ASIMOV Sessions: SF #0

Last week, we hosted our debut event in San Francisco: presented by NEAR Protocol and co-hosted by ASIMOV Protocol and EXO Labs, this first ASIMOV Sessions meetup focused on the theme of user-owned, trustworthy machine intelligence and featured a keynote from Cameron Dennis (Director of AI, NEAR) and talks from Alex Cheema (Founder, EXO) and myself, Arto Bendiken (Founder, ASIMOV). We also had futurist and author Robert Scoble moderating a panel between the three speakers!

I spoke about and presented ASIMOV's work on trustworthy, neurosymbolic personal intelligence and gave a sneak peek live demo of the upcoming multimodal capabilities of the ASIMOV platform:

My talk was favorably received; and as the tech for the demo I presented has been more than a long year in the making, I was gratified to get spontaneous applause for our efforts. It seems, then, that we succeeded in our objective of showing our captive audience something that they had never seen before: a vivid visual representation of the hybrid multimodal memory of a neurosymbolic machine intelligence as it observes the room and constructs a real-time knowledge graph to model & connect the audience, environment, and activities that it sees and hears!

During the afterparty, guest after guest told me that witnessing our live demo gave them goosebumps or chills down their spine. This even continued past the evening itself, as at each of the next three events I attended over the following several days people recognized and came up to me and told me earnestly "I was there". I hadn't quite realized how powerful those simple three words could be.

This demo was but the very first draft of a visualization for the neurosymbolic approach we're building on. We have a number of further developments cooking that when they are good and ready to ship will amp up the wow factor here by large multiples still!

After the demo segment in my talk, I spent a couple of minutes on an ELI5 explanation of knowledge graphs per se. I've myself been excited by knowledge graphs for two decades now, ever since first putting these concepts to use on a project for the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR), a part of the US Navy, way back in the day.

As I've seen in my own past work for the US Navy, the European Space Agency (ESA), and S&P 500 enterprises, knowledge graphs power streaming and data warehousing at scale, uniting the hundreds of disparate information sources that an enterprise may have. Palantir's fortune is built on this technology, and as here in the Bay Area people like single-sentence Hollywood pitches, I sometimes half-joke that we're building the Palantir for your personal life.

All this and more in the full recording of my talk and demo which runs 15 minutes:

The topic of the panel was the path to private and trustworthy AI that serves its users instead of Big Tech, and it was expertly moderated by futurist and author Robert Scoble who has a good understanding of the topics at hand. Cameron, Alex, and I each have our distinct ideas for how user-owned AI ought to be structured—NEAR AI is working out confidential & verifiable cloud inference, EXO is researching distributed local inference, and ASIMOV is building data-centric P2P on-device systems—but these visions do have a lot of overlap.

This introductory edition of the ASIMOV Sessions was a complete success. Nobody (even in SF) has ever seen anything quite like what we demoed at the meetup! The bar for novelty is high in the Bay Area, but we managed to surpass it. Audience engagement was phenomenal, with long Q&A segments, no doubt contributed to by the relatively intimate space that packed nearly a hundred people but in a friendly way.

A big thanks to Emma Rymer, our Head of Comms who organized the event from our side, and literally went the extra mile by flying to SF for it. Kudos to Soniya Ahuja & Orbis86 and Ken Nim & OffChain Global for help with the organization, as well as to Brett Bunnell and Cole-Frieman & Mallon for generously providing the space for the meetup! Thanks certainly to Tom Fellenz, one of our earliest supporters who also provided the live music for the meetup. And thanks to Akshat Prakash & CAMB.AI for live translation.

Going forward we will certainly be hosting regular ASIMOV Sessions in San Francisco and beyond, focusing on our core theses of user-owned, trustworthy personal intelligence. Make sure to subscribe to our event calendar to get notified about future events!