Last week NYC erupted with over 1,000 small pop-up events across the city, loosely curated by the NY Tech Week team on this calendar. I would describe this as a decentralized SXSW where the events are hosted without much central control which results in an explosion of activity and an opportunity for participants to expose themselves to a wide range of ideas while visiting workspaces all across the city.
The events begin to come together in the months leading up to the annual event. Most of them are invite-only so you need to sign up in advance. Sign-up forms on Partiful ask you to add your LinkedIn profile so the organizers can vet & curate who attends.
I only had time in my schedule to make a few afternoon or evening events but it was nice to sample a few, meet some new people and check out some cool spaces.
Here’s what I learned.
“Influencers are toast” said someone after seeing the demo of Mirage Studio an “AI-powered video generation platform that allows you to create lifelike talking-head videos without traditional production.”
Part of me is happy to bid goodbye to social media influencers shilling products they didn’t truly like, understand, or appreciate. The founder made the argument that their platform would open up access to imaginary personalities to help explain or position their product and would level the playing field for all companies allowing for smaller companies to punch above their weight.
I’m still not sure how I feel about this development, especially after seeing what people are doing with Google’s Veo 3. Further, if the key to communicating to create a sense of empathy, what happens when we give the keys to this rich protocol to a series of APIs? What becomes of human dialog and communication or, more philosophically, what is real?
Then someone leaned over to tell me about Nucleus Embryo. In their words,
When undergoing IVF, couples typically have several viable embryos to choose from.
Nucleus Embryo provides information on the disease risks and traits of each of these embryos, helping parents make an informed choice on which embryo they want to implant.
On the way to the next event, strange new world thoughts spinning in my head, David J’s song, Stop this City was playing on repeat.
Thankfully, my last event of the day was about the power of community and face-to-face collaboration at a shared workspace in an old factory in Tribeca at Fabrik.
The next day, at the Axios AI + NY Summit I saw Jeffrey Katzenberg paraphrase NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, “AI isn’t going to replace people. It’s going to replace people that don’t use AI,” as he drew parallels between the influx of AI technology to the arrival of Pixar’s computer animation at Disney’s studios.
Later, New York Governor Kathy Hochul sat down to speak about state initiatives such as Empire AI but also, about what was on everyone’s mind, the challenges of dealing with the Trump administration.
The next day, on the 82nd floor of 30 Hudson Yards, Brand Strategist George Scribner, shared his perspective of Branding in the Age of AI.
The outlook for Google is not great as they had neglected to evolve its brand beyond a functional search utility. Scribner’s view is that there is not enough brand loyalty and that people will flock to a better tool as the new conversational search experiences of the AI platforms have leveled the playing field. I would have to agree but user lock in is a powerful thing and Google’s recent push with AI Mode will work even better for those with lots of data and history stored with Google.
I also dropped by a mixer for Japanese businesses and sat in on a presentation by a representative from the City of Yokohama that has a local NY office to woo startups to Japan.
On Thursday, I dropped in on a round table with several SEO people talking about Generative AI chatbots and the future of discovery in this new world. There’s enough there for another post which will follow.
