Episode Details

A week of horror, an AI conference of contrasts

Hi, this is Alex. In the podcast this week, you'll hear my conversation with Miguel, a new friend I made in AI.engineer event, and then a recap of the whole Ai.engineer event I had with Swyx after the end.

This newsletter is a difficult one for me to write, honestly, I wanted to skip this one entirely, struggling to fit the current events into my platform and the AI narrative, however, decided to write one anyway, as the events of the last week have merged into 1 for me in a flurry of contrasts.

Contrast 1 - Innovation vs Destruction

I was invited (among a few other Israelis or Israeli-Americans) to the ai.engineer summit in SF, to celebrate the rise of the AI engineer, and I was looking forward to that very much. Meeting many of you (Shoutout to everyone who listens to ThursdAI who I've met face to face!) and talking to new friends of the pod, interviewing speakers, meeting and making connections was a dream come true.

However a few days before the conference began, in a stark contrast to this dream, I had to call my mom, who was sheltering, 20km from the Gaza strip border, to ask if our friends and family are alive and accounted for, and to hear sirens as rockets flying above her head, as Hamas terrorists murder, pillage and kidnap, in what seems to be the 10x equivalent of 9/11 terror attack, relative to population size.

I grew up in Ashkelon, rocket attacks are nothing new to me, we've learned to live with them (thank you Iron Dome heroes) but this was something else entirely, a new world of terror.

So back to the conference, given that there's not a lot to be gained by doom scrolling, and watching (basically snuff) films coming out of the region, given that all my friends and family were accounted for, I decided to not give the terrorists what they want (which is to get people in state of terror) and instead to choose to have compassion, without empathy towards the situation and not bring sadness to every conversation I had there (over 200 I think)

So participating at an AI event, which hosts and celebrates folks who are literally at the pinnacle of innovation, building the future, using all the latest tools while also hurting and holding the dear ones in my thoughts was a very stark contrast between past and future, and huge credit goes to Dedy Kredo, CTO of Codium, who was in the same position, and gave a hell of a talk, with a kick-ass (no backup recording!) demo live, and then shared this image:

This is his co-founder, Itamar, who was called to reserve duty to protect his family and country, sitting with his rifle and his dashboard, seeing destruction + creation, past and future, negativity and positivity all at once. As Dedy masterfully said, we will prevail 🙏

Contrast 2 - Progress // Fear

At the event, Swyx and Benjamin gave me a media pass and a free reign, and I asked to be teamed with a camera-person to go around the event and do some (not live) interviews. I was teamed with the lovely Stacey, from Chico, CA. Stacey has nothing to do with AI, in fact she's a wedding photographer, however she definitely listened with interest to the interviews I was holding, and to speakers on stage.

While we were taking a break, I looked out the window, and saw a driverless car (waymo) zip by, and since they only started operating after I left SF 3 years ago, I didn't yet have a chance to ride in one.

So I asked Stacey and some other folks, if they'd like to go for a ride, and to my complete bewilderement, Stacey said "no 😳" and when I asked why not, she didn't want to admin but then said that it's scary.

This struck me and since that moment, I've had as many conversations with Stacey as I had with other folks who came to be AI.engineers, s