AI events in Greater Victoria

Anu's Take

Microsoft spent years letting somebody else's lab be its AI story. There are seven models with its own name on them now, and the launch post makes a point of saying they were trained from scratch with nothing distilled from another lab. That is a sentence you only write when people have been asking, so I would rather hear the team that built them talk through it than read it again.

Anu's Take

AI turned up in classrooms a good while before anyone wrote the rules for it, which is roughly how these things always go. This session steps back from the panic to ask what it actually means for students, parents, and the people who will eventually be hiring them. A lunch spent on a genuinely hard question, which beats another one spent pretending it isn't one.

Anu's Take

Every stakeholder alignment exercise I have been part of produced a wall of sticky notes and a promise to synthesize them later. Later is usually never. Here the synthesis happens in the room, in seconds, and the humans keep the judgement calls. That is the version of AI I can get behind.

Anu's Take

This one's going to be epic. I was at last year's, about 60 people showed, and the winner, Calum Bird, built an app that connected to his bank account and an SMS service to track his spending and text him a burn whenever he made a bad call. The poorer the spending decision, the bigger the burn. It was brilliant.

Anu's Take

Jonathan's checkers program did not just take the world title and a place in the Guinness Book of World Records, it went on to solve the game outright: perfect play is a draw, and that is that. Games have been AI's proving ground ever since, from Chinook to the chatbots writing everyone's emails, with a detour through Halo, whose AI sidekick Cortana later turned up on Microsoft's payroll. A lunch hour with the rare person who actually reached the end of a game, back to explain why the field keeps starting new ones.

Anu's Take

A full day of Microsoft 365, Copilot and AI sessions across three tracks. Last year's debut sold out and I'd expect this one to as well. The quiet reminder underneath all of it: most of the Copilot features on stage are already sitting inside licences people pay for every month and have never opened. A summit like this earns its keep if the room goes home and finally turns the thing on.

Anu's Take

The useful thing about this one is who is on the panel: four founders in their twenties, on what they have actually got AI doing, rather than another room of Gen Xers forecasting what it will do next. The billing is what is running, what it took to get working, and where a person is still required. The organisers have also published a list of what they still need, down to a mic and someone on the door, which is the same candour the panel is promising, pointed at their own event.

Anu's Take

Great event last year!