We tried something a little different in this month’s DAW. We actually tried two things that were a little different in this event.

What we intended to be different was that we were going to have a panel of experts who would field a bunch of questions from the audience, capture them on a whiteboard, and then talk through them. Ultimately, we did that—not exactly as it had been drawn up (so to speak), but it worked out.

The unintended difference in the event was to see how many things could go wrong and still have us pull off a successful and engaging meetup. Speculation was that the questions and answers were going to be so good that our robot overlords became concerned and flexed their AI capabilities to undermine the meetup. To wit:

• On Monday, one of the three intended panelists pulled out of the event. No problem, Brian Sampsel was hastily recruited and graciously accepted the last-minute invitation.
• On Wednesday morning at 4:00 AM, one of the other panelists went into labor. Did she take the time to email us that she had become unavailable? Yes. Yes she did. Katie Schafer is a machine in her own right (as our other panelist, Pete Gordon, had already noted several days earlier). But, no problem. We could do this with two panelists. What else ya’ got to throw at us, HAL? Well…
• Weather anyone? The venue and the surrounding area had a tornado watch issued late afternoon, and the venue—Rev1—was squarely inside the tornado watch area. The tornado watch lasted until 7:00 PM (the event started at 6:30 PM). There was rain. There was wind. There was hail for Pete’s sake!

Apparently, though, analytics types take their cues from the USPS. Or have poor judgment. Or some combination? We wound up with a great turnout, with lots of good pre-talk discussion over pizza and beer:

Conveniently, the event is in the interior of the building! #tornadosafety

The discussion itself covered a wide range of topics—skewing heavily towards AI and less to date science (data science is involved in AI, of course, so it was still there):

A Range of Topics to Discuss

There is no deck to share, no recording, and this attendee didn’t take scrupulous notes, so we’ll go with a smattering of the discussion that could be retrieved from his brain the following day:

• When will AGI (artificial general intelligence) be achieved? Pete’s estimate (which seemed serious) was: 2033. But, he also noted that AlphaGo’s infamous Move 37 (in 2016) was a glimpse into that future.
• To RAG or not to RAG? Well… that’s a hot topic. It depends.
• Poisoning of training data? Why, and what are the ramifications? It sounds bad, but it’s got it’s uses—see Nightshade.
• Should newly minted software engineers be worried about AI making their jobs obsolete? No. Full stop. They’ll have some powerful new tools to employ, but their jobs aren’t going anywhere.
• What about marketing analysts? Will AI take their jobs? This prompted quite a bit of discussion. Brian made the point that AI can do some pretty impressive exploratory data analysis (EDA), which is definitely useful! One attendee asked if he could see getting to a point where you could tell an AI-based tool what your KPIs were, and it could then just analyze the campaign. The answer was, “Yeah… but a human still needs to set appropriate KPIs!” Even MMM came up—is that AI, or is that just… sophisticated linear regression (statistics). Kinda’ more the latter, but “AI” gets slapped on it for branding purposes and we get excited!

And, of course, lots and lots more! Some pics from the event: