FutureProof: Data Centers, West Coast AI & a Festival is Coming

0:00Incoming transmission from the future. Vancouver AI community meetup. >> The reason why we're here is because like 3 years ago when AI came in kicked over the table of my creative industry and profession in photography and design, I was looking for a place to go figure that out and chat with other people about it and like learn more. I got I both I I saw the disruption and I was like, "Wow, this changes everything.

0:24There's got to be some new things I can get involved with here." And so I started learning and started a Discord server and started inviting other people into that. And then I I moved back to Vancouver after the pandemic and I was looking to like go to the AI events or plug into an AI community and there was really nothing going on. The things that were going on were like highly technical, hierarchical, like the the programmers group of UBC or whatever, you know, or something like that. And And And there was no there wasn't like a cross-disciplinary big tent group of people who were getting together being like, "Yo, I'm excited and I'm scared."

0:55And both those things are true at the same time. And so that's what we've got going on here. That's what makes this community unique. You'll find people that are critical. They're in the streets doing demonstrations. an interview tonight about the data centers that are coming to Vancouver. Obviously, everybody knows about that. The politicians are co-opting the airwaves on that and we're going to have a very healthy public dialogue during this upcoming election about um what do British Columbians want when it comes to AI? What are we willing to take when it comes to data centers? How much voice and say do we want to have in the future that is manifest here in British Columbia? And so um underpinning a lot

1:29of this a lot of this stuff is this uh BC AI ecosystem nonprofit that we started like a year ago. There's 300 of us are members now. It's an annual membership that gives you discounts and inclusion into our different events and chats and different things like that. But that's really helped us gain some like political power and voice. We had um Minister Rick Glumac, the AI Minister of British Columbia, speak last month. Next month, we are in the riding right here of uh Member of Parliament uh Taleeb Noormohamed who's also by chance the parliamentary secretary for innovation in AI essentially the number two federal person when it comes to AI. We in this community have a vision for building a

2:07West Coast AI center of excellence out here akin to the ones that we find across Canada been federally funded for like a billion dollars places like the Vector Institute, Mila Institute and the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute Amy. So you know we we are we've got momentum as a community we're finding our voice and our personality and our legs we've got infrastructure now and um you know I'm just going to skip right to my little thing cuz I've got the flow going which is out of all this out of our three years of meetups out of our 12 subgroups out of our 300 member network people be coming to us and they're like yo Web Summit kind of sucks and there's

2:45some other kind of there's some other kind of half-baked AI events going on in around town. Why are you guys doing this monthly thing all the time? Why don't you do something more like an an annual conference and I said you know that's been my passion for a long time before I started these meetups I had I was that photographer for like TED Talks and for South by Southwest and for Fashion Week and stuff for many years and I like 20 years and I I developed a a strong perspective on what makes events awesome and what I wanted to bring to the people in terms of like you know community intellectual cultural events that were

3:18addressing the most important issues that we're all facing you know and I wanted to do that for a long time but I didn't have the drum beat I didn't have community we didn't have a non-profit and so when people been coming to me lately being like are you want to do this conference I'm like we're ready. We're we're we're ready and so I spent the last couple months building a website outreaching to international speakers and you know I've been announcing them this week. Kevin can we stumble our way through my slides? Is that cool?

3:48Yeah so Future Proof Festival of AI here in the Space Centre 3 days October 28th through 30th. The venue's booked. We're good to go. Hit it. Um, you know, like I said, this is the data center issue. It's in all of our faces. We're I've done like five media interviews with the Tyee. I did one with Bob Mackin tonight. I did one with some PhD researcher from UBC this week. It's it's on people's minds. It's on the conversation.

4:17Um, and so let's have a talk about that. Um, this is the website I built. Please go check it out. There's a lot of interesting stuff going on there. There's a lot of depth and detail that I've been building the as a foundation for you guys to learn more about what we're getting up to and figure out a way to get involved.

4:33I put out a call for speakers. Many of you guys have already submitted, but there's a chance to I'm The way I envision this is like 50% international speakers and 50% are local speakers. 50% international audience and 50% are local audience. It's a chance to like bubble up the best of what we got and show it off to the world. And it's a chance for me to curate into this community the best of what I see going on out there and bring it here.

4:58And speaking of the best of what I see out there and bring it here. Dave Olsen, I'm so excited announce this. Amber Case is our first international out of town keynote speaker that I booked. She runs the Calm Technology Institute. This is a a major international nonprofit that certifies big products as like human-friendly, calm tech, non-disruptive to the nervous system, but she's got a long background. I used to work for Esri, the Environmental Systems Research Institute, the big GIS provider, and she sold a company to Esri back in the day. Before that, her and I used to organize Cyborg Camps in Seattle and Vancouver. People just exploring the edge and periph- periphery of, you know,

5:35humanity and stuff. So, Amber Case is a badass coming to Vancouver from Denver, Colorado. Um, who knows who this is? Ana Serrano. Yeah. This is Ana Serrano. She's the Chancellor of OCAD University Ontario College of Art and Design. She also runs a big conference out east called the Democracy Exchange. She's at the forefront of helping to figure out how federal funds around adoption and upskilling for the creative industries, for the artistic industries, for cultural producers, film, music, this type of She's very She's got the ear of Evan Solomon and the powers that be and runs OCAD U. She's going to be coming out and talking about their perspective on who gets to you know, decide the future of culture

6:21as it relates to AI. Who knows who this is? Linda Brown? Linda Brown? Do we got any graduates from the Center of Digital Media here? Anyone go to Center for Digital Media? Anyway, we have a really cool Center for Digital Media here in in Vancouver. It's 20 years old. It's a project that was a consortium of UBC, SFU and Emily Carr and then funded by the city, province and the feds. So, this lady runs a AI healthcare startup and she's had several ways. She's a very successful entrepreneur, but she's my hero and mentor because she I was on her board of New Media BC back when DigiBC was New Media BC like So, like our

7:03Finance Minister Brenda Bailey used to run DigiBC and then DigiBC used to be New Media BC and when it was New Media BC, Linda ran it and she got the city to pony up some money. She took that money from the city and she got the province to match it and then she took all that money and took it to the feds and got them to put $40 million in the kitty and that's why we have that whole Great Northern Way campus over there. So, you guys know I'm trying to build this West Coast Center of AI Excellence. So, this lady going to come out and talk to us about like how we go from like

7:31grassroots community to building real life infrastructure. Gabriel Zaro A lot of you guys know him from here. He works for EA as like the director of online community for all sports games. He This guy runs Discords with 5 million people in them. He knows a lot about AI and he's using it in all sorts of ways, but he's talking about humanity as the operating system. He's got a really unique TED Talk that I'm excited to have him give um here.

7:59Antonia, who runs Ethos Labs down the street. Again, this woman is at the forefront of figuring out how can Canada's AI money is going to be allocated and distributed when it comes to education and you know, um you know, black and indigenous youth. She runs a youth center on Main Street. It's amazing. A lot of the people in this room mentor during the AI experimentation lab that they run over there on the weekends for for youths. Um she's amazing. She's super plugged in.

8:26She's funded by like Microsoft, Sony, and the NBA. And um she They've got a great If you haven't heard of Ethos Labs, you should definitely check it out. This is Sarah Downey. She runs our responsible AI professionals certification program. She's a badass when it comes to helping nonprofits figure out AI. And um she's going to be running her responsible AI professional program during our Future Proof Festival.

8:50And we're going to have a little startup zone. We're going to have a like kind of resembles a trade show. So, I was on our community call last week and I was hustling tickets to our closest group of members and they were like, "Yo, actually I want to do more than that. Can we have like a booth and buy a pack?" And so, um uh Kareem, one of our members, helped me figure out a little startup package. So, we're going to have like a little exhibition area for startups that want to come do their thing. There's a couple I think there's up to like five people who already like said they're bringing their robots and their software that

9:17runs on robots. So, we're going to have like a a bit of a embodied AI theme to the whole thing. Cool. So, it's going to be Wednesday night opening, full day Thursday, full day Friday. Kevin's planning a film festival component. Then we're going to have a wrap-up party here. It's going to be a banger. And um I hope you guys can all come come check it out.

9:39Next one. So this is the the big thing that I'm doing tonight and this is why I wanted to keep cruising. So I've built the whole website. I've built got the speakers coming. Everything's in place and like 30 of you guys have already before I launched kind of like bought a ticket or whatever, right? And that's kind of the wind beneath the wings right now is early ticket sales.

10:03And so to encourage early ticket sales tonight only until midnight, if you buy a ticket, I'll give you two so you can bring a friend or a colleague or something like that. If you're one of those 30 people that already bought a ticket, same offer already applies. Hit me up and I'm going to give you a second one for a friend. But it's 650 until April 15th and then it goes to 950 bucks. It The my cost for everyone here is like 350 bucks per person. That's what allows me to do the two-for-one and get everyone in the door right away. So this will be like the cheapest after this I'm going to start marketing to outside like to the

10:35rest of the world or whatever and so it's going to So this is what you want to do if you're going to come if you're going to be part of this, hit up the code. If you sign up before midnight, two-for-one, you can bring a friend and we'll get them all sorted out. Okay, thank you for the sales pitch.

10:49I will leave it to be important. Up next we got our community announcements. So that's going to be Jimmy and that's going to be Josh and that's going to be Bill McGraw and if you have a community announcement and I talked to you, now's your time to come up. Jimmy. >> Oh, how am I going to follow that?

11:10>> Bro, I'll do your I'll do your pitch for you, bro. Well, we'll give it a palate cleanser. We'll give it a palate cleanser, yeah. Jimmy's got a cool AI a conference coming up too. So he's like don't make me go right after you. Come on up. >> I'm I'm one of those hot day conferences.

11:24>> This is Steve Jones from our Comox Valley AI group. Come on, Steve. >> All right, hi everyone. Yeah, so um few few months ago someone in Comox alerted uh teamed up with Chris and started a Comox version of of this kind of monthly event and it's super exciting. Uh we've got people coming out of the woodwork.

11:44Uh you know, I I spend half my year in Comox, half in Vancouver. Sometimes it feels like in Vancouver this is where stuff happens in Comox, you know, you're just uh biking and kayaking and everything, but it turns out it's a lot of people working remotely for world-class companies and building world-class companies and just doing exciting stuff out in the woods and on the Gulf Islands. So, we've had this monthly meeting going for a few months now. Uh there's a barbecue next week if you're over in Comox and you're looking for an excuse to come over to Comox and uh >> And not just the startup people, bro.

12:09Talk talk about the little education thing that we stumbled upon this week about the uh SR-71 you guys got over there. >> Yeah, so School District 71 is the local school district there. They're doing some interesting stuff with AI and and you know, it it's everything is a little smaller, a little less political maybe than in the big city, which also makes it a little easier to to get into those conversations and and have some really interesting uh engagements. So, we're we're hoping to have that.

12:33>> superintendent of that school district and the director of technology for that school district have built a whole plan and strategy and portal and infrastructure and tools that is like beyond like a lot of what I see a lot of people asking questions and there's a lot of infrastructure in place out there. It's very very interesting.

12:49>> Yeah, so it's it's great um and uh we're we're having a good time. So, if you're interested, I think we'd also be interested and we don't have the full calendar booked out yet. Uh but if you want to get in front of people and give a presentation and maybe this room is a little intimidating for you, hop on a ferry, come uh give a give a try in Comox. And uh we're we're a pretty friendly laid-back group, so >> I go every month and I keep asking if anyone wants to road trip. So, if you want to go to Comox, let's go.

13:13>> All right. Come on up here, guys. We got to move through these things, so >> When's the next one? >> Uh it is next Wednesday, right? Steve, next Wednesday? >> I think so. Yeah, yeah. >> The fourth. >> Or the fifth. >> The fifth. >> August fifth. Wednesday, August fifth. >> Wed- Wednesday, August 5th.

13:27Jimmy. >> Hey, uh my name is Jimmy Stewart and I'm putting together a community of AI professionals that are in the enterprise deploying AI at scale. So they're looking to bridge the gap between pilot to failure. Like a lot of those stuff that they do and all these great conferences they go to they meet a lot of hyped up people saying they got the next best thing in AI and they bought into it and now they bring it back. Try to deploy it and then it's falling over and they don't scratching their head why. CFOs on their back, CEOs on the back, they're having to answer all kinds of questions in the boardroom. So they come to Jimmy to

14:04figure out how to fix all that. Chris is actually going to be one of our keynote speakers. He's bringing the human side to the event and really kind of grounding these leaders and making them putting them in check and essentially making sure that they're deploying human-centric responsible AI which is a core theme of our summit.

14:23>> Here's my pitch right now. Conference, I've seen your guest list. He's legit got like 75 CIOs from American companies coming here. So if that's your customer, you should buy a pass to Jimmy's thing and go hunt hunt CIOs. >> Yeah, so yeah, definitely we we're definitely got a lot of CIOs coming.

14:41Founders that are not in pilot, they're in production, they they can scale, policy makers, investors, anybody that's involved with enterprise scale AI. >> Thanks Jimmy. All right, Angelica Professor UBC. >> Yeah, hey guys. >> SFU, I'm sorry. Give me a break. But you you said you said yeah. >> That's all right. >> Um, will you tell them will you tell them what your specialty is?

15:09>> I'm a roboticist. I'm an AI roboticist and I work on developing robots that interact with humans. And just as Chris said, we all have this feeling of I'm really excited about this but also kind of scared. Um Um and so in this feeling I recruited a neuroscientist and a psychologist to help us study what is happening in our brains when we interact with AI.

15:34Um I am running this study. Um I want to get as many people as possible to kind of get a diverse demographic not just like this as if you students. So if you have any ideas about how you can make the word out, it's just like coming over and interacting for 10 minutes and we kind of you know, see what's happening in your brain. Some people will go and get their brain imaged and get a 3D scan of their brain at the end. Um I'd love your help so that we can go for safe responsible AI.

16:00Thank you.

16:05>> Um Angelica, before you leave real quick, I've been meaning to email you. >> Where do we sign up? >> Oh, thank you. Um I don't know. I sent a slide. I don't know if it's still up there, but I I have a whole bunch of posters so I can just come find me and then I'll give you the little QR code.

16:19>> Um Angelica is on the Mind AI and Consciousness chat so you could ping her there if you're on our WhatsApp group. That's that's a good way to do it. Um I've been meaning to email you. Uh I've really enjoyed our discussions about AI psychosis. And I think it's a really important topic. As you know, I think it's a very important topic cuz I think it uh uh probably touches people who don't realize that it touches, you know, and stuff. It it's a very interesting phenomenon. It's got to be on the agenda for future proof festival and I would like for you to like propose something, please, or take the reins and do something like

16:55>> Yeah, do you want to hear about that sort of thing? Yeah. I've been uh on my sabbatical and I've been studying it heavily this year. So um I would All right. So I'm on the spot. I can't really say no. >> know. Or at least like pass me a collie, but no really, I want to have the I mean I'd like for you to lead the dialogue, but at some level I want to be a part of it too cuz I'm fascinated, you know, and >> Yeah, we need to know what's going on, right? Um so thanks.

17:17>> Cool. Yeah, thank you. I appreciate it. Yeah. >> Come talk to me after. >> Check out her work. It's it's profound. Josh. >> Everyone, this is my first time here. Thank you so much, Chris, for inviting me. I'd love to meet all of you guys. So, what I do, I host and produce live stream content. It's kind of like e-sports for web design or now I'm featuring AI tools, but anyways, that's kind of about my background.

17:44Do we have a slide up here? Okay. So, how I met Chris was about 2 years ago with another Chris, Chris Do. If you do you guys know have you guys heard of Chris Do before? >> Everybody know this guy is famous on the internet, friend Chris. >> So, he's from LA. He's coming he's actually in town already. So, every year he usually comes for a fishing trip and then he usually does a talk. So, next Thursday he's coming in for a sales workshop and I think now with AI it's never been easier to build. And so, if you're building something that's meaningful, I think the skill sets next that's really helpful is going to be

18:17sales and marketing. Like, how do you go to market with your service or your product? And then how do you sell in a way that isn't salesy, right? That's that's human and it takes something that's natural to you like your gifts, your talents, your abilities and share it in a way that is authentic to you and that meets your customer's needs. So, that's kind of what we're going to talk about. Chris is going >> So, Chris's jam is that he helps creatives figure out how to look across the table from their clients and be like, "No, ma'am, that's going to be $18,000."

18:48>> In a way that helps them. >> to break poker face like like Susan is where Susan at? Susan just became a consultant yesterday at AI consultant left her big company became AI consultant. I know you need to look across the table and be like, "My rate is $250 an hour." And just hold that face, you know.

19:08That's his that's his whole jam. >> The 8-second pause. >> He helps people like figure out how to really understand their value so they can communicate it to people that are buying their creative services or whatever. And so, he's the world's expert. >> Yeah. And uh yeah, if you guys are just done with the whole performance, you know, sales game and try to always be closing, all that stuff. That's not what this is all about. It's really identifying like what is natural to you and then really relating to the customer. So, all of that, it's full workshop. Uh there's great food. It's here in downtown.

19:36Again, uh you can scan the code and get more details there. Um and if you want to know more, love to talk with you. So, >> Thanks so much. All right, cool, man. Bill McGraw, what's up, dude? Hey. Thanks, Chris. >> You guys know Bill. He's been here since the very beginning. Like I said, we've been hosting this thing for like 3 years back in my studio back in the day.

19:57Bill's here been here since the beginning. You've kind of like found your way in AI. You started producing some AI events and stuff. And you got a couple things going on the next little while. >> Yeah, just quickly appreciate it, Chris. Uh I host a uh meetup every month for the AGenTx Foundation. Uh this is a group that's founded in Toronto. Uh grown to now 20 locations around the world. Uh they didn't have a start uh a meetup in Vancouver. So, I I said, "Okay, well, we we need we can't have that, especially with Chris doing stuff like he's doing." So, we uh uh it just turns out we've uh we do it monthly. It's tomorrow night at um

20:34uh Northeastern. So, if you're it's free, there's food. Uh it's really focused on uh cross uh we started with a lot of devs um and now we've got a lot of UI UX people who are just um dabbling, people who are deep into it. So, lots of conversation about uh how do you actually deploy this and keep the human in the loop? I think that's the big thing.

20:55>> Yeah, if you guys are like, "Yo, Chris, your meetup's barely even AI. It's not even technical at all. I want to show people my cloud skills and have them check out my GitHub repo." You want to go to the AGenTx AI meetup at Bill's place. We could definitely got those vibes in this room, too, but they don't always get flexed out here. And then you got another thing going on.

21:11>> Yeah, so it's just starting. You may have heard of Alexander College. They've taken over a it's a private secondary post-secondary school. They've taken over building downtown and they're building out an innovation center for AI. So servers in the in the basement. They want to call it data center. We can't call it data center anymore because that's bad. So So it's really not a data center, but it does give compute to the students and compute for the community, which I think is important.

21:43Second floor is going to be this innovation center. So we're looking at an incubator, products, all kinds of good stuff. We're just getting started with it in the next couple of months and we'll have more to talk about it as we go forward. >> Thanks, Bill. >> Appreciate it. >> Yeah, man. I'll take that.

22:00Anyone else on the community announcement train, Jason? >> No, I don't have an announcement. The question is we need to hold Bill. >> Bill McGraw. Hey, Jason wants to get a hold of you and go to the AGenTx meetup and he wants to go to the Alexander College meetup. How do they find you? Like just on our group chat or what?

22:16>> Yeah, it's a it's a Luma event. It's the AGenTx Foundation meetup. And if you want to if you >> Jason, if you ask on the events channel, I'll reply later. >> For sure. >> Yeah. >> Or find me >> We're working on it. Do it is a little wild here tonight, man. Like I was feeling the flow and did the whole future proof thing and I blew up Kevin's whole deal over there. Like come on, I'm sorry. But he didn't have a QR code anyway.

22:41He didn't have a QR code anyway, though. Okay. Okay. Before we move on, is there anyone else who is in the community announcement zone who is feeling shy or didn't get a chance to talk at the right moment? Andrea Rimer, you want to mention your podcast?

23:03I'm coming to you. Hi folks. My name's Andrea Wyman. I have a podcast called she they asked that looks at the people living at the front line of the housing crisis which are women and gender diverse folks who structurally have less ability to access housing and therefore in a greater crisis and would love to have you check it out. I have no idea what it has to do with AI or what we're all about, but thank you for the opportunity.

23:34>> That's funny because I actually I was referring to power you. I didn't even know you had that podcast. I She also has this really cool video series she does on the internet called power you where she's examining like power, access to power, where it comes from, how it's accumulated, how it's reinforced, how you oppose it and challenge it and I find it awesome and I I anytime someone starts to talk to me about this kind of stuff, I point them at power you. So that's that's what I was talking. Yeah. And that's what that has to do with AI.

24:06Is there anyone else who needs to talk? This is that moment. Mage, I appreciate you not because you could have said so many things. Mage and Mayumi won another AI animation hackathon 3 days ago. Um