It has been a roller coaster of excitement and anticipation helping plan and execute the first ever TED conference focused on artificial intelligence. For the past 5 months, the cred team has been working closely with TED as leads on the speaker experience team. This week, we saw it come to life at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco. Here are some of our highlights from behind the scenes.
Speakers were top notch. From Shane Legg (DeepMind) to Ilya Sutskever (OpenAI), Andrew Ng (DeepLearning.AI), Cathie Wood (Ark Invest), Jim Fan (Nvidia), Pelonomi Moiloa (Lelapa AI) and so many more—full list of speakers here—these really are the brightest minds in AI out there today. Not only are they some of the brainiest people on the planet, we also found they are genuine, humble, and just plain nice. The speaker room backstage was buzzing all day. It was such a pleasure getting to know them and their fantastic teams.
A few things we learned about AI.
AI is moving quickly. In 2018, Max Tegmark spoke at TED and predicted artificial general intelligence (AGI) would happen within the next few decades. Yesterday, speaking at TED AI, he moved that timeline up to the next 2-3 years! As the motto of the event declares, we must “brace for impact.”
AI has the potential to do a lot of good. Aviv Regev explored AI’s potential to harvest data to generate personalized treatment for patients and Eric Topol stated, “AI will have the most transformative Impact in the history of medicine.” Reid Hoffman and Kevin Scott had a conversation about the potential for AI to amplify human intelligence and Oak Felder talked about the power of AI to enhance—not replace—artists, writers, and producers of music.
It also has the potential to do a lot of harm. Agnieszka Pilat described intelligent machines as children with the whole of humanity parenting them. She warned that when we disseminate hate and techno-pessimism online, where machines learn how to behave, we’re turning our fears into a self-fulling prophecy. Phebe Vayanos talked about the populations being left behind by AI—those most vulnerable. She said, “When designing AI for marginalized and vulnerable groups, we need to ensure it is capable of integrating their values and moral priorities.” And Percy Liang urged for data transparency and accountability in AI.
It takes a village. It was incredible to see more than 120 volunteers come together to make the event happen. It was especially fun to work alongside the speaker experience lead, Amanda Mork, and one of cred’s partner agencies Hatch. Their team did an amazing job getting top-notch editors at the event and fantastic coverage of the conference on Fast Company, VentureBeat, and more.
Curator Sam De Brouwer is a genius. She and Walter De Brouwer pulled together an amazing group of leading voices in the AI space with incredible content, perfectly curated along the way. According to Chris Anderson during the closing remarks of Day 1, we had all just experienced the most amount of TED content in one day in the history of TED. Now that is an accomplishment!
We can’t wait to see you all there next year. 🚀
Need help planning an event or getting out speaking? Hit us up!
