If you were not able to join Transform live, the keynote and breakout sessions are now available on our website for on-demand viewing.
Artificial Intelligence is now a part of our everyday lives. This technology is no longer theoretical, but is making a direct impact on businesses and their bottom lines. Nearly every industry has woken up to the potential of AI to transform their operations, whether it’s leading the charge of an entirely new category, like autonomous transportation, or modernizing legacy industries, like finance, real estate, and retail. AI is poised to be as transformative as the internet, and with that, organizations are learning that data is the new code. If they’re not investing in this critical technology now, they’re at risk of being left behind.
Today we hosted our inaugural conference, Scale Transform, to showcase the state of AI today, from the latest research breakthroughs to the real-world impact across industries. As I shared in my opening remarks, “AI continues to surprise us with its new capabilities, primarily enabled through advancements in the core resources of data, compute, and algorithms.”
We brought together more than 9,000+ leading researchers, practitioners, and executives to hear from the people and companies leading our industry forward. It was a day full of thoughtful conversations and presentations that examined the strides made in advancing these core resources, the challenges that still lie ahead, and what we can expect in the years to come.
AI research has been crucial in advancing the industry and our understanding of what’s possible. We’ve made significant progress across countless areas that have propelled the industry forward, yet there is still plenty more to be done. Some of the latest research discussed includes:
Soumith Chintala, Creator of PyTorch speaking on the future of ML frameworks.
This research and advancements made by others in the industry, including our conference partners, Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI), PyTorch, DeepLearning.AI, OpenAI, Pachama, and ELC, are the catalysts for meaningful use cases of AI.
One of the biggest challenges for our industry is scaling AI systems from proofs of concept to production. A common theme heard from speakers throughout the day is that data is the critical foundation that companies must invest in to unlock AI’s full potential: Andrew Ng of DeepLearning.AI discussed how models can improve with more compute, data and parameters, however, it's not just about how much data you have, but the quality of that data. Andrew brought up a critical point here, because developing AI with bad data means it won’t live up to the potential and quite frankly it’s dangerous. It can lead to:
Andrew Ng, speaking on the need for good data to develop AI.
Bart Nabbe, VP of Strategic Partnerships and Corporate Development at Aurora, reinforced this point, stating, “You’re not building ladders to get to the moon, you need rockets.” And data is the fuel for those rockets. He emphasized that in the early days of training ML, every piece of data counts, however over time it’s increasingly important to be precise and focus on the long-tail, differentiated data to improve models.
The importance of creating ethical and unbiased AI has been a focus in the industry for years, and as the technology has gone mainstream, so has the conversation. Global leaders and technology experts across the world are tackling challenges in developing AI that is ethical, as well as ensuring the benefits of AI can be equally distributed. Our speakers provided passionate advice on the topic:
Kevin Scott, CTO of Microsoft at Scale Transform.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li, speaking on the need for diversity in the field of AI.
Perhaps most importantly, we also heard inspiring work that’s happening in the real world – tangible examples of how AI is already improving the way we live and operate:
The continued advancements in AI have created incredible applications in today’s world but there is an exciting future that awaits - from the potential to create safer transportation to agricultural benefits like increasing crop yields and improving healthcare outcomes. At Scale, we’re excited to have a hand in creating trusted, ubiquitous use of AI and we can’t wait to see what’s next.
A special thank you to our conference partners: Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI), PyTorch, DeepLearning.AI, OpenAI, Pachama, and ELC. We are also grateful for all our incredible speakers representing organizations including Aurora, Blend, Brex, Cruise, DoorDash, Etsy, Facebook AI, Fast.AI, Flexport, Google, Hugging Face, iRobot, Microsoft, Qualtrics, RedFin, University of Toronto, and Waymo.
If you were not able to join us live, the keynote and breakout sessions are now available on our website for on-demand viewing.