Convening His Extraordinary Network as The AI Age Begins
Leyden has built up an extraordinary network in the 30 years since he came to work with the founders of WIRED magazine at the beginning of the digital revolution. He has followed the front edge of technological change and come to know a large number of top innovators pioneering a wide range of fields.
Over the years he has convened this burgeoning network in various event series to help collectively figure out what’s really going on in the tech world and what’s probably coming. So when Generative AI arrived he saw the need for another series of meetings of the minds.
Leyden hosted one of the most influential event series on Generative AI at ground zero for the AI revolution in the center of San Francisco for the first two years after ChatGPT burst onto the scene. Each event posed one big question that everyone was trying to figure out.
He convened dozens of the world’s top experts and entrepreneurs in the AI field in public conversations through his series The AI Age Begins. And he invited many of the leading innovators from industries and fields impacted by AI to these exclusive gatherings.
These events always maxed out with waiting lists and have attracted top journalists from The New Yorker, Bloomberg, Forbes, Reuters, Axios and even foreign media from Asia.
Below you can watch each of six epic events that were recorded in high-quality video. Just click on the video box and you can watch a playlist of all the key talks from that evening starting with Leyden himself setting the stage and posing the key question of the night.
The videos allow you to go back to those critical two years and hear from some of the leading experts in the world and see the palpable excitement.
A Short Overview of the Whole Series
The AI Age Begins event series started out in 2023 being called The Great Progression. After several events that year we developed a highly-produced video that acted like a trailer for the series, as well as for Leyden’s company Reinvent Futures that produced the series.
Leyden did the voice-over for this 5-minute video that starts with a big picture overview of what he means by The Great Progression and then explains how and why we convened the network to figure out the key questions surrounding AI.
The video also gives you a good sense of the location for the events (and the party after) held at the Shack15 club on the top floor of the iconic Ferry Building at ground zero for the AI Revolution in San Francisco.
What are the Real Implications of Gen AI?
Each event was organized around one key question and the first event started with the most basic about how big a deal the arrivals of Generative AI actually was.
Remember that ChatGPT 4 had just been released in March of 2023 and we held this event in May of 2023. So you can see both the excitement and the confusion as our speakers tried to make sense of the implications on the fly.
This convening was filled with journalists from major publications from the mainstream media, and the cover story of Businessweek magazine that next month started by quoting Leyden in the first paragraph.
Some might want to watch this for the historical interest though many of the answers are very much relevant still today.
What are the Positive Possibilities of Gen AI?
The next big event we needed to first look at the positive potential of this powerful new tool and we lined up a dozen speakers to give their answers for 5 minutes each.
Remember that at that time much of the coverage of AI was negative and many people saw the new technology as mostly a threat. We wanted to look at the other side of that narrative. You can watch it all with one click to start off the entire playlist.
Or if you want to jump right to the rockstars you can jump ahead to Google Brain Cofounder Greg Corrado, Siri Cofounder Adam Cheyer, Coursera Cofounder Daphne Koller, Former Head of the Patent Office Michelle Lee, Tech Guru Kevin Kelly, or GenAI founders like May Habib of Writer.
What are the Actual Risks of Gen AI?
Although many of the people who Leyden convened were optimistic in general about tech, we did need to look hard at all the various risks that were swirling around in the circles of government, think tanks and mainstream media.
So we looked hard at 10 different issues that people kept raising about the risks and had some of the top experts in the world talk about how risky they actually were. Watch the whole nuanced conversation.
What is the Case for Techno-Optimism Around AI?
For the 2024 season we changed the name of the series to The AI Age Begins and broaded the questions from the very fundamental ones of the first season when we were all just figuring out Generative AI and what it could do.
The first event of 2024 we just took on the key question about whether we should be generally optimistic or pessimistic about what will happen with AI. We invited a range of experts and thought leaders in a wide range of fields to help us make the case one way or there other.
The last 5-minute video in the playlist is Leyden taking a survey of how optimistic the 300 or so people gathered were very end of the program.
How Can AI Accelerate Progress in Clean Energy and Climate Tech?
The next big event we wanted to explore how this potentially world-changing new general purpose technology could help us in what is probably the biggest challenge facing human beings - climate change.
So we got top AI experts and entrepreneurs together with top climate folks and see what we could come up with. This conversation was less optimistic than the previous one, to be sure.
Most of those who gathered saw the arrival of AI as a good thing that should be fully exploited, but not enough to make up for the many other ways we are losing ground in solving the climate crisis.
How Can AI Accelerate Progress in Bioengineering & Healthcare?
Leyden sees the emergence of bioengineering and synthetic biology as another world historic development that could make a huge impact on the world.
So we gathered another network with expertise in the world of biology to cross-fertilize with the up-and-coming builders of AI.
We had 12 speakers take 5 minutes to answer the question of the night, and then we rolled into a two hour party afterwards.
Within a couple weeks Leyden learned that four of the speakers got funding for their ambitious projects. Check out the lineup of amazing ideas that emerged from this gathering.