In Case You Missed It: Standout Tech Moments from SXSW 2024
South by Southwest or SXSW 2024 featured electrifying performances from artists and Hollywood stars alongside the rockstars of the technology industry. From industry leaders to emerging companies and products, the technology aspect of the SXSW conference offered a glimpse into where tech, especially artificial intelligence, is headed. Remarkably, SXSW 2024 saw the crowds boo and jeer the push for AI adoption. Check out the highlights from the event.
- The South by Southwest Conference and Festival (SXSW 2024) featured electrifying performances from artists and Hollywood stars alongside the rockstars of the technology industry.
- From industry leaders to emerging companies and products, the technology aspect of the SXSW conference offered a glimpse into where tech, especially artificial intelligence, is headed.
- Remarkably, SXSW 2024 saw the crowds boo and jeer the push for AI adoption.
SXSW 2024 wrapped up over the weekend after an exhilarating nine days of festivities, discussions, and exhibitions. We wouldn’t go so far as to call the 38th SXSW conference a frenzy. However, the music emanating from concerts and film premiers turned Austin into a lollapalooza of arts, entertainment, and, to some extent, technology.
SXSW 2024 had more than 170 film premiers and saw the introduction of 125 feature films, 60 short films, and 19 music videos. Meanwhile, the abundance of music was felt not only through concerts but also through artists thronging city bars.
The event also saw approximately 80 artists and bands dropping out of attendance owing to the SXSW conference’s association with the U.S. military (a “Super Sponsor”) and its support to Israel against Palestine and with RTX (formerly Raytheon) and its subsidiary Collins Aerospace.
“Bye. Don’t come back,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott tweeted, expressing his solidarity with the military.
While technology was on the back foot at the event-cum-conference, with certain other events, such as CES, Web Summit, MWC Barcelona, and others, reserved to showcase the latest innovations, SXSW 2024 offered an interesting perspective on AI. It served as the staging ground for some whacky new tech.
Here are Spiceworks News & Insights’ takeaways from this year’s SXSW conference.
SXSW 2024 Highlights
1. Artificial intelligence
If the speakers, panelists, artists, or whoever attends don’t talk about AI, is it even an event nowadays?
AMD CEO Lisa Su took the stage as one of the keynote speakers at SXSW 2024. Su said AI is perhaps the most important tech in half a century and that her company would ramp up the GPU supply. October 2024 marks a decade for Su as the AMD CEO when the company emerged as a leader in personal computing chips and GPUs.
While AMD competitor NVIDIA rides high on the AI wave based on the cloud, Su said AMD’s plans encompass facilitating AI PCs through products such as Ryzen 8040 series chips. “The goal of AI PCs is to ensure that every one of us has our own AI capability. You don’t have to go out into the cloud,” Su said.
“You can actually operate on your own data. You can actually ask it questions. It’ll answer for you. It’ll answer for you faster. It’ll privately answer for you because maybe you don’t want your data going everywhere. And it’s just the beginning of what I think is the ability to make all of us much, much more productive.” Making AI PCs a reality is also on NVIDIA and Intel’s agenda.
Regarding technological revolutions, AI “feels bigger, more important, and more significant than any of the prior ones,” said Dell CEO Micael Dell. “It will be an enormous leap forward in all domains.”
Access to cognitive power necessitates computing, networking, storage, and memory infrastructure, among other things. Dell argues that 75% of the data is still on on-premise data centers and the edge and that organizations don’t want to change that. “Customers want to bring AI to their data, not the data to their AI.”
Dell is thus focused on the data center aspect of AI, even as AMD works on bringing efficient computing infrastructure for AI PCs.
2. A new tech supercycle
Future Today Institute CEO and futurist Amy Webb opined that we should expect substantial and sustained changes from three technologies. If you think AI is one of those, you aren’t wrong.
Webb delivered one of the keynote addresses at the SXSW 2024 conference, during which she said that AI, a connected ecosystem of things, and biotechnology will push the global economy into a new “technology supercycle.” A supercycle is a period of prolonged and robust economic growth that leads to sustained demand for commodities and increased asset values.
Webb’s address included the Future Today Institute’s 17th Tech Trend Report launch. “At FTI, we’ve been tracking trends in each of these categories: AI, biotech, and the connected ecosystem of things. But what’s interesting is that a couple of years ago, they started converging,” Webb said.
“Those convergences have created a flywheel of big leaps, AI-enabled tech breakthroughs that were intended for hospitals and sports created a consumer market for things like smartwatches and rings; and once that flywheel got spinning, it created a new value for consumers. It created a more practical utility that led to more funding, which attracted talent.”
The three technologies Webb noted are on par with the steam engine, electricity, and the internet, except contemporary innovations are far more complex, intensive, and pervasive than earlier.
Webb went on to tout the commencement of the development of Organoid Intelligence, i.e., AI fused with lab-grown tissues resembling a human body in the next ten years. “Biotechnology will move us past silicon-based computing systems,” she said.
See More: Counting Down to NVIDIA GTC 2024: All Eyes on the New Blackwell GPUs and AI
3. AI – It’s not all hunky-dory
The progress made in AI often elicits awe and a sense of wonderment at the possibilities it can unlock. However, the emerging technology also faced resistance from film and TV fans as they booed a video sizzle reel featuring cutouts of AI experts speaking positively about AI and urging watchers to adopt it.
Played before film screenings, the sizzle reel featured Josh Constine, partner at SignalFire; Amy Webb, CEO of Future Today Institute; tech journalist Kara Swisher; Sandy Carter, chief operating officer of Unstoppable Domains; and finally Peter Deng, VP and head of product at OpenAI.
“I actually think that AI fundamentally makes us more human,” Deng said, attracting the loudest disagreements. On stage, Deng also failed to answer the question of whether artists should be compensated for their work that was used to train generative AI tools like DALL-E and ChatGPT amid shouts of “yes!” from the audience.
The Daniels (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert) of the Academy Award-winning Everything Everywhere All at Once also expressed their concerns over the use of AI. Kwan said, “It’s probably going to solve cancer. It’s probably going to give us a lot of climate solutions. This is a powerful thing, but I’m terrified of what this new story we will have to tell ourselves to accept this new convenience, this new progress. It’s terrifying.”
4. Product innovations at SXSW 2024 and innovation awards winners
ICON’s Phoenix: 3D printed architecture and construction company ICON introduced Phoenix, a new device that can build 27-foot tall buildings measuring up to 24,000 square feet. Besides this multi-story 3D printer, the company also announced a new low-carbon building material called CarbonX, a ready-to-print catalog of homes called CODEX, and a design software and project management tool called Vitruvius.
ICON claims it is building with Phoenix for just $25 per square foot. However, the cost increases to $80 per square foot if the construction includes the foundation and roof.
The namesake product by Generative Goods allows users to do what most consider is the biggest drawback of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) – have physical ownership. NFT owners can thus bring their art to Generative Goods and take home a physical embroidered product.
Meanwhile, Truveta bagged the SXSW 2024 innovation award under the Artificial Intelligence track for the Truveta Language Model (TLM) for patient care. Lune won the innovation award under the Interface Design track for the camera-equipped and AI-based Lune smart amplifier to learn, create, and share guitar music.
Additionally, Dot Inc. and Serviceplan’s Dot Pad is a device that accepts visual inputs like handwriting, sketches, and signatures and converts them into tactile graphics. This smart tactile graphics display differs from others in design since it uses electromagnetism instead of piezoelectricity. The device is compatible with iOS and iPadOS.
Viral Nation’s social media profile monitoring solution for brands took away the SXSW 2024 innovation award for the Social Media category, while the product designers at Enchanted Tools won the Product Design award for the Mirokaï prototype.
What did you like about SXSW 2024? Share with us on LinkedIn, X, or Facebook. We’d love to hear from you!
Image source: Shutterstock
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