Last week, hundreds of AI pioneers, builders, and leaders gathered in San Francisco for TEDAI, an event curated and organized by the brilliant Sam & Walter De Brouwer, in collaboration with TED.

Some of the greatest thinkers and doers in the industry took the stage and brought thoughtful and practical conversations about how AI is changing our social fabric across disciplines and industries. Through TED Talks style presentations and live demonstrations, attendees got a deep dive into the opportunities and challenges driven by the acceleration of technology. 

image credit: TEDAI

The agenda covered a wide range of subjects  - from workforce transformation, and navigating issues like copyright, defense, and geopolitics, to AI's role in reshaping communication, fostering creativity, enhancing social connections, accelerating drug development, and strengthening cybersecurity.

As a volunteer I had the opportunity to not only feel the buzz on-the-ground, but also listen to both days of insightful conversations. Some highlights included:

Day 1 - TED Talks  @ Herbst Theater

Language, Science and Humanity, How Far Can We Go?
Speakers: Carlo Rovelli (Theoretical Physicist & World’s 50 Top Thinkers), Jessica Coon (McGill University), Jakob Uszkoreit (Inceptive Nucleics), Pratyusha Sharma (MIT), Surya Ganguli (Stanford & a16z), Max Jaderberg (Isomorphic Labs), Guillaume Verdon (Extropic & Creator of TensorFlow Quantum)

Infrastructure, Dependence and Governance, Why Does it Matter?
Speakers: Sebastien De Halleux (Field AI), Illia Polosukhin (NEAR Protocol), Reid Hoffman (Inflection AI & Greylock), Julia Boorstin (CNBC), Eugenia Kuyda (Replika), Paul Scharre (Center for a New American Security), Ethan Mollick (Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania), Ben Zhao (University of Chicago), Emilia Gomez (Joint Research Centre, European Commission)

Intelligence, Scale and Architecture, What’s Next?
Speakers: Joelle Pineau (Meta), Noam Brown (OpenAI), Stephanie Zhan (Sequoia Capital), Tri Dao (Together AI, Stanford & Princeton University), Karan Goel (Cartesia), Pedro Domingos (University of Washington)

image credit for first two pics: TEDAI (last one is me)

Day 2 - Panels & Interactive Sessions @ SHACK15 in San Francisco's Ferry Building

Acceleration/Deceleration in AI
Speakers: Guillaume Verdon, Igor Kurganov (Former top-ranked poker player), Reed Albergotti (Semafor)

Human-Centered AI
Speakers: Tim Davis (Modular), Diyi Yang (Stanford), Nancy Xu (Moonhub AI), Panos Madamopoulos (Stanford’s HAI Institute).

AI and Agents
Speakers: Noam Brown, Omar Shaya (MultiOn), Alex Reibman (AgentOps), Sarah Allali (Floode), Jeremiah Owyang (Blitzscaling Ventures & Llama Lounge)

For additional insights, check out coverage from your news experts over at VentureBeat, Ars Technica, and Axios.

Every speaker brought engaging and thought-provoking insights, but my favorite participant is an easy choice: Enchanted Tools’ Miroka robot, which delighted the event with its bubble-blowing antics both on stage and on the demo floor!

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