On Oct. 14, East Liberty’s Bakery Square played host to the very first AI Horizons Pittsburgh Summit, bringing together global and local experts on artificial intelligence to discuss the future of the sector, safety and regulation, its unique energy requirements, and how it will impact different sectors and our world as a whole.
The event drew about 650 attendees and included a full day’s worth of networking sessions, keynote addresses and panel discussions with an A-list lineup of speakers and more.
The main sponsors for the event were financial giant BNY and Google, whose Pittsburgh offices are Bakery Square’s anchor tenant. Christopher Martin, senior director of BNY’s AI Hub, said the company was “proud to be doing this here in Pittsburgh” and that “one of the reasons why we’re here at this event is to try to help tell [Pittsburgh’s] story.”
Other local big names involved in putting the event together were Carnegie Mellon University, Duolingo, BlueTree Allied Angels, PNC Financial Services Group Inc., the Jewish Healthcare Foundation, the Allegheny Conference on Community Development and Walnut Capital, the owner and developer of Bakery Square.
For the event, Walnut Capital and the AI Avenue Working Group converted a floor of Bakery Office 3 to serve as the primary location. The floor was adorned with “AI Horizons Pittsburgh Summit” branded materials — the wall was plastered with custom wallpaper, and water bottles were distributed with the branding directly on them. But despite the production value and lineup, the event was organized in less than six months.
“What I learned from AI Avenue Working Group was that we have to move fast, and we’ve got to plant the flag,” Joanna Doven, AI Avenue Working Group strategy consultant, said. “I did some traveling and saw what other cities were doing, and I thought, ‘wait, nobody has the world’s No. 1 AI school.’ Nobody has it, but we have it. … We have a governor that literally has the state’s first economic development strategy in [AI].”
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro was the keynote speaker, discussing government policy and its successes and shortcomings in utilizing and regulating AI technology. Shapiro also sat on a panel discussion with CMU President Farnam Jahanian and Cris Turner, global head of knowledge and information products at Google, moderated by former CNN Senior Tech Correspondent Laurie Segall.
Nvidia, a global leader in chipmaking, also had a presence at the event. Anthony Robbins, vice president, federal at Nvidia, was on hand to sign a formal memorandum recognizing Nvidia’s decision to invest in the Pittsburgh region and create its first ever AI Tech Community here in partnership with CMU and the University of Pittsburgh. Shane Shaneman, senior AI strategist, public sector at Nvidia, also was a speaker at the event.
Other prominent leaders in AI who spoke at the event included Zico Kolter, a board member at pioneering generative AI developer OpenAI and director of machine learning at CMU; Andrew Moore, CEO of national security startup Lovelace AI and former head of Google Cloud AI; and Stanford International AI Center Lab Director Karen Myers. Kolter and Myers both spoke on a panel discussing the balancing act of the benefits of AI with the potential dangers, including deepfakes and misinformation.
The event also brought together a litany of policymakers and policy experts, including former Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald, Lieutenant Gov. Austin Davis and White House Apprenticeship Board Chair Rob Cherry. Policy focused panels dealt with national security, urban development and the significant amount of energy that AI technologies require.
View the full story at bizjournals.com.