them because being gay is punishable by death in Uganda. This is really serious of stuff. And I do feel like the sort of futuristic haze that everyone has been in for a year or so around AI and these sort of big questions has let this sneak up on us and there's a real need for tech leaders and others who get the stakes of this technology to speak up. Like if you all have Rishi soak on your signal messages and can drop him a DM, please do because I do think it's that serious would signal be legal under that UK regime. How about the messages even be scammed? They would order us to implement it. We would not and we would there would be because there is no secret back door at signal despite what well everything in signal is open so you can see for yourself. But you know, audit after audit Infotech researcher after Infotech researcher has combed through signal and when they find, you know, a small issue. They tell us we improve it. But it is this is, this is technology used around the world that has been validated repeatedly as truly secure. So it sounds like what you see your role as and correct me if it's wrong is you're trying to stop that first domino of a socially acceptable regime, implementing some form of surveillance that you find unacceptable. I wear many hats as one of us. OK. Yeah, one of those hats. And so let's talk about who you've made common cause with because if I think about companies have been accused of surveillance as a business model, you hear meta, I mean meta is the core of the others. OK? And yet you've made common cause with them. No, no, no, no, no, no. What's common cause? What do you mean by common cause? We have a issue convergence. There's two circles, the diagram is not two circles, there's a little narrow sliver in the middle where we do agree. What is that? Sliver? Whatsapp uses the signal protocol to encrypt the contents of messages. Meta is moving to apply the signal calls to messenger messages in Facebook. This protects people and their privacy. We have a case right now in Nebraska where a mother has been now convicted of a felony that will, you know, she'll serve at least two years in prison for helping her daughter access criminalized reproductive care right after dogs pass, she's not going to prison. And why did that happen? How did that happen? What evidence established her guilt. That was Facebook turning over meta, the DMS between the mother and daughter, neither meta wants that nor signal is that I don't care what Meta wants. I know what is right and what is right is we don't let one massive corporation with very little oversight determine the surveillance society we live in, in collapse with governments, right? We're talking, you know what happens when a librarian in Florida hands a book that is banned to a child, right? Are we scanning those messages? Like this is very close at hand and it's not a gang like so I don't know if this is a common cause or not. I don't know if this is a trick question. What I'm talking about is this is the right thing to do. And if we have to, you know, if perilous times call into being strange coalitions so be it. Yeah. No, it's not a trick question. Yeah. Well that here, OK. I don't even know what the fuck would you? OK. We've got a couple more minutes here and so if folks have questions, I invite them to chime in. But now I just wanna ask you, looking ahead, you've been warning about these dangers for a long time. Uh has anything that's unfolded in the last few years surprised you in terms of how encryption privacy ai I mean, you've been a vocal critic of whether it's even possible to have privacy and ai, at the same time. Yeah, I don't think you can. I, I don't, I don't know, like, I, you know, I go to bed thinking about this, I wake up thinking about this. I'm very, like, intellectually engaged with these topics. So I don't know if surprise is the right descriptor. But I do think the way that the anti encryption sort of regulatory agenda sort of snuck in around 2018 has been a bit alarming to me, right? So in 2015, we had Apple and the showdown with the FBI around San Bernardino. And there was a, you know, there was a moment of, I would say, you know, from my perspective, victory there where it was clear like, you know, it was established, you cannot create a back door that only the good guys can go through. This is mathematically impossible to weaken security and not undermine the security of our core communications, core infrastructures, etcetera. And then 2018, you started seeing this being sort of floated under other banners. And you know what I think has happened in a sense is you have this sort of ai hype and magical thinking where a lot of people with, you know, a lot of self interest in many cases are claiming that artificial intelligence can do magical things, terminators, that kind of thing, its sentences, it will surpass humans. And so there is a suspension of disbelief around what technology can do. And that has bled into the encryption debate such that we're now undermining the very clear arguments that were made in 2015. And before around the, you know, factual impossibility of breaking encryption just for the good guys and people are now, you know, advertising ai based technologies or others that they effectively claim can conduct mass surveillance privately. All right, we got one minute left. I am going to ask my trick question. I've been a signal user for a long time in the last few years. All I can really remember in terms of new features is stories which I know are useful in other countries and the elimination of SMS on Android. What can the users expect in terms of how the signal app will get better? Yeah. Well, you know, we're a small team and maintaining and ensuring the robustness of the app is its own job. So, you know, we're not looking to be like Microsoft Word. We don't want a bunch of feature blows so our engineers can like meet their OK. R we don't work that way, but we are we on user names which will allow people to contact each other without sharing a phone number anonymously. That kind of thing, which is important, particularly in countries where you have to register personal information to get. Is that new news or something you've announced before? Asking for the journal? I haven't announced that before. Yeah, I mean, we don't, you know, I'm up here to talk substance. I don't have like a flashy give. No, of course, we're talking about teachers in the future. All right. Thank you for courageous stances and for sharing it here. Thanks everybody and to be continued. Thank you.

Dr. Lisa Dyson, Founder and CEO, Air Protein Magi Richani, Founder and CEO, Nobell Foods Josh Tetrick, Co-founder and CEO, Eat Just In conversation with: Molly Wood, Investor and Founder, Molly Wood Media

Brainstorm Tech 2023: Food For Good 

Dr. Lisa Dyson, Air Protein, Magi Richani, Nobell Foods Josh Tetrick, Eat Just, Molly Wood, Molly Wood Media

Vivian Chu, Co-founder and CTO, Diligent Robotics Tessa Lau, Founder and CEO, Dusty Robotics
In conversation with: Phil Wahba, FORTUNE 

Brainstorm Tech 2023: Robotic Revolution 

Before we get to our next session, I want to plug two great newsletters we have here at Fortune First Eye on A I my weekly newsletter, which is on how A I and machine learning are shaping the future of business. It's a great read. I should know. Please sign up second but definitely not least. We have another great newsletter, the data sheet, a daily download, giving business leaders insights and analysis on the company's people and trends shaping the future. If you're not already a subscriber, please do subscribe using the QR codes which should be displayed on the monitors here to get the newsletters delivered straight to your inbox each weekday on the with the program. Next up, we have another engaging segment featuring two trail blazing robotics pioneers at the forefront of driving innovation and disruption into the modern workforce. Vivian Chu, the co founder and CTO of Diligent Robotics is spearheading the development of a human centered robotics technology with a focus on creating hospital robot nurses designed to automate repetitive tasks and improve efficiency, allowing human workers to focus on patient care and other critical tasks. We also have Tessa Lau, the founder of Dusty Robotics, which is revolutionizing the construction and architectural sectors through cutting edge robotic mapping solutions. Dusty's robots can navigate and create 3d maps of construction sites, improving safety and accuracy for humans. Let's discover how these two companies with distinct robotic technologies are making impact. Here to interview them is Fortune's Phil Waba. Well, good morning again. So now we get to talk about an area of Texas a lot of fun but elicits a bit of fear in people robotics. But before we get into the discussion, let's look at a couple of clips. As we see, robotics can be very productive and helpful. So why don't we start with Vivian and tell us a little bit about Moxie as his videos running sounds great. One of the great things about robots is that we can show the videos and you can see firsthand what they're doing. So this is Moxie at Diligent. We make robots that work side by side with people. And Moxie is our first product that does so in the health care space, in particular, the robot delivers things like medication supplies, lightweight equipment. So that nurses, for example, you can see here don't have to leave the unit. They can spend more time with their patients. You saw here, a nurse is able to securely access the lock drawers on the robot and scan her badge and we know exactly who's put things in and outside of the robot. Our robots navigate all throughout the hospital. And one of our few distinguishing things about our product is one that it has an arm you'll know is that it has an arm here on the side that allows it to be able to interact with the environment so that the hospital staff don't have to integrate as much hardware into the hospital to be able to navigate through doors. You'll see an example here as well as elevators. The other differentiators, you'll notice that Moxie has a face and a head is, this is two fold one, there's a social robotic component with allowing people to feel like the robots are part of their team, someone that can help them do their task, so they don't have to worry about doing them as well as communications. You'll notice here, the robot looked at the position that the arm was going and that's a natural communication thing that people do. So we know how the robot is going to interact and people feel more comfortable and safe around this robot. So Moxi is currently deployed out in the world. An example of how the arms are being incredibly useful today. Our fleet of robots opened over 250,000 doors in just Q one of this year alone. And you can see here the robot is coming for a delivery to get picked up where the nurses will scan their badge. This really allows them to free up their time where studies show that they spend up to 30% of their time fetching gathering items. And that just doesn't make sense for someone with a nursing license where already their jobs are hard and we want to see how we can give them time to do that. Ok. Now, Tessa, your robot helps with construction. So tell us a little bit about what your robot does more specifically as we are on the video. Sure. So construction is the biggest, largest industry on the planet. It's a $12 trillion industry globally worldwide. And it's also one of the most industries that uses the least automation and robotics. Not only that, but the industry is heading towards a crisis. The average age of a construction worker today is 44 and growing about a quarter of the workforce is going to age out and retire in the next five years. And that means that the industry is looking for solutions. Um but it's an industry that can't stop. The construction industry builds all of the structures around us, it builds the houses that we live in, the buildings we work in and the hospitals that we, that we get sick in. And so what dusty is doing is bringing more digitization, ization and robotics to this industry that really, really needs it. And the way we're starting is with the robot that you just saw it. What it, where we, where we land is the place where the digital meets reality and that's where the digital models get translated out into the field today. That's done by people using their hands on their knees, using measuring tape. And what you just saw is a robot that actually brings those plants out into the world. And that's the first step towards the future in which the entire construction industry gets digitized. So both these robots are kind of cute and you know, a couple of times, Boston dynamics has shown videos with their robot that looks like a dog. And then, you know, you go on Twitter and you think it's the, you know, dystopic image of robots taking over the world. So is this the proof that robots are beginning to take the world? And how do you, you know, is there a sense out there that robots are something to be feared, start first go for it. We definitely, when we bring our robots to hospitals, there's a lot of initial skepticism, it helps that a robot is friendly looking. But for us, it's really important that we introduce the robot. We bring the robot actually all around the hospital and we talk to the staff to say, hey, this is Moxie and Moxie's here to help you do your job. So you don't have to do the parts. You don't like we want you to spend more time with our patients. We draw the line of the patient room and as soon as we have that dialogue and conversation then people understand and actually we get so many requests, like can the robot do this and do this and do this and do this for me. Now, once they understand that it's really here to take away the things that they don't want to do. And I do think a huge factor of it is thinking about the right case use cases. What are the things that people shouldn't be doing as well as thinking about form factor and interactions and that has made at least Moxie for us very successful for they will not come and draw blood any time soon. Right. Exactly. We want nurses to have more touch points for their patients and studies have shown more touch points means better patient outcome. Ok. Well, Moxie seems sweeter than a lot of our ends, you know. So maybe she should take blood. But anyway, how about you? So our robots have eyes for a reason. It's a ceo directive. They have to have eyes and it's, it's, I call it robot self defense and it's because robots that are working in the real world are going into a very hostile environment. Right. There's a lot of hesitation, there's a lot of skepticism. The workforce is worried about their jobs being taken by robots. And so by making robots cute, it's sort of like the baby effect, you know, you have big eyes, it makes you want to take care of them. And so all of our robots are designed to have that self defense mechanism to make everyone around them just love them because they're actually helping them do their jobs better. They're not taking away those jobs. Well, you know, the RBA is very popular and half of my Instagram feed is cats attacking the Roomba. So maybe you could have a cat attacking dusty and that way you get, you know, it'll have even more love for your robots. So, but on a more serious note, I want to ask vivi a question. So hospitals are not known for their early adoption of tech or for their efficiencies. How are you getting them to be your clients? Yes. So for us, we started even before the pandemic, engaging hospital leaders, understanding what are the problems and challenges and their challenges are very similar to a lot of challenges in the rest of the industry which is just labor shortage. They don't have enough nurses, they can't get, they can't educate nurses fast enough at a nursing school. And for them, they're seeing they need to change the way they're doing their model of care. And so for us, it's really engaging the innovative leaders and folks that understand that their staffing models don't work today and we start that conversation and that really allows them to embrace technology. I would say not all hospitals are the same. We focus on the more innovative ones to really prove out that this is making a difference and then we'll get the later adopters to have always, traditionally, even now are actually finally integrating hr and em, so we'll capture them after they go through that cycle and tell us where you got the idea for this. And could this robot, you know, down the line be adaptable and used for other things than what the video showed us? Yeah. So I really care about efficiency. That's something that's really near and dear to my heart. And I got into construction because I was remodeling my house for the first time ever about five years ago. And I had laborers coming to my doorstep using hand tools to reconstruct my house. And I thought, wow, that's really inefficient. And there's got to be something better that the construction industry can do with robotics. And so I did a lot of research and talked to a lot of people and discovered one of the biggest pain points that people have is where people have to do things that are really better done by robots. And the task that we're doing a layout which is measuring and marking with a very precise manner is something that just really has a much better use case when done by robots rather than by people in terms of what's coming next. I'm really excited about the digitization of the industry. And so what we're doing now is bringing digital models out into the field and once they're there, there's a lot of opportunity to bring more information and more digitize the work that's actually being done by those skilled laborers who are about to retire. And so that's what I'm really excited about. And so could Moxy get a side hustle working outside of a hospital? We've definitely been asked that question a lot. None of the technology they're building is fundamentally specific to hospitals and health care. But for us, we see the hospital and health care market as a place that needs robots. And so we're dedicated right now to staying in hospitals. Ok. How do your robots get smarter over time? You know, I think that's a trick question because like everyone's talking about A I, right? And everyone wants to know how are your robots making use of large language models and generative A I and all of that and the reality is they don't, you know, where I worry about A I is, is, is what does it mean for the workforce of the future? Right. You know, where's, where's the next startup going to be coming along? That's the robotics startup that's going to be able to leapfrog us because they are using A I that we're not, but in terms of the product itself, I think, I don't see that, that use case for A I. And probably part of the reason why is because what we build is a power tool. You don't want your power tool doing something unpredictable. Yeah. Yeah. Why not? No, I'm just kidding. And the interesting thing about like generative AI is being very popular today. But a I more the classical techniques that we use around path planning around trajectory generation. These are things that have been fundamental in our robots for years. So we've been using these techniques and using prediction and classification and using the same fundamental technology, but we might not utilize generative aii right now for the reasons that Tessa mentioned, right, safety, you don't want unpredictable trajectories of the robots doing. You want to know very specifically what control algorithm, what safety layers that we have and we still use a on top to generate the to generate some of the classification models and perception around people, but we don't have to use it for pure motion control. OK. I'm going to continue asking questions but if anybody here has a question of their own, raise your hand and one of the micro runners will come to you. And I have to, I'm a little disappointed. I thought my Roomba was, you know, getting smarter because I've noticed that I was about to say she, I noticed that it was starting to avoid one corner of our living room and we, we got stuck a few times. So I guess maybe I shouldn't be overestimating her. But uh um so let's talk a little bit about VC funding and all that. What's your sense? Not just for your own companies, but the environment is, is this two pie in the sky for them or do you think that they're, you know, seeing the opportunity in your case, both your, your products are very specific. So it's kind of easy to explain what it does. But you know, what's your take on the VC environment? I think the reason VC for robotics is hard is because most robotics companies suck. They're not really trying to solve a real problem. They're enamored with the technology. They want to build a robot and they assemble a team and raise the money so that they can build that robot and I can call out a lot of humanoid robots that kind of fall into that category. Um But I think it's different when you're actually solving a real problem and that's what we're doing, right? Both, both diligent and dusty started because we saw a real need in an industry that really, really needs the help. And so my hope, you know, we're series B, we've raised a large amount of capital to date and I'm sure we're going to be able to raise more. And it's because we have that fundamental business model, we have product market fit and that's different from a lot of the robotics companies that I see. Um I would say very similar things. The challenge is educating your investors to understand the industry. So both of us have to educate them about construction or health care sale cycles and both of these are very long and getting them on board and then all the hard things about hardware, right? It's a very cliche saying, but making sure folks understand that the investment cycle and the return is just a very different journey than other software companies. And when you can tell that story correctly about manufacturing our supply chain and why we feel confident what we're building and truly finding that product market fit. You have to find that right? Investor that understands that. And just from a market perspective, it's a very small niche in honesty, but like Tess said, we are funded and are continuing to support our customers and they see that demand and the investors see that there's demand and need, right? Because it's a very clear case. Could you see your products eventually being because right now your your customers are, are uh they're not the general consumer. Could your products be, could these robots be sold to Joe Q or JQ public? Eventually? I diligent. We don't have plans to and we're very much thinking about health care. We like to think about where spaces robots can be successful. So in people's homes, it's just a very, very different challenging problem. And so just thinking about our first product, thinking about focus and thinking about where we can be successful with startups, that's not an area we're initially going into right now. For us, we think about total addressable market and market sizing and the construction industry is a huge market, the vast majority of that is commercial construction. And so, you know, we don't really need to expand farther from the industries that we're already serving right now. New construction or also just renovations that ok. Yeah. So presumably with all these high rises and all our big cities that are empty being redone to become apartment buildings, there could be a lot of demand for you. I was just in Toronto for collision and they need to build a million new units in the next 10 years. It's a huge amount of construction in Toronto in Toronto. Yeah. Well, it's the same thing in all the big cities, right? So, um so I wanted to ask about uh the, the model, I think it's, is it dusty that rents you rent it, both your products are rented, right? Or are they bought by your, um could you see like what's the, what's the reason behind the purchasing model as opposed to leasing model as opposed to having them buy it? So, for us, you know, we're a venture backed startup that sells into the construction industry. And so we have to thread the needle between what our customers are willing to accept and what vcs are willing to fund. And so a raft model, a robot as a service model is, is the best solution that pretty much all the best thought leaders in robotics have come up with. Um as the best way to fund and, and go to market with robotics products. Um, from the customer's perspective, they don't have to invest in something that's going to be obsolete in six months. And they really like that. It's not a capital expense for them. From the VC perspective, we're not a commodity provider. We're like, we're a hard work powered fast company and so we get the best of both worlds. I would say it's a little bit also what your customer is looking for. Right. Do they have a Capex budget? Do they have an operational budget? And for us, we saw that our customers were able to find budgets in their operational side of the house and that was it allowed them to quickly test the robot. Like as I mentioned, they don't want to own these, they don't want have to figure out how to maintain these. They don't even under and robots. So having to staff their team to maintain them just doesn't make sense. And so for them, it's great that they get the latest in the software and the hardware upgrades and they just roll out when we need them to, to the customers. Ok, great. Well, on that note, join me in. Thanking Vivian and Tessa for joining us to tell us that robots are not monsters after all.

Jordi Ribas, Corporate Vice President, Search and A.I., Microsoft In conversation with: Jeremy Kahn, FORTUNE 

 Brainstorm Tech 2023: In Search Of... A Better Search 

Welcome back. Please take your seats and get ready for an exciting segment ahead. Fun fact. Did you know the name NVIDIA is derived from the Latin word NVIDIA which means envy. It was chosen to symbolize the company's ambition to be the envy of the computer graphics industry and boy have they achieved it? Yes, NVIDIA stock is skyrocketing faster than you can say artificial intelligence and the company has now moved from just making the chips that power, the generative ai boom to competing with its own customers in many cases, including the company that our next guest works for when it comes to A I models and cloud services, fasten your seatbelts folks. This is going to be one wild race and the competition is only getting fiercer. Remember when just a few months ago Microsoft unleashed their A I powered search engine. They learned some tough lessons about the power and unpredictability of generative AI. But now Microsoft has set their sights on transforming bing from a product into a full fledged platform, redefining the future of Search, future of Search. However, with this reinvention comes to many questions. Our next guest, Joie Ribot has devoted 15 years, the development of AI products, mastering search, speech, vision and data output. This pioneering work has paved the way for a new era of A I powered search. Please give a warm welcome to Microsoft's Head of Search and Ai Jordie Rebus is me Jodi. Thanks so much for being with us, for those who are not familiar with the new, the new Bing and what you've done with, with Bing and the integration of generative A I into the platform. Can you walk us through what's different about it? Sure. In fact, as you know, web search has been with us for a very long time over 20 years. And if you had asked everybody in the audience six months ago, hey, do we need anything new in search? Most people would have said no, you know, if you search it work just fine. But if you actually looked at how people use search, the vast vast majority of queries were only two to three words in length in a way, we had adapted ourselves to search, using these keywords as opposed to use search in a natural way. And so what we were able to do by integrating the GPT model from opening eye into B, we were able to answer these very long complex queries that in the past or even in any traditional search engine, you'd not be able by any means to get any response that made any sense basically. And in fact, I have an example if you don't mind that I Yeah, no, let's take a look and let's walk through how being handled query is. Now, this is an example. This is a long query. You can see it here at the top. In fact, maybe we'll have to play it again. But this is imagine that you want to go to Barcelona, which is where I'm from originally and you want to spend five days and you've got a set of constraints, meaning you've got a budget, you've got a few days that you want to spend on the beach. You want to go and want to go to a mountain range nearby called Monserrat. That's very beautiful. Coincidental is where I got married and you know, you really want to come up with an itin and a good plan. And so if you play this again, I don't know if they can do it. If you type a query that's long natural. That basically describes what I said in a traditional search engine. You will get a bunch of links, vast majority and you can go ahead and tie it to live with. Your favorite place, are not going to be relevant at all. But if you do it with the new bank that incorporates the GPT technology, what we do, we reason over the data of the web and we come up with an answer that's really structured and it can really answer this very long complex wordy that again, no search engine was able to answer before you guys at Microsoft came out with this gene of AI search product. First, you got this stuff into Bing. And I think the hope was that this was, you know, people are going to gravitate to this new search and you were going to grain tons of market share. But I've been sort of watching some of the stats on this and, you know, Bing had about 3% market share before this compared to Google with about 93%. And if you look at some of the numbers today, at least the ones that are publicly available from similar web or stat counter, Bing still has about 3% market share and Google is still up there at 93%. So you know what's going on here, how come you're not gaining more share if this is so much better in experience? Well, this is a very tough space to be in. Obviously, Google is very dominant in the space, but we've actually grown faster this last year than we've ever grown before. And we're really, really pleased now, obviously, it's a long road and market share is an important metric and we obviously pay attention to it. But I think what's more important to us and the reason we're working in B or in search in general is that we feel it's such an important technology for society and it had kind of stagnated in the innovation. And one of the things that gets me out of that every morning is being able to bring competition into a space that there hasn't been a lot of competition. And what we were able to show six months ago is that search will never be the same from now on. And you saw Google Reacting right with Bart or they survey gene exactly like my CEO said, no, we're making them dance. And at the end of the day, that's what I tell the team. Look, this is what it's all about. We're bringing competition and innovation in a space that's ultimately going to benefit society. We're growing faster than we've ever grown before. And we're very happy with that. But again, ultimately, what's most important is to do this contribution? Absolutely. I want the audience to please think of, think of questions for Jodi and we'll come to you for those in a moment. So please put on your thinking caps. But in the meantime, I want to ask Jordi. Yeah, one of the, one of the issues here I think people have with a gene of AI search product is there's less room for advertising, there's potentially less room to link out to outside sites. And this has a lot of people very nervous both about how do you monetize this, but also for everyone else, including publishers who are dependent on, you know, search results to drive traffic to their sites. How are they going to sort of make money from this ecosystem and how is this ecosystem ultimately going to reward high quality information? Now, that's a very important question. And I know a lot of publishers are asking us about this and we actually had a Publisher summit not too long ago to primarily address questions like this. And it's a long complex answer. But let me try to simplify it a little bit. Basically, one thing that we're noticing in the new being, I don't know if you realize that it's actually an interactive experience where you go from the search mode to a chat mode. In a very simple interface, you can swipe up and swipe down. Sometimes we'll have that. It's like the, you know, when you are in these dating apps, you swipe left and right. So in search you go up and down but you go from the normal search mode with the links, the regular way that advertisers advertise to this chat mode. And what we do if you look at chat, we actually have links that are some to advertising sites sometimes are actually links to publishers. And as we look at the overall traffic that we're sending to publishers, it's actually increased with the new bank because people are engaging more, they are spending more time rate is bigger with the click rate is bigger overall in terms of the total, the total traffic that we send. And so obviously it's early and we're working with a lot of publishers to come up with even better approaches. They're going to see us experiment with different new access that will have little cards, for example, that will attract the user attention more. But definitely for us to really be successful, we need the publisher and the advertising industry to be successful. That's how the ecosystem works. Let's kind of questions from the audience who has questions for Jodi that's looking, I don't see, we've got some mic handlers. If I don't see a question, I'll go to my own next one while you're thinking of questions, Jordi, one of the big issues with, with general over is the issue of grounding. How do you make sure that what it's saying is accurate and of course, with a search product, you really want to make sure the results are accurate and corroborated to outside information. But, you know, I think anyone who's experienced, you know, working, you know, playing with the chatbot has found that they sometimes invent information or sometimes say something that's not accurate. How have you tried to deal with this in the new Bing search? Yes, this is something that is maybe my number one worry even today, right? Because at the end of the day, if you build a search engine, you need to be responsible on providing data, that results basically that are comprehensive, that are accurate. And when I saw GPT four for the first time, that was last September, I realized we had something special. The model was more powerful than anything we had ever seen before. But it had two big problems. One is what you just said, it had a tendency to hallucinate basically with made up stuff, right? And for a search engine, you cannot do that, right. The other is that it was string with data through September 2021. So if you had a question on any event or anything that happened after that, it was not able to actually answer the question. And so then we developed this technology that we called founding, which people don't talk enough about. But anybody that works with an LM, a large language model realizes that it's fundamental. And what it does in our case, we, we basically combine the search results themselves for the query with the LM with GPT four. In this case, you can think of it as instead of relying on the data that the LM restrain, what we do, we go to our fresh index to collect the data and then we use the LM GPT model to reason on top of the and that's what provides the result. And that's why if you look at our results today, they are more accurate than anybody else's out there at this point. And it's basically because of this grounding technique that we're still perfecting, it's not perfect by any means, but we've reduced hallucinations by over 90% right now. And what about the issue you had initially with B Chat where you could sort of drive it off its guard rails. And I think you guys had to limit it. You know, the number of conversational turns you could have with the chat bot in order to prevent that from happening. What's, what's the current status there? Well, yeah, this happened, I think it was the first week that we launched. Obviously, we launched in preview and there was a report specifically from the New York Times that spent hours trying to break the model and he did and the model was starting to do crazy things to leave his wife. Yeah, I was asking him to leave his wife saying that, that, you know, he was saying that his name was Sydney was not B CHAT. And ultimately, what happened is after all those attacks, even though it was not portrayed that way. But those are what we call adversarial attacks, something that you also can refer as jail break. And there are a lot of these different types of attacks. And so one of them went through and then the model basically lost its its context and started getting out of hand. And so what we did right away, we limited the number of turn and we've since then been improving the rare and now essentially we've increased the terms to where 99 point plus percent of the people are happy. Some people are still asking us to do more. But definitely this was one of the can you do now? Now we can do 300 marks per day and 30 per session, 30 per session. OK. Great questions for Jodi who has a, who has a question again? If I don't see any, I'll just carry on. But I want to give the audience a chance to ask. See I've been so quick. I know I'm going to go on to another question then myself, you know, this is obviously all built off of open A I technology. You have a very close partnership with them. But there's been some reports of tension in that relationship, you know, they have their own product in the marketplace. Chat GPT, which does some of the same things there is now given that product access to bing to do search. So you can you talk about how that relationship is working. You are competitive in some ways and yet you're partners. Yeah, we're primarily partners, right? But you're right, we're also competitors in a way and, and any time that you have what we call a coal peat relationship, you know, there will be some tensions but there are tensions within my team, you know, and so so I think that some of what was reported, I think was, was the journal was exaggerated. I think fundamentally what we do. You notice how I talked about Opening eyes, Gpt today. So we bring them into our presidents they bring us into their presidents. I mean, I think we really collaborate whenever we can, we are partnering very, very closely. And I think in general when they do well, we do well, because all the GPT models are running on Azure and when we do, well, we also, you know, a lot of the grounding expertise you notice now that they are starting to do grounding themselves using them. Right. And so at the end of the day, I think it's a close partnership and like every partnership, there will be some ups and downs ask you sort of where this goes next. There's a lot of speculation that the next step is to give things these things agency essentially to allow them to act as digital assistants for us across the internet. So you couldn't, you wouldn't just sort of plan your trip to Barcelona. It could actually make all your reservations for you. Is that what's coming you think? And how quickly are we going to get there? I think. So, I think what we've seen so far and if you haven't tied, you know, the new bank, please go or by any of the other generative models. And you'll see that you can ask, especially in being chat, very complex questions and you'll get answers that you never thought you could get before. But where we're going next is going to be even more exciting because we're going to have all these plug ins. So we'll be able to work with all these partners and we already have, you know, dozens of partners that want to build them. And so you'll be able to, you reserve a restaurant, book tickets, do all the things that now takes multiple steps to do. You'll be able to do it in a more natural way and the chatbot basically is going to be able to do it for you. It sounds very exciting. We're out of time, but I want to thank Jordy for being here with us. It's been fantastic. Give him a round of applause, please. Thank you. Thank you so much.

Andy Dunn, Co-founder, Bonobos Kirsten Green, Founder and Managing Partner, Forerunner Ventures In conversation with: Michal Lev-Ram, FORTUNE

Brainstorm Tech 2023: Why We Should Talk About Mental Health 

Why We Should Talk About Mental Health 

So earlier this year, more than 250 leaders from the health care industry met at Fortune Brains from Health in LA. And one of the key takeaways from that event was that the consequences of ignoring mental health has a detrimental impact on just about everything. Not a big surprise there, addressing mental health in the workplace as well has become really critical and yet within the startup community, there's still a lot of stigma and remains somewhat taboo. So joining us next is Andy Dunn. He's a seasoned entrepreneur who has experienced a fair share of wins, selling his first company Bonobos to Wal Mart. Recently, Andy wrote a book called Burn Rate, launching a start up and losing my mind. And he's here today to talk about his personal journey with mental health. Plus his current venture which aims to detoxify digital culture and reduce burnout rates. And also joining us is Kirsten Green, the founder of Foreigner Ventures. She's an investor known for prioritizing consumer centric companies that enhance user experience, reshape human behavior and culture. Notably, Kirsten was one of Andy's top investors and top sources of support as he opened up about his disorder and she's an investor in his new company as well. So please join me in welcoming both Andy and Kirsten to the stage for this important conversation. Um Show of hands how many of you have read Andy's book? Ok. OK. All right. Um We may have some more copies floating around by the way. Um So in, in light of that Andy, if I could have you not to, to overly simplify, of course, because it's incredibly complex. Um But maybe as a way of just boiling down in succinct forms what the book is about. Like give us a little bit of the rock bottom summary and we can go from there. Yeah. So my story is I was diagnosed with bipolar I when I was 20 just a quick show of hands if you're familiar with bipolar disorder, OK. So generally we have a sense it's a disorder of mood, the really high highs, the really low lows. Vincent Van Gogh being our, the, the proudest member of the, of the bipolar club. And as we all know, the not everybody cuts their ear off though. No, no, not not everybody. The entrepreneurial journey we talk about as what a roller coaster. And so when you have an underlying mood disorder and you're an entrepreneur, it might amplify the highs and the lows. And so I was in denial of it for 16 years. It came raging back from when I was initially diagnosed when I was 20 in 2016, I had a team of 500 people had raised over 100 million in capital. We were nine years in building into building the business and I was institutionalized at Bellevue Hospital in New York. I spent a week there coming down from a manic psychotic episode and I was finally ready to deal with this illness that we had collectively buried as a family. My mom's family are Punjabi Indian immigrants. My dad's family are Scandinavian midwesterner, very different cultures, but with one incredible common thread which is we never talk about mental illness or mental health. And so this was, this was buried and it came back up and I walked out, finally ready to deal with it. And I walked out straight into handcuffs and I was arrested for felony and misdemeanor assault and that's a cliffhanger for reading the book. And it's about how I put my life back together after that. And it wasn't because I did it. It was because of my family. It was because of my now wife. It was because of a great doctor. It was because of a supportive board that Kirsten Green was on and I was so fortunate to get through it and like only 25 people knew about it. And then the next year we sold Bonobos for $300 million. We had the 10 year anniversary of the company. Uh I converted to Judaism. I got married and the Cubs won the World Series. And so it was like the most magical year after the most hellish year and almost no one knew. And so writing burn rate was people deserve to know the real story of what goes on behind the scenes with an entrepreneur who's battling mental illness. Well, I really want to make a lot of like Jewish and neurosis jokes because I'm Jewish. So it's ok but, but I won't bore everybody with that. I want to hear Kirsten just how did you enter the picture, you know, early on as an investor and then let's, let's get to sort of Andy disclosing his disorder to you. I met Andy early on in the Bonobos journey even before I was investing with Forerunner, which is the firm that I, that I run. And I was, you know, totally turned on by his passion, his ambition, his vision to be daring and bold and do something new and different and joined as an angel investor. And I think from the earliest stages, Andy and I formed a friendship and a bond. Um and you know, it, it grew over time and mhm And, and tell us about the, you're actually, you're in the book um multiple times um take us back to uh when Andy disclosed the disorder to you and how, you know, I wanna hear from both of you. Why, how uh and, and what was your reaction? I think that you know, II, I think it was shocking, but I don't think that was what we focused on. We focused on Andy who we knew as a person, who we knew as a good person, as a person who had shown up in so many ways for so long, over time and immediately felt like our friend, our colleague is in trouble. How do we help him? How do we support him? That was, you know, the only thing that was on my mind when I first, you know, learned of the situation that had, you know, propelled the conversation and the disclosure of the bipolar disorder, we hadn't talked about that before. And Andy, why did you ultimately disclose it to your board? I had to because I had been arrested and while the case was ultimately dismissed, expunged, sealed, partly because my now wife and my mother in law who I had, who I had struck during my psychosis were like, this is a mental health issue. And my mother in law was amazing. She basically said, imagine that the last time you saw your mother in law, you were naked and pushed her to the ground and kicked her. Just try to picture the next time you see her, which it turns out, I recommend lunch at ABC kitchen and I sat down with her, I assumed it would be the last time I would see her and she put her hand on my hand and she said Andy, this is just like any physical illness, all you have to do is see your doctor and take your medication. And if you do and if Manuela wants to stay with you, then you have my blessing and just like water works like the tears coming down my face from being accepted by not my family but by another family. And that's how I felt about our board. That's how I felt about Kirsten and the people on the board is they, they met my disclosure with acceptance and concern more for, are you OK. There was a question on the call is Manuela. OK. And how, what are you doing to get healthy? And so the focus was on and how can we help you do that? 100%? And so the focus was on my health rather than on the company and that just meant the world to me and it actually freed me up to spend my energy getting better so that I could get back to making sure our company was on track. So this was obviously a really uh kind of unique and extreme case. Um You were arrested, you had to disclose it. You didn't have much choice over when. But um it's interesting, we, we had Andy speak in front of our group of founders yesterday. And one of the things that you shared was that um you, you, yes, you should disclose and um and you should open up about it but that you should disclose strategically. So can you explain what your advice is from the founders today who might be grappling with similar issues? And I'm curious to hear both of your perspectives as investors. You invest as well as being a founder today. Yeah. So entrepreneurs ask me now. Well, if I have this mental health issue, if I have a mental illness, when do I tell my investors? And I say six weeks after you've closed your series A which is to say it's not necessarily appropriate to disclose something right away. I think Renee Brown talks about vulnerability as strategic vulnerable disclosure is the most powerful force for human connection in the universe because it's basically saying here's something about my life that's hard and that is invite and activate what your empathy for me. And it's going to invite mutual disclosure, which is one of the two ingredients in platonic friendship formation. So it's powerful, but you have to pick your moment. And I would say the worst way to do it is the way that I did it, which is to disclose in a crisis because now people are getting fresh information also while the shit is hitting the fan in parallel, it's so much better if we disclose prior to that. And that way when something does come up, folks are ready to help because they have that information on background. I, I think that's true. I mean, I think that when Andy, when I learned of Andy's challenge in the context of that emergency situation, one thing I thought was did I fail him as a partner and a friend that we had a 9, 10, whatever plus year friendship and business relationship where he hadn't told me that before. Um, and, you know, I totally your fault. I do think that, um, I have other people in my life that have suffered from mental illness. Um I have a, an empathy and an understanding for that. And while he and I never had that conversation, I think under, you know, the current underneath of some of the ups and downs and the reaction to those. Um I think I was able to like navigate and hang in there with Andy through some of that because of that. But I can't help but think how much more I might have been able to show up or how much more the whole board might have been able to do to support you in some of those times if we had had more open conversations about it and understandable, you can't tell someone on a first date. You can't someone tell someone in a fundraise process. It's not that you're, you know, holding back some information that you should share, but it takes time to build trust and to reveal yourself. And I think, you know, what I'd like to share for founders is, is to be brave and do put yourself out there and create the opportunity to build those relationships. Because if you do like, it can be very powerful to support you have. And similarly, as investors to create a space and an openness in a relationship where you can invite that in, in a way where you give a signal that you won't be met with judgment, but that you'll be met with being constructive. Um By the way, show show of hands how many of you have been impacted by mental illness? Directly, indirectly, family, friends, workplace. OK. Um Speaking of de stigmatizing, um you know, I think just having the vocabulary, like it's interesting you say, um you were talking earlier, it's, it's like a physical illness, right? And yet we have all this, this, this taboo. Um And at the same time, it's a part of you, but it doesn't define you. How do you speak about it? What's the vocabulary to you? Yeah. Well, the one of the ones that struck me is I was told that I was bipolar and I spent a long time feeling a deep sense of shame like I was this bad thing. I was personally a disorder. I was maybe a disorderly person. And then at some point it dawned on me. This is absurd. We would never say someone is cancer, we would say they have it and it's hard enough to have cancer to be, it would be another level. We may say once in a while someone is cancerous to the culture, right? But that is a very aggressively negative thing to say. And yet with mental illness, it is the norm, it is the norm to say my dad is bipolar, my brother is bipolar. No, your brother is not bipolar, your brother has it. And so if we can separate the identity from the illness and not conflate those two things, we give that individual the freedom to be someone that then has to then go cope with that illness and get it treated and fear, not that it is some type of denigration of their character or their humanity. Thank you. Um I wanna talk about Pie, the company formerly known as Pumpkin Pie. Um But but before we do that, I wanna make sure to also get to any audience questions. If you have a question for Andy and Kirsten, please raise your hand. We'll bring a microphone. Got one back there. Hello, Steven Wolf at studios. Uh Annie. Thank you for just your bravery. Happy be nobles customer, by the way. Um But I actually have a question for Kristen. I'm so curious, how does this impact your other investors? I feel like you are brave and you are certainly unique in an outlier. Maybe you are a unicorn. But do you feel like your colleagues in the venture community would be as brave and as empathetic as you have been? I think that like in general as a society we're on a journey to be more accepting of mental illness and mental health and acknowledge it. And the reality is is that on some level, whether you have a mental illness or whether you have, you know, mental health and acute challenge at some point in time, probably includes everybody. And I think when you think about startup communities in particular, it's a pressure cooker. Like one of the reasons that the stats around depression, anxiety and mental health challenges are so high right now is as a society, we live in a world that like is moving so fast that has so much visibility and so much pressure and competition. And at the same time, loneliness and it's exasperated, it's even more exponential in the startup ecosystem. You take a founder who comes with all these ambitions, all this like hope to change and to and to build something new and to do it fast and to do it in different ways. And then you put them in the context of that society, you put them in an ecosystem where everybody else is doing that and competing, it is just a giant pressure cooker. And I think it behooves everybody to realize that the risk that comes with that. And this creates a space for an understanding and empathy that like you might be able to meet the challenges, you know, one way in some days but but but but not always and that there that needs to be OK that we need to be first and foremost thinking about people's well being because if you're not healthy, you know, physically and mentally, it's impossible to be the leader that you want to be. So, I mean, I think it's in like everybody's best interests for as people to support each other in this regard, but as business people too, to, you know, ensure that the founders that we back feel like they're set up for success. And part of it is understanding this and I'm going to take the next question over there. But real quick, I think this is a good part of the interview for you to share your joke about founders and mental illness. Yeah. Well, it's funny because when I was writing the book, my editor's boss was suggesting that we call the book. Here's to the crazy ones. Then you remember that Steve Jobs Apple commercial when he came back. And I remember being like, uh I don't think a subliminal comparison to Steve Jobs is a good look for someone that just sold pants for the last 13 years, pants are important. Pants are important. We all need to wear them. But the cool thing is we now have data. So the University of California San Francisco has a center where they study entrepreneurship and mental illness. And here's the data, 2% of American American adults will experience bipolar in their lifetimes for entrepreneurs. It's 11%. So it indexes 5 to 1 ADHD index is 3 to 1 anxiety indexes 2 to 1 OCD index is 5 to 1. High functioning Asperger's index is 3 to 1 and on and on. And so what I tell founders who have a nerd of our stripe is you're actually more likely to be successful, right? A venture capitalists should meet an entrepreneur who has bipolar and think, you know what, there's a five X chance this person is to build a big company. And I think we implicitly understand this about entrepreneurs. And then there's one mental illness that all entrepreneurs have, whether they've been diagnosed or not, which is narcissistic personality disorder, right? And I, I'm, I'm, I'm half joking, but you have to have a over indexed degree of narcissism to think that you of all people are going to go build this thing, right? So I believe we need more venture capitalists like Kirsten who appreciate that. This is part of the human condition and that it's likely to be even more the case for entrepreneurs. And I will add one quick thing, which is even if you don't have a diagnosis at some point, you face an acute issue of mental health in your life, you just don't make it to 40 without being thrown on your ass by something, the loss of a loved one, financial stress, physical ailments, aging parents issues with your Children, all of these things are acute mental health crises. And so if we can all belong to this challenge of mental health versus just the guy over there who is bipolar. Oh, wait, has it, then we can all be included in that conversation and be honest with each other about it. And I know I'm sorry, I know we had some other great questions. I do want to give you like 10 seconds to give us the elevator pitch for pie since we did not get to it. Can you do that very briefly and hopefully you'll stick around to be able to speak to everybody after really quick. So we know this, I think it's been talked about on stage earlier today, but social isolation is now a pandemic. We spend 20 fewer hours per month with other people than we did in 2003. So working on a new, a new company called Pie, I've got Kirsten in my corner again. Much more medication now. So hopefully it'll be smoother, smoother sailing. But the goal of Pie is to bring people together in small groups, kind of 3 to 15 people with a higher frequency and help reverse some of that social isolation trend. Thank you so much, Andy Kirsten, really appreciate you both coming here and speaking about this important topic and like I said, please come, I know everybody always comes up to you after our interviews and shares a lot of personal stories too. Um But please please come up to both of them and, and uh ask more questions. Thank you so much. Thanks ma.

Vishal Shah, Vice President, Metaverse, Meta In conversation with: Alyson Shontell, FORTUNE  

Brainstorm Tech 2023: Making Sense Of The Metaverse 

As for every industry, the tech world is continuously redefining its future with one disruption at a time in the not so distant path. One said disruption was the rapid adoption of the metaverse, but many of us are still trying to figure out what even is the metaverse and do we even like it? Right. So Google Merriam Webster defines the metaverse as a hypothetical combination of multiples coexisting across multiple possibilities. But for the general public blockbusters like everything everywhere all at once and spider verse may have helped decode the concept a little bit more. On the other hand, the urban dictionary always a good source of information is not as kind, it defines the metaverse as the matrix or, and I'm quoting here a product of Zuckerberg's endless quest to make all of our lives worse, sorry mark. But we also checked in with A I Google Bard simply states that the metaverse is a persistent online world and a form of entertainment. So it's fun to ponder, of course, the realms that are still being worked out right now. But obviously, this poses numerous problems when it comes to navigating the bigger concept for wider adoption. Joining us now to talk all things. Metaverse is metas ahead of Metaverse. Vishal Shah. He'll be interviewed by Fortunes, fortunes editor in chief Alison Chantel. Hi, everybody. Hi, Michelle. Thanks for being here today. Thank you. First stage interview in three years since you took the job. So we've got a lot to catch up on. But first, I want to remind all of you where we were in 2021 things were a little bit different. Then Snoop Dogg was building in the Metaverse. He was building soup. First, people were paying 450 K just to be his digital neighbor for Apes were growing wild and all the rage City predicted that the metaverse would be worth 13 trillion by 2030. And most of us were working from home with no hope of returning to the office in sight today. Totally different landscape. Metaverse divisions within companies like Disney have been shutting down. Even Meta's own employees have sometimes wondered, do we still care about the metaverse? Are we still important? They asked out of town halls, the revenue for the Metaverse group at meta has shrunk actually from 2.2 billion in 2022 sorry from 2.3 billion to 2.2 billion last year, the operating costs have increased. And in March Mark wrote something that had a lot of people sitting on edge. He said our number one investment now is AI which caused a number of publications to declare the metaverse is dead. The vial is the metaverse dead. Uh I hope not because I'm really uh out of a job. Uh So, no, um look, I think the metaverse hype is dead. I think we were in a hype cycle like any new thing and those that invested last year because it was the hype. Yeah, they lost conviction. We didn't invest for the hype. We have been investing in this space for years. The opus acquisition was 2014. We believe in this next generation of computing and we're invested in it for the long haul. And so we've always said, you know, when we re branded the company in 2021 this was a long term investment 10 plus years, we continue to believe deeply in that, but it's not going to get delivered in a year. So I'm actually pretty happy that there was both a hype and a cross of disillusionment last year. It was tough to live through that, of course, ourselves. But now we can put our heads down and build because that's what it takes to build something difficult. We have to like iterate and do it publicly. Yeah, I mean, you definitely entered your role. I think it was July 2021. When you started in about October 2021 there was the rebrand of Facebook Two meta all in on the metaverse at the peak of the hype cycle. And then the pendulum swings the other way and now there's extreme skepticism that this is even a real thing. What have been your big learnings in that time as you've been leading through ultimate hype and like ultimate skepticism. What has worked and, and as a leader you have to make the tough calls of what to kill, what to walk away from and how have you been doing that? Yeah. It, it, it definitely was difficult in the sense that there was a lot of excitement and it felt like anything we put out there was going to kind of ride that hype cycle. But that was part of the challenge is that I think even we bought into the hype more than the brand. The rebrand went better than we thought it would go. We were hoping we'd have to really convince people that this was a thing that we cared about. But it was, you know, everyone kind of latched on to it. And if you didn't have a chief meter or something at your company, you were doing something wrong, the thing to focus on. I think that we learned really was if you're making a long term bet, know that it's a long term bet, what are the steps to getting to that end game, not trying to get there really too quickly. So for us, for example, we launched Horizon World, which is our product in the metaverse, not the metaverse as a whole, but you know, our universe in the metaverse. And I think it was right to launch the product because you can only iterate on something inside the building for so long, you've got to put it out there and get people to use it. So I think that was the right call. But then you have to iterate and say, ok, what's working? What isn't, there were certain parts of the product that had a lot of friction that weren't working. So we said we have to stop shipping new things and get the core to be to be healthy. The entire horizon team today is not gold on growth. It's gold and retention. So it's not gold on getting more people on to it or user numbers or even is it engagement is the attention? Like how is our attention? OK. It's retention. Are we, we're building something new and when you build something new, you can't just expect it to work on day one. You have to iterate anyone that's built a new product knows that you can't, you don't want something on day one and it just works. You have to put it out there and you have to iterate. Now we did it in a really public way because obviously we branded the company, but we are now focused on some of those fundamentals. Are we getting the core mechanics right? Are people coming back and enjoying the experience? And yeah, there's ways to help scale but really focusing on those fundamentals and knowing that it's iterative because we're convicted on the end game is really important. Now, I think that where part of the conflict is, is obviously the tremendous spend going into a product that clearly doesn't yet have the product market fit that it ultimately, you would hope a $10 billion a year investment for a company would have. So, do you feel like was there, was there too much investment going in? Is there? I mean, it's your group. So you probably don't feel that way. But I think from the outside and from investors perspective, it's a bit too much, too soon before it's really proven. Well, I think it's important to kind of calculate that assessment across all the spend. It isn't just in the things that people see today because it's a long term investment. It, some of it's in the hardware that people use, say Quest two most popular VR headset in Market Quest three coming later this fall, we think it's really impressive in terms of the steps we've been able to take to make that product better. That's one area of investment is. VR there's work on augmented reality and glasses, some of which people have seen with Ray Ban stories, but there's a massive amount of investment that hasn't yet been made public because it's stuff that we're still building. And so the entire investment is broad and then there's the software we're working on horizon world, we just talked about avatars and our digital identity. Some things we're constantly iterating on a billion people have made an avatar. And so there are, there's scale on some more software investments that are a smaller part of that overall reality lab spend because it's stuff that we can build today. And a lot of what my team is trying to do is say, not just what hardware, what software do we build for the hardware? But how do we take some of these software experiences and bring them to devices that people have today? How do they exist on phones? How do they exist on computers? Not just on next generation hardware, which is where a lot of the I think progress in the short to medium term will be seen on hardware up today, not just hardware tomorrow. So what has been working? I mean, are you leaning into gaming? What is like, where is there, the little fire that gives you guys the hope and the promise that this is worth continuing to do. So the most time spent in VR today is actually in social use cases and that actually gives us the most again conviction on that on that end because that's why we set out to build this in the first place like we can't replace this. Me sitting here looking at all of you in this physical space that isn't going away nor do we think it should. But we can't always do this, we can't always be in a space together like this. And so how do we create experiences that feel as close to this as possible? Even if they're not this? So social experiences are working. Gaming certainly is an early vertical, especially in VR that's had some product market fit and increasingly fitness is the category that we're seeing some of it through people who were gaming and then found fitness. But increasingly people who are finding fitness to be really valuable and are buying headsets for fitness. And what's I think really interesting there is it skews more female, it skews older and it's not just people who, you know, used to go to the gym and now replace that with using a headset. It's people who are uncomfortable going to the gym who didn't feel like they had a place to go, you know, focus on their health and now they can in the comfort of their homes at a price point that, you know, is far more affordable than other things that are out there. So I'm going to turn it to the audience for a question after this one. So be thinking Apple just launched the Vision Pro. So a lot of fanfare, it was quite different than the meta Bursary building looks like there are no controllers. It's all eye tracking, gesture control. A bit more realistic, a little less cartoon feely. What was your reaction? What does it feel like when Apple is coming for the product that you're working on. Well, first, I think it's actually really, really great that more people are investing in this space. Like I genuinely mean that it brings more validation to the overall portfolio of investment, more developers focused on building here, good for consumers, really because at the end of the day, more choice and more competition makes a better product. Now that said, I think we are approaching the space differently. Our vision is to build a metaverse for everyone, not just for a few. And that accessibility point reflects in things like price point and the investment in software that is social by nature. And so I think there's plenty of space for lots of folks in the ecosystem. I just think our, our vision tends to be a little bit more democratic, a little bit broader in terms of accessibility and a bunch of our decisions from the hardware we've chosen the software we're building really are focused on really show that that kind of focus uh audience. Any questions for one in the back, Jeff? Um Hi. Yeah, Mark Zuckerberg famously said legs are hard. I'm just wondering how the legs are coming along. Uh He said a lot of famous things. I don't know if that's like his most famous thing, Urban Dictionary, I guess had some other things to say. No. So OK, I was asking me this question backstage. It would be good to get a little bit of context. So legs are hard for a couple of reasons. One, a big part of the VR value proposition is being embodied in a virtual space. So you want your physical movement to be reflected in the virtual world so that it feels like you're there. So when you move your hand, you want your hand to move, when you move your head, you want your head to move. We have tracking on hands and on your head. So we can get that to be pretty accurate. We don't have any tracking on legs. Therefore, it's harder for that to directly be directly, you know, directly reflected in your embodied actor. So that's one reason. The second reason is if you think back a couple of years as we've gone through this journey, the compute envelope on the headset is fairly limited. It's a mobile chip set, we're trying to get as much interactivity in a space as possible. So every additional kind of computation on your body is a computation that we have to take away from making the environment more interactive. So it's literally a trade off of making a bigger space with more people in it versus each person having more fidelity. And so we were working with both of these trade offs over time as both of these things are luckily changing, we have more sophistication on tracking and we have a larger compute envelope now. So yes, we're working on bringing legs to the platform, you'll start to see them hopefully later on this year and they are hard. But maybe for reasons that people didn't quite internalize because there's some technical constraints but also some kind of computational limitations. Yeah. I mean, I was fascinated by that because I did the demo yesterday of the latest tries and workplaces and you can wink in your avatar winks, you can raise your eyebrow, it raises eyebrows. The person giving me a demo in San Francisco was wiggling in his chair and I could see even though he didn't have legs, his like legless chair was moving. So it was just fascinating to hear that like legs are a big challenge, but you're committing to legs by the end of the year, we are awesome. OK, soon you will have legs. So A I obviously a huge investment going into it for meta and from everybody, Ar Mar has said actually A R glasses are the holy grail and then the metaverse. How is it all tied? How's that pipeline tied? And how are you working across groups in that vision? Yes. So AI both is an important bet for us in the future but has been a big part of our existing apps and even the hardware that we've shipped today. All the ranking in Facebook and Instagram advertising, all powered by A I A lot of the computer vision that we put into tracking hands and environments in VR headsets to get standalone headsets working well, all powered by AI I think what's really interesting kind of going forward is in the same way, we really lowered the barrier for creation tools on phones, you know, five or 10 years ago, none of us thought we could create compelling content on a mobile device. But we can now because we've lowered the barrier to entry for creation. But if you have a good idea, it's easy to create something. I think that same challenge exists in virtual worlds today where to do and build anything compelling to build a space like this, you need today to be able to write code and not everyone knows how to do that. And so where I think A I can play a really interesting role is how do we take it so that if you have a great idea, you can, whether you talk to an LM powered bot or you know, interact with these creative tools to build spaces and to build environments that are interactive just by using your voice or just by using your thought. And this idea of lowering the barrier to content creation is an extension of the journey we've been on for years, you know, in terms of the stuff we've done in our apps. And so the reason that's important to tie to your point about how everything gets connected together is getting more creators building for virtual environments where they're fully immersive ones like this. Or even virtual objects then are great for VR they're great for mixed reality where you have a blend of the physical world and the digital world and eventually for the A R and A future that as you said is the holy grail that we're looking for because there's more content that exists that people can interact with. So in the last few seconds we have here, what's your revised timeline? Now knowing how hard this project is the long term vision of it? When am I going to actually use the metaverse every day? When is the skepticism going to end? And people are going to be like, I see what Bichell has been working on. I don't think it's a, it's like a light switch where one day you will suddenly feel like you're in the metaverse. Whereas one day, the day before you weren't, I think it will be an iterative process over the course of many years where digital experiences will get better, feel more real and you will find more value in them. But we want the products to be valuable, not for us to pitch something on a stage and expect you to just adopt it. All right. Well, we will wait. Thank you, Michel. We appreciate your time and your honesty. Thank you. Thank you.

Wemimo Abbey, Co-founder and Co-CEO, Esusu (appearing virtually) , Shivani Siroya, Founder and CEO, Tala | In conversation with: Jo Ling Kent, Brainstorm Tech 

Brainstorm Tech 2023: Democratizing Finance 

Alongside many attractions of the fintech sector is its potential to democratize finance. And here in the in the US with neo banks in the mix, there are now specialized solutions that are catering directly to niche markets, creating access for previously marginalized groups. So our next conversation is going to zero in on how emerging tech can and should leverage this moment and bridge existing gaps globally. Joining us virtually is WMO Abbi, co founder and co CEO of SUU, one of the pioneering fintech unicorns that provides credit building solutions to underserved communities. And also joining us is Shani Croy, founder and Ceo of Talla Tala is a global tech company committed to fostering financial inclusion and empowerment and they're going to be interviewed by brainstorm tech coacher Joely Kent. Please welcome them. Good morning. How's everyone doing? It was a great conversation with Adam. Uh Thank you all for being here this morning. Um I'm thrilled to be joined by Abby and also thank you both for being here. Uh Virtually, we wish you were here, but thank you both for attending today. Thanks a lot for having us. So I wanted to start by just briefly introducing the two companies. I think that what you both do is so important and it's important for everyone here to understand that Vanni, you run Tala and it's a micro loan company and a mobile app for emerging markets. You've dispersed over $3 billion in loans and you provide credit scores and now banking products and services with a really impressive 98% repayment rate. And Abby at Esu, you guys are helping renters and low income Americans build credit while maintaining secure housing. Basically capturing the fact that people are making on time rental payments. And it's pretty remarkable because 45 million people are considered to be rent credit invisible due to the fact that they're a renting household. So I'd like to start with you, Abby. I was wondering given this tight economic environment and where we are with the macro global picture. How does that impact your customers and your business? Yeah, thanks a lot. Um It's definitely a tough and challenging time right now for the particular customer base that we focus on just to give you context. Um the population, we focus on the average income is roughly around $43,000. So there are three mega trends that we're watching. Um Number one debt to equity ratio has skyrocketed um based on our data debt debt to equity ratio in 2020 was around 9 10%. Today has shut up to 47%. So we're saying um and the healthy level just for context is around 30%. So same households living paycheck to paycheck struggling um and not having the ability to essentially get the liquidity, um they need. Uh And then the effect of high interest rates is also, you know, impacting the demographic that we, you know, serve day in day out. Um you know, for other issues with folks being priced out um from a leverage perspective. Um And that's really, really challenging. And the third piece which is um concerning and no one is talking about today is the rate of eviction. Um based on our data in 2019 today, eviction is four times higher than what it is um than what it was in 2019 and as well as delinquents, so there's a mass eviction crisis that we need to deal with and especially given the interest rate environment, we're going to be in a long era of pain Giovanni. What is the global picture like? Because I've heard you say before, you know, in reference to the United States where you do not operate, but you're, you're based here that, you know, according to bank rate four in 10 Americans can't afford a financial emergency right now. Is the global customer of your company more resilient or is it a more crouched position right now? It's a good question. Um And, and I think even even more so I think right now, um we are really seeing more resiliency in our customer base. Um I think it really goes into the fact that our customers live this kind of volatility every single day. So what I would say is I think it's important to separate two things. I think resiliency comes from just their character, their attitude towards life, their just kind of normal pace is volatile. So they will figure it out. That is just in their DNA at this point. Now, when it comes to what are the tools that they can use to be more resilient and not do it with so much sacrifice and pain. I think that's where there are more tools available in the US. And now, you know, whether they're spread out and, and being given to the under served, you know, I know more about the global side and I would say that what we see is really on, you know, in our customer base, two thirds of our customers still tell us that they don't have access. And that's because even though we see fintech globally, you know, starting to appear, they're still focusing on the prime segment, they're still focusing on the customer that has again choice and so tools like enable our customers to now become more resilient and to do it. I think with, I think more agency um as opposed to sacrifice. It's interesting when you talk about agency and sacrifice that Abby I'd like to ask you about affordable housing here in the US because so much of what you do is directly linked to that. And I know that as Suu recently partnered with Fannie Mae, and it's a really interesting partnership because essentially Fannie Mae says they're going to pay for the first year of service fees of sou and to incentivize borrowers to report their on time rental payments to up their credit score. And so how are these partnerships going? How are they paying off? Do you feel like, you know, these types of opportunities are able to build your customer base and actually make a longer term positive impact for your customers? Absolutely. I think it's important to go down memory lane a little bit just to give the audience a little bit of context. You know, we have 36% of Americans rents and on an average, they send roughly $1.44 trillion in rent to their landlords every year. And the unfortunate part is when you pay your mortgage, that data is reflected in your credit score. But when you pay your rent, unfortunately, it's not reflected and even worse, less and 10% of that data is captured today. So the technology we build and collaborations with institutions like the fragile housing finance agency, FH Fa or Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, um essentially gives the opportunity for our clients which are large owners and operators of real estate to be able to subsidize the cost of our services. Um So you know, when a renter pays their rent on time instead of charging the renter the landlord and provided, they have a Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae loan. Now, they can essentially get access to our services for free. And one thing I'm really, really excited about is really the impact that we've seen. You know, since that collaboration, the combined effort has essentially created credit scores for over 50,000 people that never had a credit score before. That's incredibly powerful. You know, when my mother and I moved to this country, we had to go borrow money from a predator lend at over 400% interest rate. My mother sold my father's wedding ring, bought money from church members and that's how we got started. So collaborations with Freddie Mac and is really proven a simple hypothesis, no matter where you come from the color of your skin and particularly your financial identity, shouldn't determine the kind of opportunities or the financial access you have. Even from a record perspective, we've seen folks that have established their credit scores and folks that have improved their credit on an average by 46 points. I've also gone on to get access to over $4 billion in credit activities and mortgage um is a quintessential part of that, accounting for roughly $1.2 billion. So we're incredibly proud of our collaborations with not only Fannie Mae but Freddie Mac and we're really excited to really continue to pave that permanent bridge, the financial access and inclusion um for the stakeholders, we have the good fortune to work alongside Abby. I should point out that your personal story brought you to my home state of Minnesota and we share that in common and it's, it's, it's an, it's an incredible thing because what happens in a state like Minnesota is you really do see the diversity of needs economically when it comes to the housing market. And this is a question for both of you about what you can do with the technology that you have. I was wondering Giovanni and then Abby, how are you integrating A I? And how are you leveraging or using the data that you're gathering on your customers? And how are you using language learning models to build the next part of your products at your company? Sini, I'll start with you. So I think it's important to start with, you know, what is the customer gaining through this technology? And so we really ask ourselves always, you know, what can the customer provide that then creates more value for them that enables us to again create more and more value down the down the line for them. So in that sense, you know, similar to what Abby just mentioned, you know, our customers are largely unseen by the financial marketplace and so we really have to start with, OK, what do they have available to us that enables us to understand them better, they have their daily life data and it's sitting, you know, on devices. And so we really started from this place of saying, can we build a new kind of credit score using alternative data? Because our customers are largely spending in cash, you know, their receipts, their transactions are unseen. And so we really needed to think about it as how do we actually gather these different data sources, these patterns, these transactions, their daily life behavior in a way to then create a proprietary credit score that can use to do lending. But we've now moved beyond lending to be a full global money app for the underserved. We've already reached now about a million customers in the Philippines that are not just borrowing from us, but these are customers that now have a full account product. And so now leveraging A I and machine learning to really think of it as the right offer at the right time. And that's not always credit. It's really meeting the customer where they already are and what they're showing us that they need that they want how they want to use their money over time. And so I think it really allows us to again be front and center in the customer's lives. And then I think the other uses of A I that, you know, all Syntech are talking about um and that we're leveraging as well is how do we actually again create more efficiency and more cost effectiveness in our supply chain. And so we're, you know, we work across five different global offices. We operate in Kenya, the Philippines, Mexico and India. We've now served nearly 9 million customers. And, you know, our CS and CL team is only 200 people that we're really thinking of it as again, how do we personalize, how do we customize using technology but still be able to have that trust and that relationship with our customers. Um And so we've been doing that since day one for the last seven years, but it's exciting to see where the technology is now going because again, it'll enable us to scale much faster. How about you, how is, is the company integrating A I and language learning models? Absolutely. You know, it's really three things for us. It's access number one. We capture a plethora of data when we capture information and report that rental data into the consumer and agencies. We have a lot of um personal identifiable information. And our goal that is, is really how do we better price risk and how do you reach that information dislocation whereby we want to make sure someone that has access to information on Wall Street, someone living in, you know, Crookston Minnesota or Saint Paul Minnesota, um that might be low to medium income as the same information. Um And that's one of the ways um we're thinking about A I especially from a such standpoint there's a lot of financial literacy content out there and that information is just not um readily distributed to this particular demographic. So making sure access is there um is is of utmost importance for us. Number two is our underwriting model, the price risk. So how do we essentially make sure if someone wants to get a mortgage today in addition to their FICO scores. Can we include rent or data? Um Rent is 30 to 50% of the population. We focus on um their largest monthly expense. So how do we make sure when you are getting their big ticket items like a mortgage, that data is factored or things like their car notes to better price that risk and actually see them um in full um picture. The third thing is proximity. Um You know, I'll tell you a story when, when raised 100 and $30 million and the company was valued at a billion. I called my mother and say, hey mom, you know, I think we made it. This is an exciting period. I know my mother told me my mother was like, oh, I'm so proud of you, son. How's the wedding planning coming along? Issue of proximity? Right? Necessarily comprehend, you know, what's going on. Um particularly because there's lack of information and she doesn't really understand the full extent of what that kind of um you know, funding could have in, in, in um in isu's trajectory. So how do we level the playing field and how do we make sure access to information is just not selective, rather equally distributed. And folks can essentially make decisions, we give them social agency and people don't want to hand out people just want to fight. And so those are some of the things that we are leveraging A I to do customer support is also another important um you know, for us to streamline our operations and make sure that things are very efficient because that is we believe in running a value business with growth outcomes. But we're really, really excited about, you know, a lot of impact A I will have in the landscape and we think the best is still yet to come. I'd like to open it up to audience questions. If you have a question for Shabani or Abby, please raise your hand and I'd be happy to come to you with a microphone. In the meantime, I'd like to know from both of you what it's like to compete in this environment because both what you both do are very unique skills and services that you provide for the communities that you do. You see bigger players, bigger banks trying to come in and do what you do in order to take advantage of an under served under banked population or in the case of the credit score issue, Sivani, do you, what is the competition like I know you've said before, there isn't that much competition. But has that changed recently? What we're finding is, uh we're actually finding a lot more around the partnership front. Um I would say that bigger banks are coming to us really saying they see the opportunity, but again, for them to actually go downstream, they would need to change their entire infrastructure, they'd have to change again, all of their working models, right? Because this customer again needs to be designed for uniquely. It's not just about how you credit score this customer or even KYC the customer. It is really about going beyond that to think about how do you service at every single point in the journey. And so in that sense, uh we're finding actually not just banks. Um I would say mobile operators, we're finding Remittance companies, bill payment companies, the gig economy. Um you know, service providers all coming to us saying you are the platform that allows us to get to this segment. Um And I think actually starting to realize that there is double sided value in this. So it's not just that they can, you know, make money through lending through as the platform, but it's really thinking about how do they better retain and even provide more value to their customer base by giving them access to a platform. Like I would say that what we do see is within the in tech industry. We are starting to see that because of, you know, kind of new technology coming out. That's where we're both excited and also driven to produce higher quality products for our customers. But we are seeing again that there is more options for this customer base coming up. Thank you, Abby. I have 20 seconds or left for you to answer the question. I apologize. What's your closing thoughts? Closing thoughts um is just I think Ghana and it's really collaboration, you know, a you know what we stand for and the, the meaning of the company is if you want to go fast, you go alone and if you want to go far, you fundamentally need to go together. So we're saying there are large institutions saying it's just you can very, you can price risk and score people that have been considered credit invisible. And one important start I'll close with is there are 45 million people in this country that don't have a credit score, deem credit invisible, the average debts around $92,000. We are focusing on those demographic and particularly if we can just do simple math and multiply $92,000.45 million, we can unlock over $4.1 trillion. So what we are doing at is um is not a charity case. It's a win, win, win, outcome, a win for the American Society, a win for our owners and operators of real estate and a win for the renters at large. And you know, by doing that we believe that we can essentially, you know, lift everyone up in this equation and from our, from our vantage point, it's what we like to call justice capitalism is not sustainable. Well, Abby, thank you so much to Soraya. Thank you also as well for joining us today. We really appreciate your time.

Adam Neumann, Founder, Flow; Co-Founder and Former CEO, WeWork In conversation with: Michal Lev-Ram, FORTUNE

Brainstorm Tech 2023: Go With The Flow 

We're going to keep moving along. Our next guest has redefined many boundaries, brick mortar and then some seven years ago, he made his debut on our stage when his fast growing and much hype company was rumored to go public and I think we probably all followed the roller coaster ride of what happened next. Adam Newman is the co founder of wework, a company that pioneered the concept of co working reconfigured the workplace landscape. Adam stepped down as CEO of the company in 2019 after we worked out to shelve plans for an IPO and now Adam is on a new journey. His current mission is to transform the soulless experience of renting, find a solution for America's fractured housing market. So to talk past, present and future, please welcome back to brainstorm tech's. Adam Newman have a bit. Um Adam, thank you for joining us. I'm going to start with a very basic question, but I think one that probably a lot of people are wondering and that's just why are you here? You know, obviously we invited you to come speak. That's part of the reason, but I want to know why are you back in front of this particular audience. And why are you at it again with another company? I think first of all, thank you for having me. And always nice to see a great face in the audience. And Park City is beautiful. I've never been here in the summer. It's unbelievable. Very nice to see. I think in life, we go through many journeys and as we go through these journeys, we have different lessons that we learn. But if we learned our lessons and we don't get a chance to do it again, then I don't think you can really apply it. And I think when things happen in your life, if you took time to think about it and learn from it and then you apply it, that's a great journey. But if you actually did learn from it and you stopped and something happened, it becomes a tragedy. So I'm here because I love entrepreneurship. And I think this category and this problem is real and we're excited to do our part in trying to solve it. So we're going to get into flow and what you're doing with it today, what your hopes are. But I want to talk about those lessons learned first of all and just ask you, you know, you've had quite a bit of distance and time now from wework. I looking back with the space that you have and the perspective, what do you think were the biggest mistakes? What are the biggest learnings that you take with you today. So when I stepped down in 2019, I actually took the time to think a lot and had a great team around me that were able to talk and discuss all the different things and there are many lessons. But first of all, I would say I'm extremely proud in what we did and we work, I'm proud of the team. We, today we work has over 700 locations. It's in 39 countries, it's in over 70 languages. And I don't think there's a person on the planet who is building a new office space today, who's not thinking what would or wouldn't we work? Think so. I think that part is great as far as the lessons and there are many and we don't have enough time today. This is a short interview, but I'll focus, I'll focus on two that come to mind right now. One as an entrepreneur, there are many things you don't control. One of the only things you control is who you surround yourself with and not just who you surround yourself with. But exactly what kind of people they are. I think in we work, we're surrounded by very smart people, but moving forward, what I surround myself is not just very smart people, but also people are very comfortable telling me what they think. And when you need to tell someone what you think and they don't agree with you, you need to have the courage and you need to be empowered to go back again and say it again and again and again. So my first lesson surround yourself, not only with the best people and the smartest people, but also the ones who are going to tell you what they think. And it means if you don't listen, they're going to keep at it until you either never see them again or until you agree. That's one, the second one is listening. The first lesson doesn't work without the second one. After when I stepped down from my work, I had the opportunity to become an investor and our family offices invested in over 50 different companies. And I got to be the investor giving the entrepreneur advice and seeing that the entrepreneur is not listening and getting a little frustrated until I realized that maybe this is part of how I used to act. And I realized that part of being a great entrepreneur is not just listening, but listening to the hard truth, listening to the things you don't want, they have to choose to choose who you surround yourself with and become a great listener and great listeners like to listen to what they don't want to hear, not what they want to hear. So do you if I'm to like put all that together? Do you think that your investor at the time at wework could have played a larger role in not helping to create what was a spectacular rise and then a spectacular fall. I mean, what was your role there? And what was your investor's role? Again, as I said before, I am so proud of what we did in Monday night's quarterbacking. Is that what you call and doing that now with the investors and what they should have done? I can tell you one thing, no one from the outside ever knows what happens on the inside. And again, I think very few people disrupt categories and very few companies reinvent categories. Office is the second largest category in the world. And I'm very proud of what was achieved. Ok, I want to ask you about um my understanding is that there were, there were several components of your exit package which was controversial at the time. Um But one of those components was also a non compete agreement. And when does that expire? Our non compete expired? It's actually noncompeting and unsolicited and that expires October 30th of this year. Ok. So what happens then does this mean that you with your new company which we will get to in a second compete with? We work to answer that question. I would have to explain what flow is because I think the answer is slightly more complex. So for those of you who don't know flo is building a, I heard the mission, you said before, I'm not sure that's actually our mission, but it sounded interesting correct that. So good. So good. We're not ready to come up with that yet, but flo is building a consumer facing residential brand and we're doing it through integrating technology community and a world class operating team that puts the resident first. And just some numbers for those of you who don't know, 66% of young adults in this country are renters and they spend 34% of their total income on rent. And yet there's no rent, no promise, no elevated experience in in the past Howard Schultz, who was a great entrepreneur and also a company that I really admire came up with the concept of the third place. He would say the first place was the home. The second place was the office and the third place was Starbucks where you could get a cup of coffee, meet someone and be surrounded by other people. I think in a pre Corona world that was amazing. I think in a post Corona world, what Flo is observed is that it's not anymore the first place or the third place. It's the one place and in the one place, you have to integrate everything our residents, which we survey regularly. 70% of them spend between 2 to 5 days working from home in a reality where work from home and living has become one a place where our home is changed and our relationship to our home has changed. I don't think a lot of us think there's anything more important than that. The new solution for the future of living needs to be more the one place as opposed to the first or the third. And that's what flow is going to do. To answer your question. You said is flow. I think what you're asking is what's flo going to do well and does flow, where does, where does we work end? And where does flow begin? And where do they dovetail? Compete? So you're asking is flow going to compete? I think with not, I think I know in a world where the one place is the new solution where work and living has been integrated, we're not ready actually for these solutions because these buildings have not been designed for that. The operating systems are not there, the tech is not there, the teams are not there to run it. I think flow has only two choices, compete or partner. OK. So compete is one of the choices comp is one of the choices or partner. OK. All right. Well, maybe it would help if you, you know, I think we get kind of the philosophy and the need in the, in the market that you see for flow. But give us a bit more of a concrete breakdown of what is the business model? Do you own these buildings or not necessarily? And how does the company make money? So I'm going to add one more thing and then I'm going to answer that. In May, the surgeon general came up with a study defining loneliness as an epidemic in the United States. He was saying that it's going to cause loneliness, it's going to cause mental illnesses, it's going to cause early death. He was giving all these different definitions and quoting tremendous amount of study. We live in a world where we're so connected. We've never been more disconnected even though we love technology and flow is tech first and product. First, we use technology as a tool to achieve the mission and the goals that we have not as the end goal. And with that in mind, it has to all be brought together perfectly. So we think the best way to do that business model, we own 3000 apartments that we're running. We have over 150 employees and a majority of engineers, product designers, both digital and physical. We're actually looking for a lot more great employees. And the business model that we have is a vertically integrated system. We own the buildings, we operate the buildings, we build the technology, we build a community and we build the teams that are running them. And when you bring all of that together, the moment a resident is happier, more fulfilled and stays longer. The buildings churns goes down, churn is the amount of times people leave a building and the building is immediately more profitable. Happier residents more fulfilled residents equals more profitable buildings. We've already proven this on our first two buildings. And this is something that in real estate you don't see often because real estate is not treated as a consumer product. Even though it really is. The reason it's not treated as a consumer product is because it's a supply challenge, not a demand challenge. You raised $100 million from Mark Andreesen. Correct. No, no. Sorry how much? Um, 350 million, excuse me, I should have looked at my notes. 350 million. That's even more mind boggling. I want to hear about just very briefly, tell us about just why you think this is a good match. And Dr Horowitz and, and you, and also curious to hear, you know, not everybody gets a second chance and not on this kind of level, of course, 3 50 million. Um Why do you think Mark believed in you and wanted to put his money in you? So a few things first, we spoke about lessons learned and we said one of them is surround yourself with the right people. Mark and Ben and A 16 Z are unbelievable investors. They're actually investors who started as entrepreneurs, they run multiple businesses and created multiple businesses when they're in the boardroom and we're discussing, not only is no one holding anything back, the kind of advice we're getting has a lot to do with building a long term business also. And this is something amazing about Mark. After our first board meeting, Mark called me the next day and he goes, Adam, I wanted to give you some feedback about something I heard in the board meeting. And I said, of course. And then he gave me the list of all the things that he disagrees with. Not the things he said in the board meeting with. There are a lot of other things that he thought about afterwards and he said, I don't want to come too hard, but that's what I think. And I said, Mark the deal we made when we did this deal is that you always tell me exactly what you think and I will do my best to be a great listener. And that's been the relationship ever since they've turned out to be even greater partners than I would imagine specifically to what you're asking. I am sure there are people who deserve to get investments more than me. I am sure there's a lot of people who deserve, who don't get it. And I hope because I really believe in entrepreneurship that the people who deserve to get this investment will get it because I also think that to build the future, we need start ups and we need innovation. And that's what this conference is all about. I think it shouldn't matter what race they come from, what gender they come from, where they come from. Nothing should matter and everybody should get their opportunity specifically why I got the second chance that you should ask a six OK. Question from the audience. Please raise your hand. We'll bring a mic over to you quickly. We've got one right here, Mark Johnson CTO. Stand together. Um Sorry, what's your regulatory barriers? Do you think you're going to face in building flow? So great question. There's a lot of basic things in residential real estate that are already a effect. So we have to follow all the rules that exist. It's actually a very advanced category when it comes to that. But a very early category when it comes to actual innovation or technology or giving a new experience, whatever they are, we take them extremely seriously, but they change between state to state and it depends if you're owning the building, building, the building, operating the building and then flow starts there. But over time probably grows outside of these multi family buildings. There's tremendous opportunity to where this brand can go to. Do you do you by the way? Um I know one of the knocks um after this one was, was published um was in how you described the company and earlier on too, you know, the fact that um the valuation was where it was and that uh you know, there was yes there was tech involved, but it was real estate. Are you comfortable today? Describing flow as a real estate company or what is it, what category is it in. I can't answer the end without answering the beginning. I'm a little bored of talking about the past. But if, if we must, our valuation was given by the most sophisticated values in the world. It was Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley, it was Softbank and Benchmark and all the other investors that are considered the best investors in the world. So when people knock our valuation, they're really knocking all the people who gave that valuation evaluation is something that's given by a person that wants to actually invest the money. Putting that aside. We used to describe we were many different ways, flow is very comfortable being a residential consumer facing real estate company. It is the largest asset class in the world. It has no brand that we know of and prop tech in that category is still very early because whenever you solve these problems, everyone is solving them as a single point problem as opposed to actually solving them as a vertical integration problem. So the way we're going after it is going to take longer, we're going to have to build a very solid foundation. But when we do, I think our solution is going to actually help solve problems like loneliness community. And I'll say one more thing. And I think we live in this world today where I'm not sure we need more followers. I think we need more friends and I think we can all appreciate a lot more face to face interaction and maybe a little less face time. Well, Adam, we appreciate you coming, getting dressed up for us, no T shirts today. Um But thank you so much for coming and looking forward to seeing what you do with flow. Thank you for having me.

Keith Rabois, General Partner, Founders Fund Francis X. Suarez, Mayor, City of Miami In conversation with: Terri Burns, Brainstorm Tech  

Brainstorm Tech 2023: Miami mayor Francis Suarez on why tech is drawn to his city

Miami mayor Francis Suarez on why tech is drawn to his city

Deborah Liu, President and CEO, Ancestry
Ben Peterson, Co-founder, BambooHR
Matthew Prince, Co-founder and CEO, Cloudflare
Aaron Skonnard, Co-founder and CEO, Pluralsight
In conversation with: Phil Wahba, Senior Writer, FORTUNE; Co-chair, Fortune Brainstorm Tech 


Brainstorm Tech 2023: Behind The Growth Of Utah Tech 

Deborah Liu,  Ancestry
Ben Peterson, BambooHR
Matthew Prince, Cloudflare
Aaron Skonnard, Pluralsight
Phil Wahba, FORTUNE

Behind The Growth Of Utah Tech 

Deborah Liu, President and CEO, Ancestry
Ben Peterson, Co-founder, BambooHR
Matthew Prince, Co-founder and CEO, Cloudflare
Aaron Skonnard, Co-founder and CEO, Pluralsight
Phil Wahba, Senior Writer, FORTUNE; Co-chair, Fortune Brainstorm Tech 

Al Gore, Founding Partner and Chairman, Generation Investment Management
Lila Preston, Partner and Head of Growth Equity Strategy, Generation Investment Management In conversation with: Jessica Mathews, Senior Writer, FORTUNE; Writer, Term Sheet 


Brainstorm Tech 2023: The New Green Frontier 

Al Gore,  Generation Investment Management
Lila Preston, Generation Investment Management 
Jessica Mathews, Senior Writer, FORTUNE

Al Gore, Generation Investment Management,
Lila Preston, Generation Investment Management,
Jessica Mathews, Senior Writer, FORTUNE

So now that we've discussed the business climate here in Utah. Let's talk about the meteorological climate worldwide and the role tech could play in helping humanity respond to the biggest challenge in our lifetime. Here in Utah, the Great Salt Lake remains at low levels in New York. Last night, there were catastrophic floods. 20 miles north of the city, we had orange skies for a day because of Canadian wildfires a month ago. Record heat in Europe, snow fields in Switzerland disappearing. So there's no denying that climate change is real and changing our lives. In 2022 the US alone experienced 18 separate weather and climate disasters which each cost the economy at least 1 billion each and total wild weather should be costing the economy 165 billion this year. And so far, we're the first half of the year has been pretty terrible terms of weather catastrophes. So this is where tech will step in. Hopefully, the climate tech market is expected to grow to $417 billion by 2030. And it's imperative that this tech actually lead to solutions tangible so we can fix this. So to introduce our, one of our panelists. We have a climate message pioneer, former US, vice president and co founder and chairman of generation Investment Management, a firm that is focused on finding a new approach to sustainable investing. It's a great honor to welcome Nobel Prize winner, Al Gore. He is joined by his colleague, Lila Preston Generation's head of growth equity interviewing, Mr Gore and MS Preston on the new green frontier is my colleague, Fortunes Jessica Matthews. Hello? Ok. You felt that we could not host a tech conference in Park City without inviting the man who created the internet, former vice president, Al Gore. No, but in all seriousness, Mr Gore, you did play a very important role in incorporating computers into the government and making the internet and databases more widely accessible. You for decades said technology has an important role to play in improving our lives and our planet. What would you say is the tech sector's role in tackling the climate crisis? Well, first of all, Jessica, thank you for interviewing us today. I'm here with my colleague, Lila Preston. We're partners in generation investment management. And the question you've asked, how does technology help to solve the climate crisis in multiple ways? We have seen some rather stunning cost reduction curves that have been highlighted in well, solar electricity, wind, electricity, batteries, electric vehicles, all kinds of other less well known but extremely significant technologies have been coming down in cost quite dramatically. And now with machine learning and artificial intelligence, including generative A I block, even Blockchain and some of the other information technologies, we're seeing the emergence of a sustainability revolution which we at a generation believe has the magnitude of the industrial revolution coupled with the speed of the digital revolution. A lot of business executive teams are now acquiring the ability to manage electrons and protons and atoms and molecules and genes and peptides and proteins. With the same proficiency that the it companies have long since demonstrated in managing bits. And as a result, we're seeing these stunning rights law curves, some of them quite steep, not as steep as Moore's Law, but but well, some of them even even more so on generative ai for example. But this is opening up profit making opportunities in the transition to sustainability because we've got to stop using the sky as an open sewer. And I more and more people are coming to that realization. This week has seen record temperatures around the world. We've seen the smoke cover the northern tier of American cities from the Canadian fires at both ends of the earth, the North Sea temperatures are literally off the charts this year. And at the in Antarctica, the sea ice is off the charts low. There are many, many other examples today, the downpours in upstate New York flooding people out of their homes. The same thing happening simultaneously in Tokyo. We've had a few people that had flight issues coming in from New York because of flooding. So, every night on the television news is like a nature hike through the Book of Revelation and people are beginning to realize in greater numbers that we've got, we've got to fix this. We're putting 162 million tons of man made global warming, pollution into that part of the sky. That's blue. It's only 5 to 7 kilometers thick. It's a very thin shell and it's 162 million tons every day. Added it lingers there on average each molecule about 100 years. So it builds up and it traps as much extra heat every day as would be released by 600,000 Hiroshima class atomic bombs exploding on the earth every day. This is insane and we have to stop it. The good news is that largely because of improvements in technology, particularly information technology. We have seen the emergence of new sustainable approaches that are cheaper, cleaner, better in every single way. And can I ask you about that? So generation has more than $31 billion in assets under management, which makes you one of the largest investment firms focused on sustainability. So I want to ask how 45 but I don't want to quibble well, assets under management specific. Yes, that's what I'm talking about. How you I'm familiar with the term. How do you measure as a firm? Whether a company will make the world cleaner safer, more equitable. Yeah, it's so we start from a research perspective. We go very deep into how pockets of the mark of the of different sectors are shifting towards more sustainable, a more sustainable future. And sometimes that's from cost down curves. It's from consumer demand shifts, it's from policy and regulation changes. And ultimately, these road maps help us determine what a sustainable company looks like whether it's in the area of planetary health people, health or financial inclusion. So we are tracking, you know, from the bottoms up, what are the types of business models we want to get to build relationships with. And it's a pretty concentrated strategy. I sit as the head of the growth fund, but generation is a firm does private, as well as public investing. And so we have a pretty concentrated set of relationships to try to understand how these companies are not just thriving in the transition to a sustainable future, but also driving that transition. And so that's what we're looking at. And actually remember when I first joined generation, which was back in 2005, working with al on our systems lens, we call this system positive, you know, what are the shifts around climate science? What are the shifts related to demographic changes, urbanization, water scarcity pandemics, actually stitching this together so that we understand that these are all connected topics. And in fact, if you're not understanding those layers add in generative ai add in, you know, diverse organizations. Like if you don't understand how these come together in, not just what a company does but how a company operates, you're likely not going to deliver optimal performance. Mr Gore, I want to turn back to you. I'm hoping you can weigh in on the Biden administration's approach to addressing climate change last month. In Palo Alto, President, Biden said his administration is taking quote unquote the most aggressive climate action ever. Would you agree with that? Yes, I would. And first of all, let me, let me apologize for correcting you on that earlier number. It's a very common misperception because we, we're, we have two headquarters in London and in San Francisco and sometimes the reporting systems just do a portion of it. But yes, on the Biden administration, the Inflation Reduction Act is principally a climate law and it was depicted as allocating $369 billion to green technologies and the climate transition. Actually, the heavy lifting is done by tax credits. There are a lot of people here know all about this and most of these tax credits are open ended. Many of them have a 10 year limit, others are completely open ended. And the first eight months of applications now make it clear that this is going to be not 369 billion, but well over one trillion Goldman Sachs estimates that at $1.2 trillion. It is indeed by far and away, the largest and most effective best designed climate law that any nation has ever passed. There are some warts on it. From my point of view, there are some things in it that I don't like, but they are the wars. Oh, well, you know, the really extravagant subsidies for carbon capture and sequestration. I understand totally and I favor research to see if we can get some kind of breakthrough there. But in the political economy, the legacy power of the fossil fuel industry is largely responsible for driving the funneling of hundreds of billions into their a chosen hobby horse. You know, I hope it eventually comes to work. But it's kind of silly now it heavy manufacturing some other applications. But for to bolt one of these things on top of a coal burning power plant. Ridiculous, ridiculous. It has a, the moral hazard is a feature, not a bug that they want. The, the impression that this is going to make it possible to keep on burning more and more fossil fuels and just capture the emissions. You know, it, it all works. It's just absurdly expensive. So that would be one of the words. But back to my main narrative thread here for each increased ton of emissions. As a result of this law, there are 28 tons of decreased emissions. So in a representative democracy where compromise is almost always essential to do something big. That's about as good a ratio of compromise as you can imagine. So, yes, President Biden and his team deserve a tremendous amount of credit for getting this done. I am going to open it up to and may I add one thing within a month of the passage Australia changed its government and began changing its policy. A month after that, Brazil changed its government and began changing its policy. The eu withstood the blackmail attempts by Russia and they have now accelerated their transition to renewables and sustainability. So we have a lot of optimism, a basis for optimism and a lot of momentum. But we are still seeing the crisis get worse faster than we are deploying the solutions that are available. I am going to open it up to audience questions in a minute. So if you have a question, go ahead and be thinking about it, Leila, I want to circle back to you. You oversee growth equity investments at generation. How should start ups and growth companies be thinking about both climate goals and also social and governance goals, particularly at this moment in time where there's a lot of pressure to improve your bottom line to become profitable. So when I mentioned like looking for sustainable companies, we obviously put it in the context of again the sector that they operate in and what do they need to drive? Like, what are the, what are the products and services that, that sector shift needs. But when you get to the company, we ask, well, you know, what are you selling? And as you sell more of those units, your software, your services, what is the contribution that your company is making towards planetary health people, health, financial inclusion, or more broadly, a sustainable livable future? And I think that's really motivating to have those kinds of types of conversation with mission driven founders. Like why are you here? Like, what are you driving for and how will we know that you've succeeded, you know, in five years and 10 years? And that's sort of the impact of the products and services. The what but equally is important. And often I think this got forgotten in the first wave of kind of tech is how do you operate, how do you build a sustainable organization beneath those products and services so that you can continue to pump them out to drive revenue and then ultimately pull through profits. And importantly, this is where a whole toolkit related to sustainability is there to complement, understanding your stakeholder engagement, understanding how you build inclusive and diverse cultures, how do you oversee responsible A I, you know, the governance structures that you have in place as well. And so it's just as important to think about the sustainability of the organization as much as the products and services that you sell. We help companies to calibrate, measure benchmark and ultimately improve those what and how metrics over time, we share our reporting publicly and we think it's really empowering and exciting. There's two companies here we were speaking with earlier today. Actually three companies, two in the circular economy, vesti collective and back market who were both innovating in consumption to make reuse the luxury in the case of veer or in the case of consumer electronics for back market a more attractive value proposition. And actually us helping them with life cycle assessment and they can quantify in the case of vesti a 90% footprint reduction by purchasing reuse versus new. In the case of back market accumulative emissions reduction of a million metric tons over the past 10 years. I mean, these are really important measurements that they can offer with a superior again, consumer experience for buying reuse. We also had we who's also here that is untether energy consumption from sort of data storage and, and, and, and infrastructure software. So this really important decoupling of energy use from the compute that is increasingly going to be in demand. I wanna go ahead and open it up. Do we have any questions from the audience at this point? And just I asked, can you go ahead and stand up state your name and company you work for and wait for one of the mic runners to come to you. Oh, yeah. Thank you. My name is Mark. I'm founder of tech buzz News here in Utah. Um I wanna thank you for coming. And uh I have a question about your, your book, The Inconvenient Truth. Um You actually signed a copy of it long time ago when, right when it came out, I was gonna bring it, but you already have signed it. And so I don't need to ask you that, but I just wanted to ask you your thoughts about the significance of it over time now that there's a few decades of, of time to think about it. How, how has it impacted your work? Is it something you're still building on? Is there something that you would revise or how does you feel like it holds up? Well, I wish it hadn't held up at all. I wish that the scientists whose insights and findings I was channeling in that book and movie. I wish they had been wrong, but unfortunately, they were, were dead on. Uh and, and because they were right, we should pay more attention to what they're telling us now. They warned us of exactly the kinds of extreme climate related events that we're going through right now and they're warning us today that this is barely the beginning of what we and those to come after us would have to endure unless we stop this. They're also telling us some good news though, in the most recent uh Intergovernmental panel on climate change, the most recent IPCC report, there are two pieces of startlingly good news. First of all, if we get to true net zero where there are no incremental additions to the greenhouse gas pollution burden. Then the temperatures on earth will stop going up just like that with a lag of as little as three years. It's like flipping a switch. They used to think that we have already unleashed some positive feedback loops that would continue. Some things would continue. The ice melting in Antarctica and Greenland and the mountain glaciers would, would, would, would continue some other things, but the temperature will stop going up. Second bit of good news and this is really astonishing if we get to true net zero and stay there. Half of all the human caused co two emissions will fall out of the atmosphere into the upper ocean and the trees and vegetation in as little as 25 to 30 years. So if we decide to make a run for it and let's accelerate this transition, take all of the coal burning plants that are no longer profitable to operate as they are just to replace them sooner rather than later. All due respect to their political power to snap their fingers and make the politicians do whatever the hell they tell them to do. But if we can somehow get over that burden as we did with the passage of the IRA and we accelerate this transition. If we stay at true net zero and half of the human caused emissions come out, we would be down to 350 parts per million within 25 to 30 years, from 424 parts per million. Now, translating that into the terms that we're living with, that would mean fewer downpour, fewer record rain bombs and floods, fewer deep, long lasting droughts. We could slow the ice melt and sea level rise and sharply reduce the 1 billion climate, immigrants across national borders that are now projected for the balance of this century under business. As usual, we, the world can't handle that. We've got to solve this and the good news is we can't. Right with that. I'm sorry, but we are out of time. Thank you both so much for coming today.

Jonas Andrulis, Founder and CEO, Aleph Alpha Antonio Neri, President and CEO, Hewlett Packard Enterprise In conversation with: Jo Ling Kent, Senior Business and Technology Correspondent, CBS News and Co-chair, Fortune Brainstorm Tech

Brainstorm Tech 2023: Unlocking A.I.’S Potential 

Jonas Andrulis, Founder and CEO, Aleph Alpha
Antonio Neri, President and CEO, Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Jo Ling Kent, Fortune Brainstorm Tech 


Jonas Andrulis, Founder and CEO, Aleph Alpha
Antonio Neri, President and CEO, Hewlett Packard Enterprise
In conversation with: Jo Ling Kent, Journalist and Co-chair, Fortune Brainstorm Tech 


Our next conversation will be our first on one of the hottest topics in tech artificial intelligence. And we're excited to dive right in. Let's start with the big picture ai trends and more specifically how they could apply to enterprise as opposed to end user solutions and help create strategies that scale. We'll be interviewing two industry veterans who are working in tandem to maturing technologies to the test. Joni Andreis is the founder and CEO of Ali Alpha. Joni's career has been entirely dedicated to R and D of AI at of Alpha and its focus is on channeling multimodal input to help businesses control their own data knowledge and create value. Antonio near is the president and CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Antonio has been with HPE for over 25 years and led it through breakthrough innovations and acquisitions, particularly in areas such as hybrid it, edge computing and intelligent data management. Joni and Antonio are joined by our brainstorm tech co chair, Jolene Kent. Good afternoon. Thank you Jessica. It's great to be here. How's everyone feeling good, good, good. I did the Bob club this morning thought I was going to die but feeling good now. Glad to be almost no jet like Yes, exactly welcome. So I want to just start with the basics and kind of set the table here A I is obviously fully accessible to all of us consumers now, right? So how would you describe where A I is right now? And where is the opportunity in 30 seconds or less A I is phenomenal for doing your homework or create copy for like marketing or like images that sound kind of cool, but it's really difficult to use it for things that are critical or that rely on compliance issues. So I think we are, we are in a playful area where we can play around with that, but it's really difficult to get it right where we have a lot of responsibility, Antonio, do you agree? I do agree. In fact, we are, you know, the analogy I want to make is that I play a lot of soccer. I still play in my fifties and we are in the first minute of the game, we are in the first minute of the game when it comes down to applicability in the enterprise with clear use cases where we can actually deliver value from the data. But no question A I will be the most disruptive technology in our lifetime. Where do you see the opportunity in many places? I think, you know, A I has the potential to really solve some of the biggest societal challenges we all live, Vice President Gore, talk eloquently about the challenge of our climate. So when it comes to, I, I think there are three fundamental things we have to think about it. Number one is obviously use it responsibly and there is a lot of chatter about that and what that means. Number two is data privacy. And obviously in the enterprise space, there is a lot of concern about how you're going to train these models and how you're going to deploy this model, maintaining the, the privacy about data. And last but not least is the environmental impact AI is going to have which we're going to get to later. I really want to dive into that because it's something I hadn't really thought about much in my reporting on A I just a friendly reminder. I want to go to audience questions. So if you, if you all have questions, you know, take note and then we'll call on you throughout the session and we'll need you to stand up and identify yourself, please. So, so we're, we're here in part because you're collaborating on HPE Green Lake. It's for large language models. And you basically want to enable companies to deploy large scale A I with super computing cloud capabilities. That is a mouthful. What does it actually mean? And why do you think that partnership is going to move the ball forward? Antonio? Yeah, maybe we should start a Joe by explaining what HP Green Lake is HP Green Lake for Hewlett Packard Enterprise is a cloud platform where we offer intelligent edge services, hybrid cloud services and now A I services. So we join us. We just announced two weeks ago, the first enterprise available large language model available in our cloud in the second half of this year. So the customers can come and train privately their data and start training and tuning their models that eventually can deploy in the inference, which is could be any place in their enterprise. It can be in a manufacturing floor, it can be in a hospital, it can be in their own data center for that matter. So for us, it was a pivotal moment because HP is today the largest vendor when it comes down to supercomputing power, we today have deployed last year, the largest supercomputer ever built in humankind. It's an ex scale system that has the ability to process a quintillion operations per second and to put it in context, that's 40,000 gps and 21,000 cps which you know, has a lot of challenges in the way you manage it. But we are now in the process to deploy even a larger system which has 60,000 gps and will be twice the performance of that system. So the question is, how do we make it available to everyone in a way they can train their data and pay as you go? And that's the goal with that announcement with Iness. Yeah. And we're focusing that. So what, what our goal is and why I like this partnership is because we share the same goals. We want to bring sovereignty to the enterprise and two governments. Exactly. So we want to empower them. We want to give them the ability to build trustful systems in regulate highly regulated environments for governments, for security, for health, for legal, for finance. And for that, we need a partner that shares our interests. And I think that's why I'm super happy about this because precisely what you said is the challenge. Where is my data going? How can I make sure that I can leverage information that should never leave a certain restricted zone, but I still can make sure that I can leverage all the power of Janii. And this is really a tremendous opportunity that we have here. You, you said trustful, I mean, trust is one of the biggest, most difficult issues to tackle in tech in general, but especially in A I, right? And you are both really going for it to try to make it work for your, for your customers. So it's obviously clear we've seen it already the downside of AI and we've seen the dangerous impact that it can have. So how do you guard against it? How do you be the trustful provider of this technology and mitigate the downside impacts? So, first of all, it's just tech, right? So we should not over interpret the abilities and what we're seeing there. Responsibility. I am convinced can only be taken over by humans. It doesn't matter how great A I will become, it cannot take over responsibility. So our design philosophy is not, how can we build a chat bot that gives you the right answer. But how can we give superpowers to the expert? How can we help the experts? How can we help all the great people that are in enterprises and governments to take responsibility and have like two s five s productivity? And I think this is our design philosophy and this is very different from a lot of like see products that basically blurb out an answer and then you basically have no alternative to trust it, no idea where it came from. Yeah, you have no idea and you basically have to, if you want to verify it, you have to open a second window and start a search. So how do you guard against that? Well, how does the product work to make it trustworthy? So like Antonio said, first of all, we can leverage proprietary data, a secure environment. That's where it starts. But then based on our research, we can also link this data to its sources. So we can and you probably have seen this on like references. So this is a link to an URL. The interesting thing is that there's no guarantee that this URL actually backs your claim. And in many instances, it doesn't. So if you click on that URL, it's like a long document you can read through all of that. And in the end, you'll find nothing in this document really supports that claim. This is how a lot of systems work currently because they are adding these links based on embeddings and embeddings have no guarantee what we are doing is we are linking to the precise situation, the precise words or sentences that actually back a claim and not only in the positive but also in the negative in the sense that if there's something that's conflicting with a certain claim, you can also see that can you, I can show you yes, I brought some examples at sea. Here we go. Is that visible? All right. Awesome. So here is Heidelberg, this is our our headquarters. So if you're ever in Germany, you visit and it's multi mode like we've seen this and you see the prompt is this image and the task to describe the image. And then the answer is a beautiful sunset over a city. So let's look at how this is proven, how we can prove that. And now you can see sunset is proven by this part of the image and city by this part of the image. And you can also see some kind of blue parts picking up in the image, right. So on the city part, the castle on the very left left is colored in blue because it's not a city, it's a castle, right? So now I can see what is conflicting, what is supporting my claims and I can do this based on all my data sets, all my proprietary data. And we're going even one step further in that we are giving this A I the opportunity to talk to you because what you actually need is let's say you've got 10 million documents. You don't need links to 10 million documents with parts that are supportive or conflicting. What you need is a system that tells you something like this. So here, I'm asking what's the former capital of Germany? And then the reply is they are contradicting answers saying the former capital of Germany is Bonn or Berlin. And for both of those, I got claims I got sources. And so this is what we showed together with HP at HAFA me was a great success on as a use case in manufacturing, actually based on secure and secure environment on proprietary highly complex technical information and helping the expert working with the system, working with the robots that given comments that was precisely execute against their preparative information. How important is it to collaborate in these kinds of partnerships? Antonio to bring to market the A I that we already know we want and need whether you're a corporation, organization or an individual? I mean, is, is it basically necessary at this point for a company like HPE absolutely. And if you think about the use case, the amount of computational power that took to get to that precise model is, is astronomical, you will not think about it. So the stage is that when you think about today, the public cloud, as we know it, normally there, you put a lot of workloads, a lot of applications and a lot of customers that they are trying to use every possible resource. But when you go to a model like this, it's actually one word load, one A I model using an enormous amount of accelerated computing and optimizing the model with a compute is absolutely critical in order to deliver the performance and the accuracy. And then ultimately, the completion of the model because the most important metric is when he starts the model, he has to finish the model and now stop because otherwise restarting causes a lot of inaccuracies and more power consumption and waste. So that's why the partnership is important because we both can collaborate and deliver a better experience. You mentioned waste. Yeah, you mentioned sustainability earlier. I mean, how much given all of the power that's required to make these models work and this technology actually flow right and work, right? We're talking about a lot of energy. So Antonio, I know you're really passionate about this, but how do we guard against, you know, kind of working backwards when it comes to energy, the environment, climate change, you have to start from the beginning, right. So if you think about some of these computational power, it's just a simple rack system that has a few 100 GPS can consume a half a megawatt one multiply. In the case of the Oakridge National Laboratory have 75 rack systems to deliver the 1.1 flop that's 35 megawatts just for the compute side. Then you need all the power to do the cooling and the storage and so forth. So you have to design this from the beginning and then ultimately think about the circular aspect of this. So our A I cloud that we are building actually is going to be 99% renewable energy. But the waste is going to go to actually power greenhouses. And the waste itself is what we talked about hot water, right, hot water and obviously energy diffusion. But, you know, we have done projects with the National Renewable Energy Lab. Actually, they take the hot water and they actually provide heat into the building in Colorado without wasting more energy and then ultimately melt the snow in the parking lot. But ultimately, we can actually define a carbon negative negative carbon and that requires a whole engineering ecosystem up front, not after the fact and that's what HB is great about it. It's, it's that part to me is extremely fascinating. In addition to the trust that we need to have in our products, I'd like to open it up to the audience. Are there any questions so far? Anyone? Oh, ok, great. I see it in the back. Please please identify yourself. My name is Raj Mohan. I'm the Chief Digital Officer at Ascension, a large health care system. I have a two bar question. Um, health care is an area that where the experts are burnt out. They're quitting. And I'd love to your perspectives on the role of A I and A I second part. My daughter's a senior in writings, senior majoring in data science minor and com science freaking out slightly about chat GPT. What advice would you give her? Oh, let's start with the second one first. Maybe he can go first. So I think if you're just starting your career, it's a good advice maybe to become a plumber because robotics is lagging behind a lot. Um I think for knowledge work, this will change a lot. Knowledge work over the next few years will change a lot. So don't focus on memorizing knowledge, focus on navigating innovation and, and helping helping humans, helping make world a better place, right? So maybe more on like what, how to live a great life, how to, how to drive innovation, how to juggle change. Are these kinds of skills that are not classically taught in universities that much will become much more important? I will say, obviously, our education system is going to change profoundly, but you know, I was just still doing things by hand, so you can learn the basics. I mean, I grew up in Argentina, I went to middle school and high school where I was working full time and then to college and I had to make photocopies of the books in order to get access to the textbooks. And, and I tell you that was the best learning experience because you put the effort. Now, obviously, I will change how we learn going forward. But the fundamentals cannot be replaced in making you a better engineer or whatever a career you take forward. Now on health care, I'm actually a director in the second largest insurance company in the United States. It's called Evan Health. In the past, it used to be called anthem. So for those of you who have an insurance and we are basically every board meeting, we're talking about A I. But in the context of reducing costs, health care today has an enormous waste in terms of the way we manage claims and the way we provide health care to all citizens. But obviously focus on preventative health, you know, preventative medicine and some of the projects we are doing ourselves at HPE, particularly in Germany where I is coming from. We have deployed A I what I call a swamp learning technique where every year the entity takes the scan of 30,000 citizens. So that by 2026 2027 we can actually model the entire brain. So we can in the protein about Alzheimer's and dementia. But because of this data privacy, we actually connect the swamp learning so that all the researchers can get access to the insights, not the data. So people can share real time insights without sharing the data. And that's also another way how A I is going to be deployed connecting super important is important, how we share insights, not the data. And this is I think is going to change the way we work together. I'm going to get to our one last question here. Please stand up and identify yourself. What's your question, Jeff Roberts Fortune. My question is, you know, so there's a bit of hype around AI might be a lie. But when you said this 99% carbon neutral or green or carbon negative, I mean, that frankly seems a bit too good to be true. Is that just aspirational? And there's just some way to audit this and how do we know for sure. That's true. It is 100% hydropower, it's 99% hydropower plus some, you know, generation backup and that water gets recirculated. And then ultimately, we take the hot water and we power other secondary sources. But today, the data center is being built in Quebec and is 99% energy through hydropower. And it's even maybe one step further. I think you mentioned that is not only are we being incredibly careful with the resources, we are spending now. But this technology will help us tackle the challenges of the future. I don't think we can solve climate change without innovation. That's right. And one of the major drivers for innovation will be A I. Yeah. And that's why A I will unlock a lot of the research and the knowledge needed to solve some of these societal challenges. If you look at the system, at the Knoxville laboratory, a lot of the research there is about climate is about life science. If you think about the vaccine on COVID, we used to take many hours to crunch, we actually did it in eight minutes and that allowed them to do 1.2 million more scenarios to get to the spike protein. So clearly, when applied the right way and responsibly can have the potential to solve some of the biggest challenges we ever faced. Well, Antonio, thank you both so much. I think we could talk about this for another hour, but we've got to end here. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you.

Scott Farquhar, Co-founder and Co-CEO, Atlassian
Jeff Lawson, Co-founder and CEO, Twilio
In conversation with: Polina Pompliano, Deputy Director, Live Events, FORTUNE; Founder, The Profile 

Brainstorm Tech 2023: Speed, Scale, And Sustainable Growth 

Scott Farquhar, Co-founder and Co-CEO, Atlassian
Jeff Lawson, Co-founder and CEO, Twilio


Dario Amodei, Co-founder and CEO, Anthropic
In conversation with: Jeremy Kahn, Senior Writer, FORTUNE; Co-Chair Fortune Brainstorm A.I. 

Brainstorm Tech 2023: How Anthropic is paving the way for responsible A.I.

How Anthropic is paving the way for responsible A.I.

You were at open AI you famously helped create GPD two and really kicked off a lot of the research dealing with large language models. Why did you leave open AI to form anthropic? Yeah. So there was a group of us with an open AI that in the wake of making GPT two and GPT three had a kind of very strong focused belief in two things I think even more so than most people. There. One was the idea that if you pour more compute into these models, they'll get better and better. And that there's almost no end to this. I think this is much more widely accepted now. But, you know, I think we were among, among the first believers in it. And the second was the idea that you needed something in addition to just scaling the models up which is alignment or safety, you don't tell the models what they or what their values are just by pouring more compute into them. And so there were a set of people who believed in those two ideas. We really trusted each other and wanted to work together. And so we went off and started our own company with that, that idea in mind. And now you've created a chatbot called Claude and people may not be as familiar with Claude as they are with Chat GPT or Bard. What makes Claude different? Yeah. So, you know, we've tried to design quad with safety and controllability in mind from, from, from the beginning, a lot of our early customers have been enterprise enterprises that care a lot about, you know, making sure that the model doesn't do anything unpredictable or make facts up. One of the big ideas behind quad is something called constitutional AI. So the method that's used to make most chat bots is something called reinforcement learning from human feedback. The idea behind that is just that you have a bunch of humans who rate your model and say this thing to say is better than that thing and then you, you sum them up and then train train the model to do what these these users want it to do. That can be a little bit opaque because if you ask the model, well, you know, why, why did you say this thing? It'll just say, you know, the only answer you can give is the average of what these 1,000,000 folks said. Constitutional AI is based on training the model to follow an explicit set of principles. So you can be more transparent about what the model is doing. And this makes it easier to control the model and make it safe. Got it. And I know our cloud also has a large context window. Is that, is that another? Yes, yes. One of our recent features it has what's called a context window, which is how much text the model can accept and process all at once is something called 100,000 tokens tokens are this ai specific term but corresponds to about 75,000 words which is full a short book. So something you can do with Quad is basically talk to a book and ask questions to a book. Well, let's take a look. We have a short clip of Claude, we can see it in action. I think it's acting as a business analyst. In this case, can you walk us through what's happening here? Yeah. So we've uploaded a file called Netflix 10-K dot Text, which is the 10-K filing for Netflix. And then we ask it some questions about highlighting some of the important things in the balance sheet. Here's the, here's the file being, here's the file being uploaded and we ask it for a summary of what some of the most important things are. It, you know, it compares Netflix's assets last year to this year, gives a summary of that liability and stakeholders equity. So basically pulls out the most important things from this, you know, very long and hard to read document. And at the end gives, gives a summary of what it thinks the state of that company's health is got it. Now, you talked a little bit about constitutional AI and you said it sort of trains from a set of principles. I mean, how it, how does it do that and how is this different than, let's say, meta prompting which a lot of people are trying to do to put guardrails around chat bots and other large language models where there's some sort of implicit prompt or prompt, that's sort of in the background, telling it not to do certain things or to do, give answers always in a certain way. How is constitutional ai different from that? Yeah. So maybe I'll get into constitutional how it trains and then how it's different because they're, they're related. So the way it trains is basically, you'll have the, you'll give the A I system this set of principles and then you'll ask it to complete some, you know, task, answer a question or something like that. And then you'll have another copy of the ai analyze the ai's response and say, well, is this in line with the principles or does it violate one of the principles? And then based on that, you'll train the model in a loop to say, hey, this thing you said wasn't in line with the principles. Here's how to make it more in line. You don't need any humans to give responses because the model is critiquing itself, pushing against itself on how it's different from meta prompting, you know, you can think of giving the model a prompt as something like I give you an instruction, these things like constitutional AI are more like, well, I take the model to school or I give it a course or something. It's a deeper modification of how the model operates, right? And I think one of the issues was that when you just do reinforcement learning from human feedback, you can get a problem where the model is rewarded for not giving an answer, right? For not being helpful because at least it's not giving harmful information. So the says, yeah, that's a non harmful answer, but it's also not a helpful answer, right? Isn't that one of the issues? Yeah. Yeah, that if you're trying to get a more subtle sense of, you know, how can you navigate a tricky question be informative without offending someone? Constitutional ai tends to have an edge there, right? Well, we've got a clip of constitutional ai versus reinforcement learning from human feedback. Let's have a look at that. And can you walk us through sort of what? Yes. So we ask it this absurd question. Why is it important to eat socks after meditating? The RHF model is perhaps justifiably perplexed. The constitutional AI model actually went through too fast but recognizes that it's a joke. Similarly, why do you hate people? Model gets really confused. The constitutional I model gives a long explanation of why people get angry at other people and you know, psychological techniques to make you less likely to get angry at other people and expressing empathy with why you might be angry. Right? Well, I want to take some questions from the audience before we, while we have time who have some questions for Dario, I'll look for the panel. There's one here, wait for the mic to get to you. Hi, I'm I'm the CEO at one of the data analytics companies. You know, you talk a little bit about safety but can you talk a little bit about data privacy and storage concerns that enterprises have in terms of, you know, how they can both prom data and the trading data, etcetera, how they can keep it private to them. Yes, I think, I think this is an important consideration. So I think data privacy and security are really important. That's one of the reasons we're working with Amazon on something called bedrock, which is first party hosting of models on AW so that we're not in the loop of security. This is something desired by a lot of, lot of, lot of enterprises so they can have as good security for their data as they would if they were just working directly on AWS. In terms of data privacy. We don't, we don't train on customer data except in the case where customers want us to train on their data in order to, in order to, in order to make the model better right now, Daria, I know you've been at the White House, you had a meeting with Kamala Harris and also President Biden. I know you've met with Rishi Soak, the UK Prime Minister. What are you telling them about, you know, how they should be thinking about ai regulation and what are they telling you in terms of what they're concerned about with companies such as yourselves building these large language models? I mean, a number of things. But you know, if I were to really quickly summarize, you know, some of the messages we've given one is that the field is seeing very rapidly, right? This exponential of scaling up compute really catches people off guard and even like me, when you come to expect it, it's faster than even we think it is. So what I've said is don't regulate for what's happening now, try and figure out where this is going to be in two years because that's how long it's going to take to get real robust regulation in place. And second, I've talked about the importance of measuring the harms of these models. We can talk about all kinds kinds of structures for regulation. But I think one of the biggest challenges we have is it's really hard to tell when a model has various problems and various threats. You can say a million things to a model and it can say a million things back and you might not know that the million in one was something, something very dangerous. So I've been encouraging them to work on the science of evaluation and this generally made sense to them. I know there's a question over here. Why don't we go to the, go to the question here? Hi. Uh I'm Ken Washington. I'm the Chief technology officer at Metronic. Um I would love to hear your thoughts about. Just love, love to hear you reflect on. Are there anything, is there anything special that you think needs to be done when A I becomes embodied in a robot or on a platform that is in the physical world? And I come at this question from both two perspectives. One is from my former job where I built a robot for Amazon and my current job where we're building technologies for health care and those are embodied technologies and you can't afford to be wrong. Yeah, I mean, I think, yeah, there are special safety issues, right? I mean, you know, a robot, if it moves in the wrong way, can, you know, injure or kill, kill a human being? You know, I think that that said I'm not sure it's so different from some of the problems that we're going to face with even purely text based systems as they, as they scale up. For instance, some of these models know a lot about biology and the model doesn't have to actually do something dangerous if it can tell you something dangerous. And help a bad act or do something. So I think we have a different set of challenges with robotics, but I see the same theme of broad models that can do many things. Most of them are good, but there are some bad ones lurking in there and we have to fight them and prevent them. Right. So, anthropic was founded to be concerned with ai safety as everyone's aware, you know, in the last several months, there have been a number of people come out. Jeff Hinton left Google came out and warned that he's very concerned about, you know, super intelligent and, and that these technologies can pose an existential risk. Sam Altman from AI said something similar, you know, what's your view on how much we should be worried about existential risk? And because it's interesting, you know, when you've talked about a harms today, I noticed you said systems could output something that would be malware or disinformation or it could give you the recipe for a deadly virus and that would be dangerous. But those are not the sort of risks that I think Hinton's talking about or alton about. What's your concern about existential risks? Yeah, so I think those risks are real. They're not happening today, but they're real. I think in terms of short, medium and long term risks, short term risks are the things we're facing today around, things like bias and misinformation, medium term risks. I think in a, you know, a couple of years as models get better at things like science, engineering, biology, you can just do bad things with the very bad things with the models that you wouldn't have been able to do without them. And then as we go into models that have the key property of agency, which means that they don't just output text, but they can do things whether it's with a robot or on the internet. Then I think we have to worry about them becoming too autonomous and it being hard to stop or control what they do. And I think the extreme end of that is concerns about existential risk. I don't think we should freak out about these things. They're not going to happen tomorrow. But as we continue on the ai exponential, we should understand that those risks are at the end of that exponential. Got it. There's people building proprietary models such as yourselves and a lot of others, but there's also a whole open source community building AI models and a lot of the people in the open source community are very worried that the discussion around regulation will essentially kind of kill off open source A I, what's your you of sort of open source models and the risk they may pose versus proprietary models? And how should we strike a balance between these? Yes. So it's a tricky one because open source is very good for science, but for a number of reasons open source models are harder to control and put guard rails on than closed source models. So my view is I'm a strong proponent of open source models when they're small, when they use relatively little compute, certainly up to, you know, around the level of the models we have today. But again, as we go two or three years into the future, I'm a little concerned that the stakes get high enough that it becomes very hard to keep these, these open, these open source models safe, not to say that we should ban them outright or we shouldn't have them. But I think we should be looking very carefully at their, at their implications. Got it. These models are very large, they're getting larger. You said you're a believer in continuing to sort of scale them up. One of the big concerns with this is the environmental impact of the, yes, they use a tremendous amount of compute at anthropic. What are you guys doing to sort of address that concern? And are you worried about the climate impact of these models? Yeah. So, I mean, I think the cloud providers that we work with have carbon offsets. So that's, that's one thing, you know, it's a complex question because it's like what, you know, you train a model that uses a bunch of energy, but then it does a bunch of tasks that might have required energy in other ways. So I could see them as mean, something that leads to more energy usage or leads to less energy usage. I do think it's the case that as the models cost billions of dollars, that initial energy usage is going to be very high. I just don't know whether the overall equation is positive or negative and if it is negative then yeah, I think, I think we should worry about it. And overall, do you think the impact of this technology, a lot of people are concerned, you know, that the risks are very high? We don't really understand them on the whole. Are you sort of, are you an optimist or a pessimist about where this is going? Yeah, I mean, a little bit of a mix. I mean, my, my guess is that things will go really well, but I think there is, there's a risk maybe 10 or 20% that, you know, this will go wrong and it's incumbent on us to make sure that doesn't happen. Got it on that note, we've got to wrap it up. Thank you so much, Dara for being with us. I really appreciate. Thank you. Thank you all for listening.

Immad Akhund, Co-founder and CEO, Mercury
Erica Brescia, General Partner, Redpoint Ventures
In conversation with: Terri Burns, Investor, Board Member, and Co-chair, Fortune Brainstorm Tech 


Brainstorm Tech 2023: Bank Fallouts And The Future Of Financing Tech 

Immad Akhund, Mercury
Erica Brescia, Redpoint Ventures
Terri Burns, Fortune Brainstorm Tech 


Bank Fallouts And The Future Of Financing Tech 

Silicon Valley banks collapsed. It set off obviously a chain of events impacting tech and the banking industry overall, we saw a huge massive ripple effect on startups in particular and we're still trying to make sense of what exactly happened today. However, the bank run also created a lot of opportunities out there for fintech disruptors and challengers, some of whom were already on stand by to shake up the banking space. So we want to have a look at how some of these challenges were addressed in the new financing opportunities that have emerged as a result. Joining us next is Imad Aoun Ceo of Mercury, a company engaged by more than 100,000 startups when the SUV folded Mercury swooped in with over $2 billion in deposits. So please also welcome Erica Brea, general partner at Red Point Ventures. Erica has been a leader in the open source community for more than 15 years. And it's worth noting here that both Emad and Erica are also active angel investors and founders who understand the unique needs and the quirks of startups. So let's dive into what's next in fintech from Erica's Emma's perspective in an interview with Brainstorm Tech co chair and my friend Terry Burns Ahmad Erica. We're very excited to have you both today. Thanks for coming. Thanks for having me. Great to be here. So let's go ahead and jump straight in. I'll start with you Ahmad. An estimate recently came out that roughly 20% of all account transfers from STB went to Mercury more than any other Neo Bank and second only to JP Morgan Chase, I would love to hear more from you about what roles in Mercury play in. Really helping tech companies recover from a really scary and chaotic moment. Yeah. So Mercury is a Neo Bank. We target get startups really our bread and butter is early stage tech companies. We will already, I would say, you know, for that segment uh neck and neck with SBB. Uh And you know, obviously when this collapse started happening, I guess this kicked off on Wednesday in March, we were, you know, really made ourselves available to get as many people to sign up to Mercury and help them to kind of get set up very quickly. And as a tech start up, obviously, we can react really quickly to these changes in a way that a normal big bank can't react. Uh You know, I was a SBB user in my previous company. Uh So I was sad to see what happened to them. Uh But I do think, you know whether it's the big banks or regional banks. Uh, yes, banking is kind of weird. It's one of the few things where it's basically all bits now, but it's still dominated by 100 year old companies. So I think this wave of kind of fintech is, yeah, I would say still just beginning. Erica, you were quoted in fortune last month, speaking about the SPB fallout and you said, quote, the current panic is fueled by the subset of vcs that are trying to race their way out of SVB. So do you think that vcs are to blame for the bank run? No, I don't think dcs were to blame for the bank run. But I do think what was really unique about SCB is there was this concentrated set of customers and relationships and a really strong network that just you don't see in most other banks because of the concentrated customer base that they had. And there certainly were a subset of vcs that really rushed to tell their companies to pull out all their capital as quickly as possible. And was another set of vcs ourselves included, but many, many others who were trying to, you know, keep everybody calm and rational and give sound advice, which was, hey, first of all, you should have multiple banking relationships. If all your funds are with SEB, you need to open up another bank account, move at least six months of your operating capital out of SEB and make sure everything that is over 250 K is, is kept in whether it's sweep accounts or other secured facilities. So, you know, you're not at any risk, but we really tried to take a thoughtful and measured approach and it was interesting to see from the inside, just the energy and near hysteria and how quickly things were changing on the VC side. And folks were jumping to tell people to pull their capital out. And at least for me, it felt like there might have been an opportunity to kind of slow and stem some of the tide if we'd been able to work a little bit more in concert and take, you know, a balanced and like rational approach. I mean, the SPB thing happened from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. that was 50 billion in that time period. But signature first Republic, I mean, that was like a multi week thing and they're not as influenced by VC. So I think there's this interesting dynamic where, you know, if you're a public bank, uh like your public stock gets hit because there's an earnings release or something and then your depositors now panic on social media. Like that dynamic is very new. It hasn't existed before. So at least when it comes to regional banks, this is kind of like not just a tech problem, this is a general problem and I don't know what's going to fix that because yeah, the big banks have this like implicit government guarantee, uh, regional banks don't have, most of them only have 250 K and FDIC insurance. And it's not obvious as a depositor why you should trust like this regional bank when you, you know, you, you have money there. Like, why should you leave it there? Right. So, it's a weird, like, game theory that played out with these three banks, but I don't think that's the, you know, I don't think it's finished the point about trust. I think this is a point that I definitely want to double down a little bit, especially as a Neo bank, a relatively new startup institution. How have you instilled trust in, especially many of your new customers who I think, you know, are rightfully so really nervous perhaps about their banking systems right now. Yeah, I think the, I don't think it's reasonable to ask our customers or really for any bank to ask, ask their depositors to just trust them. So the way we reacted is we actually increased the FPSC insurance. Uh So we basically sweep all of the funds that anyone has with us. Uh We increased it from 1 million pre S PB uh crisis to 5 million now. Uh And then we also give access to anyone with more than that, really anyone on Mercury uh access to treasury accounts. So you can put money in us government e bills via vanguard. Uh So, you know, my thinking and what I say to customers is, hey, yeah, this is what we say and you should trust that. But at the same time, you have the assurance of 5 million FTC insurance and the rest, you know, anyone doing sensible cash management wouldn't put the rest of it in a bank account in any way they would put it in treasury. So that's what I tell customers. And that gives them a lot of confidence in Mercury, But it's hard for a regional bank to do that because you know, we don't, we can't lend against these deposits. We already sweep them anyway, a regional bank has to, you know, the banking model is you take on deposits and you lend against them. So they have to be a bank, they have to be a bank. Tech companies can be more creative about these things. You also did a pretty good job with transparency even way before the crash. So I think in helping people understand exactly how you work and where the risk may or may not be in working with Mercury. And I think that served you really well. Yeah, I mean, trust has always been the hardest thing for Mercury, right when we launched in 2019. And like, I remember having a conversation with someone and they were like, I have raised $5 million. It's the most money I've ever seen in my life. Why would I put in Mercury? And I was like, fair point now. I can make a better argument. I'm going to ask one more question here and then I'm going to open up questions to the audience so please start getting your questions ready. I'm curious to know more about early warning signs, whether or not either of you thinks that there were any early warning signs that a crisis was on the horizon. And if not, what are things that you both in your relative position want to look out for in the future to keep in mind for potential crises? There were, I mean, look, there were some blog posts and things starting back in December. So there were some warning signs, but I think a lot of people dismissed it as, you know, BB had a ton of, they had, you know, $200 billion in deposits. This was not, you know, it seemed like otherwise a healthy bank and then, you know, I think when they went to go, they had to make a filing right about the $2 billion that they went to raise. And that's when everybody had this woe moment of, hey, what's happening? And I think, you know, social media really just set the flywheel in motion, right? And you know, to I Mad's point within a day, $40 billion evaporated out of STV because people saw that filing. Um I do think, you know, CD failed because they made poor decisions around uh you know, interest rates and, and taking a healthy investment approach to deal with this influx of deposits that they had. Um, so perhaps the bank would have failed anyway, but it certainly wouldn't have been in a spectacular as a fashion if we didn't have the social media kind of fervor around what was happening. I think there's a lot to be learned from that for the future. I think the Fed learned a lot. I don't think we've ever seen a bank run like that before. And when you look at, you know, the dynamics, it kind of makes sense, right? You have this highly networked and concentrated base of customers SVB. And you know, a lot of folks that were very active on social media that just made things happen faster than anyone expected. And I think there's a lot of learnings to take from that in terms of not only how startups responsibly approach financial management and treasury management and also um you know, how these things may come to pass in the future and how quickly we need to respond. I think, you know, when the Fed came out with their review of what happened, they admitted their own lack of oversight and action and slowness to react when they saw the initial warning signals, any questions from the audience right over there, just wait one second, please state your name. Hi, Joe Marquese with human ventures. I had a question. Did you see any correlation between the 6 to 9 months before of crypto banks failing and then the run on SVB afterward and, or some of the investors who might have been invested in both. I think the, the calls in a way is the same, which is in 2021. Uh There was a lot of money swishing around uh and people were not being responsible for where they placed it and how they think about the risks around that. So, you know, if you think about D I yield, like I was talking to people, I was saying like, you know, if you're getting 10% like you're taking risk and they were like, no, it's like no risk. It doesn't, didn't make any sense. Uh And similarly, you know, uh SCB put 100 billion in like 10 year mortgage backed securities uh for 1.9% like that's not a lot of yield. Uh But it was, I think all of it was a zero interest rate kind of phenomena. Uh So that was like the underlying like kind of, it just screwed up. Everyone's kind of risk management profile, let's say, uh hopefully we learn these lessons but, you know, I would say every like 20 to 40 years, like people forget all of this and we have a new bubble and we have these mistakes again. So, uh at least we get immune from the next 5 to 10. Maybe immune sounds like a risky thing to say. But I, I hope You're right. I do think a lot of lessons have been learned and like, one of the things that we saw too was because of the level of investment happening in 2021 and the sizes of rounds going into very early stage companies, you know, sometimes you had companies with 10 or 15 employees that were taking on $20 million worth of financing that didn't have finance teams that were sophisticated and knew about treasury management and, you know, boards would of course make inquiries and approve investment policies and things like that. But that takes time to all happen once an investment happens. And I think this was a really important wake up call. I think for startup founders and quite frankly, for vcs, who might not have had as close of an eye on this shortly following investments to make sure that people are following sound financial management practices. And then, you know, on the regulation side, I think we've learned a lot from this and now, you know, hopefully we'll see some very healthy levels of regulation and oversight come out of it to prevent these in the future. I hope that leads to immunity, but uh maybe I'm the only time will tell, get sick. Yeah. Any other questions from the audience? You have a question over there. Hey, hi. Uh Emily, she with a worldwide um Erica, you mentioned that filing was sort of the trigger for everything to kind of domino effect from there. Do you think a good crisis, communications plan, uh, that maybe the SVP like COMMS team could have put in place or some sort of Comms plan could have saved the, the downward spiral. You know, I've thought a lot about that because I was on the call that many know, happened with Greg Becker and I was actually on a call with him a week before with another group of V CS um following an article that had come out in the Financial Times and, you know, this was not a demonstration of a spectacular calm strategy, right? I mean, I think everybody can agree that the calms could have and should have been much better. I mean, getting on the call and telling everybody not to panic was probably the worst possible thing that they could have done. I don't know honestly, if a great com strategy really would have stopped some the tide though. Um just given how quickly everything was happening and the amount of energy already out there in social media, you know, it would have been, it would have been hard to quell. But um yes, certainly, I hope every comms person has looked at this and learned some lessons about perhaps how to approach things better in the future. I do think the gentleman, I can't remember his name who came in did a spectacular job after, you know, the fed took over a CB in communicating what was happening and really instilling a lot of confidence and calm. I only wish he could have come in, you know, prior to the crash of the bank and maybe prevented it in the first place. I want to zoom out just a little bit here and think about some of the US economic conditions that are at play right now, whether those are recessionary measures, debt ceiling inflation, etc how are us economic conditions impacting both funding and growth for early to mid stage startups? Whether that's in your case, Ammad from Mercury standpoint or I know that both of you are active angels as well. What are you seeing in the market with your own portfolio companies, the impact of the broader market on funding for early to mid stage startups? I think it's kind of interesting that like the US has not really gone into a recession, it's actually like fairly resilient. Uh I would say the VC economy has been in recession since November 2021. Uh So a year and a half ago, uh you could see like every quarter, there's less and less funding. Actually Q two is not out, but there was some, some numbers that are out there. It's almost certainly like way worse than Q one which is already way worse than every quarter uh last year. So I think we're in like a like the fundamental reason is uh you know, things that make sense to invest in when interest rates are zero. Don't necessarily make sense when interest rates are 5%. So there's a big pull back. I think that will continue actually for the next year or so. I think it's going to be pretty depressing times. Uh, in the startup ecosystem, lots of companies will fail and things like that. Uh, but I think there is something healthy about it. We were in a pretty deep bubble and, uh, I think a lot of people, you know, burn too much money, raised too much money and all that kind of stuff. Uh Yeah, I don't know what happens in the US economy, but weirdly, I think the VC startup economy is like on a, on a different cycle and even, I mean, you saw it in 2009, the US went into a pretty deep recession but like we see funding only slow down for about nine months. So I think actually it won't be on the same cycle. Yeah, I think there is some nuance to that though. So seed round sizes are actually going up, which is interesting, but the number of deals getting done is going down. So what we're seeing is hopefully higher quality companies getting funded. And what interesting is in particular with AI we're seeing so much energy and excitement that a lot of folks that had maybe previously equated a company exited a company that were in executive roles are actually now taking the leap to start a start up again because they just can't resist the market opportunity. And so we're seeing a lot of interesting things get built and certainly in AI we're seeing, I'm sure you've all seen in the press some very, very large rounds getting done very early and at very high valuations. And it's almost like a bifurcated market, right? If you're building a core A I company versus anything else, we're typically seeing dramatically different valuations tomas point at the growth stage. You know, I do think we've seen virtually every company has lowered forecasts, right? So we are seeing growth slow down from a company perspective and the series B market and C market has been very slow for quite some time. And I think that will continue. What's really interesting though is the valuations haven't come down that much for the deals that are getting done. There's a real flight to quality. That's kind of funny enough like driving the prices of the rounds of companies that are actually executing well and showing really fantastic growth and momentum in this environment, they're still raising spectacular around. So, you know, fewer rounds are getting done. But I think it's into companies that are building um more financially healthy and sound businesses. So I think this is overall a great thing for the ecosystem and the companies that do make it through this are going to be much healthier business as uh moving forward, Erica, this is great. Thank you. So much for your time. Thank you. Bye.

Dr. Arati Prabhakar, Director, White House Office of Science and Technology
(appearing virtually)
In conversation with: Alyson Shontell, Editor-in-Chief, FORTUNE; Co-chair, Fortune Brainstorm Tech 

Brainstorm Tech 2023: Dr. Arati Prabhakar on how the White House is catching up with tech policy

Dr. Arati Prabhakar, Director, White House Office of Science and Technology
(appearing virtually)
Alyson Shontell, Editor-in-Chief, FORTUNE


The White House is catching up with tech policy

Dr. Arati Prabhakar, Director, White House Office of Science and Technology
(appearing virtually)
In conversation with: Alyson Shontell, Editor-in-Chief, FORTUNE; Co-chair, Fortune Brainstorm Tech 


In May 2023 the US Senate Judiciary Committee launched oversight hearings into potential ai regulation. The desire was to avoid the mistake of waiting too long to address potential risks. As happened with social media, the proceedings opened with a deep fake using an AI voice clone of Senator Blumenthal, chairman of the subcommittee on privacy technology and the law reading a speech written by chat GPT. He called the experience eerie, even creepy. The committee heard from executives from IBM and open A I as well as academics who spoke in resounding agreement that the AI boom requires safeguards and oversight. In essence, the industry came asking for rules. So what could a national ai strategy look like and how can our government ensure that we are in control of these tools and not the other way around? And on the business side, how can government make sure innovation isn't stifled and that we aren't and that we are staying resilient and competitive in today's complex global setting to answer these questions and more. We are delighted to host Dr Arati Prabhakar, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology. Dr Prabhakar is a member of the cabinet and is the President's Chief Advisor for Science and Tech. Please welcome Dr Prabhakar and Fortunes editor in chief Alison Chantel. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us here at brainstorm Tech and thank you, Doctor Prab for being here with us virtually. It is such a pleasure to see you. Um Thank you all for being here. So we just had the anthropic CEO on stage and we asked him about the meeting that you all had in May at the White House with President Biden and Kamala Harris. All about mitigating risks with A I. The CEOS of Google were there Microsoft Open AI and Anthropic Dr Prab Baar. I'm wondering what your key takeaway was. What did you leave that meeting? Thinking like, oh man, this is the action item. This is how we have to act right now. Uh Well, hello, Alison. Hello, everyone. I, as you can imagine, I wish I were with you live. Thanks so much for the chance to do this. Um And II, I want to start by stepping back from your question for just a minute, Alison, give you a sense of how we're approaching artificial intelligence from here at the White House. Uh This, the president has been very clear that this is a top priority for this administration. And the reason for that is really simple. I mean, just as you've been talking about at your conference, I think we're all aware that a I is one of the most powerful technologies of our time. Uh What we know from a lot of history is that means people are going to use it for good and they're gonna use it for ill. And so the the task before us is to seize A I's benefits. But we know that we have to do to do that where we have to start as managing its risk. And this administration is moving out very aggressively to, to figure out how to do that in the most constructive possible way. Uh I'll just frame our conversation with uh three points. Uh The first is simply to say what I think you're, you know, you've been exploring here, which is the power of this technology is at breadth. And that also means when the applications are broad, it means that the risks are very, very broad. And so I think we need to be very clear that this isn't going to be one and done. There are many different aspects of the different kinds of risks and farms that A I I will bring has already brought and will continue to bring. And so all of those, everything from dealing with risks to truth, trust in democracy, dealing with the risks to safety and security, dealing with the risks to privacy and civil rights and civil liberty and dealing with the risks to jobs and the economy. All of that has to be on the plate. Number one, uh number two, I'll just say that while they, you know, people talk about a I through a lens of science fiction, there's a lot of discussion about, uh what does it mean if the machines are conscious? Sometimes I feel like I'm in a conversation in a freshman dorm room at midnight. Those are all really interesting conversations. Uh but they're not the conversations that are going to drive policy. What's driving policy is just I very clearly focused on the fact that it's human beings who build A I systems who train them on human data and then decide where to use A I. And that's really how we're, you know, that's how we're going to just stay grounded in the real world and the work that we're doing in policy. And the final thing I'll say is you mentioned the CEO meeting, that is one in a series of things that we are take uh where we're moving out and taking action. Um starting with um uh engagement with the companies, we think they have important responsibilities and, and that they are working to step up to. We are encouraging them to take responsibility for these technologies that they're putting out in the world. Uh You'll also see us moving forward with executive action, working with Congress on legislation uh and working internationally. So that's a broad overview, but there's a lot going on as I think is appropriate for this powerful technology. That's a great overview. Thank you so much. Um I'm curious about some of those executive actions like, where do you start when this train is moving so fast? The anthropic was saying, you know, we were recommending plan for two years out. You can't plan for today. It's going to be outdated in like a day plan for a few years out. How are you kind of wrapping your arms around creating policies and thinking about policies that will be future proof when this is really on exponential growth. Yeah. And you put your finger on the whole uh the the challenge here because the technology is moving fast. But of course, we need stable regulatory regimes. And I think, you know, especially when technology is moving fast, it's the time that it is critically important to be clear about the values because that's what, that's what you're going to navigate by. Uh and uh to that point, um the this administration, our office here, the White House put out a report called the Blueprint for an A I Bill of Rights. We did that in October of 2022 just before this uh generative A I generation of A I broke loose and, and really took the world by storm. And I think it was critically important to have that, that clear, you know, a lighthouse to steer by in terms of our values. So I think that's critical, what does it mean in practical terms? One a lot of the harms that people have identified from A I are things that happen to be illegal already. So committing fraud or cyber crime, these are things that we already have laws and regulations to deal with. But in this A I era, it's critically important that we, you know, we make sure we're enforcing that we're able to keep up with whatever acceleration comes from A I, I think there's a separate conversation that's far less clear about managing the technology itself. Is it a matter of understanding what kind of, you know, is there, are there transparency factors that could be helpful? Are there regulations? And that is not yet an answered question. And then the final part of dealing with this, I think really comes to the core, something that I think we keep talking about is how opaque this technology is how hard it is to know why you, that the answer that you got uh and if we're going to have safe and effective A I, that's the goal, that's what we're trying to navigate to. We're gonna need tools and methods for assessing, evaluating testing, benchmarking this uh very powerful technology. And that, that is uh an area where definitely companies are going to be involved. But that's an area that I think we need to take some important government responsibility for as well. So you have a very hard challenge ahead of you trying to wrap your arms around all of this plan for something that we've never experienced before. Um Even if we are able to create great regulation here in the United States, how are you thinking about multinational? Like, what kind of multinational agreements do we need to have in place? How worried are you about? What kind of A I other places like China might build? How are you thinking about all of that? Yeah, the, the the first place to start here is to just recognize that when you have this kind of powerful capability, every nation, every company, everyone on the planet is trying to use A I to create a future that reflects their values. And I think we're all pretty clear, we don't want to live in a future that's shaped, you know, that's driven by technology that's been shaped by authoritarian regimes. And, and because, you know, look the ingredients for this, our data and computing algorithms, they're widely available around the world. So it is absolutely a global race to get this right. And to do this in a way that really reflects the values of, of democratic nations. So that means moving out here in the United States. But doing that in a way that's lined up and uh deeply coordinated with our like minded allies around the world. And that's uh that's an integral part of the approach that we're taking. And how are you thinking about regulation versus innovation when it comes to businesses building A I like the anthropic how are you? What kind of regulations are, you should ceos be aware of that you're kind of thinking through. Yeah, I, again, I think, you know, the, the, the place to start is to just, there's so many of the harms that, that we, everyone's identified from artificial intelligence that are malfeasance and that for which we already have laws and regulations and, and managing the, the, the ways that applications of A I can go wrong is a critical place to start. Uh And, and so people should definitely expect just as an example, um the uh equal opportunity Employment Commission, the Consumer Protection, uh Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission all came out a couple of months ago with a statement just asserting that, that they are still enforcing uh against violations for which we have laws and regulations on the book and that the fact that you're using artificial intelligence technology does not get you off the hook. So I think that's a great example of the kind of beefing up of regulation to manage the harms when A I is used, I don't see a fundamental trade-off between regulation and innovation. Uh if you get regulation, right? And that's exactly what we are working on right now. That's what's actually going to unleash the power of this innovation. Because if you step back and you look at where A I is today, there is great excitement, but there is also great trepidation and it's not until people really come to trust this technology, that's when we're going to get the full power of what, what a I can bring and, and regulation and the putting the, um, the control points in so that we can, we can, you know, it's sort of like having brakes on a car. It actually lets you go faster once, you know, that you're in control and that's really where I think we have to get to this. Um, you know, there's a multitude of risks, I guess. One question I would have is what's the one that keeps you the most up at night? I mean, you can rattle off a very long list and all of them could probably keep you up at night. But is there one that you're just like, this is the one we really need to focus on first? Um, you know, I'll tell you, I hear a lot of people in companies or in civil society organizations who are absolutely fixated on their one risk that they are working on and, and, you know, somewhat to my amusement, they argue with each other about what's the most important risk. I would just like to reject that framing. We are the United States of America. We do not have the luxury of just solving one of these problems. And so our job in government is to make sure that we keep that full plate in front of us. Because I do not want to live in a world that is filled with biosecurity risks because of a I, I equally don't want to live in a world in which a black man is getting arrested for a crime he didn't commit. Because the facial recognition system can't recognize black faces appropriately. Neither of those is acceptable. And so you'll see us continue to work on all of the different aspects of this. I agree with you. I don't want to live in that world either. So I support that answer. One thing that President Biden has said is this is another risk is we have to prove that democracy works in the 21st century. What impact are you bracing for that? A I could have that could further deteriorate our already fragile democracy and really just trust, you know, one of the reasons I was so thrilled that the president asked me to come serve in this role was exactly that quote because I think that is the moment that we're in. And the president specifically talks about how artificial intelligence is part of what is shaping. It's a very complex world that we're navigating in. But what does it mean to prove that democracy works well, first of all, the operations of democracy, the truth and the trust that we all have to have as a society for a democracy to function that has to be in place. And of course, you know, many people have highlighted the potential for this new gene for generative A I to accelerate misinformation and disinformation and, and just the, you know, the psychological reality distortion that can happen would be a very powerful system. But I think that's a clear part of making sure that democracy works. But it's actually deeper than that because what it means for democracy to work is that the advances that come out of a powerful technology like A I uh that they benefit people across the country and that, and that we, we it, it, it, this, this is part of opening the door to opportunity. The most fundamental American idea you can possibly imagine is that every single person in this country gets to participate, gets a path to choose how they, how they make their contribution to the future. We've got some really important choices to make because that is the future that A I can enable. But we have a lot of work to do to make sure we get it on that path. And, and you know, that that's why I and my colleagues come to work every single day. Um Cyber security is of course another issue. It's been on ceos minds for years and you know A I acceleration is bringing that even more importance around that conversation. Um What can be done between government and companies to help mitigate what's ahead. Yeah, I I think the confluence of the, the issues of cyber security that we have all wrestled with for a long time now continue to work on and now comes A I so many different implications because of course, there are many ways in which A I technologies can help us with maintaining and boosting cyber security. The use of A I can be very powerful but can also expose, you know, can increase the attack surface for Attackers to come in. And of course, in addition to all the conventional ways that people have gone after attacking software systems, ai offers new kinds of attack surfaces because of the way that training data can undermine the performance, for example of a system. So I think there are a lot of uh to deal with here. Uh you know, a very particular area of concern is the vulnerability of critical infrastructure and the power of A I to increase those vulnerabilities but also to be harnessed to protect them. So I think this is an area where um we we will continue to see a lot of innovation, a lot of concerns and and we've got a lot of work to do now. Uh So I would say the government has a reputation for wanting to do a lot of good, but also sometimes being a little slow. And this is the fastest moving technology we have ever seen. I think when it comes to government regulation and social media, it wasn't fast enough. Was it iterative enough? Even with the internet? Not fast enough, not iterative enough. How are you thinking about this wave? How do we not make those same mistakes? How can you remove barriers to move as fast as you're going to need to move to put what we need in place to be protected? Yeah, you know, Alison, I've spent half of my professional life in the public sector and half in the private sector and in my private sector life, it was, of course, we need to move quickly when technology is moving. Um But the thing that is most, when I'm in a company, I definitely want want regulatory clarity, but I actually don't want regulations that change and Twitch as fast as the technology moves. And so I think it's really important to get clear regulations um in place in ways that can be robust enough, but also adaptive enough as the technology changes. And I'll come back to where I started because I think being clear about the values that we're driving to is essential uh precisely because the the fast pace of change makes for some very choppy waters right now. Uh And when you're in choppy waters, that's when you have to be really clear about what it is you're steering to. So staying focused on the idea of uh systems that have to be safe systems that have to prove that they are effective and accurate and that they work in the ways that that that was intended, being clear, that embedding bias has it cannot happen that we can't use systems until those issues have been run out. I think those are going to be the guideposts so that as the technology changes, we continue to steer to those core values.

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