In another sign that that the nascent generative AI scene has finally arrived into the mainstream, San Francisco held its first ever generative AI conference Tuesday at Pier 27.
The conference, Gen AI, was hosted by the Austin-based AI company Jasper, which uses the technology to help businesses create marketing copy and images. It drew about 1,000 people.
Generative AI burst onto the scene last November when the chatbot ChatGPT opened to the public, showing the masses the potential of AI that can generate long-form text, code or images based on a simple text prompt.
And if you believe the speakers at Gen AI, the technology is about to disrupt nearly every industry, white collar job and even art form very soon. These speakers included New York Times columnist Kevin Roose and executives of prominent well funded AI startups like Anthropic CEO Dario Andrei, Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque and the vice president of product for OpenAI, Peter Welinder.
"So much of the tech community is obviously here, and a lot of our speakers are already here," said Dave Rogenmoser, CEO of Jasper. It's just way easier than trying to plant the flag in Austin and fly everyone in for a day."
Rogenmoser says the conference is not only San Francisco's first generative AI conference, but the first in the world. And it's part of his mission to build a community around the technology, similar to other communities like Web3.
"I love community, it's a huge part of our business," he said. "We just thought there's been a lot of AI conferences, but they're highly technical and a regular person wouldn't know what's going on, so we held this conference to invest in the community, simplify the message and like make it accessible to other people."
