Tag: AI

One Year Later: What Have We Learned About Russia, Facebook and Our Elections?

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NewCo Shift Forum 2018

John Heilemann, Renee DiResta, Laura Rosenberger and Roger McNamee discuss the future of democracy in an era of unrestrained social media.


One year after the Shift Forum convened one of the very first conversations around the role of Russia in disrupting the US electoral process in 2016, moderator John Heilemann once again convenes a panel of experts to plumb what we know about the story. What was revealed is both fascinating and deeply disturbing.

John Heilemann: All right, guys. We have the third in our series of political policy-related panels this morning. This is the one that I have been most looking forward to, because I think it gets to one of the issues that everybody in this room has been thinking about. Everyone in the country’s been thinking about, and the one that no one in the country was thinking about.

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AI Isn’t Magic. It’s Just Math.

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NewCo Shift Forum 2018 — Signal P&G Talks

Jana Eggers on why AI shouldn’t be feared, and must be understood.

Jana Eggers, CEO of Nara Logics, during NewCo Shift Forum 2018

Jana Eggers, CEO of AI startup Nara Logics, wants everyone to understand AI. In her five minute Signal P&G talk at Shift Forum, she explains that in the end, it’s just math and a lot of data — and that data increasingly will be coming from businesses of all stripes, not just the big tech platforms.

Jana Eggers: Wow! What a day it has been. I’m nervous to stand up here in front of you all because of all the greatness that has been shared on the stage. Thank you for taking a few minutes with me.

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“It’s Time for Silicon Valley to Be Paranoid”

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NewCo Shift Forum 2018 — Signal P&G Talks

SVB’s Erik Peña on how China is different — and why it matters.

Erik Peña is a Managing Director in Silicon Valley Bank’s Corporate Relationship Management Team.

If you want to understand the future of business, you best study China. At the Shift Forum this past February, we asked Erik Peña to help us better understand the world’s fastest growing superpower. Below is the full transcript and video from his fascinating survey.

Erik Peña: Good evening. I wouldn’t call myself an expert in China, but I’ll give you a very quick overview on SVB to set the stage of our role in China. Then we’ll dive right into China, as soon as I figure out the clicker. There it is.

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What Comes After The Cloud?

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Newco Shift Forum 2018

As CTO of Adobe, Abhay Parasnis oversees the company’s technology strategy, and he’s betting big on narrow but deep AI.


Now that every business worth its stock price has moved to “the cloud,” creating massive technology winners like Salesforce, Amazon, and Google along the way, the technology industry finds itself searching once more for a metaphor that can drive its seemingly endless cycle of identifying and building the “next big thing.” And while it seems almost too obvious to identify artificial intelligence, or AI, as that next thing, Abhay Parasnis, CTO of Adobe, makes a strong case for why the received wisdom may yet prove true.

Famous for betting the company on the cloud five years ago (and winning big), Adobe is making an even bigger bet on a certain kind of AI — what Parasnis calls “narrow AI.” Adobe’s goal is to leverage narrow AI across its core suite of products in creativity, marketing services, and business services, in the process simplifying them and making them accessible to a magnitude of order more potential customers. Forget Terminator references, where a generalized AI takes over the world, Parasnis told me at the recent NewCo Shift Forum. Think instead of the magical world of Harry Potter (minus Voldemort, of course). Below is the video and full transcript of our conversation, edited for clarity.

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The Future of Work: Four Generations Working At Once, Plus Machines

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Newco Shift Forum 2018

Responsible for driving Dell’s global brand and purpose, Liz Matthews kicks off the Future of Work dialog at Forum last month.

Liz Matthews, Senior Vice President, Global Brand and Creative ,Dell Technologies

The Shift Forum is driven by “Pillars,” core themes that we explore over three days of conversation, debate, and provocative presentations. Our partner in our Pillar on “the Future of Work” is Dell Technologies, who presented the findings not only of its own research in the space, but also of five table moderators who reported out their conversations about the topic during lunch at the event. In this video and transcript below, meet Liz Matthews, who runs Dell’s brand globally, and the five moderators, who are all extraordinary in their own right.

Liz Matthews: I am Liz Matthews. I run Brand and Advertising for Dell Technologies. We are thrilled to be here with all of you. We’re actually very, very excited to support the Future of Work conversation here at the Shift Forum.

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Elon Musk Is Not A Robot

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Money Quote November 16 2017

Robots don’t cry. Or do they?

Elon Musk: The Architect of Tomorrow

Holy moly. Elon Musk is really a human being! This in depth profile by Neil Strauss is either an incredible scoop, or a deft bit of PR by Musk himself, who certainly is a master of the public reveal. Either way, it comes off as genuine, and it paints Musk in a very soft light. Money Quote: “There is clearly something Musk wants to share, but he can’t bring himself to utter the words, at least not on the record. “It’s so terrible, you can’t believe it.” The tears run silently down his face. “I can’t remember the last time I cried.” He turns to Teller to confirm this. “You’ve never seen me cry.”

“No,” Teller says. “I’ve never seen you cry.”

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What the Future of Artificial Intelligence Demands

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Medium Premium Preview

Smartening up our global auto fleets would required the equivalent of increasing the iPhone industry by at least five-fold.

In one of our Medium Premium series created in conjunction with noted authors and journalists, Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Computing, by AI expert Azeem Azhar, explores the role of society if we ever want to get serious about Artificial Intelligence in our lifetimes. In the first part of the exclusive series (membership is required, but Medium does have a “metered paywall’’), Azhar discusses how artificial intelligence is ramping up the demand for computing cycles.

You can read the first entry here, which discusses the demands machine learning-like applications are going to make on available computing processing. The second entry, found here, explores how the demands of AI will drive two shifts: the resurgence of the processing on the edge, and the arrival of new processing architectures.

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The Best Of NewCo Shift — Week of September 26th

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Here’s another week’s edition of NewCo Shift Weekly, a roundup of top NewCo Shift stories. Thank you for continuing reading and sharing these stories. Remember to follow us on Medium and social media to receive real time notifications from all our stories as they’re published. And let us know what you’re interested in us covering or pitch your own stories at editorial@newco.co. Thanks for your support!


Lost Context: How Did We End Up Here?


Today marketers pour the majority of their budgets into the Google/Facebook duopoly — 70–85% of all digital advertising dollars go to the one or the other of them, and nearly all growth in digital marketing spend is attributable to them as well. But the real story is the complex, out of control nature of their ad platforms, which are now being hijacked by Russian actors and lord knows who else. How did we let that happen?

“Selective Constitutionalism”

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Don’t Quite Grok Blockchain? We Got You Covered.

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Plus an AI cagefight between tech’s most famous founders, and a path to salvation through handwriting.


Raise your hand if you understand the blockchain. OK, smarty pants, you can skip to the next story. But most of us may need a primer (or three). And given that blockchain technology dominates tech and business news these days, it seems a good moment to point Daily readers to a trio of relatively painless pieces that will give you a good overview of how it all works.

Start with this short Medium piece from 2013 (yes, four years ago), entitled Explain Bitcoin to me. One of the first bitcoin/blockchain pieces to go viral, author Nik Custodio uses a simple example (a digital apple) to explain the core concepts behind bitcoin, which was the first at-scale use of blockchain technology.

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AI & Automation Won’t Kill Work

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Sponsored Post

Drudgery, however, is about to be wiped out


By Mousa Ackall, VP of Brand Marketing, WorkMarket

The hype around artificial intelligence (AI) and automation is alive and well. It’s hard to browse your Twitter feed or peruse the web without seeing something about autonomous vehicles, AI powered thingamajigs, or the impending robot apocalypse.

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