Our Social Media Super Star Jasmine Gilbert headed off to London Tech Week (dubbed ‘the ultimate tech experience’) to see if it lived up to that promise. She came back with a download of learnings:
Unlock Your AI Mindset
Tanuja Randery, Vice President and Managing Director of Europe, Middle East & Africa (EMEA) for AWS spoke about how big AWS cloud has been in terms of technological advancement, but that they’re expecting AI to be even more transformative. Generative AI is projected to have a revenue potential of around 12 trillion dollars and is expected to power more than 30% of enterprise applications in the years to come. AWS has invested £8 billion into data centres that could add £14 million to the UK economy by 2028, creating close to 15,000 jobs.
Randery talked about being customer-obsessed and making it easy for people to have the tools to invent and reinvent. She referenced:
- Trainline have just launched their GenAI travel agent on Amazon Bedrock
- Bundesliga uses AI for content creation, with 400 pieces being automated every month enabling their creative teams to focus on creating more bespoke content
- Amazon’s Rufus is a Gen AI language for improved shopping experiences. It’s being used in AI-powered fraud detection, removing false reviews and counterfeit products by looking at the business history behind it.
Europe 2050: Our Path to a Prosperous 25 years for European Technology
Niklas Zennstrom, Founder of Skype, Founding Partner & CEO, Atomico mediated a panel with Ilkka Paananen, Co-Founder & CEO – Supercell and Victoria van Lennep, Co-Founder – Lendable.
They were discussing how to make Europe the powerhouse for tech over the next 25 years and shared that more founders are starting companies in Europe than any other region
The real gold of this discussion was the point they made over AI being deployed not to extract value, but to solve real world problems and that responsible innovation is the only way to build trust with customers where you’re handling their data, their money, and their private information. Where profit and purpose used to be mutually exclusive we now need money and ethics to work together.
They were saying that Enterprise Management Incentive eligibility is currently a bit of a barrier to success. They urged UK tech founders to stop comparisons with Silicon Valley, changing the narrative that you need to move to the US to be successful. They landed on the encouragement to build fast, build responsibly, build together
From Track to Boardroom: What Corporate Business Can Learn from the Cutting-Edge Tech Development Process in F1
Sam Shead, Former Tech Editor of LinkedIn spoke to Christian Horner CBE, CEO of Red Bull Racing about how technical development influences the Red Bull business. Horner shared that there are 2,000 people in the tech department at Red Bull and that in the world of F1 long term planning is about 2 weeks. The technology moves so fast, you have to think fast and innovate quickly.
Red Bull is an empowering organisation where everyone is focused on the performance of the car and takes pride in being a part of the team. Red Bull recognises the importance of flexibility, investing and developing people as your biggest asset. Part of that is ensuring that they have the right tools and the right leaders with the right skills.
They’re on the fifth evolution of driver simulators. They develop the car in the virtual world because you can’t test on the track. What they’ve found is that 90% of the time, the simulations reflect the real-life conditions and outcomes.
One of the biggest debates in their field is around sustainability. They currently have a 50-50 focus on combustion fuel vs electric, their argument is largely around the visceral excitement of F1 requiring the roaring engines, petrol fumes and raw emotion behind the cars. Formula E is already an existing sport with its own fanbase which is quite different to theirs.
Whilst Shead challenged Horner on issues of diversity and bringing women into the sport, Horner said that it goes beyond that, they’re supporting the grass roots F1 academy and trying to bring diversity through across the board, with more female engineers etc. He also referenced their Principal Strategy Engineer, Hannah Schmitz as somebody capable of modelling the future of technological innovation to the next generation.
Driving Innovation: How AWS Generative AI is Transforming Performance in Formula 1 and Beyond
Nicola Hume, Presenter & Host of Talking Bull spoke with Bernie Collins, F1 Strategy Analyst at Sky Sports (who Jasmine got to meet and grab a selfie with!) and Jonathan Allen and Felipe Augusto Chies of Amazon Web Services (AWS) about the role of data and generative AI in car performance.
From the amount of sensors on the car (over 300) to the data they generate (1.1 million data points per second), whilst GenAI makes sense of it all, it still takes humans to drive the analysis and make the right decisions. They also still rely on the driver’s senses and experiences, not just the technical data. It takes guts and data combined in balance to get it right.
They spoke about the use of data to determine key business decisions such as which races are in and out of the annual calendar, based on things such as the inefficiency of pit stops on certain tracks (Imola). They also use data to understand which races are the most entertaining to watch.
They run simulations to analyse track surface, ambient and asphalt conditions at different times of the day, over braking zones, the camber on each corner and where there are overtaking opportunities.
Then they test the cars in practice on the Friday, to fill in any missing data points. Every lap they run teaches machine learning models and enables them to get the data in a consumable way as quickly as possible to refine the strategy and cars. Advancements in technology are so fast, they’re out of date in fortnight.Â
Whilst they’ve been collecting data for a long time and the data hasn’t changed, the way that they use it has. They now know how to collate and read it and this ability is determining their competitiveness in races that come down to milliseconds.Â
They then went on to discuss Amazon Bedrock which is democratised and offers a large number of language models. They talked about the convergence of digital twins, machine learning and GenAI. They discussed how selecting the right language model based on application is so important because currently you have to choose between fast, comprehensive or cheap. For example, chatbots need to be fast, but outputs for use in legal settings need to be accurate (so they’re prepared to wait for longer processing times).
The Quantum Computing Advancements Set to Unlock the Promise of AI
Whilst an avid F1 fan who found those talks fascinating, it was this talk by Ilyas Khan, Founder & Chief Product Officer of Quantinuum that opened my eyes to a whole new world.
Whilst we’re still a few years away from quantum joining the AI conversation, there’s not a country of significance anywhere that doesn’t have a quantum programme. The UK quantum programme is in its third year of a five-year iteration and last year was the first year that a quantum computer could calculate at the speed a super computer couldn’t keep up with. Powerful GPUs, code LLMs and quantum computing all has the potential to combine and accelerate each other.
GenQAI will be the new concept that furthers current generative AI and one major industry that will see research improvement through Quantum data is biology. Using quantum computing, the GenQAI will help the fight against cancer, understand cellular genetics, parasites and molecular biology. While GenAI is still using stochastic approaches, brute force guessing its outcomes by random probability, Quantum AI is making accurate calculations. Helios a technology focused on drug delivery will be made available in September as a landmark achievement, and the company are looking at a 7-10 year period of innovation to reach their current goals.
In Summary
The exhibition space was full of businesses looking for investment (they should check out our InQubator program!) so was a real hive of activity. As a member of StrategiQ’s AI Council, I went to gain current insights on AI and wasn’t disappointed. I enjoyed connecting with the team from Edinburgh University and certainly didn’t expect the calibre of people speaking. The talks were certainly the most valuable part of the event for me, with the Quantum AI talk dropping the virtual bombshell that everything’s about to change even more! It made me realise how fast tech changes, and the work involved just to stay on top of it, but made me even more determined to try!
