Last week, I had the exciting opportunity to attend South by Southwest (SXSW). Despite being an honorary Austinite for the last 10 years, it was my first time experiencing this behemoth of a festival, which blends tech, music, film and comedy all into one.
And what an experience it was. Touring the Creative Industries Expo alone, I saw futuristic robots, dazzling artistic displays, and plenty of vendors eager to show how their product of tomorrow is ready to change my today.
Yet still, these were but entertaining sideshows to the numerous talks I had scheduled from experts in the industry – focusing on cybersecurity, AI, and broader technology trends.
AI in the Limelight
Unsurprisingly AI was a dominant theme throughout the festival, with plenty of people fully aware of how much LLM is shifting the technology landscape.
Given how bullish the tech industry has been on AI, you could be forgiven for thinking that the forecasts for AI would be all sunshine and rainbows. Instead, most prognosticators seemed fully cognizant of the limitations and concerns that come with AI.
In one particularly memorable talk, Marek Kowalkiewicz provided some humorous anecdotes about algorithms gone awry, and compared them to minions eager to help, but wreak havoc the moment we turn away. His guidance of taking advantage of automation but on a careful, gradual scale seemed prudent for any technology.
The talks weren’t limited to the purely digital realm, either – hearing from OpenAI’s General Counsel, Che Chang, about balancing legal risks and potentially nefarious users against the potential features gave some great insight into the business processes happening within one of the most talked-about companies on the planet.
