Transcriber: Leonard Ryunosuke Reviewer: Anna Sobota
As I was preparing for this talk, I was thinking to myself,
“How do I give this audience a transformational experience?”
Mostly so that when my five-month-old son watches this video and he grows up,
he’s proud of me.
Luckily, my wife is a university professor
and she said she watched every TEDx talk on AI
and none of them talk about the topic that I work on every day,
which is AI ecosystem building.
I’m Joseph Wehbe and I’m an AI ecosystem builder.
We are at a tipping point in AI.
The AI ecosystem that exists in Boston, Silicon Valley
doesn’t exist in the heartland of the US.
All of us have a goal in AI
but the barrier to achieve that goal is really high.
The problem is we can’t lower that barrier
or delete the entryway for each stakeholder.
We have to redesign the pathway for every stakeholder
to achieve their AI goal.
How do we achieve that?
We are in Boston, home of the greatest learning infrastructure in the world.
You might believe that we’re just in an innovation ecosystem,
but we actually exist in an AI value network.
An AI value network is a group of eight stakeholders
comprised of upstream resources, downstream channels
and subsidiary resources, all working towards the common goal
of building the next generation of AI talent.
A traditional innovation ecosystem is made up of this five stakeholder model,
as defined by MIT.
But in an AI ecosystem it’s a lot more complex
because of all the resources that have to go into building this ecosystem.
So, the eight stakeholders are students and researchers, government stakeholders,
entrepreneurs, investors, platform companies,
executives, workforce leaders.
But everything else that supports this ecosystem:
the chief scientific advisors,
the AI Centers of Excellence, the AI labs, the computational hardware resources,
the AI accelerators and incubators, the AI ethicists, the projects -
the opportunities for us to grow.
Now, this exists here in Boston,
but what about in my home state of New Jersey
or in the heartland?
Do they have these resources?
Do they have localized ecosystems?
Are they able to achieve their goals if they don’t have all this supports?
I wish the answer was yes.
Unfortunately,
if you’re in New Jersey or Pennsylvania or somewhere in the heartland,
where you don’t have a pathway to achieve that goal
AI just becomes some unreachable technology.
So I believe that the barrier
to overcome, to AGI is building localized AI ecosystems.
Why is local important?
Because we have local talent, local capital, local R&D,
local small businesses, local future of work problems to solve,
local ethical dilemmas in each community.
So we can't tell the world to just go on Coursera
or some online program to learn about AI
when we’re in the greatest learning infrastructure in the world.
We need to give them the opportunity locally in every region in the US
to build their local AI ecosystem.
So my call to action for all the visionary leaders
is to build local, figure out the stakeholders in your region.
You might not be able to replicate all these stakeholders
because AI is about the people.
We can’t take all the people in Boston and put them in another city,
but we can solve this virtually
by bringing all these stakeholders together
and creating pathways for every stakeholder.
So whether you're in medicine or marketing or finance,
you should have a pathway to achieve your AI goal.
And like I said, unfortunately,
if you don’t exist in an AI value network or local AI ecosystem,
you just don’t have the pathway to achieve that.
So, that’s the work we do at my company daily -
is building these virtual AI ecosystems that are local to every region
because we believe building localized AI ecosystems
is the barrier to overcome to achieve AGI.
Thank you.
(Applause)