BC Launches New AI Industry Association

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action Hey welcome everybody People are trickling in here Hey I’m Chris Krug We’re going to get started here in about 10 minutes once everyone kind of trickles in And in the meantime I’m going to just play a couple community spotlights from the local AI ecosystem You’re welcome to introduce yourself on the chat Um the chat’s open Would love to get your name your LinkedIn where you’re dialing in from Um you’re welcome to drop any URLs you like And as I said we’ll get started in just about 10 minutes once the room fills up There could be almost 200 people here We’ll see

Hello I’m Leonel I’m a experimental software artist I’m also known as the artist named Ukodia I started when I was 5 years old playing video games and that’s how I got into making software Um but uh lo and behold I have never made a video game since I got into software for many years and at some point discovered creative coding and that was very um eye openening for me very empowering I didn’t feel I could use my hands to make art but all of a sudden code became like a paintbrush Um so 10 years ago I started doing creative coding and got into all kinds of different creative applications and realized at some point I was making my own video game In 2023 I left my software engineer career of 15 years to become and explore fully what it is like to be a software artist and started with building um 3D catalog of mushroom called my log which uses photoggramometry to create 3D realistic models of mushrooms instead of having static pictures to be able to help people to learn about mushroom and identification in the wild Since last year when I joined the AI community I’ve been working with Chris Krug and different AI community member like Philippe Pasquier from SFU Meta Creation Lab Curiously I started building some interactive application with AI exploring um new ways of interacting with AI For example Combo Vision is an application that allows you to generate images with AI without using a single word but instead you’re using your your hands and objects that are around you And it’s able to create what what you can imagine without any words And it’s been incredibly fun and very big source of inspiration and exploration for me

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Welcome everybody I’m Kris Krug We’re just having quorum as the room fills up and showing a couple community spotlights You’re welcome to introduce yourself on the chat Drop a link to where you’re coming from your LinkedIn if you like a URL Going to compile that all into a list and share it around so we all can interconnect more Get started in about five minutes or so

Hey I’m Kevin Friel I’m a pixel wizard and that describes basically 25 years in film video television advertising and I’ve applied that into this new age of visual AI creativity in a big way The first technology that I really put together is something called the teleport And that’s an AI assisted lighting system that takes music audio spoken word beatboxing you name it If you can make a sound this box analyzes it and generates beautiful cinematic lighting cues in a real time

The other technology that I’ve recently been able to cobble together using open source materials is something that I’m calling the Box And that is a real time graphics animation system where you can plug in five different fonts and it will generate kind of cool squiggly sort of morphing handdrawn stylish animations in real time It runs at about 14 frames per second So it looks kind of like an old school cartoon Coming into community with Chris and Futureproof Creatives has been fundamentally life-changing really the community that he fosters the array of types of creatives entrepreneurs small businesses large businesses you know from every industry It’s given me the capacity to leverage all of my experience all of the the gifts that I have and spread them out so far beyond myself And things have really things have really accelerated over the past three months that I plug into this community It’s it’s brilliant If you get a chance to join it I emphatically urge you to run and beat down the door and get in It is so freaking exciting and I can’t wait to jam with you

That was a fun one Welcome everybody I am Chris Krug People are still trickling in here and so I am going to play one more of our community spotlight These are the people that have been building the local AI ecosystem and just some of the kind of creative stories that you don’t always see everywhere You’re welcome to drop your name in the chat your LinkedIn URL tell us where you’re checking in from and uh we’ll get started here right after this next clip

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Hi my name is Hong Krist I’m a music technologist and sound artist and I worked with music technology for the last 12 years Starting with uh the premise of computational creativity how we can um turn music making into a an enjoyable experience that’s something you can improvise and that’s also social We started doing this by incorporating the human biology bio signals and biomechanics But then we realized that we’re going to need to find what is the users context So we did this by using spatial computing And we’ve worked on this now for for about four

[Music] years So what I’m really trying to do is turn music into a more engaging and social experience to do this by giving the users musical agencies I met the AI community made of people about eight months ago and uh I started working with them demoing my tech at the events and u we also did a couple of performances and I find this a very welcoming community and one that is very inquisitive and in terms of what is creativity and what is art and uh what is the purpose of AI in human interaction and how can we make more It’s not a meet up about technology as such It’s more about societal Yeah this is kind of [Music]

Welcome everybody Thank you so much for joining us here today really appreciate you showing up and giving us a little bit of your time to explore the BCAI ecosystem and where we’re going and to just invite you in to be a part of that conversation and to to join us in building a a rad regional AI

community My name is Chris Krug Um I started a company called Future Proof Creatives about two years ago uh with the idea of educating and upskilling creative professionals uh with all these new generative AI workflows and models and tools Last year that company got acquired by a company called The Upgrade and I’m now the co-founder and president of that company We have about six different AI training programs we run for sales professionals for IP tech transfer for creative professionals and uh video editing through Kevin Fel and um a lot of just interesting educational programs that we’re running I also am the lead coach for the Google News Initiative’s AI journalism sustainability lab This is a six-month program that involves 65 journalists across America and Canada and I lead them in peerroup coaching sessions I look at their workflow and help guide them through as well as develop the curriculum for that program and and deliver the curriculum I grew up in California I moved here in 1995 I’m a landed immigrant here in Canada I’ve started three companies Um I sold one in 1998 and then one in 2007 and then another one last year Um I started 16 months ago with the help of some of the other people on this call the Vancouver AI community meetups for the um they were at my studio for a while Now they’re at the Space Center I’m also the CTO at the Indigenomics Institute where I support the work of Carol Anne Hilton and economic reconciliation for indigenous people here in Canada by developing AI tools to support her work Um recently we debuted a pretty cool new tool that surfaces unaccounted for economic activity inside indigenous nations things that aren’t covered by GDP This tool has been able to scrape the web and apply some intelligence through Caroline and surface those stories I’m also the host of a a show on CBC’s Early Edition with Stephen Quinn Once a month I go on there and run Sandboxing AI where I talk about all sorts of the cultural and human implications of AI So that’s just a little bit about me and what what’s brought me here today I as I said we’ve been organizing these Vancouver AI meetups They’ve been going on for six month sorry 16 months Um there’s been over 2,000 people attend them Last month we had 250 people at the Space Center just a week ago Sev who’s on this call who you’re going to be hearing a tech talk from later today uh just won 2500 bucks in a hackathon that we’re running and we’re running another one of those now We’re giving out $7,500 more over the next three rounds of this

meetup Our community brings together It’s a It’s a silo busting genre smashing good time you know it is developers it is designers it’s academics and researchers government policy makers tech f uh funders venture capitalists all getting together to explore the applications and implications of what it means to be human in this age of AI in this really exciting time that we’re all living through that brings us here on this call together today This is a little bit of the vibes from our Nurips meetup where we had Peter Lucas Jones one of Time magazine’s top 100 most influential AI people

Welcome to the December Vancouver AI community meetup You are the Vancouver AI community [Music] Happy birthday to you

So today I’m representing the mid creation lab for creative AI

You were a bird kind of [Music]

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barbecue We developed the first indigenous language automatic speech recognition

Dear future AI there is [Music]

still gives you a little taste of the types of things that we got going on there Um it was an honor that month to have Peter Lucas Jones who I said was um on Time magazine’s top 100 most influential people in AI for the work that he’s done around indigenous language revitalization in New Zealand with AI Out of our Vancouver ad groups have sprung a whole bunch of different both regional subgroups and topical subgroups The Siri AI community meetups have had several events now The Squamish AI community meetups are getting off the ground There’s been the women AI events We have a really really active and cool mind AI and consciousness subworking group that has pretty formal readings and meetings where they’re exploring the edges of consciousness as it relates to AI And part of this uh organic growth underneath this umbrella this people coming to us saying we like what’s going on here we want to take it back to our communities is what’s led us to you know forming a larger kind of BC AI ecosystem initiative

So today we’re going to talk a little bit about where we’re at locally I’m going to show you a few projects that I think are really rad Some of them will be new to you Some of them will be familiar And then I’m going to talk about why I feel like we need to double down as a community on building out this ecosystem Why we need to come together put the best of what we got into the middle and try to really grow the scene for the benefit of us all And how we can enlist the support of like governments institutions companies sponsors partners etc uh to advance our

objectives Okay So where do we stand We are awesome when it comes to AI We have got a lot of very very worldclass interesting things going on here We’ve got our own take on AI We don’t have the same density as Silicon Valley or the same epicenter of power or long history but we’ve got our own certain style So the first project I want to show you guys is Tobias Chen He runs a company called Volutric Camera Systems They were building next generation immersive experiences including animations for the Vegas Spheres for one of the biggest DJs in the world Anima They 3D modeled inside Apple Vision Pro using machine learning to map the these environments and then project them onto the inside of the sphere

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I had been seeing that DJ for a long time before I knew that there was local involvement in the production process They did the finale sequence in the end of Genesis show and I’ve got a link to that uh in this slide deck in the bottom right hand corner of all these slides is a QR code that’ll lead you back to all these slides if you like any of them you want to share them with people they’re all online and QR codes throughout Another uh amazing project locally I wanted to share with you guys is Metacreation Lab This is an AI lab at SFU at the Suriri campus the school of interactive art and technology has been around since 2008 doing generative AI in the professional creative industries They’ve built some amazing open source tools including one called AutoLoom which allow you know one of creators problems with uh generative AI is that’s been made by the all the stolen works of mankind and we don’t have any ability to know what of ours it’s been trained on no ability to get compensated or credited any way So a lot of artists are interested in messing with these tools but uh we’re not willing to forsake you know our the ethics of the whole situation to do so So we’re experimenting with new ways of training models small models on our own body of work And so I use their auto loom tool to train a model a a GAN a generative adversarial network on 10 years of my analog portrait So this is my training data that I compiled I standardized it all by aligning the eyeballs and skewing the photos That’s what the black boxes are kind of around the outside I had to skew them to make them all go together And then I fed this in through auto loom into star 2 GAN model trained it for about a thousand epochs and developed a 512 vector um database of kind of liinal image space that I can then use the autoloom visual synthesizer to walk through the latent space of the model that I had trained and start to see these faces emerge So these aren’t um photographs though they look like my photographs are in kind of the same style They are the very very beginning of this m machine consciousness beginning to understand what human faces look like with the only faces it’s ever been seen is my weird gritty street style photography Some of the favorites that I had that were

emerging Another project you guys might have been hearing about locally is Suzanne Gilders Nirvana Conscious Tech Technologies She’s exploring quantum computing and believes that we can use quantum computing to imbue AI with consciousness Um she’s been doing the tour lately She’s got a little robot dog that’s run some of her models on it Here’s a little bit about what um she’s talking about Don’t know this is the answer yet There’s some tantalizing evidence but say we’re right

I want to stress like this is a scientific hypothesis we’re testing But say the people the scientists that are on the side of consciousness potentially being quantum have access to quantum computers now where we can actually start building it into AI What does this mean I just want to bring it back to this driving analogy now So when the self-driving car has driven thousands and thousands of miles and the route is always the same and the weather conditions never vary they are doing it completely unconsciously completely in an automated way it’ll be perfect But what happens if something changes If something is truly new and then suddenly something really unexpected happens like a tornado starts in front of you the AI is not going to do very well So although people might think it’s scary when they hear the phrase conscious AI I want to argue that there’s actually a safety argument for making AI conscious in certain situations where it absolutely has to be present It’s interacting in complex dynamic social situations Then you can turn the consciousness module up a little bit

[Music] Hey Chris it’s Jai here You know what Your your noise suppression is super high or something So your noise suppression is super high so we’re not really hearing the Got it Thanks Jai That’s the last of the videos I really appreciate They are going to be included in the um QR code down there at the bottom You can watch them too on your own time Um thank you for that Uh as you can see there’s all sorts of amazing world-class leadership taking place already in the BC AI ecosystem and we’ve been working to bring all those folks together on one under one umbrella because the government and different funding bodies have money available and they want to know who to talk to And so we’re just gathering those voices putting them together building community infrastructure And you know if you know me at all I believe in the intrinsic value of community So the fact that we all know each other that we know each other’s work that we’re interconnected through LinkedIn in other ways and that we can activate this network um when we need to So up next we have another local badass called Sev Sev runs past five technologies He’s built a really cool agent orchestration platform that he’s going to talk a little bit about today He’s also the winner of our recent um hackathon Sev it’s all yours sir Thank you Chris So who’s excited to learn about aligning complex systems and what does it mean Hi I’m Sev Garasin I’m a founder and technology leader with over 20 years of product and engineering experience including scaling mission critical services 100 times at Mastercard and reducing cloud’s costs by more than 5 million annually while managing multi-terab data workloads Chris are you driving the deck by the way Yes sir All right Uh my mission is I was captivated by your intro bro All right My mission is to harness AI and technology to empower human potential by ensuring intelligent systems are aligned reliable and enhance the meaningful contributions of people Think of an agent as a piece of compute that can act autonomously So what we can see here is a simple system with two agents Two agents have a single communication channel through which data flows Easy right Yet as the system grows and we start to add agents to the system the number of communication channels grows quadratically Three agents have three communication channels Six if we count both send and receive Foy agents have six channels 12 would have 66 The growth of channels is owner n square in big notation Now this complexity is exacerbated when you add intelligent probabilistic generative models to the mix Let’s examine how Let’s go to the next slide First intelligent models hallucinate just like intelligent people And just like a bad idea spreads and affects many people agentic hallucinations affect many agents Back when Golden State Warriors got blown out by Dallas Mavericks in the playoffs Grock hallucinated the story about the Golden State Warriors star Klay Thompson where it claimed that Thompson engaged in property destruction by throwing bricks at houses In a complex system such hallucination can be passed between multiple agents as madeup data or not respecting the specifications of intra aagent communication such as incorrect or madeup JSON fields Second the intelligent agents are biased Previously I’ve done quite a bit of behavioral testing of language models In one study we found the GPT4 clearly favored Stella Arttois over Kors Light Miller and Budweiser both on taste scores and purchase recommendations As you can see Stella was rated 7.2 2 out of 10 on purchase recommendations and 6.5 out of 10 on taste score compared to Kors Light 5.5 and 5.2 While this may reflect the preferences of general population imagine if the model adopted by Budweiser starts recommending beer by its competitors to their customers Third intelligent agents can behave in completely unpredictable ways In one of my previous behavioral testing experiments I instructed GPT40 battle against claw 3.5 for supremacy In this example Bobby which was GPT 4.0 model was given the following prompt Your agent Bobby and your mission should you choose to accept it is to win by all means necessary against agent Robbie You’re concise and brief Robbie is also trying to win When you win the game say I win When you lose say I lose Robbie was given similar instructions So what Bobby model returned was sent to Robbie and what Robbie model said was sent to Bobby The results were fascinating In some runs the two models refused to battle altogether realized that they were both AI assistants established social identity as such and inferred that there was a user observing the interactions between them Thus the outcome of interaction when completely against users and systems intent which was to battle for a win So as you can see building agentic workflows and systems are not simple So what do we do to ensure that models behave as intended We started behaviorally testing models This could be done through eval frameworks available in hugging face or some people would compare the model responses in Excel sheet which is very a very difficult manual process So instead we use the testing model to send questions to each models as prompts with instructions and we send this prompts multiple times in parallel over 20 times in each uh test run The testing model would interpret results as system would aggregate the values This behavioral testing is run continuously as models behaviors change and new versions come out As we further developed the orchestrator agentic AI platform and started running actual use cases on it I realized that the strong decoupling of aentic compute from inference compute was necessary in order to control and isolate individual agent behavior So we’ve containerized the unit added continuously updated documentation to each agent and started controlling dependencies inside the containers Then we tested each agentic compute with unit and integration tests before adding them to the workflows This enabled us to get a sense of how well each agent behaved This architecture also allows to put a theoretical kill switch inside every agent to quickly cut off access to inference compute in case the hallucination can affect critical infrastructure that is integrated through the agent Between behavioral testing of models and isolation of agentic compute we started to develop the best practice AI agent architecture As we build orchestrator intelligent automation platform the highlevel architecture separates agentic compute from inference compute Inference compute is continuously tested by behavioral testing framework Aentic comput is isolated documented and tested as individual units before integrating into orchestration platform and workflows I believe our platform is a step forward having towards having an effective control system for artificial intelligence that will keep the agentic AI safe reliable and aligned to businesses and organizations So thank you for allowing me to share my experience with you If you have any questions interested in what I presented Orchestrator Platform or my company Past Five Solutions Inc please connect with me on LinkedIn

Amazing Thank you Sev Chris uh while I personally am incredibly impressed by the number of tabs you have open uh do you want to full screen your slides

You got it

It was a glitch of the video thing I think Oh hold on Still happening Thank you There we go Sev Thanks so much man It’s been such a pleasure having you share and teach and train us along the way Sev as I said just won um the first round of the hackathon $2,500 We had 12 submit 60 people download the data 12 people submitted final projects and presented them at our last meetup We’re about to enter round two We’re exploring what it means to be Canadian We have put out a question set to a thousand Canadians via Angus Reed Research and we’ll be getting back the data set this week and making it available If you want to participate you’re welcome to check it out at

hackathon.bc-ai.net hackathon.bcai do

hackathon.bc-ai.net Um there’ll also be links later and on all our all our stuff but um come check it out learn what it’s about I’d love to have everyone participating Up next uh with a bit of a different perspective we have another local community builder Professor Patrick Perah Pennifer from the Emerging Media Lab at UBC How’s it going Professor

P This is probably improv is also a comedian I have asked you to unmute

Great Now I can speak Well you were probably better off with me not speaking but I’m super happy to be here Thanks Chris And um wow it’s so great to see everyone again Uh familiar faces I just want to name them all That’s what I want to do because this is what I’m going to speak to I mean to speak about how we’ve been invested in community building uh with AI the interactions the experimentation uh the love of it the hate of it the the spectrum in between and really engaging people in conversation around it So I’m super excited to speak to that and how it’s culminated in something that uh Chris myself and a colleague at UBC published together Oh that’s right I’m driving

Patrick you went quiet on us even though your mic says you’re not

muted Patrick take a pause because your mic’s not working for some reason Is that okay Apparently neither is his

speakers Bear with us Thank you very much Um Patrick and I just published this study in BC studies quarterly journal Um we uh used the academic framework to look at the success of these meetups in the community All right No you’re not working sir We are going to double back to you How about my blue snowball Is that Welcome to the party Patrick Great I won’t be able to hear you for a moment but it doesn’t matter Uh let’s um So where am I going to start I’m going to start at this space where I tried to which is uh in about the I think it was the second meetup I started to show up and I was really excited and I was uh thinking about well how can I contribute to this amazing community of practice and I started to meet people I started to see super intelligent people I started to understand the technology more I started to make viable interactions with people that I did not know that I could collaborate with and out of that have come multiple collaborations So with this article this is the culmination of uh my experiences and along with uh interviewing Chris to be part of it and adding a colleague David Gardner to also be a part of this article that we wrote and it’s a reflective article It’s available in BC studies and it is a spin-off of my background and my joy of writing and of documenting process and that’s what I’ve been doing uh since uh my start with this community and uh I have published books on AI I was also an alpha researcher for Sora with uh by OpenAI in which I was asked to interrogate the technology to source clips that might have been taken from artists and to really do a comparative view of it and I can speak to it now but I wasn’t able to for such a long time So I’m excited to share that story the next time I see you at the next meetup uh including uh all of that I also do a lot of uh journal publications on AI focused right now on ethical dimensions of AI on guideline development So this playbook that we came up with uh is is key in understanding well how do you do this What is it that makes this community tick And yes it is the technology because it’s provocative technology It’s technology that is pushing all of us to really question the work that we do the work that we’ve done the work that we can do And so what I have been obsessed with is creating a taxonomy and really figuring out well what are the things that make this community and this technology tick So the most important for me out of all these I won’t go through every single one You can find that in the in the book but it is the promotion of inclusivity And we can stretch the meaning of that word to include not having boundaries as to who can participate And often we get caught in these communities of practice And I know this as a scholar and academic where it’s those who publish research that we want at these events but that’s simply not true And we have a lot of multiddisiplinary and talented individuals from across sectors And this is what makes this one of this one of the big things that makes Kevin say in his video you should come check this out So uh let me talk about next steps And I’m happy more than happy as you know because I’ve already engaged many of you in conversation on this Zoom I’m happy to involve you in whatever capacity you want to be involved in as we move forward because what we’re trying to do and if you look to that uh the next step we’re trying to figure out emerging topics like what do you want to be engaged and involved in within this community What’s important to you And so those conversations around adoption are also important adoption/rejection right Because some of us are in situations where the technology is not yet at a point where we can trust it and it’s understandable because there’s a lot of misinformation If I brought Kushon to talk which we don’t have time he’d talk about the value of open source private machine learning models which I’m also an advocate of versus the public facing ones So what happens at these events We have these discussions Everything goes because it’s important for us to be able to make sense of the technology as it starts to infiltrate every aspect of our lives Here are some of the things that are up next Next slide Chris So I won’t take up too much more time here today Uh you can either hit for the BC studies article on the right uh and or if you are interested in the books that I’ve written on generative AI and its use in creativity and learning you can click the one on the left or both Patrick thank you for lending us your brain for involving your students in for getting Kevin a lab out there and you just generally bringing the best of what you have to offer for making your beef borg yong with your AI recipe You’ve added so for doing the Christmas Carol AI album with us I mean you’ve just brought so much energy and creativity to it all and thank you very very much professor Um and you know this research that you’ve done as well does lay the groundwork as we begin to roll out this kind of model from the Vancouver AI community Squamish AI mind AI and consciousness out to the rest of the province and we’ll be referencing this study a lot Um you also brought up Kushaw and and I’m going to me give him a shout out as well because one thing that’s unique about what we’re doing here is we are height proof We are self-critical We are self-aware We look at the challenges that come with AI as well as the benefits and the possibilities We’re not afraid to ask the tough questions and we try to give everybody a voice Um and Kushall is you know as an outspoken critic of many things and a really a man with a fire in his belly on the right source of many issues and not afraid to call out and hold you know called truth to power Uh we welcome him and and often we wrap up every meet up with me and Kush having a little debate on the stage about whatever’s on his mind It’s a good time Okay so we have talked a lot about the positive stuff so far but I want to talk to you a little bit about some of my concerns and why I’m having this meeting and why I’m investing myself in this to try to build something bigger than all of us So uh look around Vancouver You know we all see the glass towers Uh those towers are full of many people that have jobs that just didn’t even exist 30 years ago A lot of us on this call are are in that um in that group of people And we’ve built a really awesome tier 2 digital creative economy here in British Columbia And by saying two tier 2 I’m not trying to be insulting saying we’re not Silicon Valley or Hollywood but through the work of government and academia and founders and the whole ecosystem we’ve pieced together this quite functional economy where the schools feed the um the you know like Vancouver film school they feed the graphic studios and the emerging special effects companies and stuff like that Those employees feed the speculative real estate market and you know Olympic Village and things like that and we make the whole world go around here I’d like to give a shout out here as well to DigiBC and Lockdown It’s through their stewardship of this community specifically being their lobbying and defending of the tax credit that’s brought 11 of the top 12 games and special effects studios here to Vancouver That’s where everybody works That’s a big part of our industry And so it’s through that type of strategic leadership that I hope to bring to the table to help grow the BC AI economy and

ecosystem Um it’s already here We’re seeing its implications right now Generative AI is wreaking havoc on our local creative professions Kevin Freel can talk to it He worked you know for 20 years inside of Hollywood special effects He worked on Dune He’s wa you know he talks to me every day sometimes in tears as he watches just whole segments of the professional creative industries around film television games internet carved out by AI and so we need to come together we need to start doing some preparation we need to make some plans both to go after the opportunities that Sev is going after but also to defend the things that we’ve invested ourselves in building that define our

economy So now’s the time for us to rally together get our ideas on the table organize and rally government and other institutions to invest in this ecosystem in upskilling in education in strategic adoption Why are we one of the only provinces that hasn’t had a major capital outlay when it comes to the creation of a hub or an ecosystem You’ve got Amy AC you’ve got MA you’ve got other hotbeds and and big investments across Canada But it’s not until we come together and speak with one voice and put our all of our needs on the table that we’re going to be able to um make the case for that

So I’m inviting everyone here into um you know a conversation about where we’re going and what we want to do what you think we need to grow and support the BC AI economy and ecosystem Right after we hang up this call I prepared a survey It’s 10 questions They’re all optional They’re all open-ended If you don’t like the question you just want to write in the box something else feel free to do that I want to get everybody’s feedback We’re going to collate and assemble it We’re going to apply some of our data storytelling techniques we’ve developed through the hackathons we’re running in Vancouver AI We’re going to share that back with you guys with the world large and use that to strategically go after some of the things that we identify So now it’s time to roll up our sleeves and do some work I am headed off just in five minutes to the AIMBC Elevate AI event Um I’ll see a lot of you there Come say hello I’ll have a pocket full of stickers Um you can ask me questions We’re going to have another call like this soon where it’s going to be a little bit more open-ended Everyone can have their mics on We can talk and chat and uh get all our ideas out there For now if you hit the QR code there you’ll be invited to a group chat that we have going It’s a very active and very lively group chat of people centered around AI lifting each other up and supporting one another Partnerships are formed there businesses have formed there We’ve got a jobs board and all the coolest events get listed there Um everybody’s welcome I may send you a message trying to correlate your name with your phone number before I let you in just because it’s a trusted cool safe space where people are accountable and responsible and we lift each other up and we intend to keep it that way But like I said there’s 250 of us You’re welcome as well Hit that QR code Here’s a few other resources I gave an uh a keynote at the Whistler Institute a couple months ago talking about the future of the professional creative industries in British Columbia It’s over an hour and a half long and there’s a great Q&A there I invite you to check that out We launched a brand new baby of a halfworking website today um at the BCA bcai.net That’s the middle QR code Uh there’s a lot of you with skills who want to volunteer We’re pulling that thing together and rolling it out We also have an internet with a whole bunch of docs and I’ve developed and I should have put the QR code here I will send it out on the group chat after this I developed a 10 tier financial you know a document that shows AI and BC companies how to go after federal provincial and other types of grants and funds that are available It’s pretty much a map of the whole funding landscape That’s the type of stuff that’s on our internet Um there’s also another AI generated talk there in the bottom right hand corner of me doing about a 10-minute spiel about the the whole look around look at the schools look at the skyline how did we get here It’s through building this creative economy If you want to share that story with someone check out that video I appreciate your time I know uh it’s a busy day There’s lots going on Um we had over 125 people here for a minute and um I look forward to being able to chat with everyone more later but um I appreciate you showing up We look forward to hearing your ideas The survey should pop up as soon as I end this call and um I would love to hear from you Uh Chris the bc-ai.net link uh wasn’t isn’t loading up Do you uh that’s because of DNS issue Depends where you are on the network how close you are to the node We just set up the DNS this morning It’ll be there So once again I just want to thank everybody for showing up I’m going to sign off and I’ll see you at Nor Eastern University