Mission statement
It’s said that the person with AI will always outperform the person without AI. The purpose of the AI Society is to help people keep up with a tool, that is progressing at an astonishing pace, to ensure they are best equipped in the job market. Our club started when the technology itself was already incredibly mature. We aim to keep the pace.
The center of the action
The AI Society San Francisco isn’t the only one on Hult campuses. We have sister clubs in the London and Dubai campuses. This is the most miraculous technological innovation of our time, so having clubs dedicated to it on all the campuses is understandable.
It started routinely. Me and the other co-founders had an interest back in October, started the club, and it’s snowballed into something a lot more involved since then. There are five to six relevant events running every day in the city of San Francisco or Silicon Valley. But that’s just the nature of the city. When you are in the heart of entrepreneurship and innovation in the US, you have to realize that where you are, physically, is where a lot of the exciting developments with AI will be.
When you are in the heart of entrepreneurship and innovation in the US, you have to realize that where you are, physically, is where a lot of the exciting developments with AI will be.
A gap in the market
My background is in engineering and most of my co-founders have a similar background. At Hult, it’s far more common to be from a business background so my skillset already set me apart. This is why my co-founders and I felt best placed to start this having had a head start in the tech space already.
Going beyond a hobby
We started our degree here in September 2023 and in the space of two months we were in talks to teach our own class. Professor Ted Ladd, who teaches the class ‘The Future of AI and the Future of Work’ became our associate professor and mentor of the AI Society. It shows a lot of foresight on his part to understand this tech is moving quickly and we, as students were keeping up with it.
It was around this time that ChatGPT 4 came out. This version meant that you could now customize your own language model as well as prompts and a knowledge base all your own. You can then, in turn, have these GPTs interact with one another to build autonomous units, which become autonomous business units. It’s been revelatory for businesses and now we get to go to Chicago this summer and present a paper we wrote there. It’s an exciting time for the AI Society.
The three pillars
The club is propped up by three pillars. The first is the community aspect, where everyone involved in the AI Society is in a large WhatsApp group. So, all of the members from London, San Francisco, and Dubai can all converge and discuss ideas and plans. Currently, we are sitting at about 300 members.
The second is the events side of things. We are very fortunate to be based in San Francisco so have access to a lot of amazing speakers and opportunities. We’ve had professors from Berkeley come and speak for us, we have presented events from startups who even provided us vouchers to use their startups, and even people from larger tech companies like Spotify have been in touch to talk about how they developed their algorithm. It’s been amazing the engagement we’ve had.
Lastly, there is a focus on workshops. As I already mentioned in our mission statement the AI Society is all about education and empowerment regarding this tech. We’ve been using our technical expertise and background in engineering to host these online labs. We cover everything from image creation tools like DALL-E to the ChatGPT 4 work we have been doing in classes. Because of the pace the tech is moving there’s always something new to learn.
Even people from larger tech companies like Spotify have been in touch to talk about how they developed their algorithm. It’s been amazing the engagement we’ve had.
Just the start
So, my co-founder Aaron is going on to do a Dual Degree so he’s going to be sticking around as a student. But I’m actually graduating this summer. The truth is, though, I have no plans to step down from AI Society. While we are always looking for more members, I think my role will only increase after I graduate. We don’t know how far this club can go yet, especially considering we only began half a year ago and already have over 600 followers on LinkedIn. I found a job in San Francisco, so considering I’m going to be right here in the action, I may as well stick around to see what happens!
