Cypher 2023 was packed. The first day of events saw more attendance than expected: almost 1,500+ attendees and over 600 companies took part in India’s largest AI conference.
The event began with Karthik RanganathGeneral Manager of Enterprise IT at Shell Research and Developmentspeaking of unleashing AI innovations for the better.
In his keynote speech, Ranganath explained how Shell is harnessing the power of AI to make the energy sector more efficient, while sharing its partnerships with several AI startups to help address some of the pressing challenges of the energy sector.
This was followed by a talk on “digital minds” by Jacy Reese-Anthisco-founder of Sensitivity Institutewhich focused on the relationship between humans and machines, in the context of advances in generative AI.
He explained that there is a profound change not only in the way we interact with computers, but also in the way we, as a society, interact with each other. “We talk to the computer like we talk to a friend with natural language instead of writing commands in code,” he said.
With the rise of chatbots, there is a risk of forming attachments to the computer that take on human characteristics with its language. His philosophical questions were thought provoking and left the audience thinking about his ideas.
Georges Kuruvillathe Chief Data Platform Evangelist at SingleStore, explained how the company built one of the best real-time data management systems, eliminating the need to rely on multiple vendors to store, manage and exploit the data.
He explained the ease of working in real time with a single platform. He also discussed the issues startups face when it comes to data management, while explaining how their biggest clients work with big data.
Biren Gosh with his jovial personality really connected with the public.
Ghosh explained how his company Technicolor Creative Studios used all AI tools that create innovative animations and visualizations. He also showcased it with stunning videos that he released while explaining the hows and whys of the entire creative process.
Let’s move on to a more informative session, Abhishek Nandy chief data scientist at PrediQt Business Solutions Pvt. Ltd. And Intel Company certified instructor, gave a workshop on the Intel® Architecture Adapted AI Kit, specifically aimed at data scientists and AI developers, on how they can deploy AI models, especially LLM, transparently.
He also covered Intel® Developer Cloud, access to Ponte Vecchio instances, and hands-on demonstrations using LLMs with Langchain and OpenAI Stable Diffusion.
Moumita Sarker, from Deloitte, discussed how organizations can effectively balance the need for speed to market with the requirement for robust AI model development and testing. Even though this last step takes time, it is urgent to have a product. She shared, “AI needs to be served in modules, organizations need to make it easily pluggable. Spend more time on the pilot, spend more time on user co-creation. Make it valuable, give them the ability to personalize it.
One of the panel discussions explored how AI has burst into every area of everyone’s lives and workplace. The conversation took place between industry experts Akanksha Singh, Jayachandran Ramachandran, Vinodh Ramachandran And Chirag Jain.
Much of the discussion focused on how AI adoption has affected employees and how to handle this introduction in a positive way.
In addition to this, it also discussed legal, academic and entrepreneurial perspectives and the panelists also elaborated on best working practices.
“Leadership must provide resources and clearly explain the vision of the organization. It is the responsibility of everyone in a leadership position to instill faith and rally the organization towards a common goal,” Vinodh Ramachandran summed up clearly.
Finally, legendary South African cricketer and fielder Jonty Rhodes spoke about the role of data collection and analytics that gives players an edge in cricket. The retired player is a coach of IPL teams who has covered different aspects of player analysis. This inevitably improves strategy, he said, but not without the dangers of too much information, which leads to decision paralysis.
Humble Rhodes was in good spirits and spoke about his love for India. He also presented the Minsky Awards to some of the exemplary leaders and companies in the field of AI and analytics for their contribution and impact.
