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Nils Pihl, founder and CEO of Auki Labs, is developing technology that lets robots navigate the physical world on their own—without human input or cloud-based maps. Together with Terri, the humanoid robot, he’ll demonstrate the posemesh protocol, a system that gives machines a shared, real-time understanding of their surroundings. It’s a step toward a future where robots can move through space with the awareness and coordination we expect from people.

The Robot Will See You Now

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Hello, hello, good afternoon. Welcome back. Thank you, thank you. Welcome back, everyone. I hope you had a great lunch and even better conversations. I certainly enjoyed mine. To kick off our afternoon, we're going to start by exploring the next frontier of robotics. Oki Labs is developing tech to help robots navigate the physical world on their own without human input or maps. Here to demonstrate, please welcome Aki Labs founder and CEO Neils Peel and his co-presenter, Terry, the robot. All right, hello everyone. My name is Nils. This is Terry. Terry is a unitary robot made in Hangzhou, and today we are going to talk a little bit about how to make the physical world AI accessible, and that's not just about the ramp over there. It has a lot to do with machine perception. I believe that over the next 10 years or so, we are going to see civilization grow to over 100 billion productive participants, most of them AI. And as a result of this growth, I think we will see the world economy grow by something like 10X in the next 20 years. In fact, that may be conservative. Uh, I was born in 1986, let's say 20 years ago, and since then, the world economy has grown 10X. Uh, the world economy has grown 3x in the last 20 years or so, so you only have to believe that we will move about 3 times as fast as we have been to do a 10X in the next 10 years. And Behind the growth that we saw over the last 20 years was that software ate the white collar world. If you are a white collar worker today, you are definitely working on a computer, you're definitely working on a phone, you are definitely using software. Software is a big industry. But 70% of the world economy is still tied to physical space and physical locations, and I actually believe this is going to increase. So What happens next? I believe that faced with the realization that most of human productivity, but also the things that bother us in the world are still tied to physical locations, we can't say that the AI revolution has truly begun. Until Terry can get a better job than being an intern. So let's talk a little bit about what needs to happen for Terry to become productive. We must make the physical world accessible to artificial intelligence. Today, out of the box, Terry is blind. He has a camera, he has a liar, but he has no modality for understanding what he's looking at. He has no, you can't ask him to guide you to the bathroom or anything like this. And we believe that the future humanoid robot stack is going to be made up of 6 layers, and since I only have 7 minutes to go, we'll go through this very quickly. Number one, of course, which you've seen already is we need locomotion. Robots need to be able to walk around without falling over, and I can tell you that I'm going to need to help Terry down the stage today because locomotion is still early. But of course we also need manipulation today. Terry cannot open a can of Coke for you or iron your shirt or anything like this. There's a lot of work left to be done with manipulation, but even if Terry knew. How to manipulate things. You still couldn't ask him to, for example, empty all the trash cans here at the conference. To do that, he's going to need spatial semantic perception as well, not just the camera, but the ability to understand where things are and what things are, and he needs to be able to put that into the context of a map so that the second time you ask him to empty the trash cans, he remembers what the trash cans are and doesn't bounce around like a first generation Roomba. And even when he has a map, he's going to need positioning to understand where he is in relation to the map. A lot of people don't know this, but the GPS is a line of sight technology, so your GPS does not know you're sitting at that table, doesn't know you're in this room, it doesn't know you're on this floor. And then finally we're going to need some kind of applications layer to tie all of these things together. In 2021 at Aki, we realized that you could get a head start on the robotic stack by skipping. The tricky part of locomotion and manipulation. If you wear a pair of glasses. And you have an AI look through your glasses. Then you could do what we call hybrid robotics, where we have human locomotion, you can have a worker that walks as well as me. You can have human manipulation. But you can still have AI perception, you can still have AI mapping, you can still have AI positioning, and you can still run AI applications. In fact, you can create AI co-pilots for physical work. And why wouldn't that be one of the stops on the way to the full AI revolution? Because today, did AI take all the engineering jobs or did AI become a fantastic co-pilot for engineers? And just 2 months ago, we closed our first multi-million dollar deal where we used this stack with just phones and glasses and soon also robots to help retailers understand what is happening in their physical environment. So for the first time ever they can capture an accurate digital twin using spatial computing and AI telling them where their products actually are so they can get better sales reporting, but it also helps them do AR navigation for the staff, reducing the walking distance by a whopping 40% for the people that pick up your online groceries, and they can also do AI and AR task management uh using the system. This is being rolled out into thousands of locations today, and later this year, together with our partner Mentra, who makes smart glasses, we will be releasing an AI co-pilot for physical labor, capable of detecting empty shelves, things that need to get done. So as the retail worker walks through, it turns out we don't replace. The retail worker, we replace the store manager. You get an AI co-pilot that helps you figure out what to do. And that same system is what will allow someone like Terry to understand where are the products and know what to build and where. So what comes after the GPS? Asia is a good place to talk about that. Uh, you need spatial semantic perception, meaning you need to understand where, where things are and what things are, you need to understand the difference between a bicycle and a stoplight. And this hit home for me when I was living in Beijing. Beijing is a big city. I lived there for 7 years. In fact, it's so big that there are more cars on the road in Beijing than there are people in Los Angeles. And if you do a quick back of the napkin calculation based on the average commute, you find that roughly the time it took to build the pyramids. Lost in Beijing traffic. Every single week. And now we might imagine that self-driving cars is going to solve this because cars are going to be coordinating with each other and we won't need red lights anymore, sure, if and only if. These robots, these cars, learn to describe space to each other and their own precise location and the precise location of things that they see. The GPS is never going to work for that because the GPS is a line of sight. This is New York, the biggest city in the West. New York has over 900 buildings taller than 100 m. Astonishing. Until you realize that Hong Kong, where I live, has over 4000 buildings taller than 100 m, and Hong Kong. It's just this little area down here. The rest of this is the Greater Bay Area. It's Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Dongguan. It's an area 2/3 the size of Greater LA but home to 87 million people. And more high-rise buildings than all of North America and all of Europe combined. So it's no wonder why Buddha, that so much machine perception work and GPS replacement work is happening here in Asia by the standards of this century. There are no big cities in the West. So what happens next? We believe that the most important work that civilization can undertake right now is to make the physical world accessible to AI so that we can as a first step, get AI co-pilots for all the physical labor that we wish we could do better and ultimately replace that drudgery with the help of companions like Terry that soon we'll be able to do these tasks autonomously once we've made the physical world accessible to AI. Thank you very much. Nils, that is just so impressive. Hi, Terry. Good to see you. I have just one question for you. You know, you were talking about the development of the robotic technologies and, you know, where we're at and where we're going. By when will Terry be able to bend it like Beckham? Uh, there's already, uh, robot soccer leagues happening sponsored by Booster Robotics. Um, it's not super exciting to watch yet. Terry, I tear you down the ramp in a second. It's like my grandma, you know, uh, needs a bit of help down the stairs, um, but yeah, it's already happening. Uh, robots fighting rings have already started happening. Uh, I think, uh, robot entertainment is, it's now. Yeah, I think I saw a Black Mirror episode about that. Thank you very much. Thank you.

AI is no longer confined to research labs or isolated industries; it is redrawing industry boundaries, redefining competitive advantage and reshaping societies.
From healthcare to geospatial intelligence and big data analytics, AI is fundamentally transforming entire sectors at scale.
But will AI live up to market expectations and deliver on a promise to nurture innovation and boost productivity?
Will AI’s tangible economic gains outweigh the pains?
We will explore the systemic shifts triggered by AI, the role of public-private collaboration, and which sectors are poised to win the race for AI and capitalize on the new technology’s potential for substantial growth.

Beyond Boundaries: AI Impact Across Sectors

Katherine Boyle, General Partner, Andreessen Horowitz, Nini Hamrick, Co-founder and President, Vannevar Labs Moderator: Michal Lev-Ram, Fortune

Most Powerful Women Summit 2024: Inside The Defense Tech Revolution

 Victor Riparbelli, Co-founder and CEO, Synthesia Mati Staniszewski, Co-founder and CEO, ElevenLabs Moderator: Jeremy Kahn, FORTUNE

Brainstorm AI London 2024: The Future Of Synthetic Media

Photography by Joe Maher Fortune Brainstorm AI

Hi, welcome back. I hope you had a good break. Um I'm very excited to be joined with uh some of the, the CEO S of two of the hottest sort of start ups in the gene of A I space at the moment. Um And as you heard from Ellie, uh both working in synthetic media, which is maybe using tech to generate something, but maybe also using, you know, existing video, still images or voice to generate media and content to show you how this works. First, we've got two very exciting demos. First, we're going to go to Victor who's going to show you a little bit about how synthesia product works. Victor. Go ahead. Thank you so much. Yeah, I think we should give a visual in just a second here, but maybe before we jump into that. Uh So these are on a mission to make video easy for everyone and that's, that's something a lot of people have attempted before us. But we take kind of a new approach to this, right? We don't think of this as building smaller and more affordable cameras. We don't think of this as like slightly better editing apps that run in your phone. We're just building technology that eventually is going to be able to replace the entire physical production process of using studios, cameras, actors, microphones and all those stuff. We want to take that entire workflow and make it into something you can do entirely from behind your desk. Um Today, we're a fast platform and we help predominantly enterprise create more videos to communicate better with their stakeholders, which could be employees, could be customers. And I think we'll get a visual up here now of how it actually works and how easy it actually is to do. So this is the platform and in some ways it's sort of model a little bit on powerpoint. That's how easy we want to be able to, to do. And what we're showcasing here is our A I video assistant which uses LL MS to essentially help you get to a draft of your video in, in just a few moments. So what you're seeing here is someone putting in uh the URL to an article, of course, a fortune article because we're here today giving the system a little bit more context of what it is that we're trying to do with this video. And in just a second, the system will then go in, it will pass the content and it will give us a draft on editable copy that we can then kind of tune to what exactly we want it to be like now in the context of an enterprise, this may not be uh an article like this, this would probably be a knowledge based article. It could be a case study that you want to share with your customers or anything else really, you want to turn into a video as you can see here. Now, um we begin to actually write the script and it is of course using all the data that it's kind of taking from this URL. The idea here is not that this is a final video that you can just publish, but it is to take you 70 80% of the way. Instead of having what we internally call the blank screen of death, we give you something to actually begin kind of working from and we don't just write the script, we actually also give you the visuals. So as you'll see here, there's some text on the screen, there'll be some bullet points, there'll be a bunch of things that you can sort of edit yourself. Of course, everything can be edited. We have these avatars which is the sort of core of our product. Um And I think after this video is done, we of course see what the video looks like, but it's just to give you a quick visual of how easy it actually is to make videos with these systems. And it's one of the things that excites us the most about this new wave of generative tools and it's awesome if we can make it easier for Hollywood people and video production professionals to make video. But I think what's much, much more interesting is taking everyone in the world, including everyone here and making you into video creators and in some ways it sounds a bit science fiction in other ways. I think it's just natural evolution if you go back 4050 years in time and it wasn't part of most people's job to write texts, right? You had like secretaries, you had people in companies who would write things on typewriters and send them to the right people. Then we all got computers and keyboards and now I'm pretty sure everyone in this room you write as like part of your your daily tasks, right? Then powerpoint came along. We all became designers without really knowing probably all of you here know how to operate a powerpoint. And obviously, we think that the next iteration of this is going to be video, which is just a much, much better way of compressing information than text. At least for most people out there. I think with that, let's see the demo of what the final video looks like. This uses one of our latest technology, our latest model called Express One, which essentially teaches the avatars how they should perform and behave. But let's see the video. Imagine stepping into a room where the air crackled with the energy of innovation, a place where the future of A I and its impact on our world is not just discussed but shaped. Welcome to Fortune brainstorm A I in London. A gathering that promises to be the nexus of A I's brightest minds from leading technology companies at Fortune brainstorm A I in London. Expect to dive deep into conversations that matter. Hear from Google, deep minds, vice president and faculty A I CEO, as they unveil the future of A I and its transformative potential on society. Microsoft's chief scientist alongside accenture's chief A I officer will explore the profound changes. Generative A I is set to bring to the workplace. This event is not just about listening but engaging with roundtable sessions and ample opportunities for networking. I hope you enjoy the event. Great, very impressive given how quickly it all generates. Um Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. And now we'll hear from Maty and about 11 labs which is uh you may know about voice cloning. Let's see how this works. Thank you, Jeremy. I will attempt doing it live and maybe that's a very quick introduction. 11 labs is a Audi research and deployment company with the goal of making content university accessible across voices and languages. And what I will show you now is free demos, quick demos of how some of those technologies come to life. We should get a visual any second now to the screen. And the first of those building blocks is a one that most of you might be familiar with, with foundational text to speech. And that's one of the breakthroughs that we've, we've, we've figured out of how you can take existing text. And by understanding the nuance of the context, turn it into emotions and into the right intonation with a specific voice. So queuing up, I will use 11 apps to help me with the introduction to all of you and we'll see how that comes across. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Fortune A I Brainstorm summit. We are thrilled to have you join us from around the globe for this dynamic gathering of minds and ideas today. Hm, we stand on the brink of new discoveries and innovations in the field of artificial intelligence that promise to redefine what's possible in business society and beyond, you could hear the pauses, you could hear the information, you could hear the excitement and also a little bit of ponder with the hm uh as, as as the A I was speaking and this is one of the voices from one of voice actors we work with. And actually there is plenty of those voice actors as part of our platform. We now have over thousands of voices which created clones of their voices and then shared it while every time it's being generated, they earn compensation and return as well. And whether you want this voice, a voice with an Australian accent with a different style or gender, this is all possible within the platform. But this is not again. And one of the things that's super exciting about the technology that it not only allows you to create the content in the language of the speaker, but actually take the content and turn it into other languages while preserving the same voice and the same characteristics. And I'll swap over to a demo that some of you might be familiar. It's a John F Kennedy speech from moon landing. And we'll see how initially he speaks in English and then I will flip it to Spanish and to Hindi life and you will see how some of those characteristics come across while we play the demo. But why some say the most, why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why Kala Montana Masala Porque A Sua Atlantico hum for J for John. That's one small step for man. I didn't say I read it and you can see the emotions come across while the moon and the liftoff happened. And that's something we're excited about how you can take that content and enable those global audiences to watch it while still enjoying that original experience. But of course, in the audio world, there is so much more than speech and the voices. And as you think about the future about our work is how we can enable some of that work across some of the tangential domains, the sound effects, the music, how we can bring it all together with the video and truly make it an immersive experience and to close it off. I also show you something that you might be familiar from text to video work with Sora from Open Ayes as well where we'll take some of the stitches from the videos and we'll supplement it with A I generated sound effects. What we are trying to do is hit that unmute button with those videos that you've probably seen online out there. The real in a place beyond imagination where the horizon kisses the heavens. One man dares to journey where few have ventured armed with nothing but his wit and an unyielding spirit. He seeks the answers to mysteries that lie beyond the stars. And that's the goal to make all the all the content out there accessible across voices, across languages, across sounds. And uh and thank you. Well, I think you all agree. Those are pretty impressive demos. Um And you know, amazing technology also a little bit scary. Um And I think looking at this, a lot of people immediately think about uh some of the negative use cases around deep fakes, around fraud. Um I know there's already been some concern around 11 labs. Uh You know, whether people have used voice clones to uh perpetuate frauds. Uh how are you guys trying to, to prevent that from happening? Um And to make sure these technologies are not used uh for harmful uses. Uh Victor, maybe you go first actually. Yeah, sure. I think, I think any most new technologies, we immediately go to all things, things go wrong. Right. And I think in this case, that's definitely right. These technologies will be used by bad actors to do bad things. For sure. I think we should not be staring about that at all. And so for us, the the sort of safeguarding the technology has always been, has been been part of the company from day one. So we found the company in what we call our, our ethical framework, which is the free c consent, control and collaboration. Um It's a long topic, but I think that the kind of fundamental keystones for us is around consent. So never ever recreate anyone's voice or video avatar without the how do you, how do you guarantee consent? So we have a KYC style check when you go through, right? You submit your avatar footage. It is reviewed by a human being. You have to stay out of specific uh specific sentences to make sure you can make your clone. So essentially it is impossible today to go in and take some youtube videos or something and make a clone or someone that is just like not possible. Um And that we intend to keep it that way controls about content moderation. So we employ pretty heavy content moderation. There are quite strong stance on what you're allowed to create what you're not allowed to create. I think for most of us, the sort of what we call the red content is easy to agree on hate speech, violence, swearing, things like that. What gets harder is, well, someone's making a video about cryptocurrencies, for example. Right. Are you talking about what a great technological invention that is? Or you're trying to lead me into some schemes that promise I'm going to get rich in 10 days. Right. And we do our best to catch that stuff. It's a huge effort. It's of course a lot of computers and A I, but it's also a lot of humans sort of figuring out who are the bad faith actors on the platform. So that's a big, that is essentially internal product for us that said it is an incredibly small amount of users we catch trying to do this, but we do think it is our responsibility to, to take some stance on that. And the last one is Maddie. I want, I want to get you in there. How, how are you 11 labs are you trying to prevent this from misuse? Yeah, I think first of all, Jeremy, you're right, the defects are a serious concern, as we're saying about this year, air generated content and audio images videos coming coming across. Um And it's something that's a concern because open source other commercial models are becoming more active and, and there will be bad actors that will use and abuse them to the to the to the cases at 11 labs, it's education making everyone aware of the technology. Second is traceability. All the content that's generated by 11 apps can be traced back to the specific user specific account. And as they use the technology, they will need to verify themselves through different steps depending on the technology they use. And the last one is traceability, but also how you can embed the traceability as part of detection. So effectively all the content out there should be known as they are generated and there should be tools that allow you to quickly get that information as a viewer, then we release our tool publicly that allows everybody to use it and find whether it was 11 apps or not and reported back to us. So right now that that exists, if I run across some content and audio clip on the internet, on X or on linkedin or whatever I can check and see if it was 11 labs generated. Yes, you can, we can you can directly go on our website, upload that clip and and get probability of how likely it is. And now we are working with some partners to extend it across other technologies. So some of the open source model, other commercial models, that's part one and then part two because as you said, you can run into that in social media, but you might not be aware that it's A I generate in the first place. So how we can collaborate with social media, with telecommunication companies to check it on the fly while that content is being sent to you. I want to ask a question about the ethics of some of this. There's an interesting use case on the JFK speech. There have already been some cases of politicians in, in various countries wanting to appeal a certain audience in a language that they don't speak and they have translated their speeches in real time. I think maybe even using some of this technology to, to appear to speak those languages and they've said, oh, that's legitimate, I'm just trying to reach a different audience, you know, with my content, with my political content. But other people have said no, that's a complete red flag. You don't actually speak that language, you're presenting yourself with something you're not. What do you have a policy around this? And also at synthesia, do you have a policy around the creation of political content? Yeah, so we don't allow political content today. Um I think they'll change over time. Uh But I think we, we take a generally quite permissive stance on what you can use these technologies for. We also may be the enterprise. Um I do think it's a very interesting philosophical question. I think in five years time, something like that, no one will be talking about this anymore and everyone will be doing it. But I think as with any new technology, you will have this sort of years, right. Where people are trying to figure out what's right, what's wrong. Um, you could say, is it ok for a politician to have a ghostwriter to write a piece in fortune? Right. They didn't actually write it themselves. Is that worse? The same? Is it ok. Um, so I think, you know, all new technologies come with these sort of interesting questions and dilemmas and some of them will ring out to be very important and very, very true. And I think some of them will, will, will care less about in the future. And, and that idea of a policy definitely echo some of the vector pieces as well and where uh it's going to happen at one stage. And now as a society, we need to come together and figure out what's the right way of approaching that. Currently, we don't allow people around to impersonate any of that work or pretend that they are part of the candidates. Uh uh uh And the p and do the political speech or political content. Great. I want to take one question from the audience because I, I think I only have time for one. But if, if there's a question, please raise your hand and I'll try to come to you right here. I see as a gentleman here at this table, if you raise your hand again. Oh, great. If you could stand up and I yourself, uh it's Mark Salmon from the times, um uh when um Sadiq Khan had a deep fake of him, uh made the Met investigated and they concluded that they, they couldn't take any action. Um Do you think it's possible to write a law uh in this country to combat against that kind of deep fake? Um And do you think that's desirable, should there be laws against deep fakes? Obviously, I'm not a lawmaker. So I can't give you a definitive answer that I can give you my personal opinion. I think ultimately deep fakes is an advanced version of impersonation and impersonation is in most cases illegal if you do it for deceptive reasons, like fraud, for example, I definitely think we should include deep fakes of that, maybe even make the punishment harder if you're doing, using a deep fake for malicious impersonation. But where to draw the lines legally, I think it is very difficult to say that's not my, my my and to add uh one quick note to that as you, as you rightly ask, this content is out there, there's plethora of tools that can generate that content and what's the true solution? There's definitely the legislature that, that, that uh the countries can pass. But then also on the technical level, what we can do and beyond trace of and being able to detect it as you think here is out how this could work as part of the society. And one thing we are advocating for is beyond water marking. What's A I approved A I maybe there's a version of water marking what's real content and for Sadiq Khan or any other candidate to be able to transmit a message and that message is decoded. This is really Sadiq Khan that's speaking. So we don't only detect for what's fake but actually verify what's true. Excellent. Uh We're out of time. Thank you very much for the demos and thank you very much for the conversation. Uh Put your hands together, please for Maddie and.

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