Future Disruptors: Exploring Tomorrow’s Tech Landscape

An Axios Expert Voices Discussion Event in Las Vegas, Nevada

The big picture: On Wednesday, January 10, Axios hosted an Expert Voices event in Las Vegas that convened experts for a discussion looking at the effects of today's emerging innovations within the tech world and whether their impact will disrupt the industry for years to come. Axios global technology correspondent Ryan Heath led the conversation.

What they're saying: Attendees shared their thoughts on recent developments in emerging technologies that have stood out to them, and several raised questions around the future of open source AI models as powerful tools.

• Maurice Turner, TikTok technical policy lead: "Something that stuck out with me at the show today was this notion that open source models are now only lagging behind foundational models by about a generation, which in temporal terms is months, which is an incredible amount of power that everyone will have access to, so I'm looking forward to seeing what individuals on a small scale are able to do."
• Alan Davidson, Assistant Secretary of Commerce and NTIA Administrator: "One of the assignments that came out of that executive order came to my organization, and we are due to give the White House a study by July of this year about the risks and the benefits of policy approaches we should take around open source AI … I think this is going to be one of the big issues we deal with throughout this year, other governments are trying to tackle it as well."
• Missy Krasner, Redesign Health venture chair: "With Amazon, Google and some of the bigger folks that are going to commoditize the toolset, particularly with LLMs, how do we think about cost? Because it's compute, it's an API call, it's a whole new world of cost … This is sort of a new cost center if you will particularly for health systems, for payers, they're used to infrastructure costs but this is a whole new model."

Thank you to PwC for sponsoring this event.