ST Engineering

Our ranking reflects the dominance of energy companies, the enduring profitability of Southeast Asia’s banks, shifting global supply chains, the steady rebound in tourism, and the rapid ascent of AI-driven businesses in the region.

Fortune Southeast Asia 500

Our new ranking reflects the rise and fall of energy markets, multinational supply chains, and tourism in the region.

Key Financials (last Fiscal Year)

Revenues ($M)

Profits ($M)

Assets ($M)

Total Stockholder Equity ($M)

Profit Ratios

Profit as % of Revenues

Profits as % of Assets

Profits as % of Stockholder Equity

Get insights into ST Engineering including business profile, stock information, news, and rankings from Fortune.

ST Engineering Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings

legacy

st engineering

Companies

ST Engineering | Fortune

ST Engineering Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings | Fortune

Hosted by ROSHN Group  
Around the world, significant strides have been made to increase the number of women in corporate leadership positions. In the U.S., women make up 29% of C-Suite level roles and hold approximately 30% of board seats. And here in Saudi Arabia, nearly 10% of board positions are held by women, a new reality made possible by the Kingdom’s ambitious Vision 2030 strategy and other significant government-led reforms. Even with such progress, untapped opportunities remain in industries where women have traditionally been underrepresented – from construction and engineering to technology and energy. In this special lunch program, we’ll explore the strategies needed to advance women into C-suite positions, create more inclusive workplaces, foster untapped talent, and create a path to parity – not just progress – for women at all levels of business.
Panelists:
Dr. Maryam Ali Ficociello, Group Chief Governance Officer, Red Sea Global
Giovanna Carnevali,	 Executive Director, Master Planning, ROSHN Group
Dr. Saeeda Jaffar, Senior Vice President and Group Country Manager – GCC, Visa
Jena Ladhani, Chief Executive Officer, Global Workplace Solutions, KSA, CBRE
Renée McGowan, Chief Executive Officer, India, Middle East, and Africa, Marsh McLennan
Moderator: Michal Lev-Ram, Contributing Editor, Fortune

WOMEN’S LEADERSHIP LUNCH PROGRAM: ADVANCING WOMEN IN THE WORKPLACE

Conferences

Manohar Paluri, Vice President, Engineering for Gen AI, Meta Interviewer: Jason Del Rey, Fortune  

Brainstorm AI 2024: The Challenge of Defining AI Transparency

 Manohar Paluri, Vice President, Engineering for Gen AI, Meta Interviewer: Jason Del Rey, Fortune  

You're gonna help me with this pivot today after that performance. It's hard to match up, man. Yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna do our best here. So let, let's jump right in. Um Meta with Lama has a very distinct point of view on this topic. Can you explain why open your version of open? We won't get into the, is it really, really open? But um we could have those conversations outside but why your version of open and how do you think about the strength of open versus what some people see as the risks? It's a very often question that you get when you lead Lama and uh uh last year, when we faced this question, the answer wasn't super clear to us, but philosophically, uh we always believed open is the way to go all the way from open compute porch. And many of the things that meta has built uh Lama being the latest incarnation of it. I want to answer it in two ways. There is a particular way of thinking about A I development over the past four or five decades. Every time we overestimate what we can achieve with these models. And with the progress in A I, and we feel it's something to be enclosed and built upon and that's where the value is. But every time we hit a wall in unlocking General Intelligence, uh unlocking A I that actually need not be customized can be used out of the box. If you really look at the progress of A I today. In fact, even the 3.3 launch that we just did on Friday, there are multiple variations of those models uh and customizations of that that have already launched. And part of that reason is because it's open because people are able to build on top of it, customize it. So it's ridiculous for me to actually think of a world where we enclose A I and say you have an API for intelligence. Instead we, I genuinely believe the progress in A I over the coming decades is only going to happen if we actually go the open route where everybody can customize it, access it, um deploy various applications on top of it all the way from using an API but also customizing the weights. And that's where Lama uh vision stems from. And it actually has a tremendous amount of benefit for meta as well. So it has, it benefits the world, it benefits the developers, it benefits meta. So that's to me is the reason why we are open. So it's II I can understand seeing a A no brainer especially in the competitive landscape. And I and I get the, the speed to improvement and speed to innovation. Um We haven't really talked about the downsides and um you know, there, there are many out there that, you know, depending on your point of view or if you're a government official, you might see. Right. And so, you know, there's a report report in the fall that researchers linked uh to the Chinese military, we're building on top of an early version of L A. Um Again, I think the response was that's against our policy or our rules um still happening. So why should the world trusts meta with this open source approach with such powerful technology? When we know whether you know whatever your views of Chinese military are there, there could be actors out there who might not use it in the ways designed or intended. Um This particular one. so first and foremost, we should be very grounded on, on how we see the world uh with the data that we have and with the facts that we have, right, the competitive landscape of A I is pretty amazing in terms of the progress we have been able to make across the world. This is not a particular country. This is basically uh if you if you really look at the success of building the best models today, it has four components to it, this talent that you need to be able to build these models, there is compute which is flops that you put into these models, especially the flagship models are the largest large scale models that are actually used to distill and build very efficient models. And there is data, uh Lama at least has been built on publicly available data and license data. So unique data, the higher the quality, the better. And finally, the distribution which is aligning these models for various applications. If you have these four things, you are actually able to build the best technology and unlock value and the competitive nature is across uh the whole landscape across countries and continents. There is a huge uh competition in terms of building these best models. And to me taking a step back, if you want to play the long game of actually making sure this value accrues to everybody in the world. Again, you go back to how many people are building on top of it. How fast are you building on it and how responsibly and safely are you building it. And if you look at the operating systems that are available today, the safest operating systems are the open systems. So similarly, if you put out a model, there are thousands of people who are redeeming these models, there are thousands of customizations of these models that are much more efficient for hardware, much more safer for various applications. How is that going to happen if it's done by a single company or a single entity, it's going to only happen if everybody, all of the talent across the world are customizing this for applications and building a safer uh future and future that is more accessible to everyone. So that's, that's the real. So, so is the point that they, they're gonna always be use cases that we, we, we don't love but uh we're together, we're gonna build guard rails around that or am I, am I misinterpreting? I have a fundamental way of thinking about it, which is if you, if your router doesn't work, you actually don't go to the, you don't go to Linus Walters to actually complain about the router. You basically go to the manufacturer of the company to complain about the router. What is working. What is not similarly when I think about A I and these foundation models, that layer is not where you actually control or where you think about what is working or what is not what applications you actually enable on top of these models is where you have to have checks and balances. And to me that is the real place where you actually have significant value, both upside and downside. And we need to look at it from a responsibility and ethics point of view. That's why when you think about Lama, what we did is at a model level, it's so hard to compress all of the policies of the world into one model. It's not possible. So at a system level, when you build a system, you have this input and output guards, what does that enable you? That what enables you is that you can have the model but you have certain questions that you want to answer, you have certain answers that you want to curb. And that flexibility is what you need to give at the application level. And then the policies that are more regional cultural geopolitical can kick in and say, OK, this is how we are going to deploy these models and this is how we think about safety and responsibility. Let's shift gears real quick. I want to talk about some of the consumer applications of wa and meta A I so um meta A I started, you, you would know the exact timeline started showing up in all our apps, Facebook, Instagram, whatsapp, right in the search bar. Um What have you learned from? You know, I think what some people saw is just, you know, slap, slapping that on there and see seeing what happened like what, what is the feedback been? And then I wanna talk about the scale of, of that use case. So we've been blown away by the adoption of me. We are close to 600 million monthly actives at this point across all of the surfaces that you talked about. But at the heart of what we are, what we are trying to do is Lama is our engine that enables me, I I which is a universal assistant, but it also enables business A is wearables A I which is a Rayan meta glass that you can wear and you can invoke me I I, the assistant and with have a hands free intelligence experience uh created A I and many of the other A I that people can customize towards their liking, whether it's a particular fan following they have on a particular character and so on and so forth. So the goal for us with this foundation models is to enable all of these product experiences. So humans, human connection is stronger, human agent connection is stronger. And that's kind of like the at the heart of what we are trying to achieve building the future of human connection and the technology needed for it. And Lama becomes the centerpiece and med is our universal assistant experience. So it's been pretty amazing to see how med I gets used across all of this. How do you, I mean, because I, I've struggled to figure out what is the right U use case when I'm, you know, looking for, I don't know, an old high school friend or something. Um And that's probably not the right use case, but it's in that same search bar, right? And so um what, what are the use cases that have been most common or, or maybe surprising. So, so many of the uh so II I kind of have two or three that come to my mind because I always believe what you use is the best way to actually think about the product. Uh imagine is one of the experiences that you can use for in Medi. I, so you can actually imagine anything. And recently like three months ago, we had a birthday cake that I designed with my four year old daughter. You can imagine it. You can add a princess, you can add an Eiffel Tower, You can make it a strawberry or chocolate flavor. And then you have this custom cake and you're like, OK, this is pretty awesome. And then your building and then your cookie had. Yes. No, I didn't cook it. I had some, let's cook it. I wanted the daughter to be happy on birthday. Uh uh So there was one, you can actually invoke my I I in a group. Uh So if you think about how you uh uh use these models and interact with our assistants, you're all, you're, you're naturally in a conversation in a group and you can actually uh invoke me. I I to ask a particular latest score. So you're talking about a whatsapp group in whatsapp group. Uh So I'm an Indian cricket huge cricket fan. We're always talking about what's the latest score stuff? This is this group with, with uh my buddies and then we can ask me for the latest score. It will give you the latest information we can actually have uh some really fun roasting sessions uh for the groups on uh for the people on the group. So these are things that are now on me. You could open uh and you could definitely do it. Yeah, I see an editor who would gladly roast me right now. But these are some exact. So you want social plus this intelligence come together at the heart of it and you're already on whatsapp, you're already on Instagram, you're already on Facebook. So basically, we're bringing me I I and all of these A I in that place. So interactions with friends, interactions with businesses is natural and intelligent. Um I was curious about that 600 million number that I keep hearing about active users. So I asked meta A I like, can you like explain like what is an active user mean or what is an engaged user? And so I won't go through all the, we, we had a long back and forth kind of, you know, insightful. And at the end, uh meta, I told me that perhaps more than half of the 600 million might be not explicit uh engagements where I know I'm engaging A I, but maybe a meta A I is working behind the scenes on a result uh on a search result. And um I was just curious is, is that accurate? And um because I, I know, you know, all the companies are very proud of these active user numbers. And so Um Yeah, I'm, I'm curious, I'm curious for your take on what, whether, whether that sounds about right? That maybe half of that number is sort of not explicit uses, but A I working behind the scenes, let me answer that. Uh So the two answers to it, one is uh technology when it works should be seamless. So when you are actually doing a search query or when you're actually asking a particular answer, you're actually trying to do a thing, whether it's on our app, any of the surfaces, whether it's whatsapp Facebook, you're not necessarily trying to say I want to use search, I want to use Medii, I want to use this. You're trying to get a particular job done. You're trying to solve a particular problem from that context. We're trying to make sure Medi I can understand what your query is and if it requires a language model or if it requires a real time query or if it requires a frame graph access, we are able to do that seamlessly for you. So you can actually get the job done in a much better way than before. That's how we think about it. And going back to the question that you are asking, uh it's really hard to break down which particular intent was search only which particular intent was accessing a frame graph or looking at a particular subs string or asking the language model for latest information and so on. So all of this together is what we are trying to unlock with me. I was going to say when you said two different parts, I thought, I thought that was going to be a really wrong non answer. But we're really saying we should just trust meta A I's answer. Maybe we're, we're, we're actually, the technology is definitely improving day by day. And that's one of the other things if you look at the launches, we have done over the last year, we basically did five launches all the way from Lama three family to 3.3. And if you look at where we started the beginning of the year and towards the end of the year, we have more than 600 million variants of a Lama that people have built on the 600 million monthly actives that we talked about. And me, I was in the fledgling uh part, we just started thinking about me. I, I, so going from uh product experience that doesn't exist to a product experience that's used by these many people. It's pretty amazing. I think we're all at the time. Thank you so much, Mano. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Jamie Miller, Director of Biomimicry, SJ Group, In conversation with Nicholas Gordon, Fortune

Brainstorm Design 2024: Biomimicry in Architecture and Engineering

All right. So maybe let's start with, you know, obvious straightforward questions. What's the best way to understand what biomimicry is? Biomimicry is Velcro in the 19 forties, the Swiss engineer got fed up with birds sticking to his pants and his dog's hair and took his frustration into fascination to copy that hooking mechanism to make Velcro one of the most successful adhesives of our time. It's a wind turbine blade that copies a humpback whale fin and those bumps on the leading edge called tubac and applying that with applying it to a wind turbine blade, finding that that blade is 20% more efficient runs at slower wind speeds and it's quieter. So biomimicry is recognizing that nature has been designing for 3.8 billion years and in that time has figured out some really brilliant strategies to similar problems that we face. And then how are you using that those 3.8 billion years of, of design when it comes to architecture and buildings? The process of doing biomimicry quote unquote is, is to always start with what do you want your design to do instead of jumping into what you want to design take a moment and think, what is it that you're trying to achieve? And once you understand that function, you ask the natural world. So practical examples, we designed a building in India. We wanted it to be self cooling, we wanted to capture the monsoons and hold them. So our question was, how does nature self cool? We looked at termite mounds, we looked at elephant skin. Uh We looked at prairie dog holes and we learned from those metaphors, those strategies to make really simple uh design solutions. To give you a practical example of how it applied the elephant skin has this beautiful cracking kind of um facade. We'll call it uh I'll, I'll preface this by saying to you. I dropped out of biology. I hated biology. So I'm looking at it through an engineering lens. And what we realize is that those cracks, when an elephant blows water over its body, those cracks capture the moisture. And so it allows it to evaporative cool over a longer period of time. It's like a little protective area. So we designed this rock wall facade that's hooked up to the rain harvesting system, trickles water into the rocks and has that same kind of process that evaporative cools. It pulls the water off at a slow rate to passively cool the building. I mean, it's funny you mentioned that you dropped out of biology because in that case, like then how did you get started in this field in the first place. I mean, you like, how did you become an expert in this topic before then joining up with um SJ group? It, it started 20 years ago, I was uh an engineering student um in Canada, learning, learning engineering. And, and the whole time I had this feeling like there had to be a different way of doing things. I was being trained in a certain paradigm. So I took this elective called math and poetry. It was an hour and a half of math theorems and an hour and a half of poetry. It wasn't the synergy of the two. It was just, we studied math and then we studied poems. But in the math part, our professor was brilliant and at having us almost imagine like we're coming up with the theorems ourselves. And the one that stood out and kind of shifted my whole paradigm was the Fibonacci sequence. So it's a sequence of numbers that um when you play with them, you get the golden ratio and then you get that spiral. And that's where the professor got me. He once, once we saw this spiral, he said, where have you seen this before? And in that moment, I realized that spirals in the packaging of sunflower seeds, it's in the way that pine cones curl. It's in the way that you're, when you pull the plug in your bathtub, you get that vortex that spiral was ubiquitous in nature. And in that moment, I realized that nature could teach us about design. So up until that time, I had been learning to use math and science to engineer my environment. When in that moment, I learned that nature through math and science could teach us about how to design. Let's say 11 more definitions. Question, you know another one of the topics we're working on is regenerative design. It tell me more about kind of what, what you mean by that term when it comes to the built environment, I'll, I'll start by saying nature is naturally regenerative. So what I love about biomimicry and why it's so powerful is that these terms like circularity, regenerative design, passive design. Nature has already done it and biomimicry can inspire us to look at what can nature teach us to do next. And so regenerative design to me is, is really about recognizing that humans are natural. We're a natural species, our breast feeds trees, our bodies feed the soil. Why can't our buildings feed their ecosystem? So at some point in our history and our evolution as a species, we've diverted, we've diverged and that was what I really got excited about. My phd was wondering what made us so different. And so regenerative design is just coming back, adopting new paradigms, new principles so that we create systems that go way beyond doing less harm and are truly regenerative. So what does it actually mean when you're looking at a project, whether, you know, just a building or a larger area, what does it mean to, you know, to work with the natural world as opposed to against it or ignoring it? So this is a key part of our, our paradigms that we've, we've adopted is that in when we build the first phase of any design process starts in our imagination, it starts with our assumptions, our biases, how we think informs how we design. Some of the assumptions that you can see in our built environment is that we're separate from nature. We've designed incredible concrete systems that separate us from nature. We've also built on this paradigm that we can control or predict nature. Um And these aren't necessarily wrong. But what we've realized is that the more that we've grown, the more difficult it is to predict nature, the more expensive it is to fight nature. Nature wants to come in nature abhors gradients. And if I mean, the case study is, if we all left the city today, what would naturally happen is nature would take over. So the the thing about stopping to fight nature is learning from her principles, learning how to design in a way that allows nature to come in and allows us to kind of dance with nature, but let nature lead. Um So part of the reason why I think this, we're talking about this now is obviously there's climate change, climate change is made um sustainability environmental protection, a lot more present, I think in, in the minds of developers and designers. Um obviously, we're based here in Asia. A lot of our cities are threatened by climate change, extreme weather. I remember last year the really bad floods that happened in Hong Kong, like I've never seen floods that bad in Hong Kong ever. Um in my, in my 30 years of living there. Um So, you know, what would be your, your advice to developers and designers out here when it comes to biomimicry and regenerative design, you know, what should they be looking for? How should they be thinking about this problem? How should they be thinking about design in an age of climate change and extreme weather? Yeah, great question. We, we start all of our processes with something called the living story and, and what that means is we want to learn what the land wants to do, what it will support us in doing and what it will permit us to do and it gives us this unique lens to kind of like imagine what's the trajectory of that landscape? If we were not to touch it, if we weren't to do anything, what does Nature want to do and then to start to start to make design decisions based on that. So if nature wants to flood, the old paradigm or the engineering based resilience is try to fight that flood, but how big are berms going to be how much energy are we going to put into fighting it? There's a great project in Toronto where I'm from, where they designed in a wetland and designed all their buildings to flood. So it's a shift in the paradigm again where we're using ecological resilience and eco ecosystems don't fight environmental pressures. They kind of learn and adapt at, at, at multiple scales. So integrating new technology, digital um uh technology to learn what nature is doing to be more nuanced and then make adaptations in real time. Another example is like you think of your skin, my skin is responding differently here than it is here. So having that more locally attuned responsive design is a, is a key part of, of managing climate change, reintegrating uh natural phenomenon into our designs and doing it in a way that, you know, doesn't make us too uncomfortable and it's good. You mentioned the tech is like this isn't an anti tech thing at all. I mean, there's a lot of research that goes into new materials, new design processes, like what role are, you know, new technologies? And yes, here's the A I question, you know, what role is A I also playing in making these ideas more feasible. This is the brilliant thing about biomimicry is that it's a bridge, it's a bridge in so many ways. I work a lot with indigenous communities because it's providing me a bridge with some of their principles and thinking. But it's a bridge also uh in terms of historic technologies and future technologies. And what I mean by that is, you know, how do you harness when you do biomimicry, you come up with some pretty bold kind of metaphors. Like, what if this building could breathe like a lung or what if the skin of the building could breathe like skin when you have that metaphor? It's like, well, OK, how do you make that come to life? How do you do that? And that's when you start to look at the plethora of technologies that are available and see and you cherry pick the ones that help that metaphor come to life and, and become real. Um I do want to ask about, about your role, you know, you are the director of Biomimicry for SJ group, a big multinational construction and architecture firm. Why do you think a big firm like SJ group is investing time to make a director of biomimicry position? Um So in my journey, uh II I had a company and, and one of the, the, the companies within Sur Beard was my client and we built this relationship over time and really built out that biomimicry practice. But I think what SJ A did was they got on to that realization that like I said earlier, regenerative design, passive design circularity, all of those things already exist in nature. So, biomimicry is kind of this catch all and it's a way of looking at design and, and in a way, yeah, it's a way of looking at design that's like perpetually trying to copy and mimic nature. So I think they just saw a little bit ahead of their time because nature is also going to teach us what to do next. But the cool thing is is that um although I'm, I'm the first director, we are shortly followed by Microsoft who, how also has a director of biomimicry in the latest uh regenerative design report by Arup. It was co-written by a biomimicry expert. Uh We're seeing Perkins and will purchase a company that is very biomimetic. Um Jacobs Engineering has hired a bunch of biomimicry professionals. So the cool thing is is that we're seeing this uprising and this acknowledgement that nature is the only model of sustainability we have on this planet. We're a very young species. And so when you use biomimicry, you kind of put ourselves in our place and we can see that it can lead us for a long time. Um You know, I I I've seen some of the, some of the designs that you're putting out there that your team is putting out there. I think I saw the, was it the Hiway idea? It's like these Hexagons that are surrounding a bridge and it's a cool looking idea. One wonders if you talk to the construction, the guys, they'll be like, oh, sorry, boss like this. This is not, I mean, it's a cool idea but it's not going to work. I mean, how, I mean, do you ever have to feel like you have to compromise between, you know, there's this cool idea based off of natural ideas and then you try to work on it with the materials and the process that we have and it's not possible, like, do you ever have to compromise between those two things? Yeah. I mean, I guess there is compromise. The point of biomimicry is to push the paradigm. So you're going to come up with bold ideas. But the point of that is to develop, it's a development of believable ideas that might not yet be possible but, but provoke a conversation, what could be possible. But really, we don't try to compromise because I, I've seen in my time that the only limitation to, to the application of biomimicry is creativity, it's the creativity and how you abstract metaphors from nature, but also the creativity and how you can exploit or harness or use existing technologies to put, put that bold idea to life. And so, um no, I always think there's a solution. It's just a matter of finding it. And are there like smaller things that can be done with, with building projects? So not maybe like a a radical change but small tweaks that can be made to really kind of, you know, to make our buildings more efficient, better cooling, whatever you want them to do Yeah, there's, there's thousands of biomimicry technologies out there. I've been tracking them for 20 years. Um, you know, cool windows that copy, um, uh, spider silk that reduces bird collisions by 70%. You know, there's, um, uh, IOT technology that kind of matches all of your electrical systems and helps them communicate similar to bee, uh, bee hives and how bees communicate. So there's technologies you can use. Um, but, you know, if you want your, your building to circulate better, look at, you know, natural models, it's, it's there are so many ways you can apply biomimicry to an existing uh building or project. Um So I know you've had to work with kind of many, many designers over the world, kind of telling them how biomimicry works. But you know what's kind of the one piece of advice or the one way of thinking about this issue that you'd give to an up and coming designer that wants to start looking into the space, applying some of these natural techniques in the design work they're doing. So there's two things I'll say. First of all, biomimicry is very simple. Um Maybe I'll start with this. It's just, it's essentially a lens that when you adopt this lens, your whole world will change. So I'm going to invite you to just close your eyes for a second or just imagine a forest in your brain. That forest has ancient elders that have long lasted climate change. Towers that are moving fluids up hundreds of feet without electricity, collecting solar energy. With these materials that use a subset of periodic table of elements. Water based chemistry, these leaves are built in benign manufacturing. They fall into a circular economy. Those trees are communicating with each other through underground networks and tunnels through their mycelium. When you start to see that nature is doing chemistry, engineering design, you start to realize that there's a whole world out there. And to practically do biomimicry, there's two things I'll say one is to go back to that function. Whenever you have a design challenge, just ask, how would nature do that function? And then the second part is I like to break biomimicry up into form based biomimicry, which is copying shapes in nature to achieve a function process based biomimicry is manufacturing or behaving that's like the termite mound example. Um And then systems based biomimicry, which is where I love to play. And that's when you start to learn the subtleties of, of nature. And you start to learn the brushstrokes. It's like imagining the natural world this beautiful piece of art. And we've been asked to add to it. And over hundreds of years, we've been scribbling on that piece of art. But if we learn those brushstrokes, we can add to it, we can learn the nuances of the artist and build to the beauty. All right. So with that contemplated image, um I'd like to kind of. Thank you so much, Jamie for kind of introducing us this idea and all the cool techniques, materials technologies that are coming out from looking at the natural world. So everyone, please. Thank Jamie. Thank you very much.

Brian COX, Director of Gameplay Engineering, Inworld AI Dian GUAN, Co-founder and General Manager, Asia Pacific, Patsnap Donn KOH, Co-founder and Design Partner, Stuck Design Hanyi LEE, Founder & Creative Partner, Anak Moderator: Ellie AUSTIN, FORTUNE

Brainstorm AI Singapore 2024: How AI will impact human creativity

Brian COX, Inworld AI, Dian GUAN, Asia Pacific, Patsnap, Donn KOH, Stuck Design Hanyi LEE, Anak Moderator: Ellie AUSTIN, FORTUNE

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the stage. Thank you so much for joining us. So this is the only session um at the conference that we're dedicating to the creative industry. So there's a lot to discuss and Brian, I want to start with you. It's a really simple question. Can you explain the most significant way in which A I is revolutionizing gaming? Uh Sure. So at Enro A I, we provide A I models and microservices for game developers to add all kinds of A INP CS gameplay features and content generations. OK. Um We'll come back to some of that in a second because you showed me a very cool video before we came on stage of you kind of explaining a world that you wanted to be created and A I simultaneously creating that world in a lot of detail. So, so there's a lot to discuss there. Dean that snap is a global leader in A I powered IP and R and D Innovation Intelligence. You work with companies and organizations like NASA Tesla Disney, huge organizations. How are you working with these brands and A I on a day to day basis? How is A I impacting the way that you're working with these organizations. The pa specialize in providing uh smart data and intelligence for R and D research and development professionals throughout the R and D life cycle all the way from ideation to discovery development to commercialization. Um So if you think about R and D, it's much, much more than the eureka moment of a genius guy coming out with a brilliant idea. It's actually a lot of tedious and very long process. For drug discovery example, it takes more than 10 years to develop a new drug. A lot of data collection searching, trying to synthesize the data fighting patterns and eventually come to the product that works. So pass snap build our own large language model and also a lot of small models trained on the special data set patents, academic journals and papers. So our model is like a very specialized GP T we understand R and D professional much better. OK. Dawn Let's come on to you. So ST design is a design and innovation consultancy and I believe that stuck has developed its own A I tool called hyper sketch. Why was it important to you to develop your own tool rather than use one that's already on the market for us? Uh Hyper sketch was a reaction to the A I tools out there which I think are often very much focused on trying to get the best quality of output um using the best data. But, but for us, we needed something that would amplify creativity and, and sometimes in that space, bad data actually is the best data because we are trying to get the unlikely things that surprises us and the things that haven't been good answers of yesterday. So for the main reason, we do hyper sketch as a way to amplify our work. And can you very briefly explain to us what hyper sketch does how, how you leverage it to improve your work with your clients? Oh, sure. If you take a simple doodle, half a doodle, maybe because you have half an idea with all the prompts, you could just get it to say, make some products for me and you will see in high fidelity pretty soon in a matter of seconds. So that gives you something to bounce back with like almost like a brainstorming companion. Fascinating. OK, honey, let's come on to you. So you're the founder, creative partners I mentioned of an app which is a global design company that works with the likes of Netflix Apple Bany entry. And what I'm interested in is at what stage are you using A I in the creative process when you're doing work for these massive organizations? Um I mean, we tend to break our process into three stages, the conceptualization stage, the exploratory mock stage and the execution stage for us. The middle portion of the exploratory I guess mocking stage, that's when A I has been amazing. It has variants, it has depth, it gives you, I guess a lot of opportunities and possibilities. Um But definitely not the first nor the last. And OK, so why not the first or the last, I guess? I mean, our bread and butter is ideas. Um So I guess for us if you replicate A, I, I mean, if you use A I for the first or the last, you're just going to get the instant artificial sameness and blend this, which is, I guess the worry that most people have with A I in general. And yet if you use it in step two, what does it enable you to do? And how does it accelerate your work potentially? I mean, if you're like a two man design shop, you can pretend that you're 100 men strong or you can pretend that, you know, you know, knowledge about, I don't know B house or you know, I mean, something that I have no clue about. So it allows you to pretend to be other people. It allows you to be transported, transporters, allows you to be many places at once. So I think that's really the beauty of it, Brian. I, I want to come back to you on the subject of guard rails and, and so, you know, if you are to create, as we were discussing earlier, a whole new world in gaming, how do you make sure that that A I doesn't go rogue and maybe the characters don't start talking about things you don't want them to talk about or doing things that are dangerous and not something you'd want the players to replicate. Yes. So we allow our clients to first choose which A I model they want to use either the publicly available ones or our own. And then we also have safety filters and customers can choose which filters they want to enable or disable. So for example, if you want to have a character that can talk about alcohol or politics, then you can enable that or you can also disable that so that they stay track of the topics that you allow them to talk about. Got it. OK. And I think at the moment, your A I models are, they're all focused on English language, but I believe that that's about to change. Do you want to tell us a bit more about that? Yes, that's right. As of today, we support multiple languages. So we support English simplified Chinese, Japanese and Korean. And we got some feedback from our partners LG plus and then to make sure this is culturally relevant to give a better experience to players in those regions. And why did you, my final question on this is why did you choose those languages? First of all, there are a lot of video game players based in, in China, Japan and Korea. And that's why we wanted to focus on those markets first. And that's also the, the regions that we received the most requests from like, hey, can you please support our language? And uh yeah, very excited about it. Do you see yourself broadening out to cover European languages more in the future? Is there something that's going to keep rolling? I can't make that promise yet, but I believe we will. Ok, great. Um I do want to open up the questions at some point. So please bear that in mind. And if there's anything you'd like to ask our panelists get thinking about it, um I want to go to you, Dan and I know you don't think of yourself necessarily as a creative, but you're someone who enables creatives to do to do the work um that they want to do. What's your, we, we've spoken about some of the massive possibilities of A I but, but what's your fear as we start to integrate these models into the creative process? What's keeping you up at night? And how do you think your fellow CRE your creative here should be solving for it? Well, for our case, uh you're right that we enable creative. So R and D is a very classic form of the changing, I mean, converting human creativity into new inventions and new products that benefit of us. So from our perspective, I don't see as, as a, as a uh a problem is more on the positive side when we observe how our customers embrace A I I think first of all, our customer who are the research and developers by nature, they are curious people. So they are one among the first in the organization to embrace A I and in R and D space, we already see so many success cases already. Just take one example, maybe some audience already know um in terms of drug discovery, as example, it takes 10 years, more than a billion dollars, even a new drug. And it's a very, very tedious process. And one very important step is to identify the 3d structure of A molecule. Without that, you cannot develop any drug that can cure the disease. And this used to take a very well trained professional few months at least or even years to decode one particular molecule. But deep deep mines, Alpha Pho managed to solve this very difficult problem by using A I to analyze the patterns and recognize the patterns so that significantly transform the entire industry. So we see more and more use cases where clearly R and D people see the benefit rather than the problems of using A. But of course, one risk is once this repetitive task being done by A I because the R and D process, even though it's creative, there's a lot of non creative tasks. For example, running the experiments repetitively collecting data, analyzing the data. So about one third to a half of the employees in this uh R and D centric companies are doing those tasks once this is taken away by A I, what do these people do? It takes years of training to be a professional in any particular domain. So that's one potential risk that we have to address. And I want to continue with that subject and ask Don and Honey Don if you're, you know, a young person who wants to get into creative industries in this day and age, whether that's as a musician, a writer and artist, is it mandatory for now? Now for you to also understand generative A I coding? Because in a way, those quite technical mathematical skills are at odds with the traditional creative skills. So how do you balance those two sides? I don't think you have to technically operate it, but you need to have some literacy with which these systems behave because you want to use it to get better results than what the system is giving you and everyone has the same tools. So you've got to kind of understand how to use it. Well, to get a result that is firstly more competitive than what the system gives you directly and also better than what others are doing with it. So, so that that is the core thing. I think, I, I don't think we need all to become A I scientists or you know. Yeah. OK. You need to have literacy in it but you don't need to be executing it yourself? Yeah. Ok. Um, honey, so last year a group of authors including George RR Martin filed lawsuits against open A I, um, alleging that Chat GP T was trained on their original work without their consent. And so my question to you is what should creative companies be doing to ensure that they don't become the subject of legal action for wrongfully using original source material. I know that's a big question. Um, I think that, I mean, most of the times we've used it, it's mainly for commercial use for clients. So I think that's why like I mentioned before, it should be used mostly for exploring but in the execution stage, which is usually when I guess the usual copyright laws and I guess infringement come about, I think that's when it gets a bit tricky because I mean, if it's not created by some kind of human behind it, then there really is, you know what I mean? I guess no, no right towards that at all, John. Have you got anything you want to add to that? I mean, there's a lot of similarities, even though I think the legal debate is out there with me seeing something on the street and then accidentally using it in my design. In the end, we still have to kind of check that the final output. Like what honey has mentioned is not infringing on anything else that has already been done. So it's not very different from how we've operated innovation so far. OK. Are there any questions for any of the panelists? Um If uh Yes. Oh, fantastic. Let's go with this question here. But, and if you could just stand up when the microphone comes to you, uh I believe it's coming from here and say your name and the organization that you're from and then ask your question. Hi. My name is Lois. I'm from GOV Tech, also known as the Government technology Agency. So my question is actually um kind of thinking about this whole lawsuit thing in a different perspective. So can I interpret that the presence of such legal issues facing this A I based companies are actually an indication of valid profitability or a valid market such that it's not, it's not a bad news, right? In fact, if you look at it, it's an indication, it's a proof of viability. So, um I mean, recent news about perplexity, which is an A I company uh trying to get around this as well. Um What are your thought on on such seemingly negative news? Yeah, thank you. Who wants to take that? Um So um many of our partners and clients, they provide their own data so that solves this issue. So you can either use the existing area models and most of them will tell you what they're trained on or if you want to provide your own data set, then you can and then you can ensure that all the data that the A I is using uh is, is your own and then you can avoid lawsuits that way. OK? Anything. Y yes, you can ask a question and then there's another one that we're gonna come to you. If you just wait for the microphone, please so that we can hear you. It's just coming. Thank you. Hi, my name is Steve from Spark. So yesterday the grab I was saying that they are creating a lot of creatives through A I, right. They're personalizing it. So if they are say 1 million customers in Indonesia and each has a unique need and they read their pattern over a period of time how they are interacting with Grab, so they're able to personalize it. So now ads are getting created uh through A I. Secondly, accenture has an add on where they said, OK, let's make a creator which should appeal to people. So they picked up things which uh people like something like pets for kids and they incorporate all those things and give it to and they created ad and then they told a creative person to create an ad and then they tested both and the one created by A I got better. So how do you interpret that? How the industry, the creative industry, the TV ad industry is going to shape up with a coming into picture. Do you want to take that? I could take that? I would just say that. Uh, I don't know if everyone here feels the same way, but when I do work, if I feel lazy, I don't use a, I, yeah, it's, it's contrary to what a lot of people think. It's because when I, when I feel lazy or when I, when I do work and I involve a, I, I have now 1000 options to compete with and decide between. So when, when I'm kind of like feeling too tired, I'll just do something of my own and then submit it. Now, I don't think A I allows us to kind of get better work. In fact, the demand is there for us to do this explosion of A I and then either pick really, really well or I do it because you know that if you don't, if you just use that your competitor is going to do the same. So the market forces are going to force you to out innovate A I actually. Mhm um There was another question towards the back. Ok. Yeah, this one here, please. If we could just get a microphone. Thank you. Hi, my name is David from paypal. So I'm just interested in how this gaming industry is evolving. Given, you know, generative A I and I've read news about how certain companies have business models that are quite brutal, right? Really laying off half of the artists, especially those who are strong in two D art, right? You have trained for years only to be let go. And now using the company just uses ja I just keep the best artist there just to monitor the and, and you know, make them come up with graphics or add ons and stuff. So I want to seek your views on how this um you know, gen A I is impacting this workforce, right? And what are the solutions? And do you think it is ethical for, you know, some of the managers and the top horns in these companies to lay off all these 22 D artists? Yeah, great question. So the way I see it is using Inworld, we don't replace people, we use in worlds as a tool to help creatives reach their goal. So for example, if you're a narrative designer and you're creating a character before you had to write every line, the character would say now what you have to do using our, our tool is you set up the character's personality, backstory, emotion, all these parameters, basically, you customize the character and then that character will speak using the personality that you've assigned to that character. And because they can give dynamic responses, now, you don't have to make a linear game, you can make story even even happen and all the characters will react naturally to it. So our tool doesn't uh risk the jobs of narrative designers. Instead it gives them more possibility to be creative rather than change rather than writing the individual lines, they now have to create the entire personality of the characters and then let the characters uh speak naturally. Does that answer your question? Yeah. OK. OK. Um That, OK. We can do one more, very quick question, please. And then uh if we can get the mic very quickly and then a very brief answer. I'm April Sander, who I'm from Sando education. My question is simple is how do you feel about the future with A I to create less uh individualized atomized individuals? Will it actually increase greater communication amongst people and truly reflect greater creativity and culture of people as people, as, as community, as, as as humankind? So how will that impact human interaction essentially? And he says, honey, do you want to take that very quickly? Um maybe a slightly cynical view. But I mean, if you understand that the basis of A I is that it pulls from existing material that's in direct opposition to the pursuit of originality, which is what most creators are here to do. We don't want to copy. I mean, even if the even if we end up, you know what I mean, referencing the intent of originality is the aim. So I guess if you have that in mind as the basis or kind of a guard rail, then yeah, I think it will definitely help with communication in general and just, you know, speeding things up, but you should never replace it. Yeah. Brian Dean Don and honey, thank you so much for joining us. There's so much more to unpack, but we really appreciate you being here.

ST Engineering

ST Engineering in Fortune Rankings

Videos