The development of various applications of artificial intelligence will go further faster with more collaboration — that's one of the through-lines that emerged from Upper Bound, says the team Taproot sent to cover the AI conference.
Reporters Shayne Giles and Ashley Lavallee-Koenig dove deeper into what they learned in Episode 47 of Bloom.
A session on an autonomous-vehicle training course called Duckietown and a progress report on the uses of machine learning in developing lab-grown meat may not seem to have a lot in common, but it was clear from both that silos don't help, Giles said.
"Cellular agriculture, just as we touched on with Duckietown, is definitely an industry that could benefit from more collaboration," they said. "A lot of the funding has been private over the past few years, and so there's all of these different companies all trying to accomplish the same thing independently, whereas if they worked together, they'd be able to make a lot more progress a lot faster."
Neither self-driving cars nor steak-from-a-petri-dish are here yet, but machine learning is already in action in the supply chain industry, as evidenced by a session on Routeique's collaboration with Amii. That caught Lavallee-Koenig's attention.
"I have been working for a large corporate retailer for four years, so I've been on that back end, and I've seen what a mess the logistics side of things can be," she said. "The amount of energy and packaging we're wasting by not having those processes be efficient is actually quite a shame, I think. So to see the potential to have that optimized, as they say, even from a worker's perspective, I think it would make things a lot easier."
Hear more from these Gen-Zers on the changes coming now and in the future, including Rich Sutton's vision for a transcendent kind of AI, on the June 20 episode of Taproot's podcast about innovation in Edmonton.
Photo: The Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii) hosted Upper Bound in downtown Edmonton from May 23 to 26, 2023. (Ashley Lavallee-Koenig)