AI events in Greater Victoria

Anu's Take

'Physical AI' is this year's headline term, and right now it stretches to cover almost anything. What makes this hour useful is the vantage point. ROK counts the stack from bare metal up. Firmware first, then the controls a person actually touches, and only then anything with a browser in it. Ask that room where AI belongs in a device and you get an engineering answer rather than a trend line.

Anu's Take

The claim worth turning up for is not the immersive tech, it is that human skills become measurable once a team is under a clock. Most of this genre asserts the outcome and measures nothing, so a testable version is a step forward. Read the listing closely though: this is billed as research, which means you are not the audience, you are the sample.

Anu's Take

The listing does not mention that this is one stop on a run that has already been through Tel Aviv and Shenzhen. Victoria is on that list because Alhwyn and Jia Ming put it on, one based here and one who runs the Calgary and Toronto rooms. Neither is doing this for the first time, which is the main reason to bother.

Anu's Take

Victoria Tech Week opens on the Monday, and this is where it starts: a room of the people leading the teams pushing hardest on how software actually gets built. The year's question is what engineering leadership is for once the agents write most of the code. Not a bad thing to open a week on.

Anu's Take

This is a topic that needs a lot more attention than it is currently getting, so it is good to see it start bubbling up to the top. The interesting part is who is delivering it: a Meta-certified trainer is the one calling this the awkward teenage phase. I do wonder what Cory Doctorow would make of that, since an advertiser losing visibility and control is stage three of Enshittification almost to the letter.

Anu's Take

The question on this agenda with actual teeth is what gets disclosed to clients and what does not. Everyone billing for marketing work has settled that one quietly by now, project by project, and almost nobody says their answer out loud with competitors in the room. Ross Dunn has been broadcasting about search since 2009, on what is still the longest-running SEO podcast going, so he has watched several cycles arrive that were going to change everything. Whether this one is different is the interesting part.

Anu's Take

René has been in the agentic coding space longer than most, and he spoke at Prompt last year. Him moving back to Calgary was Victoria's loss. Happy to have him here as often as we can get him, so get him while he is here, before he makes like a pumpkin and heads back over the mountains.

Anu's Take

Pretty much every story this year about an agent going rogue turns out, on inspection, to be a story about permissions. Not the model misbehaving: a key left somewhere convenient, a token scoped to everything, an approval step nobody added. A talk that spends its time on access architecture rather than prompt craft is aimed at the right half of the problem.

Anu's Take

The first one was excellent, and it came with more pizza than the room could physically get through. My Mona the Octocat plush sits on my desk. The second reads like more of the same, which is the compliment rather than the complaint. I can't make this one.

Anu's Take

Go for the floor, not the stages. Two of the four are streamed and recorded, so the headline talks reach you at home for a fraction of what the trip costs, and what does not travel is the exhibition hall, the other two stages and whoever you end up standing next to. Worth doing that arithmetic before booking anything.

Anu's Take

Rachel is one of the earlier faces in Victoria's AI scene, which means she is talking from a couple of years of the actual work rather than from this month's news cycle. The last time we shared a stage here, four of us spent it debating which platform wins. She has the room to herself this time, and her premise is that the call should not default to the loudest technical voice. Guilty, and worth hearing anyway.

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

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

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

So sad I can't attend this one, because Calum Bird and Daniel Kopaee are both rockstars. Ontology basics beside LLM security is a sharper pairing than it looks: one is about naming things precisely enough for a machine to use them, the other about what happens to what you hand it. It is also always great to spend time with Geoff Shera at Frontier.

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

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

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

Quantum is probably going to be what overshadows AI in the buzzword and craze category. I can't get enough of it right now.

Anu's Take

Code is becoming the cheap part. This is where Victoria's senior engineering leaders figure out what the job even is once the agents are writing it.

Anu's Take

Feels like we optimized for connection and accidentally optimized out the humans. Curious if we can design AI that nudges us back toward each other instead of just making us more efficient at being alone.

Anu's Take

Video is where it's at this year. Well, that's what TikTok told me.

Anu's Take

GPT-2. What is that?

Anu's Take

This is the room to be in if you want to know what's coming down the pipe and how the dev shops of the future will build software. Be there or be square.

Anu's Take

Jamie is a Gem. Nuff said!

Anu's Take

$100 discount code for VDS members. DM me to get it. This is going to be epic. Plus I'm there as well. It's not often that an Anthropic Claude Certified Architect rolls into town. Let alone one putting on a workshop for the general public.

Anu's Take

Avatars? This is going to be interesting.

Anu's Take

Jeremy Moseley in the house. Fresh off of Microsoft Build. What else might we hear about?

Anu's Take

I can guarantee there will be a number of game changing announcements. Peter Steinberger, creator of the OpenClaw AI agent system, as a featured speaker. Enough said.

Anu's Take

Veilstream has found a way to make data masking easy and fun!

Anu's Take

Curious about AI personas?

Anu's Take

To be or not to be. What is AI?

Anu's Take

AI-native eh! What does that mean?

Anu's Take

The perfect time and place to see local Microsoft advocate Anu (Me) go head to head with three other multi-disciplinary genAI experts. Guaranteed to see Steve and I butt heads.

Anu's Take

The last session was very diverse and amazing collection of individuals. I can't wait to get back into it this week.

Anu's Take

Data and dating? Is dataing a word. What does it mean if I live by a bagel shop.

Anu's Take

Hear directly from Jesse about why the RUH AI platform should be the platform to run your digital workforce on.