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<p>Employees say:</p><p>"Of all the organizations I have worked for ILIA does an excellent job of offering lateral development opportunities. We're still a lean business so we don't always have positions available for vertical growth so the People team has gotten creative by finding opportunities for team members to cross-train in other functions or departments."</p>

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ILIA | Fortune

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AI can analyze, remix, and replicate — but can it help us create something genuinely new? That question now sits at the center of modern design. IDEO CEO Mike Peng argues that AI can be used to generate original work, but only when humans lead with curiosity and intent, using intelligent tools not to repeat what’s been done but to provoke what hasn’t. How can designers push AI beyond familiar patterns, harness it to challenge assumptions, and build workflows where machine intelligence sparks unexpected directions? How can AI be used to produce work that surprises, delights, and stands apart in a world where sameness or even plagiarism is only a prompt away?

The Creative Edges of AI

Conferences

[ MUSIC ] Welcome to Fortune Tech Debate where we debate the issues of the day in two minutes. Today we're discussing Fortnite. A bunch of celebrities are suing the maker of this video game, Epic Games, for ripping off their dance moves. Lisa Marie, is Epic Games in the wrong? They're definitely in the wrong. It's really unfortunate, too. You have these creators Rappers, artists, actors that are making [ UNKNOWN ] that people love and Fortnite just comes in and rips it off and they don �� t just use it in the game, but they are selling these dance moves. That �� s Really messed up. All right, look, well here's where I disagree with you. I can't conjure the legal basis for a lawsuit on this thing. It doesn't make any sense to me. The stuff wasn't copyrighted in the first place. How can a celebrity then go out and say that they own this thing? It's something that is so part of pop culture that everybody mimics and does on the dance floor and on YouTube, etc. It doesn't make any sense to me that they can actually put a, say retroactively I have a trademark on that thing now. Yeah, but they're big because those artists put it out there and were good enough to get noticed. And you know maybe they don't have a case. It's really murky territory I would argue, I don't see what gives Fortnite the right to actually monetize these dances. But it's still not a good look. And it's also interesting because they haven't asked. 2 Milly has filed a lawsuit, the Backpack Kid, Russell Horning. From Katie Perry's SNL performance yes, and also Alphonso Riviero is now suing for his Carlton Dance from Fresh Prince of Bellaire. And it's interesting because another show Scrubs was used in Fortnite, Turk's dance was used, and they actually asked The executive producer Bill Lawrence for the okay. So they clearly know that that's probably a good idea, to at least check in, and they're not doing that, and you have to ask why. Well, I mean, I can understand why maybe they might need to check with the network, or the show, or the producer, something like that, you know. Alfonso, he's coming in, I understand this is a whole part of his identity, doing the Carlton Dance. But that's not something he owns, that's part of the show itself. Well we don't know what his contract looked like, we don't know if he was the one that said I think [ UNKNOWN ] my character should do this. It's really murky territory. Well hey that's all we've got time for, come to Fortune. com for more tech debate. [ MUSIC ] [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

Do Celebs Have a Case Against Fortnite?

Entertainment

Right now, you know, after we started in September 2012 so early about five years, over the years we've collected the worlds largest speech corporates, speech database of Chinese people speak english, and based on that we built, which we believe the most accurate Speech pronunciation evaluation engine, and the speech evaluation engine in the world, especially for language learners. See, we are able to tell someone with a bad pronunciation from someone with a good pronunciation but bad grammar. We have You know, we can give people very accurate score, and pinpoint the mistakes on their pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, and coherence. Tell us how many learners you have on your database now? We have over 50 million registered users. That's our free user base. We launched our first, and you know, pretty much the only paid product Which was the worlds first AI teacher, Amobofong, for English, back in July of 2016. By this July, so 12 months in, we have over 600, 000 paying customers. And how much does it cost? Yeah. It's pretty disruptive. We charge people 99 RMB a month. So that's basically $ 15 a month. So for those of you who don't live in China typically learning English cost about between, on a low end $ 1500 Yeah >> Or on high end I would say $ 4000 per year. Okay give uptake. So that's basically what we're saying, it's basically one- thirtieth of the cost annually. And we are actually also offering something more effective and efficient. So we basically tell people, it's one- thirtieth the cost and one- third of the time. We use ETS, which also is in Princeton. And we use ETS's. Test called a toy bridge. It's score maps to the canonical sort of language proficiency system called CEFR, the Common European Frame of Reference. And basically we use that as a benchmark. We realize okay, within two months our 400 Test corporate users have 16 % of them have increased at least one level. From A1 to A2. Or from A1 to B1. And that they have spent about 36. 5 hours across that two month period. But then CEFR would say hey it at least takes you about 100 hours to up one level. So that's the traditional method. So do you know about the demographics of these people? I mean, what their ages are, where they live. Yeah, so for our free user pool, we have one third about K- 12, K- 12 students, one third college, and one third sort of adults, mostly adults. Really? Yeah. That's remarkable. And Wow, I mean, so you've built these algorithms, this voice recognition system that helps Chinese speakers to learn English. That sounds like a fairly specific thing. Do these algorithms, could you easily reverse them around so that you could- [ CROSSTALK ] As is, we've been They have been very satisfied with our level of accuracy. Not only on pronunciation but also on translating to grammatical error detection and across different spectrums and now they are moving forward with co- branded app with us. So- It sounds like one of the things that he has really got going for him is this corpus of data though. It sounds like having all this data, having all these examples of good and bad- Correct. So we started from collecting bits and pieces of pronounciation data, or speech data. Right. Yeah. But then after we launched this AI teacher course, it's a structured course, it's a multi- level course. Now we started, basically quote on quote, recording people's full study traits. Imagine you were studying at school, when we were in school we took exams, those are snapshots of your learning status, okay? These are sporadic, these are not continuous. But now we just have people learning just every step along the way. You know, for these guys. And remembering now they are spending on average five hours a week, yeah, so it's a lot of data. But, in China tho you have a lot of people that their most comfortable language is [ UNKNOWN ] or that it's [ UNKNOWN ]. People that are Kantonese, Chinese. Speakers, really different right. And so the way in which they approach English, the things they get wrong, the things they get right. They have difficulty pronouncing, must be a broad spectrum, does it matter, or doesn't matter at all what the original dialect is? Well it does matter if wanna have any proof right? So that's why we actually, We understand a lot about that. So we know people from Guandong, you know, will tend to have certain mistakes. You know, people from, say Analos will have other types of mistakes. Other types of mistakes. So you know, we, from, you know, pronunciation courses through other courses, we Give them personalized feedback kind of curriculum. So what I didn't mention, which I should, is that in that AI English teacher course, at the back it's adapted learning energy at work. So you know yeah it basically would analyze you know on the one hand the product would it's highly interactive so a lot of data coming in and the engine would analyze it and start pumping out you know expert generated content but in a individualized way like [ INAUDIBLE ]. So interesting thing. So you're going to put a lot of American English teachers in China out of work, no doubt, with this app. [ LAUGH ] Well, I mean, one funny thing is that, it's a huge market, okay. Some people would, I think, for the time being still prefer to talk to a real human teacher, which is perfectly fine. But you know 80 % more than 80 % of our paying system base, was paying for the very first time. Third of the time, third of the cost and you can do it on your mobile phone is a pretty hard proposition to resisit. It's a serious question thought Tom, this is An isse for all types of Ai is what does it do to job prospects? I mean, we hear these numbers out there. Everybody cites the Oxford study that says that 47 % of jobs are gonna be wiped out. I know McKenzie's done some intersting stuff that even something simple. Like if voice recognition technology Improved about ten percentage points, and just got to the mean of human capability, that it will wipe out all these call centers in Bangalore and Manila. What do you think about that? And is that Too dire or do you think that's- I think jobs changed. And I think they change in every revolution we go through. I think the industrial revolution caused all kinds of job change. Actually, we're not plowing fields anymore by hand, that changed a lot of jobs. So we moved from agrarian to industrial, to the tech industry. And now to AI. So I think it will absolutely, fundamentally change the way we were. I think it will change a lot of people who are consumer facing Whether it's, they're in retail or whatever area, whether it's a call center or whatever they're doing. But I think it doesn't, the work we're doing in health care doesn't replace the doctor. The work we're doing, having all this data. I mentioned the data because he has the data. We bought a lot of data in health care. It's not publicly available data to have all these images to scan to build up at this learning repetition of what's a cancer cell and what's not? So you really need all that data. We're improving the odds, improving the efficiency, improving the efficacy of people who are reading these images, not replacing them. So I think for professionals in this field, I don't think they're at any risk at all. I think if you look at truck drivers, I'm not so sure that autonomous Vehicles aren't gonna replace truck drivers. I think that part of it, certainly, they're gonna have to change from the world in some of these roles, to other positions. But I don't think we're gonna replace teachers, even if we have outstanding language learning apps. I don't think we're gonna replace doctors. With Watson Health we can do an awful lot of things to help those doctors make accurate diagnoses, he's serving an underserved market Think about all the people in western China who don't have access to top, all of China who don't have access [ INAUDIBLE ]. Throughout China. [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

Liulishuo founder and CEO Li Yang and Fortune’s Clay Chandler discuss

Will AI Replace English Teachers In China?

Leadership

[ MUSIC ] Welcome to Fortune Tech Debate. We debate the issues of the day in two minutes. Today we are talking about Microsoft, which is recently called for a Geneva Convention for cyber warfare. Let us put two minutes on the clock. All right, Jeff, take it away! Yeah Microsoft pretty bold out there saying that it's time for the world, it's kind of a kumbaya let's hold hands and be nice around the cyber front. We've got a convention for torture, let's have one for cyber weapons in the scary world where. Russia is attacking us with them. US might take now the North Korea missile, getting out of hand. Let's have a cyber convention and be nice. Yeah, I gotta say, I think this is actually a pretty good idea, I mean the general General council of Microsoft Brad Smith, he made this big presentation at the RSA security conference earlier this year and he said that it's about time that we have rules like this, governing the international norms for cyber warfare and. I got to say I agree. Yeah and maybe he'll host a tea party at North Korea next week too. I love the idea in theory but look who are we dealing with out there North Korea is crazy, they are not gonna Don't just be, don't just be- For Treaty conventions to work, Geneva Convention [ INAUDIBLE ] to European parties once upon a time, this is a different world out there, North Korea were there, Russia, China, not so nice either. Hold on, I mean there are different policy proposals inside of here that definitely seem like good ideas, like having an independent governing body that can attribute cyber attacks Back to the nation states from once they came. Yeah attribution, everyone's talking about that, let's fear who did it but you know what would lead to? That's gonna lead to a more propaganda cuz who are country's gonna put on that board, since most of the worst hackers out there are from countries already, I think that's just gonna add More fog and confusion to what we have already. It would be a governance issue but hopefully it'll be staffed with cyber security experts, people who are really good at computer forensics who could provide some really detailed insight into this thing. But other than that look it's a scary world out there. We've got all of our different countries dispersed globally and they have energy grids and you know what if someone were to attack that and take that down that would be a huge problem for the civilian population. But too soon right now you need rational people on the other side and for now it's too scary let's wait on this. [ SOUND ] Well I say the time is now but anyway the time is up. Come to Fortune. com for more tech debate. [ MUSIC ] [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

Microsoft Wants a Digital Geneva Convention for Cyberwarfare

Tech

The treaty would protect civilians and companies from government-supported hacking.

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